Local dynamic stability of spine muscle activation and stiffness patterns during repetitive lifting

To facilitate stable trunk kinematics, humans must generate appropriate motor patterns to effectively control muscle force and stiffness and respond to biomechanical perturbations and/or neuromuscular control errors. Thus, it is important to understand physiological variables such as muscle force and stiffness, and how these relate to the downstream production of stable spine and trunk movements. This study was designed to assess the local dynamic stability of spine muscle activation and rotational stiffness patterns using Lyapunov analyses, and relationships to the local dynamic stability of resulting spine kinematics, during repetitive lifting and lowering at varying combinations of lifting load and rate. With an increase in the load lifted at a constant rate there was a trend for decreased local dynamic stability of spine muscle activations and the muscular contributions to spine rotational stiffness; although the only significant change was for the full state space muscle activation stability (p < 0.05). With an increase in lifting rate with a constant load there was a significant decrease in the local dynamic stability of spine muscle activations and the muscular contributions to spine rotational stiffness (p ≤ 0.001 for all measures). These novel findings suggest that the stability of motor inputs and the muscular contributions to spine rotational stiffness can be altered by external task demands (load and lifting rate), and therefore are important variables to consider when assessing the stability of the resulting kinematics.