Long-lasting body leanings following neck muscle isometric contractions

Our objective was to investigate the neural mechanisms and the functional relevance of motor effects that develop involuntarily following the release of a sustained isometric muscle contraction. The few data available in the literature deal only with post-contractions occurring in a body segment. Although these data emphasise the role of proprioceptive input, the question as to whether this phenomenon is of central or peripheral origin remains unclear. Given the leading role of neck muscle proprioceptive input in body orientation and posture regulation, we designed two experiments to test for postural posteffects after voluntary and involuntary neck muscle contraction. The spatiotemporal characteristics of the posteffects were analysed by means of stabilometric recordings following 30-s isometric contraction of splenius, trapezius and levator muscle groups, and 30-s electrically-induced contraction of the levator muscle group. Results show that a postural response occurred after voluntary contraction of each muscle group tested, which was oriented in the plane of action of the muscle, and lasted 14 min at least. In contrast, no clearly oriented body leanings were found after electrical stimulation of the levator muscle, except for a slight increase in natural postural instability. Data are interpreted as a change in the postural reference resulting from an increase in proprioceptive inflow accompanying mainly the voluntary muscle contraction.