Age-related, or osteoporotic, fractures present a significant burden both on the individual as well as the health care profession, so preventative measures are of the utmost importance. Exercise is often prescribed to individuals regardless of age in order to promote strong bones during growth and prevent bone loss during aging. However, it is still not clear what types of exercise and what ages are optimal for improving bone. A recent article by Ireland et al. addressed this topic by comparing tennis players who began playing as children or young adults.

The Experiment

A mixed group of males and females with mean ages of 51 and 63, respectively, participated in this study. All participants were regular tennis players (three hours or more per week) and had no history of leg or arm fractures two years leading up to the study. Information was collected from each participant including when they first started playing tennis and how long they played.

Participants were then grouped into those men who started playing before the age of twelve (childhood/young starters) or after the age of 22 (adulthood/old starters). For women, menarcheal status (first menstrual period) when they began playing tennis was used to determine if they started in childhood or adulthood. 

The authors assessed arm bone structure at a variety of sites on the radius and ulna (forearm) using x-ray densitometry in the form of a peripheral quantitative tomography (pQCT) machine. They also measured hand grip force using a hand grip dynamometer (an instrument similar to squeezing the handle of a gasoline pump).

The analysis in this study was rather complex with several statistical analyses being used. Of primary interest was the comparison of playing (dominant arm) to non-playing (non-dominant arm) in young and old starters. However, more general analyses examining bone traits with age and sex were also conducted.

The Results

The age groups chosen for this study resulted in a total of 56 young starters and 32 old starters. Participation in other sports was recorded and found not to significantly affect differences among groups. The key findings from the study were as follows:

General Results

An analysis of all study participants found that older players had larger forearm bones (cross-sectional area, CSA), but reduced upper arm muscle CSA, reduced grip force, and reduced bone mineral density (BMD) at the distal radius when compared to younger players.

Regardless of age, racket (dominant) arms were found to be larger in CSA, than non-dominant arms. The most pronounced side differences were found in the humerus (upper arm) where bone mass (as measured by 2D area) was greater in the dominant arm.

Comparing ages, the most pronounced effect was that enhancement of humeral (upper arm) bone mass and outer size (circumference) was 41-48% smaller at age eighty than age forty.

There were some sex differences in playing arm bone structure with women having enhanced bone in the ulna and men having more enhanced bone in the humerus.

Results Incorporating When Participants Started Playing Tennis

• Starting age was not a significant predictor of muscle, bone, or force parameters overall. Thus, starting tennis in childhood gave similar results as starting in young adulthood.
• A multiple regression analysis indicated that starting age did correlate with the difference between dominant and non-dominant arm bone. Specifically, young starters tended to have greater differences between their playing arms and non-playing arms with playing arms being larger in size. However, at certain locations, like the end of the radius closest to the elbow, older starters tended to have more bone mass in their playing arms relative to their non-playing arms.

The Limitations

• The starting age difference examined in this study is, for some of the individuals, very small. 22 years is young adulthood for a male and major changes in bone size/shape still happen after that age. A more interesting comparison would have been a starting age comparison to older adults (~thirty years) or the elderly (~sixty years).
• This study wasn’t designed to separate age effects such as the menopause event in females (only nine menopausal aged women were in the study).
• Training volume during life, although accounted for in the study, was taken from patient recollection, rather than documented in any quantifiable way.
• This study examined a very specific type of exercise – tennis. Its results may not be applicable to other types of exercise.

The Take-Home

This study indicates that starting exercise earlier in life (twelve years versus 22 years of age) will not universally improve skeletal traits by the time one is at an older age (forty to seventy+). Starting early permitted certain skeletal enhancements, particularly in men, but there seems to be a cap to how enhanced bones can be at the forty-to-seventy+ age bracket. This was evidenced by dominant arms not being as large as non-dominant arms in older individuals of this bracket when compared to the difference between arms of younger individuals in this bracket.

Still, what was significant regarding starting age was the relative changes that could be made within individuals. That is, for a given older adult age (forty-to-seventy+ bracket), beginning exercise at the “earlier” age (twelve years instead of 22 years) led to greater enhancement of the dominant arm relative to the non-dominant arms. Thus, while beginning exercise earlier in life may not completely offset the process of age-related bone loss, it may permit maximization of one’s individual potential for maintaining strong, healthy bones.

References:

1. Ireland A, et al., “Effects of age and starting age upon side asymmetry in the arms of veteran tennis players: a cross-sectional study.” Osteoporos Int. 2014 Apr;25(4):1389-400. doi: 10.1007/s00198-014-2617-5. Epub 2014 Feb 15.

Photo 1 by Anatomy & Physiology, Connexions Web site. Jun 19, 2013. (OpenStax College) [CC-BY-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Photos 2, 3, & 4 courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Is Starting Sports in Childhood Best for Bone Strength? appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Caving: My Worst Nightmare Turned Into a Sport (Valerie Worthington)

As someone who fears the dark and enclosed spaces, caving sounds like my own personal ninth circle of hell. But so does BJJ to some folks. So what is the allure of caving, and why do people do it?

Taking Up Tennis in My 40s: My New Sport (Danette “Dizzle” Rivera)

CrossFit advises to regularly try new sports, but in all my time training I never have. Until now. Now in my 40s, my husband of 14 years, who is also a tennis coach, is my new coach of my new sport.

What Baseball Players Know About Life: (Why 0-For-20 Isn’t a Bad Thing) (Logan Gelbrich)

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What is Parkour? Are You Already Doing It? (Valerie Worthington)

Parkour? Par-what? Freerunning? What are people talking about and why are they climbing all over EVERYTHING? Get the lowdown on this awesome sport you can literally do ANYWHERE.

How the LA Kings Saved My Grandfather and Me (Danette “Dizzle” Rivera)

Little did I know the LA Kings and the Stanley Cup would be the elements that finally brought my Marine Corps grandfather and me together, and rekindled our relationship.

Repeated Small Blows, Not Concussion Could Be the Real Danger in High-Impact Sports (Becca Borawski)

Two recent studies conducted on high school athletes concluded the accumulation of small blows to the head while not being full concussions could still cause lifelong brain damage.

Science Says Alcohol Not the Best Post Workout Drink (Joshua Wortman)

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The Fitness Benefits of Fencing (Becca Borawski)

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Chess Boxing: The Sweet Science Meets the Royal Game (Valerie Worthington)

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It’s Not a Skirt, It’s a KILT: Highland Athletics 101 (Nicole Crawford)

There was a moment I questioned marrying my husband – when he told me he was wearing a kilt to our wedding. Now, years later, I have fallen in love with the Highland Games and all things Scottish.

Curling: A Sport For Weekend Warriors and Olympians Alike (Valerie Worthington)

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Life of a Strongman: An Interview With Tom McClure (Becca Borawski)

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Science Says: Soccer is Good For Your Heart (Joshua Wortman)

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The 17 Commandments of Rowing: My Journey From Hate to Happiness (Becca Borawski)

I used to hate rowing, but then I actually learned how to do it properly…and I fell in love. Read these 17 tips on how to become a more efficient and happier rower.

The post Something For Everyone: 14 Sports We’ve Covered appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

I was always an exceptional student, but any lesson I’ve ever learned with some serious, life-altering substance came from the game of baseball. As long as I can remember, I set out to be a professional baseball player and, boy, did I sign up for a wild ride.

As a hitter, to master the game of baseball means to have success just thirty percent of the time. Immediately, there is an unavoidable battle with success and failure built right into the foundation of the game. On top of that, baseball is an experiential sport. To master it is to be very specialized. Sure, athleticism helps, but even I will admit one need not be a great athlete to be a great baseball player. Running track or playing soccer, for example, means less for one’s ability to have success in baseball than nearly any sport. As they say about athletes trying to learn baseball, “You can’t steal first base.”

So far, we’ve outlined that playing baseball, by nature guarantees, at the very least, a ton of failure. Also, getting good at the sport require a lot of skill development that cannot be acquired outside playing the game. Therefore, to be good one must endure thousands and thousands of seemingly negative experiences to make progress in the sport. Soon, players begin a process that looks like a giant funnel from many participants playing Little League and t-ball, to fractions of one percent of those playing professionally. Most of this weeding process, however, has much more to do with the intangibles of the sport than the physical skills, like who can hit, field, run, throw, and catch.

Could you devote hours a day, nearly every day of the year, for a decade or more to experience stretches of failure like an 0-for-20 streak? Going 0-for-20 in the commercial real estate business would mean losing your job. Try shooting 0-for-20 from the field in the NBA. You might as well turn your jersey in before the buzzer even sounds.

Alex Rodriguez gets paid $25 million dollars per year and will have streaks of failure like this multiple times in a single season. His thoughts? “I don’t worry about it,” Rodriguez said. “I always look at baseball like the stock market. You don’t look at it every day. When it’s a good stock, after a long season, it’s going to be there.”¹

What does A-Rod perceive his “stock” to be? “Google,” he says.²

That is the biggest lesson of all. Masters of the game of baseball have a characteristic that masters of the game of life often share. They are process oriented and ferocious in their preparation, but they waste no time with that which they cannot control. The Petri dish that baseball creates to test this skill has incredible relevance to life outside of the sport.

We all want results, regardless of your task, career, desire, etc. We all want performance. The funny thing is success is scalable. One million hours of work may result in fame and fortune for me, but one million hours of work may result in failure for you and visa versa. There are too many uncontrollable factors to say, “If you do X,Y, and Z you will get success” in any given arena. Life throws us slumps and challenges we could never expect, just like baseball.

So what do we do? The hard part is that the best way to get results is to focus on the process. It’s like playing Black Jack. You can play the game by the book and mathematically create the biggest advantage possible, but when you’re down two thousand dollar in ten minutes, your emotions creep in. This is where “hitting” when you’ve got eighteen happens out of frustration or desperation. Major Leaguers always play the book. It’s how they got there. They are masters of the plan, even when they are 0-for-20.

A common stereotype of baseball players is that they are arrogant. I won’t disagree. I’d like to defend this stereotype in that it takes something like arrogance to have enough dignity to expect success when recent history, public opinion, and even the odds say otherwise.

Whether you ever played Little League or not, I think we all can relate to the good days and bad days life has to offer. Anyone and everyone could benefit from the skills taught in the classroom that is the baseball field. Results are largely out of our control. Working the process increases one’s chances of success – nothing more, nothing less. Control what you can and always step up to the plate like you’re 20 for your last 20.

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