Open Access

Soccer is one of the most popular sports all around the world. It is an injurious type of sport with a focus on lower extremities and high psychological pressure during matches. The stressor is linked with injuries and an increased musculoskeletal loading. This study investigates the influence of cognitive stress on the load profile of the knee joint. Twelve professional youth soccer players performed highly dynamic runs with and without additional cognitive stress. The runs were analysed with a musculoskeletal simulation software. The data analysis shows no difference in knee joint reaction loading under additional mental stress compared to the baseline. Yet running times are significantly lower in the baseline. While there is no increase in the joint loads, the running times indicate an altered movement behaviour when the subjects are exposed to additional mental demand.

Purpose: Football players have a high risk of leg muscle injuries, especially when exposed to mental stress. Hence, this study investigated the musculoskeletal response of elite youth football players during highly dynamic movements under stress. The hypothesis is that mental stress reduces performance and changes the muscular forces exerted. Materials & methods: Twelve elite youth football players were subjected to mental stress while performing sports-specific change-of-direction movements. A modified version of the d2 attention test was used as stressor. The kinetics are computed using inverse dynamics. Running times and exerted forces of injury-prone muscles were analysed. Results: The stressor runs were rated more mentally demanding by the players (p = 0.006, rs = 0.37) with unchanged physical demand (p = 0.777, rs = 0.45). This resulted in 10% longer running times under stress (p < 0.001, d = −1.62). The musculoskeletal analysis revealed higher peak muscle forces under mental stress for some players but not for others. Discussion: The study shows that motion capture combined with musculoskeletal computation is suitable to analyse the effects of stress on athletes in highly dynamic movements. For the first time in football medicine, our data quantifies an association between mental stress with reduced football players’ performance and changes in muscle force.

Musculoskeletal simulation plays an increasingly important role in sports biomechanics. In the last years, the field of application widened from orthopaedics and ergonomics to sports [1]. A muscle recruitment algorithm with a quadratic objective function is usually used to calculate muscle activity in dynamic movements. The agreement of calculated and measured thigh muscle activity has already been investigated [2]. They found a strong agreement for sprinting and running, while the correlation decreased for side-cutting manoeuvres. Nevertheless, the influence of different muscle recruitment criteria on muscle activity in dynamic musculoskeletal simulations is currently unknown. Hence, this study aimed to analyse the effect of different muscle recruitment criteria and muscle models on the correlation of numerical and measured muscle activity in highly dynamic movements.

The analysis and understanding of highly dynamic movements is a fundamental part of biomechanics. Since sports injuries often involve the lower extremities and muscles, musculoskeletal models can help to prevent them. These models allow the calculation of ground and joint reaction forces as well as muscle forces and activities for individual muscle strands. One goal of this work is to use musculoskeletal models to investigate the influence of mental stress on lower extremity loading. Moreover, the models themselves are evaluated for highly dynamic movements and practical recommendations for action will be derived. For this purpose, fast movements of youth competitive and amateur athletes will be recorded using different measurement systems. Subsequently, the models calculate the target parameters using inverse dynamics. Furthermore, measured and calculated muscle activities of the lower extremities are compared and artificial balancing forces (residuals) in the models are analyzed and minimization approaches are presented. The investigation of muscle and joint loading under mental stress has shown that the response to mental stress is highly individual. Athletes may experience a significant increase in muscle and knee forces with a simultaneous decrease in performance. The comparison of measured and calculated muscle activity proved the reliability of the models also for highly dynamic movements. With the frequently used default settings in the model and optical and inertial motion capture, the muscle activities in the model could be calculated reliably. The residual forces were highest, when the model transitioned from foot-ground contact to no contact and vice versa. By adjusting the settings of the kinematic filter and the ground reaction force prediction, the residuals were reduced by up to 54%. The analysis of musculoskeletal loading under mental stress has shown that the models can make a valuable contribution to the biomechanical analysis of highly dynamic movements. Subsequently, the models have also proven to be a reliable tool for the analysis of highly dynamic movements when the calculated parameters as well as the model-specific optimization options are reviewed. With this in mind, these models can contribute to further understand highly dynamic movements and prevent muscle injuries in athletes.