Muscle coordination in health and disease

Principal Advisor: Associate Professor Kylie Tucker

Phone: 0414 839 402

Research group: Tucker Group - Motor control and pain research

Organisational unit: School of Biomedical Sciences

Motor Control is the process of initiating and directing purposeful movement, responding to internal and external perturbations, and maintaining postural stability. This is achieved through the coordination of forces produced from many muscles. Each individual has a unique muscle coordination pattern. There are many well-known factors that contribute to muscle force generation, including muscle size (PCSA: Physiological cross-sectional area), muscle fibre properties (force-length, force velocity and pennation angle) and muscle activation. The majority of work in our field has focused on muscle activation alone, using electromyography (EMG), and ignored the other factors. Our work: (i) provides insights into how the human nervous system coordinates the activation of muscles within synergist muscle groups; (ii) identifies coordination strategies that could put people at higher risk than others of developing musculoskeletal disorders in adolescents, adulthood and with ageing; (iii) determines how interventions influence coordination strategies.