Original title: Post-activation Potentiation Versus Post-activation Performance Enhancement in Humans: Historical Perspective, Underlying Mechanisms, and Current Issues
A strong muscle contraction can be followed by two different effects. One, called post-activation potentiation, briefly makes a muscle twitch harder, possibly because a muscle protein changes after activation. The other, called post-activation performance enhancement, can improve voluntary force minutes later and may involve warmth, water in muscle cells, or muscle activation. The review explains why researchers should keep these effects separate and be careful about claiming they improve performance.
After a hard workout, you might briefly feel a muscle twitch more strongly, then later find you can lift with more voluntary force. The tricky part is that these changes happen on different timelines, so one may be present when the other is not. In this paper, the short-lived twitch boost is one effect, while the later improvement in voluntary force is another, and the review asks whether they have different causes.
Athletes, coaches, and clinicians use warm-ups and intense contractions to prepare muscles for effort. This review warns that a twitch response measured seconds later is not the same as better voluntary performance minutes later, so treating them as one effect can lead to misleading conclusions about what helps.
The abstract describes a review and says the practical importance of both effects may be limited in some conditions, especially after a comprehensive active warm-up. It does not establish that PAPE reliably improves performance, explain which mechanism is responsible in each case, or provide a single practical protocol that works for everyone.
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Post-activation Potentiation Versus Post-activation Performance Enhancement in Humans: Historical Perspective, Underlying Mechanisms, and Current Issues — Anthony J. Blazevich, Nicolas Babault — Frontiers in Physiology — doi:10.3389/fphys.2019.01359
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.