Refinement of surface electromyographic (sEMG) techniques for recording voluntary muscle activity offers further opportunity for use as both a research and clinical tool. Recent efforts directed at using muscle fibre conduction velocity (MFCV) to assess neuromuscular disorders have had difficulty in achieving high test-retest reliability across multiple sessions.

Three days of testing were conducted on 21 males and 19 females with at least 48 hours between each session. Subjects performed three isometric contractions of the dorsiflexors at 100 percent maximal voluntary contraction. Maximum force, root-meansquare sEMG amplitude, the frequency of mean power (MPF), and MFCV were obtained via single- (SD) and double differential (DD) recordings and then evaluated using the intraclass correlational analysis of variance technique.

All measures exhibited high reliability coefficients (R=0.83 - 0.98), except for MFCV measured by DD recordings (R=0.65). It was thus concluded that the methodological procedures put in place were only effective utilizing single differentiation