Muscle synergies during walking: comparison between young and elderly people. Preliminary results

The present work was aimed at analysing the young and elderly people muscular activation in order to provide evidences regarding the different role of the muscular groups in locomotion. The tested hypothesis concerns the different strategy of the counterparts, that is a greater effort in preserving stability and safety in elders versus a greater importance in the propulsion in young. Five young and five elderly subjects were involved in the experiments and were asked to walk with 6 cadences, from 40 to 140 step/min. Muscle activations of twelve muscles were recorded, filtered, time-interpolated in 200 points over a gait cycle, averaged on the steps and processed by using Factor Analysis. Results showed that young and elderly muscle activations were described by factors behaving in opposite manner between the groups. The authors hypothesized that ageing may involve modifications in the peripheral areas of the Central Nervous System, producing neuromuscular adaptation.