The effect of core muscle fatigue on the functional movement screening scores in female athletes

Background: The functional movement screen is developed to examine individual’s movement patterns through seven functional tasks. Aim: This study was conducted to examine the effect of core muscle fatigue on functional movement screening (FMS) scores in female athletes. Materials and Methods: The study has a pre-test-post-test design. The statistical population included female athletes (18-28 years old) in Tehran with at least two years of sports experience (3 days a week), of which 40 were selected as samples. In this study, core muscle fatigue was examined using the Plank test, before and after which the subjects performed the FMS test. After ensuring the normal distribution of the data through the Shapiro-Wilk test, the effect of core muscle fatigue on the FMS test was examined using Wilcoxon and paired t-tests, and Cohen’s D measure was used to evaluate the effect size. The data were analyzed through SPSS 24 software. The significance level in all tests was P≤0.05. Results: According to the results, core muscle fatigue significantly decreased the scores of the deep squat (P=0.001), hurdle step over (P=0.002), in-line lunge (P=0.001), stability push-up (P= 0.001), and rotary stability tests (P= 0.001) but did not significantly affect the scores of the shoulder mobility (P=0.317) and active straight leg raise (SLR) tests (P=0.763). Moreover, core muscle fatigue affected the total score of the FMS test (P=0.001), with the average score decreased by 4.32 after applying the fatigue protocol. Conclusion: Core muscle fatigue significantly reduced the FMS test scores with a medium to large effect size in female athletes.