Exercise, fatigue and proprioception: a retrospective

This is an account of experiments carried out in my laboratory over more than 20 years, exploring the influence of exercise on human limb position sense. It is known that after intense exercise we are clumsy in the execution of skilled movements. The first question we posed concerned eccentric exercise, where the contracting muscle is forcibly lengthened. Such exercise produces muscle damage, and the damage might extend to the muscle’s proprioceptors, the muscle spindles, producing a disturbance of limb position sense. However, provided the exercise was sufficiently severe (20–30% fall in muscle force), comparing eccentric exercise with concentric exercise, where no damage ensues, there was no difference in the effects on position sense. After exercise of elbow muscles, the forearm was always perceived as more extended than its actual position. It led to a new hypothesis: after exercise, did the extra effort required to lift the fatigued arm provide a position signal? Findings based on spindles’ thixotropic behaviour did not support such a proposition for the elbow joint, although at the wrist an effort signal may contribute. Spindle thixotropy has also been proposed to explain the poor proprioception experienced under conditions of weightlessness. After exercise of elbow extensors or flexors, the position errors were always in the direction of forearm extension. At the knee, after exercise the lower leg was always perceived as more flexed. These findings led to the conclusion that disturbances to position sense, post-exercise, did not involve peripheral receptors, and that the effect arose within the brain.