The Effect of Dual Task Practice On Balance and Electromyography Pattern (EMG) of Selected Muscles

The purpose of the present study was to survey the dual task effect on balance and EMG pattern of the muscles. 40 non-athlete students were chosen and were randomly put in 4 equal groups, ten in each one, including motor- stability dual task, cognitive-stability dual task, stability discrete task and control groups.Before the exercise, the groups were classified based on stability index; the first group did stability exercise and ping-pong bat hits simultaneously, the second group did stability exercise and stroop effect, but the third group only did the stability exercise. After doing the exercises, the data were collected in the post-test to consider the amount of changes in balance and EMG (RMSE) in four chosen muscles. The analysis showed that both dual tasks had a significant difference on stability. Motor- stability dual task was better than the cognitive-stability dual task, though. None of the groups had anysignificant effect on EMG after the exercise period. Motor task also caused much more interference on stability and EMG than cognitive one. EMG pattern also showed no significant difference between four selected muscles in a way that there was slightly increase in tibialis anterior and peroneus longus muscles and a slight decrease in gluteusmedius and rectous femoris muscles. Findings showed that the flexibility of attention capacity is related to demands of the task. It can be concluded that effect of practicing a suitable dual task can be effective with decreasing the task demands or autonomy and it makes no difference in related EMG pattern.