Effect of Whole Body Vibration Conditions on Lower Limb Muscles during Sling Exercise
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This manuscript has investigated change of lower limb muscle activation during sling exercise according to various WBV conditions in healthy young adults. This manuscript is well written and includes meaningful information for suggestion of appropriate vibration protocols. I just suggest minor comments for improvement of this manuscript as follows.
- Please add reference to the following sentence.
“When muscle tone increases, sensitivity in the neurotransmitter system of the spinal cord increases, and the firing rate responses of the motor units increases.”
- Please, provide more detailed exclusion criteria when the authors recruited subjects.
- Please, recheck statistical method. I think repeated measure ANOVA is more appropriate for this experimental design.
- Please, provide meaning of significant marks (*,**,***) in each figure.
Author Response
We also appreciate the time and effort you have dedicated to providing insightful feedback on ways to strengthen our paper.
Thus, it is with great pleasure that we resubmit our article for further consideration. We have incorporated changes that reflect the detailed suggestions you have graciously provided. We also hope that our edits and the responses we provide below satisfactorily address all the issues and concerns you have noted.
To facilitate your review of our revisions, the following is a point-by-point response to the questions and comments delivered in your reviews. The appropriate changes made in ours revised manuscript are highlighted.
- Please add reference to the following sentence.
“When muscle tone increases, sensitivity in the neurotransmitter system of the spinal cord increases, and the firing rate responses of the motor units increases.”
→ We agree with your assessment. We have added a reference to the sentence below in [11].
“When muscle tone increases, sensitivity in the neurotransmitter system of the spinal cord increases, and the firing rate responses of the motor units increases.”
- Please, provide more detailed exclusion criteria when the authors recruited subjects.
→ Thank you for providing these insights. However, we studied healthy adults with few exclusion conditions, and we filled out the contents that correspond to the exclusion conditions sufficiently.
- Please, recheck statistical method. I think repeated measure ANOVA is more appropriate for this experimental design.
→ You have raised an important point. However, we don't believe that repeated measure ANOVA is suitable for our data analysis method. Because repeated measure ANOVA is a method when verifying the average difference of data according to time changes for each data. But our data were not collected over time. Therefore, I think the one-way ANOVA method is more suitable for our research.
- Please, provide meaning of significant marks (*,**,***) in each figure.
→ Thank you for your suggestion. We have provide the meaning of masking in the revised paper.
Again, thank you for giving us the opportunity to strengthen our manuscript with your valuable comments and queries. We have worked hard to incorporate your feedback and hope that these revisions persuade you to accept our submission.
Sincerely,
Hyunji Woo, Mi Yu, and Taekyu Kwon
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
This manuscript investigated the effect of Bulgarian split squat–sling with vibro exercise on lower limb muscle activation, covering most muscles on the lower limb including gluteus medius, biceps femoris, rectus femoris, vastus medialis, and vastus lateralis. The main results show that all the muscle activation was increased, with the highest activation observed under the condition of applying the vibration at 30 Hz. This result might further confirm an understandable fact that WBV has positive impact on the activation of muscles indicated by other literatures. Nevertheless, the study is looking weak in the discussion of the underlying mechanisms for why these five types of muscle activation all have such a same trend.
Author Response
We also appreciate the time and effort you have dedicated to providing insightful feedback on ways to strengthen our paper.
Thus, it is with great pleasure that we resubmit our article for further consideration. We have incorporated changes that reflect the detailed suggestions you have graciously provided. We also hope that our edits and the responses we provide below satisfactorily address all the issues and concerns you have noted.
To facilitate your review of our revisions, the following is a point-by-point response to the questions and comments delivered in your reviews. The appropriate changes made in ours revised manuscript are highlighted.
- This manuscript investigated the effect of Bulgarian split squat–sling with vibro exercise on lower limb muscle activation, covering most muscles on the lower limb including gluteus medius, biceps femoris, rectus femoris, vastus medialis, and vastus lateralis. The main results show that all the muscle activation was increased, with the highest activation observed under the condition of applying the vibration at 30 Hz. This result might further confirm an understandable fact that WBV has positive impact on the activation of muscles indicated by other literatures. Nevertheless, the study is looking weak in the discussion of the underlying mechanisms for why these five types of muscle activation all have such a same trend.
→ You have raised an important point. However, we have fully covered the answers to your questions in the discussion. All five types of muscle activation tended to be the same because the activity of all muscles increased for various reasons as the vibration frequency increased. Therefore, we have prepared enough in the discussion for the three reasons why all five types of muscle activation tended to be the same, and related references[18,19,20] have also been prepared. We added a reference[19] for further explanation of the content.
Again, thank you for giving us the opportunity to strengthen our manuscript with your valuable comments and queries. We have worked hard to incorporate your feedback and hope that these revisions persuade you to accept our submission.
Sincerely,
Hyunji Woo, Mi Yu, and Taekyu Kwon
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
