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Presenter: Emma Antonia Sands

Group Members: Natalie Wiencus, Ryan King

Faculty Sponsor: Meghan Huber

School: UMass Amherst

Research Area: Kinesiology

Session: Poster Session 6, 4:15 PM - 5:00 PM, Auditorium, A10

ABSTRACT

Traversing steep inclines and stairs are critical activities for daily living that are more metabolically costly than walking on flat ground. Walking up inclines or stairs requires more metabolic energy to move the center of mass against gravity. These two activities put the lower limb in different postures to achieve the same goal; however, typically studied grades of incline are much shallower, and muscle-level changes are largely unknown. We hypothesize that when walking up a steep hill, net metabolic power will decrease and changes in medial gastrocnemius (MG) fascicle length will decrease when wearing wedged compared to control shoes. Participants walk at 0.6 m/s on an incline of 17˚ on an instrumented force treadmill in two shoe conditions (control shoes and wedged sneakers with a 17˚ drop from heel-to-toe). All conditions are completed twice in a counterbalanced order. Participants are fitted with an ultrasound probe on the MG to measure fascicle length change and a metabolic mask to measure gas exchange used to calculate net metabolic power. For three participants collected so far, energy expenditure decreased in the wedged shoes, initially supporting our first hypothesis. However, shoe conditions do not appear to effect change in fascicle length at the incline conditions, initially rejecting our second hypothesis. Although our current results utilize a small sample size, it is expected that trends supporting the hypotheses will continue to emerge with the collection of more participants. Eventually, this data could help inform more efficient shoe choices for those continually walking up steep inclines.