Reconsidering exercise selection with EMG: poor agreement between ranking hip exercises with gluteal EMG and muscle force

Review written by Dr Travis Pollen info

Key Points

  1. Surface electromyography (sEMG) is often thought to be a proxy for exercise effectiveness, but this notion has been questioned.
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BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE

Surface electromyography (sEMG), a measure of muscle activation, is commonly thought to be a proxy for how effectively exercises target muscles. For example, two systematic reviews identified a total of 71 studies assessing sEMG of the gluteal muscles (1,2). Despite sEMG’s popularity, its validity for predicting muscular adaptations has been questioned. A 2018 review (3) and a follow-up 2022 commentary (4) argued that sEMG does not actually predict strength or hypertrophy gains.

An alternative measure for exercise effectiveness might be muscle force, which can be estimated with neuromusculoskeletal modeling. The purpose of this study was to compare sEMG amplitude and estimated muscle force for the gluteus maximus and gluteus medius during eight hip exercises. The authors hypothesized that the relationship between the two metrics would be poor.

Surface electromyography, a measure of muscle activation, is commonly thought to be a proxy for how effectively exercises target muscles.
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Clinicians should not rely solely on surface electromyography for selecting exercises to target the gluteal muscles.

METHODS

Data was analyzed from a previous study (5) of 14 healthy female footballers with a median (interquartile range) age of 24.1 (6.5). Participants performed eight common injury prevention and rehabilitation exercises for the hip: single-leg squats, split squats, single-leg Romanian

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