Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights_ - Alex Hutchinson [66]
If it’s acute injuries rather than wear and tear that lead to arthritis, you might expect running to be in the clear—and indeed that’s what a series of recent studies have concluded. Needless to say, this conclusion will be hard for many people to believe. After all, the aging runners they know are certainly subject to aches and pains. But the data collected by Williams and others suggest that, while everyone acquires aches as they age, it’s the people who don’t exercise who acquire the most. “As these runners aged,” Williams noted after one of his studies, “the benefits of exercise were not in the changes they saw in their bodies, but how they didn’t change like the people around them.”
Will running ruin my knees?
This is a fear that stops many would-be runners in their tracks and lurks in the back of the mind of even the most experienced. Occasional aches and pains are pretty much an inevitable part of running on a regular basis, so it’s entirely reasonable to wonder whether the exercise you’re enjoying now will leave you hobbling in a decade or two. Over the past few years, several long-term studies have produced results that should put these fears to rest.
In a 2008 issue of Skeletal Radiology, a team of Austrian radiologists presented knee MRIs of seven runners who had taken part in a previous MRI study before running the Vienna marathon in 1997. The use of MRIs offers a significant diagnostic advantage compared to earlier studies that relied on X-rays. The results were clear: no new damage in the knee joints of the six subjects who had continued running in the intervening decade. “In contrast, the only person who had given up long-distance running showed severe deterioration in the intra-articular structures of his knee,” the authors note.
An even longer-term study at Stanford University has been following 45 runners and 53 non-running controls since 1984, taking regular X-rays. The latest results, which appeared in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine in 2008, showed that after 18 years, 20 percent of the runners had developed osteoarthritis (the most common form of arthritis) in the knee, compared to 32 percent of non-runners.
These two studies raise a possibility that several earlier studies have proposed: that, far from ruining your knees, running might actually help protect them. Due to the limited data available, it’s not possible to draw that conclusion at this point, Stanford lead author Eliza Chakravarty cautions. “I don’t think I would strongly recommend running for the purpose of ‘protecting the knees,’” she says. Still, the idea is plausible: the American College of Sports Medicine recently reported that each additional pound of body mass puts four additional pounds of stress on the knee, so packing on a pound a year for a decade ups your chances of developing arthritis by 50 percent—a fairly powerful argument for running to protect your knees.
One important drawback with both studies is selection bias. The runners in both studies were committed recreational runners who already had a history of being able to run without serious problems. A more rigorous test would involve testing a random sampling of the general population, rather than pitting “runners” versus “non-runners.” That’s effectively what researchers from the famously long-running Framingham Heart Study did, analyzing data from 1,279 subjects over a nine-year period and publishing the results in the journal Arthritis & Research in 2007. Using the comprehensive medical and lifestyle data accumulated for the study, the researchers found no association between exercise (including running) and the development of knee osteoarthritis.
Of course, the decision doesn’t have to be strictly utilitarian. As one of the Vienna study participants (who was preparing to run his 37th marathon) put