Exercise Science  News

Dear Falk College Students,

Welcome back to Syracuse University! I hope you had a joyous holiday season and an opportunity to relax, spend time with family and friends, and enjoy the football team’s convincing win over Washington State in the Holiday Bowl!

I’m excited about the new semester and I look forward to watching all you will accomplish as you pursue your academic and professional goals this spring. As classes begin, I want to remind you of resources at Falk College and on campus that will help you succeed:

Official Syracuse University Communications

Syracuse University email is the primary communication method at the University. Your professors and University offices will contact you with important information using your Syracuse University email address (ending in “@syr.edu”), not your personal email address. It’s important to read your University email at least once every day so you’re aware of the latest information that’s essential to you.

Student Support Services

Falk College Student Services is an important resource in your support system at Syracuse University. Student Services counselors are here to provide you with academic advising and help you meet your requirements and goals. They are also your resource for private consultation related to student social and emotional concerns. If you have any concerns this semester, please contact Student Services or visit Falk 330, Barclay Suite, in the Falk Complex.

I encourage you to connect with the staff at Falk Career Services who can help you prepare for life after college through career exploration, internship and job searching, professional networking, and more. They are also located in Falk 330, or you can search for opportunities through Handshake, the University’s job search and professional events portal.

In addition, you can connect to spiritual life on campus at Hendricks Chapel, and health and counseling services in the Barnes Center at the Arch.

Student Spaces in Falk College

The Student Lounge, located in Falk 216, is available to you anytime the Falk Complex is open. The lounge has a microwave, refrigerator, and vending machines for student use. Across the hall from the Student Lounge is Falk Café, which is open from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Monday through Friday starting Jan. 13. Visit the Food Services website for up-to-date operating hours for cafés and dining centers across campus.

There are several computer labs in the Falk Complex. Falk 113 is a PC lab, and Falk 229 is a quiet study area that has both PCs and Macs available for your use. Both spaces are available to students at any time. Falk 400 and 407 are PC labs that are also used as teaching classrooms. When class is not in session, they are open for student use. You may check their schedule of availability using the 25Live website. You may also use the quick-print stations in Falk 216 and 229 for printing and email. These stations log out automatically after 10 minutes of use.

Ways to Get Involved

There are more than 300 student organizations at Syracuse University. Be sure to explore organizations that might be outside your usual interests, too. Remember, this is a great way to meet new people and discover something new about yourself!

There are many exciting events planned for Spring 2025, starting with the historic 40th Annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Jan. 26 at the JMA Wireless Dome and leading to Commencement Weekend May 10-11. You can find more activities and events on campus by visiting the Syracuse University Calendar. For more resources and opportunities to make the most of your Syracuse experience, I encourage you to visit syracuse.edu/life/students.

I wish you the best this semester and please reach out to us if you’re in need of services and support. On behalf of the Falk faculty and staff, I wish you continued success on your journey here at Falk College and the wider Syracuse University community.

Go Orange!

Jeremy S. Jordan, Ph.D.
Dean
Falk College

Kylie Harmon, an assistant professor in the Department of Exercise Science in the Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics, has always been fascinated by this deep-rooted idea that a person could control a physical condition with their mind.

More specifically, she wondered if a person could use their mind to preserve muscle mass and strength during a prolonged period of immobilization. For Harmon, turning this idea into actual research was sparked by a published study where researchers used neuromuscular electrical stimulation on muscles immobilized in a cast to preserve leg strength and mass. Surprisingly, mass was preserved, but strength was not.

Harmon’s research found that given the role of the nervous system in immobilization-induced weakness, targeted interventions may be able to preserve muscle strength but not mass, and vice versa. Though preliminary, her findings highlight the specific nature of clinical interventions and suggest that muscle strength can be independently targeted during rehabilitation.

Harmon’s innovative research, which was conducted over several months and with nearly 40 participants, was published this past spring by the peer-reviewed scientific journal Experimental Physiology.

We sat down with Harmon to learn more about her research, most surprising findings, and next steps. Here’s that discussion:

What did you learn from the previous research on this topic and how did that frame what you wanted to accomplish with your research?

Those researchers saw that daily muscle stimulation helped to maintain muscle size, but didn’t impact muscle strength. In much of my work, I was using interventions that improved muscle strength, but had no impact on muscle size. I had some experience with action observation and mental imagery, which are neural intervention techniques in which a person observes muscular contractions or thinks about performing muscular contractions without actually doing so. These have been shown to be effective for strength gain or preservation, as they activate the neuromuscular pathways responsible for strength production. However, they don’t impact muscle size.

So, I thought it would be interesting to directly compare these two interventions – neuromuscular electrical stimulation versus action observation + mental imagery – to see if previous findings held up. We decided to design a lower-limb immobilization study with one group performing daily action observation + mental imagery to preserve strength, and another group performing daily electrical stimulation to preserve muscle size. The goals were twofold: 1) To further demonstrate that strength and size are distinct qualities and need to be addressed with specific interventions; and 2) To hopefully improve rehabilitation outcomes by preserving size and strength during immobilization.

Once you established your goals, how did you determine your research methods?

It took several months and a lot of teamwork to determine our methods. I relied heavily on existing literature to determine how to best implement lower-limb immobilization; what leg braces to use, what joint angle to immobilize at, and how long immobilization was needed before we would observe decreases in strength and size. I reached out to authors of my favorite papers to ask them about their methodologies, such as how to design an appropriate action observation + mental imagery intervention and what stimulation devices to buy.

Once I had a good idea of the game plan, I presented the idea to my mentors and collaborators to get their feedback. Finally, we developed a sizable research team to help with the project: three Ph.D. students, three M.S. students, four physical therapy students, and five undergraduate students. It was very much a team effort!

Can you describe the process of gathering your data?

We screened 117 interested people and when all was said and done, we had 39 individuals fully participate in the study. Prior to the immobilization week, we tested muscle strength, muscle size, and the ability of their brain to activate their muscles. We then had physical therapy students fit participants with a leg brace and crutches and show them how to navigate a variety of obstacles – opening doors, using stairs, sitting and standing.

During their week on crutches, participants had to wear accelerometers around both ankles so we could ensure that they were actually using the brace and crutches when away from the lab. We gave them a shower chair to assist in bathing, as they had to keep the brace on at all times except during sleep. We asked them to track the food that they ate. We also had a member of the research team call and check in on each participant every day during the immobilization week to make sure they were complying with study protocols and weren’t running into any issues.

In addition to immobilization, one group performed daily action observation + mental imagery using a guided video and audio recording, and another group performed daily neuromuscular electrical stimulation on their thigh muscles with a stimulation device we gave them.

We had participants return to the lab for a post-testing visit, and again re-tested their muscle strength, size, and neuromuscular function. If they lost strength (which almost everyone did), we had them come back to the lab twice a week for lower body resistance training until they regained their strength. We didn’t want them to leave the lab with weak, small muscles because of our experiment. Not very ethical! We ensured they were recovered, and published that data as well. Amazingly, no one dropped out during the leg immobilization, and we had 100% compliance!

Understanding this is preliminary and more research needs to be done, what can you say so far about your findings?

Yes, this is certainly preliminary, and I have additional avenues to explore and methodologies to perfect. However, our hypotheses were partially confirmed. Although daily muscle stimulation didn’t preserve muscle size, daily action observation and mental imagery did appear to preserve muscle strength to some extent based on our observed effect sizes. Although participants in the action observation + mental imagery group lost the most muscle mass, their dynamic strength increased by ~7%.

It’s pretty exciting to see that muscle strength – which is so important for overall function and health – can be preserved just by watching and thinking about performing muscular contractions. Our findings also help to confirm that while muscle strength and muscle mass are of course closely related, they are indeed different components and need to be addressed as such.

What is the potential impact of this research across the lifespan, and for short-term and long term immobilizations?

What I find so exciting about action observation + mental imagery interventions is how easily accessible they are. Anyone can watch a video and think about performing muscular contractions, and there is virtually no risk profile that I can think of. With how attached we all are to our devices, we have the ability to watch action observation videos in the palm of our hand; these techniques don’t require fancy equipment or trips to a rehabilitation clinic.

While more work certainly needs to be done to determine how these interventions work in longer immobilization periods and in immobilization with associated trauma (like a true injury or surgery), this is a very promising avenue of translational research that could be easily implemented into rehabilitation protocols. If we can preserve muscle strength during immobilization, rehabilitation timelines will decrease, which will result in lower total rehabilitation cost for patients. Hopefully with more research in this area, we can start to see these techniques be used more often in clinical settings.

What are your next steps with this research?

My next steps are to combine these interventions. Although we didn’t quite see muscle stimulation preserve strength, we did see that it was trending in that direction via some other muscular parameters. I’m interested in seeing if combining daily stimulation during action observation + mental imagery gives us even more robust results, and I’m working on a grant proposal to hopefully examine this in the future.

To learn more about academic programs, career opportunities, and research facilities in the Department of Exercise Science, visit the Falk College website.

Story highlights:

• School of Education students are introduced to real-life teaching scenarios through clinical simulations in which they interact with actors assigned to specific roles.
• Professor Ben Dotger incorporated the simulations into the School of Education curriculum 18 years ago and has expanded their presence to a number of groups and academic disciplines.
• As part of an ongoing course created through a National Science Foundation grant, students in an exercise science class gather physiological data during the education students’ simulations and are then tasked with analyzing and communicating the results.

Carly Svec ’27 just experienced a grueling parent-teacher conference. A student’s father raised serious concerns about his daughter’s change in behavior and feared she may harm herself. That raised a red flag for Svec, who realized the need to set an intervention in motion. “There are so many curveballs that can be thrown at you in a parent-teacher conference and knowing how to approach it and be prepared is so important,” Svec says.

In reality, Svec had just completed a simulation. She is an inclusive childhood education major taking Clinical Simulations in K-12 Teacher Preparation (EDU 106), a foundational course in the Syracuse University School of Education that introduces students to a range of increasingly formidable real-life teaching scenarios through six clinical simulations (SIMs). In each simulation, students interact with actors—known as standardized individuals—who play a variety of roles that incorporate issues such as bullying, confrontational parents and colleagues, and climate change. As an integral part of the school’s curriculum, SIMs introduce more subject-specific interactions as teaching candidates progress through their studies.

“Every simulation is meant to be an educative challenge, because from the very start they’re going into a really complex human-helping profession in a K-12 school environment,” says Professor Ben Dotger, director of the Center for Experiential Pedagogy and Practice (CEPP). “We get into the nitty-gritty of what it is to be a teacher in the real classroom and the real school.”

Expanding the Reach of Simulations

Aware that SIMs are a common training practice at medical schools, Dotger applied the idea to teacher preparation and introduced SIMs at the School of Education 18 years ago, partnering with SUNY Upstate Medical University, which shared access to its actors and simulation facility. “I knew early on that we had stumbled into a way of getting students excited about and attuned to serious content—if I could put them in a simulation first,” Dotger says.

Today, CEPP has a dedicated space in Huntington Hall that features six simulation rooms equipped with cameras and microphones and a monitoring room where student-actor interactions are observed and recorded. Dotger works with a team of undergraduate and graduate assistants who help organize and run the SIMs. All told, CEPP has a catalog of 114 SIMs. Along with ones for teacher preparation and specific subject matter, the center offers SIM training for school leaders, student veterans, creative arts therapy students and finance and management majors whose SIM challenges them with ethical situations.

“The platform gives you enormous flexibility to situate a learner and a standardized individual community member, client—you name it,” says Dotger, who continues to grow the program through outreach to different groups and disciplines. “My job is to think who could benefit from SIMs and then get colleagues to partner with me.”

An Exercise Science Collaboration

On a Monday morning during the fall semester, some EDU 106 students are outfitted with sensors strapped around their chests and arms that record their heart and breathing rates, heart rate variability, movement and other physiological information. During the SIMs, Tiago Barreira, an exercise science professor in the David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics, and students in the course Simulation Physiological Data Science (EXE 300) view a large monitor that displays feedback in real time as SIMs play out in six rooms at the center.

The course was created three years ago with the support of a National Science Foundation grant that focuses on STEM education and communication. Pairing it with the SIM course gives the students real-time experience in collecting physiological data, analyzing it and communicating the results to the SIM students. “The data communication piece is key,” Barreira says. “The students not only get into research, but the main thing is learning how to communicate what the data means.”

EXE 300 student Isabel Alfonso ’24, a sport analytics major, and EDU 106 student Eli Burke ’26, an inclusive adolescent education and history major, found the communication interaction both nerve-racking and informative. “Obviously we’re all nervous in the simulation, and it’s cool to actually have data with time stamps that show where your heart rate spikes,” Burke says.

Lindsey Matthews ’25, a health and exercise science major, values the opportunity to conduct research and communicate the results face to face. “It’s a great communication experience because we’re learning how to communicate this data—I’m not just sending an email and telling you what it could mean,” she says. “You have to be able to facilitate a conversation with this person to communicate the data as well.”

Review and Reflection

After completing their SIMs, the students meet in groups with teaching and curriculum doctoral student Julie Harnett ’18, G’19, a CEPP graduate assistant who leads them through a debriefing. Harnett, a former math teacher in the Syracuse City School District, asks questions, draws out important points and provides guidance on interacting with parents and how to handle a situation that involves mandatory reporting. “I love the class,” says Sophia Angelini ’28, an inclusive childhood education major. “The interactions are serious, and it’s helpful to have that pressure when you’re going into a simulation.”

Dotger calls the students’ shared experience—which includes class discussions and presentations of their SIMs performances—the “biggest community builder I’ve ever seen.” He wants them to collaborate, learn from one another and prepare themselves for their teaching careers. “You need to understand what it feels like when you’re having a serious professional conversation,” he says. “Understand that you’re not going to have all the skills from the very start, but you’ll learn them as you go and have chances to implement them in the next interactions.”

A Syracuse University story by Jay Cox originally published on Nov. 26, 2024.