2.2.2. Sham Intervention
This group received standard care plus passive dynamic exercise of the lower legs (sham treatment for NMES-RE) and transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS, sham treatment for NMES-aerobic exercise) during IPR. For the passive dynamic lower leg exercise, a physical therapist passively moved the participant’s lower leg to a full knee extension and flexion for a similar duration used for NMES-RE (3–5 s to attain knee extension and flexion). Both legs were trained in an alternating order with 5 min of rest between sets. Upon completion of leg exercises, participants were given a short break (10–15 min) for recovery before starting the TENS intervention. For TENS, we applied 1/4 of the current needed to aerobically train the muscle. For example, 100–200 mA is typically needed to adequately stimulate the paralyzed muscle with long-standing SCI; thus, 25–50 mA with a pulse duration/interval of 200/50 µs was used as the control stimulus [