The University of Kent has been awarded a grant of £160,189 from The Leverhulme Trust to fund a project entitled “Emergent properties of the fatiguing neuromuscular system.” The project will be run by Drs Mark Burnley and Samantha Winter
The project will run for three years and aims to better understand how the muscle fatigues during exercise, and why such fatigue occurs so much more rapidly when the intensity of exercise exceeds critical thresholds. The researchers will use both experiments and computer models of the muscle to study this issue.
Dr Mark Burnley explains: “when you try to contract the muscle at a constant force, the force you actually produce is not constant at all. Instead, it fluctuates, and these fluctuations seem to reflect how effectively the neuromuscular system is working. Muscle fatigue increases the size of these fluctuations and, crucially, also reduces the complexity of the patterns they produce if your effort exceeds a critical level, but we don’t understand why. This grant will be used to try and find the answer. Finding this answer should help us understand why the fatigued muscle sometimes fails us, leading to dropping objects, falling over or becoming exhausted by exercise.”