RESEARCH ARTICLE
Masseter Muscle Activity in Track and Field Athletes: A Pilot Study
Hideyuki Nukaga1, Tomotaka Takeda1, *, Kazunori Nakajima1, Keishiro Narimatsu1, Takamitsu Ozawa1, Keiichi Ishigami1, Kazuo Funato2
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2016Volume: 10
First Page: 474
Last Page: 485
Publisher ID: TODENTJ-10-474
DOI: 10.2174/1874210601610010474
Article History:
Received Date: 9/6/2015Revision Received Date: 3/6/2016
Acceptance Date: 29/06/2016
Electronic publication date: 31/08/2016
Collection year: 2016
open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode), which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
Teeth clenching has been shown to improve remote muscle activity (by augmentation of the Hoffmann reflex), and joint fixation (by decreased reciprocal inhibition) in the entire body. Clenching could help maintain balance, improve systemic function, and enhance safety. Teeth clenching from a sports dentistry viewpoint was thought to be important and challenging. Therefore, it is quite important to investigate mastication muscles’ activity and function during sports events for clarifying a physiological role of the mastication muscle itself and involvement of mastication muscle function in whole body movement. Running is a basic motion of a lot of sports; however, a mastication muscles activity during this motion was not clarified. Throwing and jumping operation were in a same situation. The purpose of this study was to investigate the presence or absence of masseter muscle activity during track and field events. In total, 28 track and field athletes took part in the study. The Multichannel Telemetry system was used to monitor muscle activity, and the electromyograms obtained were synchronized with digital video imaging. The masseter muscle activity threshold was set 15% of maximum voluntary clenching. As results, with few exceptions, masseter muscle activity were observed during all analyzed phases of the 5 activities, and that phases in which most participants showed masseter muscle activity were characterized by initial acceleration, such as in the short sprint, from the commencement of throwing to release in both the javelin throw and shot put, and at the take-off and landing phases in both jumps.
