Nature article on runner weight

those scientists just ignore quite some stuff such result things are useless.A t-rex probably could run faster.The reason their heart volume,strength,... .

Weight is a factor.Vo2max is a factor to!mittochondria could be an important factor to.

AND beeing to skinny isnt good for running either.This weight ain as good for everyone.THeir is some basic mass for energy anyone needs nd that mass is different.Even if skeletal mass only diffrents a couple of pounds for a same height.ONe inch on th shoulders easy means 5 pounds more.And u cant change your genes.When you run and just run and are at 5% bodyfat and you still weigh 150 pounds for 5'9" going to 130 probably will destroy your ability.

And that 'ideal' chart that came from numbers of runners who ran the last 10 years aint new.THere are also good heavy runners.Running econommy however does get influenced by percentage mass at the underlegs (where the elasticy is important) if you weigh 130 pounds but by genes have a lot of mass there you will be in a worse situation as the 150 lbs runner who has a big trunk but small lower legs.That WAS a usefull research.THis research looks more like an high school paper.And the T-rex probably was adjusted to run look at his huge achilles,and the skinnyness in his underlegs against his trunk.He could also take more oxygen then us.Kangeroes of 1.8 meer weigh 90 kilos but due to their skinny 'springs'or underlegs or whatever you want to call it they dont even use a fraction of oxygen of a skinny human.

This research is really stupid and tells nothing new.They better studyd something usefull,like what hapens with muscle charactrisitc ove longterm training,or a differnt training approach...

And just to show how stupid this research is go look at the verry best runners of the world kenny and haille they have a BMI of 21 not less not more.So should you have 21 to become the best runner of the world???? I dont think so

This article really didnt sayd anything new(not even the pounding issue),and making such a table is dangerous and not the golden thing.

sorry for the mistakes and the bad english.i really dont use english a lot except for the computer.I hope you still understand why i find this research totally a high school paper.

and if you didnt like to read it

* it only study's one factor namly weight of runners of the past years and not even all runners.It talks like vo2max doesnt matter nour does mitochondria,nour oes anything else...

* they make pour clames,the t-rex is one of them

* the facts they use are already known of:like we use 2.5 x or body weight...

i've read some good papers about research and this paper really seems to make researchers seem like sellsman selling teir magic formulla man bmi 19 woman bmi 17

its such a shame

I am too fat to race at all.

I am unsafe to race at any speed or distance.

About the t-rex i wont claim it will run to 40 miles an hour but it could get to 25 miles an hour(max) i think.The guys of the paper who stole it from another paper made it sound like 3 miles an hour was a lot for these animals.

It sounded like they where fat slow big things.They might seem slow due to there height.But still 25 mph of maximum speed for a couple of miles is speedy.ride a motorbicycle and chase a runner...you could catch him like it where nothing.

Tike wrote:

sorry for the mistakes and the bad english.i really dont use english a lot except for the computer.I hope you still understand why i find this research totally a high school paper.

and if you didnt like to read it

* it only study's one factor namly weight of runners of the past years and not even all runners.It talks like vo2max doesnt matter nour does mitochondria,nour oes anything else...

* they make pour clames,the t-rex is one of them

* the facts they use are already known of:like we use 2.5 x or body weight...

i've read some good papers about research and this paper really seems to make researchers seem like sellsman selling teir magic formulla man bmi 19 woman bmi 17

its such a shame

It's such a shame that you feel competent to make such comments when you clearly haven't read the paper, just a brief commentary by someone other than the authors. Hint, the paper doesn't mention T. rex at all and they don't just study body weight!

Hmmmm....I should be doing the 100. Well, now that I know I guess I can move on.

Any web sites for sprinters out there?

Your English is just fine.

Just to amplify Phil.'s comment: the original paper was in a biology journal, and studied the force of ground impact for runners of different weights. The commentary which you "read" was in Nature, and added further analysis independent of the original authors -- it was a news piece rather than a scientific piece.

But you didn't even understand the news piece, which was disputing the old hypothesis that t-rex's were slow-moving, not agreeing with it, much less claiming it as an original idea.

I find it interesting that Asafa Powell, Mo Greene, and Donovan Bailey all with BMI values of at 25 (over 25 in Bailey's case), and Linford Christie with a BMI of 26 (6'3"/210) are too heavy to compete in 100 meters.

I Wonder where 3 of the last 4 world records in the 100 came from. My impression is that you have to evaluate the power events separately from the endurance events.

yeah exactly. who the hell were the 45 elite 100 runners that they evaluated? i'm pretty sure most elite sprinters weigh more than 130 pounds.

Speed Kills wrote:

I find it interesting that Asafa Powell, Mo Greene, and Donovan Bailey all with BMI values of at 25 (over 25 in Bailey's case), and Linford Christie with a BMI of 26 (6'3"/210) are too heavy to compete in 100 meters.

I Wonder where 3 of the last 4 world records in the 100 came from. My impression is that you have to evaluate the power events separately from the endurance events.

Which is what they showed, the results for 100, 200, & 400 were approximately constant at about 23.5, for 800 and above showed the decay curve which is apparent in the graphs. Powell, Greene and Bailey's data are all used in the study and are within the statistical range expected.

i havent read the full paper i am not so rich.But what was on the magazine was what i was wabout.Yeah?

I read the abstract as well...yeah no dino stuff there i just liked dinos as a kid and the article sounded so wrong

I just had to say.

I read the abstract and then again 45 people and make a formula of them i am sure hat formula will fale on more then one future top runner...

Not all skinny runners are good

kenny and Haille where just runners i mentionned if anyone comes with the whole lot of kenyans...THey are just as good

Kenyans are not better because the lower weight but due to lower lower leg mass it was shown clearly.But there's hope

this where geeral numbers.There's quite some white runners who have that as well.

When scientists sell something they have to do it really good....

45 runners on 10 years on 8 events is not enough for a rule to me... i am not saying such a formule is totally off.But it doesnt care with everything.We dont even know everything....

As I said you were in no position to criticise since you hadn't read the paper, for a start they didn't use 45 runners they used 275 men and 261 women!

Gebrselassie has a BMI of ~20.5 which is exactly where they predict a 1500 runner would be.

Unfortunately, bad science (or good science pushed to draw conclusions that the data isn't able to support) gives all scientists a bad name, and gives ammunition to people like Malmo, who want to ignore virtually all exercise science. This particular piece of work seems to continue the trend that Peter Weyand started some years ago with the famous (or perhaps infamous) "Harvard" Paper. The early work centered on sprinting, and is largely considered to be a piece of garbage in the sprinting world because of the simplistic way the researchers went about drawing conclusions about things like stride rate and stride length.

In the present paper, if you examine the case of Mo Greene, he is listed as 5'9"/176, for a BMI of 26. For Mo to reach the paper's target BMI 23.5, he would have to lose 20 pounds: Those are the 20 pounds that John Smith had him put on so he could compete at the world class level! Asafa Powell (the new WR holder at 100) is 6'2"/192; Francis Obikwelu (the silver medalist at Athens) is 6'3"/148. This is the type of variation you have at the short end, and it is not exactly statistically insignificant. If fact, the only one of the last few WR holders at 100 that fits the conclusion of this paper is the one known to have used drugs to get there (Tim Montgomery, who at 5'10"/160, apparently used drugs because he wasn't strong enough otherwise). Khadevis Robinson, the top US 800 runner these days, has the same BMI as Justin Gatlin, the 100m gold medalist. Are you going to tell Khadevis that he has to run the 100 now, because he's "too fat" for the 800?

At the long end, look at Tim Broe, who just broke the US National Championships record for 5000. He' as much as 50 pounds (if you take USATF stats) heavier than Ritz, who can's hang with him at 3000 or 5000. Obviously, we're going to have to turn Broe into a sprinter, too.

There's also an ethical issue with projections of this manner. If you look at the chart for Women in the distance region, the curve goes well under the BMI value that the US government and medical people consider to be healthy. They are, in effect, telling women that to be able to compete in distance running, they need to get an eating disorder. This is about the last thing slender your women need to be told, or that their coaches need to contend with.

Most scientists understand statistics and realise that you will get a spread of values when you consider a population. If you consider the top 45 performers in the 100m and if their thesis is correct you might not be too surprised if the WR holders are at the higher end of the distribution (your wt data for Obikwelu is grossly low by the way). Khadevis Robinson's data comes out just slightly higher than the range expected for an elite 800m runner not unreasonable. Broe barely makes the top 50 in the 5000 and the data indicates that he's carrying too much weight, not exactly a surprise! Ritzenheim is a much more realistic build (perhaps even too light at present).

I think your comments about eating disorders are totally wrong, the implication of this data is that there is an optimum, i.e. a minimum of about 18.5 BMI, about what Paula Radcliffe is. This is about the 10%ile, which is above the value regarded as underweight, and that going below this is counterproductive. Also the message isn't that if you reach this BMI you will become elite, rather that the consequence of the training which gets you to elite status is to get you in this range, starving to get in that BMI range doesn't achieve the same results!

MY GOD

THIS IS REALLY STUPID

so, i am hardly on the curve at all, and probably "suited" for a 100M sprint. too bad that i run the 100M in 15 sec. on a good day.

this is overall a ridiculous predictor. what about fast twitch/slow twitch muscles, what about aerobic ability?

so basically distance runners have low BMIs which we knew already. ....It seems ridiculous to make sweeping inferences about what distance someone should run like these "scientists" have based simply on height/weight data.

also, looking at the USATF athlete bios, almost none of them seem suited for 10,000M.......too fat, according to this measure.

i am not about to lose the 15 lbs and revert to being a walking 95 lb eating disorder (as this graph suggests). i will stay fat at 110 pounds b/c as far as the eating disorder thing goes: been there, done that. but if i ever need thinspiration to become anorexic again i will definitely use this graph.

disgusted wrote:

so basically distance runners have low BMIs which we knew already. ....It seems ridiculous to make sweeping inferences about what distance someone should run like these "scientists" have based simply on height/weight data.

also, looking at the USATF athlete bios, almost none of them seem suited for 10,000M.......too fat, according to this measure.

The authors of the paper made no such inference, also they found that there was an optimum BMI for each event not just that distance runners have low BMIs! They were studying the mechanics of running and concluded inter alia:

"Our idea that speed-specific ground support force

requirements might explain the body mass variation present

among highly adapted runners of different specializations was

well supported by the elite human runners in our sample.

Regardless of specialization or sex, we found that a single

constant accurately links the ideal body mass for running

performance to the ground support force required of the

performer. Our original idea can be expressed as an ideal mass

coefficient with a single convenient value: 10·kg of body mass

per meter of height squared per unit body weight applied to the

ground at the specialists racing speed. This coefficient

provided mass estimates for the different specialists that were

accurate to within an average of ±1.2·kg, thereby accounting

for 97% of the total mass variation present among the 16 group

means (Equation 1, Fig.·4). The existence of a single

structure–function relationship that links the mechanical

requirements of running to the optimum body masses for

performance has several basic implications. Most immediately,

we can conclude that the fundamental determinant of body size

optima for performance is the support force that runners apply

to the ground at their racing speeds. Because different runners

use the same biological tissues to satisfy this physical

requirement, we find that running performance has a common

structural basis."

Regarding US 10km runners why am I not surprised, they're not exactly in the elite category are they? Meb is the only one able to get within 1 min of the WR and his BMI falls right on the optimum, 20. Abdirahman might even be a little too light.

the paper probably didnt and i believe you but that article most certainly did it screw up everything.

Ya knoow no one could read the substract ony a small prt and that STUPID article.That article does promote eating disorders theree they talk about bmi's as low as 17 for woman damn how could they even think about such a thing

a bmi of 17 could ruin ones heart.And you only have one heart...

phil you must admit the article is a bit freaky huh.Probably not even close to what the investigation was about.Though the article made it seem so.And the abstract didnt tell us anything.All my clams where on the article.

ALl my disrespect goes to the article,not the paper.

I am curious how it was stated all on there though

and my only thing stays its one factor that forces and all i cant read :-)

Still i'll give you right i shouldnt be mad at the paper