QUANTIFYING VARIABILITY IN COORDINATION DURING RUNNING

Jonathan Wheat¹, David R. Mullineaux², Roger M. Bartlett¹ and Clare E. Milner¹.

¹The Centre for Sport and Exercise Science and ²School of Sport and Leisure Management, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK.

It has been suggested that within-participant variability in coordination may have a functional role to play in human movement. The purpose of this study was to compare the variability in coordination for one participant, quantified utilising two previously used techniques. Hip and knee flexion-extension angles during the stance phase were calculated and interpolated to 100 data points, for 10 trials of running at 3.8 m.s-1. The standard deviation in continuous relative phase and coefficient of correspondence from vector coding were calculated at each data point. The two techniques gave similar indications of coordination variability in early stance, but were contradictory towards the end of stance. The results of this investigation suggest that authors conducting independent studies, using different analysis techniques, may draw conflicting conclusions about the variability in coordination.