ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAM ACTIVITY, CATECHOLAMINES, AND LYMPHOCYTE SUBPOPULATIONS AFTER RESISTANCE EXERCISE AND DURING REGENERATION

We examined the effect in ten male sports students of 30-min resistanc e exercise followed by either 45-min regeneration with massage treatme nt on a massage bench or supine rest serving as control, on plasma cat echolamine concentration, number and distribution of circulating white blood cells and central activitity. Resistance exercise increased fre e plasma adrenaline (A) and noradrenaline (NA), whereas sul phoconjuga ted catecholamine concentration remained unchanged as determined by hi gh performance liquid chromatography. Exercise induced leucocytosis an d lymphocytosis measured by flow cytometry was predominantly manifeste d by an increase in the number of lymphocytes, monocytes, CD3(+) cells , CD8(+) cells and CD3(-) CD16/56(+) cells. Computer-aided electroence -phalography (EEG) revealed significant increases in absolute EEG band power. The increase was highest in alpha 2 with 51.6 (SD 40.2) % (P<0 .01), followed by beta 1 with 33.3 (SD 21.0) % (P<0.01), alpha 1 with 31.9 (SD 25.2) % (P<0.01), beta 2 with 30.8 (SD 26.7) % (P<0.01), delt a with 26.1 (SD 28.7) % (P<0.05), and theta with 19.8 (SD 16.5) % (P<0 .01). All hormone and immunological variables returned to pre-exercise values 45 min after exercise with no differences between massage and control treatments. However, during regeneration differences in absolu te EEG-band power were observed between massage and control treatments . In central (C-z, C-3, C-4) and fronto-lateral (F-3, F-4) electrode p ositions absolute beta 1 spectral power density was significantly lowe r during massage treatment than during control (Wilcoxon test: P<0.01) . Overall, these data demonstrated that an influence of massage treatm ent on deactivation characteristics could be observed in EEG measureme nts but not in plasma catecholamine concentration or blood lymphocytes , indicating that computer-aided topographical EEC may be a useful tec hnique for studying activation and regeneration characteristics.