Changes in synchronization of the motor unit in muscle fatigue condition during the dynamic and isometric contraction in the Biceps Brachii muscle.

The fatigue-induced neuromuscular mechanism remains to be fully elucidated. So far, the macroscopic mechanism using global surface electromyogram (sEMG) has been widely investigated. However, the microscopic mechanism using high-level neural information based on motor unit (MU) spike train from the spinal cord lacks attention, especially for the conditions under dynamic contraction task. The synchronization of the MU spike train is generally assumed to be an excellent indicator to represent the activities of spinal nerves. Accordingly, this study employed synchronization of MU spike train decomposed from high-density sEMG (HD-sEMG) to investigate the fatigue condition in muscular contractions within the Biceps Brachii muscle under both isometric and dynamic contraction tasks, giving a complete picture of the microscopic fatigue mechanism. We compared the synchronization of MU in Delta (1-4Hz), alpha (8-12Hz), Beta (15-30Hz), and Gamma (30-60Hz) frequency bands during the fatigue condition induced by different contractions. Our results showed that MU synchronization increased significantly (p<0.05) in all frequency bands across the two contraction tasks. The results indicate that the microscopic fatigue mechanism of Biceps Brachii muscle does not vary due to different contraction tasks.