Assessment of limb function asymmetry is of interest to practitioners due to its role in return to play guidelines and reported links to injury. Dynamometry is one of the most commonly used methods of assessing muscle function, but the mode of contraction used is different to the stretch-shortening cycles experienced during real-life activities. The aim of this study was to compare measures of ...

Microtubules are structural components of the cytoskeleton that determine cell shape, polarity, and motility in cooperation with the actin filaments. In order to determine the role of microtubules in cell alignment, human airway smooth muscle cells were exposed to cyclic uniaxial stretch. Human airway smooth muscle cells, cultured on type I collagen-coated elastic silicone membranes, were stret...

Stretching exercises to increase the range of motion (ROM) of joints have been used by sports coaches and medical professionals for improving performance and rehabilitation. The ability of connective and muscular tissues to change their architecture in response to stretching is important for their proper function, repair, and performance. Given the dearth of relevant data in the literature, thi...

The heart is remarkably adaptable in its ability to vary its function to meet the changing demands of the circulatory system. During times of physiological stress, cardiac output increases in response to increased sympathetic activity, which results in protein kinase A (PKA)-mediated phosphorylations of the myofilament proteins cardiac troponin (cTn)I and cardiac myosin-binding protein (cMyBP)-...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate if a stretch regimen consisting of three 30 second stretches would alter joint position sense (JPS). METHODS A blinded, randomised, cross over design with a washout time of 24 hours was used with 20 healthy volunteers. JPS was estimated from the ability to reproduce the same position in one knee (target versus estimated angle) expressed as the difference between target ...

What do the tracing of stories about plastic bricks, moon, an aquarium, Zuko, a pregnant stingray, Facebook, stick, ghosts, and many other kin, have in common? And, how might ‘[a]rticulating those ...help “stretch” our response-ability as educators to include all humans other-than-humans part earthly survival more just futures’(Murris, 2022:18)

The purpose of this study was to assess the relationships between common measures of stretch shortening cycle function during a drop jump. Fifteen males from team sports performed three drop jumps from a height of 0.3 m onto a force platform. Ground contact time (CT), flight time (FT), height jumped (HJ), reactive strength index (RSI), reactive strength ratio (RSR) and vertical leg-spring stiff...

A two-step strain-induced melt activation (TS-SIMA) process that omits the cold working step of the traditional strain-induced melt activation (SIMA) process is proposed for 6066 Al-Mg-Si alloy to obtain fine, globular, and uniform grains with a short-duration salt bath. The results show that increasing the salt bath temperature and duration leads to a high liquid phase fraction and a high degr...