The analysis of muscle fatigue in dynamic contractions with the measurements of electromyogram and mechanomyogram

Increasing the indexes that can define muscle fatigue and determining it's relationship with various parameters will help the development of personel training programs, the regulation of personel daily life activity program and the prevention of possible muscle impairment. Therefore, in this study carried out, determination of the fatigue, which occurs in the volunteers' muscles via Bruce protocol and 100 m sprint performance test, was aimed by using various parameters. Moreover, the effects of whether the volunteers being trained or not, over the determination of muscle fatigue were analysed as well. Differently from the fatigue determination studies that are present in the literature, the records of solely Electromyogram (EMG), solely Mechanomyogram (MMG) and the combination of EMG and MMG were evaluated comperatively. For the analysis, firstly, a volunteers group, made of people who had a suport background in the past but now does not engage in any sport branches were performed. At the beginning of the study, the records of this group of volunteers who were untrained were taken according to the determined procedure. Afterwards, the same group participated in the trainings for 8 weeks and once their muscles became trained, the same procedure was applied to the volunteers again. The obtained records were passed through the stages of pre-processing, calculation of energy values based Wavelet Packet Transform (WPT), and classification. Decomposition of WPT was carried out in 8 levels and the Multi-layer Perceptron Artificial Neural Network (MLPNN) was used for classification. As the result of the study, it was determined that the combined application of EMG and MMG records was a more successful method for determining the muscle fatigue of those who were untrained. As for the determination of fatigue levels of those who were trained, the most successful results were attained by the use of solely EMG records. Once again, it was clearly revealed that the parameters to be used for the determination of muscle fatigue should not be evaluated single-handedly, and the training level of the persons, whose EMG and MMG records were taken, the daily activities they do and the sport activities they take part in totaly changed the effectiveness of determination of muscle fatigue by using EMG and MMG.