Acute Effect of Biomechanical Muscle Stimulation on the Counter-Movement Vertical Jump Power and Velocity in Division I Football Players

ABSTRACTJacobson, BH, Monaghan, TP, Sellers, JH, Conchola, EC, Pope, ZK, and Glass, RG. Acute effect of biomechanical muscle stimulation on the counter-movement vertical jump power and velocity in division I football players. J Strength Cond Res 31(5)1259–1264, 2017—Research regarding whole body vibration (WBV) largely supports such training augmentation in attempts to increase muscle strength and power. However, localized biomechanical vibration has not received the same attention. The purpose of this study was to assess peak and average power before and after acute vibration of selected lower-body sites in division I athletes. Twenty-one subjects were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 conditions using a cross-over design. Pretest consisted of a counter-movement vertical jump (VJ) followed by either localized vibration (30 Hz) to 4 selected lower-body areas or 4 minutes of moderately low-resistance stationary cycling (70 rpm). Vibration consisted of 1 minute bouts at each lower-leg site for a total of 4 minutes followed by an immediate post-test VJ. Repeated measures analysis of variance yielded no significant differences (p > 0.05) in either peak power or peak velocity. Similarly, no significant differences were found for average power and velocity between conditions. It should be noted that, while not significant, the vibration condition demonstrated an increase in peak power and velocity while the bike condition registered slight decreases. Comparing each of the post-VJ repetitions (1, 2, and 3) the vibration condition experienced significantly greater peak power and velocity from VJ 1 to VJ 3 compared with the bike condition which demonstrated no significant differences among the post-test VJs. These results yielded similar, although not statistically significant outcomes to previous studies using WBV. However, the novelty of selected site biomechanical vibration merits further investigation with respect to frequency, magnitude, and duration of vibration.