Tensiomyography Effects of the Kinesiotape Tension in the Muscular Stiffness of the Low Back Region

Lumbar pain is a quite prevalent pathology in general population within general and sporting population, which comes to mean high sanitary and sport costs. This concrete pain´s nature is often unspecific, but it seems that one of the main risk factors that predispose to suffer from it are changes in the paravertebral-lumbar musculature stiffness.

Since one decade approximately, it has proliferated, especially within sportsmen and women the use of a therapeutic technique: the neuromuscular bandage best known as Kinesiotape (KT). This treatment seems to accept different applications, despite there´s still a lack of scientific evidence for several of its supposed effects. One of the theories about its use technique is that the bandage strain generates different effects in musculature stiffness. Thus, when the bandage is applied over the skin with a pre-stretching of the elastic bandage, it can cause arise of stiffness and strength muscle empowerment. On the other hand, if the bandage is applied without strain, the opposite result would appear, relaxation and strength muscle decrease.

For trainers and therapists is important to know if the KT effect differs over the bandage technique, since the application could be different according to the specific troubles reported by the athletes. For example, talking about cyclists, who keep constantly a hold rachis lumbar flexion, could be interesting to normalize the lumbar musculature stiffness, by placing the bandage with certain strain to achieve a mechanic effect. Nevertheless, talking about other sports like weightlifting, the bandage effect should be the stiffness arisen as a preventive measure, for avoiding injuries derived from the lack of motor control in the lumbar region. These lumbar-region muscle problems affect to popular and majority sports like football, so lumbar pain is very frequently reported by football players, normally due to an agonist-antagonist musculature unbalance. In all these terms, the use of KT would be interesting in order to reduce the musculature strain degree.

Tensiomyography (TMG) is showing as one of the most useful and reliable instrument for the musculature stiffness assessing, due to its velocity, harmlessness, sensing and high reproducibility. Taking in consideration that the maximum deformity measured by the TMG is inversely related with the muscle stiffness, and whereas this project pretends to modify that stiffness by means of the KT application, it seems obvious that TMG is the most suitable measurement instrument.

All these precedents considered, the present project pretends to analyze the effects of different KT strain application along 48 hours with strains techniques of 100%, strain 50% and strain 0% in the normalization of the paravertebral-lumbar musculature stiffness, by means of TMG monitoring.