December 2024

Reverse Walking Reverses Disease Correlates

Heart disease has many correlates such as excess weight as gauged by a high BMI, blood pressure (BP), and C-reactive protein (CRP, a marker of systemic inflammation). Diet and exercise are two things you can do to reduce your risk of disease and early death.

Walking is the most accessible form of exercise available. Here we report on a study that compared the effects of backward, or retro, walking (RW) with those of forward walking (FW) on CRP, BMI, and BP; also to better “understand the influence of independent factors, namely systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), and BMI on CRP”.

Two groups of 53 men (20-25 yrs old) with BMI’s over 25 were assigned to backward treadmill walking under supervision for 4 days a week for 12 weeks at 4 km/h (2.4 mph) at a 10% incline. The controls walked forward with similar frequency, intensity, and durations.

CRP, BMI, and BP levels decreased significantly in both groups with the retro group seeing greater improvements. SBP and DBP were also reduced. RW places “higher demands on metabolic sensorimotor, cardiovascular, and perceptual responses than” FW. Others have found that RW “stimulated the lower limb muscles and resulted in higher energy consumption”, perhaps explaining the more potent effects of RW.

The bottom line is that RW might reverse cardiovascular risk factors better than FW but generates substantial risks of its own…like falling off a treadmill. So walker, beware.                            

Lower Extremity Reviews, Aug. 2024

Increasing Cycling Power: On-Bike or Off-Bike

Are you an indoor cyclist or bicyclist? Do you want more power going up hills or tensioning to increase group exercise-class ratings? Either way, ultimately you will have to increase leg strength and power. This could be done in one of two ways: on the bike, by adding tension or adjusting gearing to make it harder to push the pedals, or off the bike, by lifting weights such as performing squats and step-ups. Finally, a group of researchers tested these two modalities head to head, measuring and comparing changes in squat strength (SQ), cycling power (CP: Wingate test), body composition (BC), maximum O2 uptake (maxVO2), and leg muscle architecture (MA).

For 10 weeks, one group of 12 well-trained cyclists did 2 sessions/wk of off-bike full squats at 70% of their max (OFF) while another did all-out efforts with very-high resistances and low-cadences (ON: n =12); a third group (C: n = 13) served as controls, following the same regular conditioning cycling training as the test subjects.

Here’s the good news: both ON and OFF improved their SQ strength and pedaling-specific strength compared to C: 4.5 – 7.3% vs 2.6 – 5.8% vs -5.8 – -3.9% for ON, OFF, and C, respectively. Furthermore, the study groups improved CP whereas the C lost power, as manifested in changes in MA: the study groups developed larger leg muscles while the C experienced some atrophy. No significant changes were noted in BC or maxVO2.

Ultimately, both ON and OFF provide the kinds of benefits “for improving overall and pedaling-specific muscle strength, power, and muscle mass.”                                                                                                              

MSSE Sept. 2024

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