Gender Differences in Lower Limb Muscle Activity during Vertical Jump Landing: A systematic review

چکیده مقاله

Background and Objectives: The vertical jump is very important for improving an athlete’s performance, in which there is a possibility of an Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) injury. This injury is more common in women and one of the possible causes is the weakness of the neuromuscular system in women. Therefore, this study aimed to systematically review the studies that compared the activity of the lower extremity muscles in the vertical jump-landing task between men and women.

 

Method and Materials: Articles in Persian and English languages were searched in the Sid, Magiran, Google Scholar, Science Direct, PubMed and Scopus databases without time limitation until 2020 and with keywords related to "electromyography", "muscle activity"," vertical-jump” and "gender". Inclusion criteria included cross-sectional and gender comparisons studies in which samples were male and female athletes with no history of sports injury, the task was one or two jump–landing and lower extremity muscle activity was measured before or after ground contact. The modified checklist of the Downs (1998) was used to evaluate the quality of the studies.

 

Results: Finally, 5 articles from 1262 studies met the inclusion criteria and were comprehensively reviewed. The results of the included studies showed that in the feedforward and feedback phase during the vertical jump and landing single-leg or pair-landing tasks, women recruit the quadriceps muscles and men the hamstrings muscle more. However, these differences were not significant in some studies and significant in others.

 

Conclusion: This study investigated the muscular activities of the lower limbs during the task of the maximum vertical jump in male and female athletes. The differences between men and women were scare and contradictory and for some muscles such as the rectus femoris, gastrocnemius, and gluteus, only one study was done. Therefore, it seems that there is a need for further and more accurate researches in this field.