Table 1.
Anthropometric characteristics of the initially admitted and analyzed study participants.
Table 2.
Measured muscles and electrode positions.
Fig 1.
Differences in pain intensity at T2 and T3 in comparison with T1.
C: control group (no belt), B: belt group. *: p < 0.05, **: p < 0.01.
Table 3.
Top: Values (Mean ± SD) for the Oswestry Disability Inventory (ODI) for all observation times (T1 to T3).
Bottom: Relative change compared to T1 (Mean ± SD). C: control group (no belt), B: belt group. The indicated effect sizes (ES, Cohen's d) are valid for both values at times T2 and T3 in comparison with T1.
Fig 2.
Mean SEMG amplitude (MW ± SD) values for the examined trunk muscles at T1, T2, and T3.
Control group (no belt, C): filled columns, belt group (B): hatched columns. RA: rectus abdominis muscle, OI: internal abdominal oblique muscle, OE: external abdominal oblique muscle, MF: multifidus muscle, ICO: iliocostalis muscle, LO: longissimus muscle. The asterisks indicate significant differences (p<0.05) between the control and belt group.
Fig 3.
Color-coded representation of the grand averaged amplitude curves when walking at 4 km/h on the treadmill.
The gray bars above the color-coded amplitude curves mark ipsilateral (dark gray) and contralateral (light gray) stance phases. The black bars mark differences between control group (C) and belt group (B) with an effect size of ≥ 0.5. RA: rectus abdominis muscle, OI: internal abdominal oblique muscle, OE: external abdominal oblique muscle, MF: multifidus muscle, ICO: iliocostalis muscle, LO: longissimus muscle.