Assessing Voluntary Muscle Activation with the Twitch Interpolation Technique

The twitch interpolation technique is commonly employed to assess the completeness of skeletal muscle activation during voluntary contractions. Early applications of twitch interpolation suggested that healthy human subjects could fully activate most of the skeletal muscles to which the technique had been applied. More recently, however, highly sensitive twitch interpolation has revealed that even healthy adults routinely fail to fully activate a number of skeletal muscles despite apparently maximal effort. Unfortunately, some disagreement exists as to how the results of twitch interpolation should be employed to quantify voluntary activation. The negative linear relationship between evoked twitch force and voluntary force that has been observed by some researchers implies that voluntary activation can be quantified by scaling a single interpolated twitch to a control twitch evoked in relaxed muscle.