Analysis of one repetition during biceps curl exercise among age-matched adult volunteers using endurance, curl speed and surface electromyography signals.

Exercises under isometric and dynamic contractions are influenced by the rate coding and recruitment strategies. The study of muscle strength under dynamic contraction is normally performed using one-repetition maximum (1-RM) method. There are several variants of deriving one repetition method using number of repetitions and load that are useful in physical fitness and clinical rehabilitation program. However, the factors of dynamic contractions such as endurance time, speed of muscle contractions and muscle activity are not considered in 1-RM methods. The muscular activities are analyzed using surface electromyography (sEMG) signals. Limited work has been reported on the relationship between the 1-RM method and factors such as endurance time, speed of contraction and sEMG activity. In this work, a modified 1-RM method is proposed, namely, N-RM, using load, number of repetitions, endurance time, speed of contraction and normalized sEMG activity. For this purpose, sEMG signals are recorded from 58 healthy subjects under standard dynamic contraction protocol involving curl exercise. Conventional 1-RM is computed by using Epley's method and compared with proposed method using correlation analysis. The results show that 1-RM increases linearly with number of curls (r=1) but has a poor correlation coefficient with sEMG (r=0.01) and endurance time (r =0.4). The curl speed for lower 1-RM and higher 1-RM did not show any statistical difference (p =0.2). The proposed N-RM is observed to have good correlation with endurance time (r=0.734), curl speed (r=0.893) and sEMG activity (r=0.8851). These results demonstrate that the proposed N-RM is highly correlated to factors influencing the dynamic contractions. This method can be further extended to assess muscles under various clinical disorders and sports training.