The aim of this study was to evaluate the stress suffered by medical residents as the result of being on call for 24 hours, from a multidimensional approach. Two groups of medical residents selected according to their work shift, participated in the study: one group (n = 40) was sleep-deprived after having been actively on-call for 24 hours, and another contrast group (n = 18) had performed a normal work day and were not sleep-deprived. All participants completed pre-post measures during a 24 h cycle. These were administered on both occasions at 8 am. The measures included HRV, cortisol, cognitive performance and transitory mood. The effect of the group x phase interaction was significant for all variables analysed, indicating that doctors in the 24h on-call shift group showed significant deterioration in all physiological, performance and mood indicators in comparison with the participants in the group not on call. These results suggest the need to review medical on-call systems, in order to reduce the stress load, which has a direct effect on working conditions.

The emergence of COVID-19 caused a new public health crisis, leading to major changes in daily life routines, often including physical activity (PA) levels. The main goal of this study was to analy...

The aim of this study is to analyze the mediating role of vision in the relationship between conscious lower limb proprioception (dominant knee) and bipedal postural control (with eyes open and closed) in older adults, as compared with teenagers, younger adults and middle-aged adults. Methods: The sample consisted of 119 healthy, physically active participants. Postural control was assessed using the bipedal Romberg test with participants’ eyes open and closed on a force platform. Proprioception was measured through the ability to reposition the knee at 45°, measured with the Goniometer Pro application’s goniometer. Results: The results showed an indirect relationship between proprioception and postural control with closed eyes in all age groups; however, vision did not mediate this relationship. Conclusions: Older adults outperformed only teenagers on the balance test. The group of older adults was the only one that did not display differences with regard to certain variables when the test was done with open or closed eyes. It seems that age does not influence performance on proprioception tests. These findings help us to optimize the design of training programs for older adults and suggest that physical exercise is a protective factor against age-related decline.

Acute physical exercise works as an activator of the responses of the human organism to stress. This is based on the activation of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis, affecting physical, physiological and psychological levels. This study aimed to analyse the effects of a single bout of high-intensity resistance exercise on cognitive-behavioural responses: visuo-spatial path learning and memory, as well as physiological responses (salivary cortisol levels). Nineteen healthy male military-trained powerlifting subjects were tested in a within-subject design on two experimental days with an interval of 48 h. The stress and cognitive variables were measured by cortisol levels and Ruff–Light trail-learning test (RULIT) test scores, respectively. The results showed the immediate influence of acute exercise on cortisol, with significantly higher cortisol levels found in subjects after completion of the acute resistance exercise. In addition, this study found a significant deterioration of memory and learning ability after a dose of intense resistance exercise. In conclusion, the study highlights the relative effects of resistance exercise on cortisol and cognitive performance depending on the intensity and type of the exercise, the moment of measurement and the cerebral areas implicated.

The effects of the use of reduced feedback frequencies on motor learning remain controversial in the scientific literature. At present, there is still controversy about the guidance hypothesis, with some works supporting it and others contradicting it. To shed light on this topic, an experiment was conducted with four groups, each with different feedback frequencies (0%, 33%, 67%, and 100%), which were evaluated three times (pre-test, post-test, and retention) during a postural control task. In addition, we tested whether there was a transfer in performance to another similar task involving postural control. As a result, only the 67% feedback group showed an improvement in their task performance in the post-test and retention evaluations. Nevertheless, neither group showed differences in motor transfer performance compared to another postural control task. In conclusion, the findings of this paper corroborate the hypothesis of guidance and suggest that the use of a reduced frequency of 67% is a better option for improving motor learning than options that offer feedback at a lower frequency, at all trials or not at all.

This study aimed to investigate the validity of using built-in smartphone accelerometers to estimate the active energy expenditures of full-time manual wheelchair users with spinal cord injury (SCI). Twenty participants with complete SCI completed 10 5-min daily activities that involved the upper limbs, during which their oxygen consumption and upper limb activity were registered using a portable gas analyzer and a smartphone (placed on the non-dominant arm), respectively. Time series of 1-min averaged oxygen consumption and 55 accelerometer variables (13 variables for each of the four axes and three additional variables for the correlations between axes) were used to estimate three multiple linear models, using a 10-fold cross-validation method. The results showed that models that included either all variables and models or that only included the linear variables showed comparable performance, with a correlation of 0.72. Slightly worse general performance was demonstrated by the model that only included non-linear variables, although it proved to be more accurate at estimating the energy expenditures (EE) during specific tasks. These results suggest that smartphones could be a promising low-cost alternative to laboratory-grade accelerometers to estimate the energy expenditure of wheelchair users with spinal cord injury during daily activities.