Evaluation of knee joint reaction force for the back and front leg during the forward jump in soccer

Abstract

Non-contact anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries often happen during the forward jump-landings in soccer [1]. Two main parts of the forward head jump are jumping and landing. Usually, one leg locates front, and another leg locates back during jumping and landing phases [2-4]. The ground reaction force, which presents the impact loads, affects the knee joint reaction loads and can grow biomechanical stress on the anterior cruciate ligament [3,5–7]. Therefore, the aim of the current study was to compare knee joint reaction loads between the back and front leg during the soccer forward jump. What are the differences in knee joint reaction loads between the back and front leg during the soccer forward jump? Twenty elite soccer athletes (68.3±7.5 kg, 178±5.3 cm, 27.5±4.5 years) participated in the current study [8]. Ten Vicon motion captures (Vicon MX, Oxford, UK, 200 Hz) were used to measure the kinematics variables [6,9,10]. EMG activity in the rectus femoris, vastus lateral, vastus medial, tibialis anterior, gastrocnemius medial, gastrocnemius lateral, soleus, biceps femoris, and semitendinosus was recorded by the Myon wireless EMG system [11,12]. Raw EMG signals were full-wave rectified and linear enveloped using a dual-pass fourth-order low-pass Butterworth filter at 4 Hz [13]. A musculoskeletal model with a total of 10 bodies and 92 muscles was used to estimate joint reaction loads in OpenSim [4,14,15]. The inverse kinematics, static optimization, and joint reaction analysis were used to estimate angles, muscle loads, and joint loads, respectively [16,17]. Fig. 1 presents the mean of knee joint reaction forces in anterior-posterior, medial-lateral, and superior-inferior directions during the forward jumping and landing for the back and front leg. Significant differences of knee joint reaction were found between back and front leg.Download : Download high-res image (131KB)Download : Download full-size image Fig. 1: Mean of knee joint reaction forces in anterior-posterior, medial-lateral, and superior-inferior directions during the forward jumping and landing for back and front leg. This study compared the knee joint reaction loads during the soccer forward jump for the back and front leg by a previously described musculoskeletal model. In general, the forces experienced at the knee joint were not of similar magnitude.