Position sense at the elbow after fatiguing contractions

Fatigue is often associated with increased clumsiness. One possible explanation for this is that the proprioceptive signals from receptors in and around muscles change during muscle fatigue. Thirteen human subjects were tested for their ability to match the elbow angle of one arm with the contralateral arm, before and after a fatiguing contraction of one arm. Contractile fatigue was induced by a series of maximal voluntary contractions of the elbow flexors of the dominant arm. While fatigue of either the target arm or the matching arm usually changed the ability of individual subjects to match arm position, this effect varied markedly from one subject to another and no consistent pattern was discerned. In particular, there was no reciprocal change when the fatigued arm was the matching arm compared with when the nonfatigued arm was the matching arm. The absence of a consistent reciprocal effect indicates that the fatigue-related changes in the ability to match arm position are not solely due to changes in proprioceptive signals and that central fatigue processes are probably involved.