Immediate Effect of Intermittent Versus Continuous Hamstring Static Stretching on the Muscle Tone and Range of Motion

Abstract

| Abstract |1) PURPOSE: This study examined which stretching exercise had the most positive effect on increasing the range of motion (ROM) of the knee joint in healthy people and whether there was a difference between continuous stretching and intermittent stretching. METHODS: This study included 30 healthy university students from OOO University. The subjects were asked to sit on a mat and perform hamstring-stretching exercise during which the ROM and muscle tone were measured with pre and post-tests. Each subject was assigned randomly to a continuous stretching group (stretching without relaxation time group, n=10, G1) or intermittent stretching group (stretching with 10s relaxing time group, n=10, G2; and stretching with 20s relaxing time group, n=10, G3). The participants conducted hamstring stretching exercises with a †Corresponding Author : Myoung-Kwon Kim kimmk@daegu.ac.kr, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7251-6108 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. sit-and-reach box at three different rest times (0s, 10s, and 20s). Subsequently, they underwent passive knee extension (PKE) tests, in which the ROM of the knee joint was measured with a goniometer, and the muscle tone was evaluated using a MyotonPro. RESULTS: Significant differences in muscle tone, stiffness, and ROM were observed between pre-test and post-test in each groups (p.05), the rate of change of the ROM showed that the intermittent stretching group developed more effective maintenance of the hamstring flexibility. CONCLUSION: No significant differences in the muscle tone of the hamstring and ROM of the knee joint were observed according to the hamstring stretching exercises with three different rest times. On the other hand, the rate of change of the ROM showed that intermittent stretching maintained the hamstring flexibility more effectively.