A comparative study: tongue muscle performance in weightlifters and runners | Hacker News Reader

A comparative study: tongue muscle performance in weightlifters and runners

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

64 pointsluu47 comments

It would be interesting to see how muscle development faired and progressed with musicians. Opera singers, specifically. I can't think of another subset of the population who have explicitly geared themselves toward using these small muscles in ways which require both strength and endurance. An opera singers' entire musculature is geared toward natural, acoustic amplification, and their use of the tongue to manipulate acoustics via vowel sounds would make an insightful corollary study.

Most wind instruments require pretty unique tongue actions for 'punctuation' of music. I can speak for the potential for trumpet to be pretty grueling on both lips and tongue for pieces that are rapid, staccato and/or long.

I think the whole point of this study was to see how muscles reacted to that were unrelated to those trained by the athlete's sport.

I suppose it would be interesting but would be a bit like comparing runners and weightlifters to sedentary people. In fact I think that group would be better for control...

Interesting results. Just last night I read an article about training for rock climbing that suggested cutting back on intensive cardio routines outside of climbing if you're having trouble making strength gains, and I went to sleep last night wondering how much merit there is to the claim, since I'm both a cyclist and a climber.

Anecdotally, when cycling in the city it's usually shorter rides with high intensity hill climbs and sprints, but after an 18 hour, 300km ride in the country last summer, it took me weeks to get that climbing/sprinting power back, that one big ride made me substantially weaker.

You can still do cardio and maintain muscle mass. Sprinting is better than running miles and miles.

But, if you want to run marathons or triathlons, google "alex viada the Hybrid Athlete." He's a bodybuilder who maintains his muscle mass and strength while also doing triathlons. He has a background in biochemistry and works in pharmaceuticals. At least he used to. I'm not sure if he still does.

Given his background in body building and pharma, I would bet he is using PEDs to be able to be a hybrid athlete.

Based on a google image search I think that's a safe assumption. Still impressive though.

I’d agree. The people I know who can reasonably simply be a “hybrid” are those who use various anabolic steroids, SARMs, and peptides, the latter two bring more interesting for this case as various ones target, say, joint damage and help repair them

I know a bunch of triathletes who look like that despite not using PEDs. They do, however, treat their bodies like temples and have the most rigorous diets I've ever seen.

Same here, but there's no sense trying to convince the people here that.

Further off topic: high intensity workouts also have the benefit of being short and therefore easier to do after work :)

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A great workout that only requires an exercise bike is:

- 4-5min of biking, sprinting for 30sec every minute.

- no break, 20 push-ups, 20 squats, 20 crunches

- ~1min break, repeat the above two more times

The result should be a ~20min strength building exercise that is easy on the joints and gets a nice heartrate/endorphin spike.

The body-weight push-ups and squat are only a very light strength building exercise. Sadly, you'll still be above average in fitness if you do this workout.

If you keep some progression going, and don't over-eat, you'll end up with a pretty nice physique at least.

I think a big reason why so many have a hard time maintaining a life-long fitness habit is because their goals are merely cosmetic. The first thing an excercise routine needs to be is fun, and after that the rest is butter.

The entire discipline of calisthenics would disagree with you on this one... (oh, and me too)

The discipline of calisthenics does not consider plain push-ups, bodyweight squats and crunches as anything more than beginner-level exercises.

The trick with body weight exercise progression is to use leverage to increase the effective resistance. For example: http://stevenlow.org/the-fundamentals-of-bodyweight-strength...

Done correctly body weight alone can allow one to achieve great strength. In fact, it’s probably superior on account of gymnasts can easily do weight lifting exercises while weight training doesn’t really transfer to gymnastics.

Further off topic still... you need to add some pulling exercises to balance your pushups, maybe some vertical pulling and pushing (pullups, overhead presses) as well, and swapping the squats for lunges or step-ups once in a while will give you better overall leg development (squats for quads, lunges and stepups will work glutes and hamstrings a bit more)

You're probably not going to run into issues with that low of an intensity (20 pushups is not nothing, but if you stop at 20 every time, it's not like you'll keep making the imbalance worse) but adding another few exercises will only add like 5 mins total to your workout, and will give better overall results

Great input! I believe a serious workout would involve some sort of lifting routine before hand. This exercise is really just intended to get some cardio/endorphins without being heavily aerobic.

Further off topic, you have essentially described the model that CrossFit uses! You could steal workouts from https://www.crossfit.com/ as the publish them for free. There is also a lot of good material tied to the crossfit name for high intensity interval training if you google around.

For what it's worth, 8 years ago when I had a climbing coach and took it seriously we did HIIT (before it took off as a trend) and it was further super tailored for climbing - for instance had days of the week called climbing specific which were mostly campus board with camera work for motion tracking type stuff. So at least I can vouch for a small group of fairly serious Colorado climbers who mostly did this type of training versus just running for many miles. Outside of climbing / training I mostly just walked a LOT to stay lean but that's quite different than running for long periods. I think there is some specific differentiation between alpine sport climbers and boulders/indoor comp climbers in terms of endurance needs.

I definitely made noticeable strength gains with his program I did it from like 18-23/4. Biggest regret of my life giving it up but that's another story!

I can only think of one activity where tongue endurance is important, and I guess it's good that runners come out ahead in that department.

Actually, the weightlifters were better in some regards.

> Finally, TE [tongue endurance] was overall significantly greater in runners than in weightlifters (P = 0.001).

I'm assuming you're not trying to move a heavy weight, so the runners probably take an advantage.

Weightlifters had greater tongue strength, for which I can't think of a benefit, but runners had greater endurance.

Strength is actually very important if you read Taoist sexual kung fu practices, they even had exercises for tongue strength specifically.

I can think of another — sleeping.

A doctor named Mike Ilkes published a book claiming that snoring is mostly caused by weak muscles in the tongue, soft palate, and lower throat, and can be cured through simple exercise.

I can't vouch for the veracity of his claims yet, but ask me again in a few months…

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness/body/simple-worko...

Im overweight and snore as a result, or have sleep apnea or whatever. Tongue Endurance might okay a small role but its not helping me. I am a beatboxer and consistently train my tongue and muscles around the throat.

Jokes aside, this is actually a very interesting study. We all know that physical characteristics are developed specifically by different activities (endurance for runners, strength for weightlifters). But I think most people would think this is due to local effects at the level of the muscle or specific neural circuits for different movements. This study suggests that a more general physical adaptation is at play, since the tongue isn't involved in running or weightlifting.

Yeah, this is neat. I suppose it does make sense - running is going to have an effect on the whole cardiovascular system, the legs being just a part of that, and weightlifting will affect the whole of the CNS's ability to recruit muscle fibers, so it does stand to reason their would be systemic changes. The body becomes better in totality at what it practices, and it's neat to see evidence of this.

There may also be some self-selection when it comes to people who choose to be weightlifters or runners. Tongue strength differences may be a genetic correlation with particular body types rather than a result of training.

Exactly what I was thinking. Did the study control for genetic effects? The study compared "weightlifters" and "runners" - people who have presumably already been pursuing the activity for some time, instead of of being randomly assigned to such an experimental condition.

So we might expect that genetically stronger people (with stronger tongues) would gravitate toward weightlifting, with the same trend for self-identified "runners" and endurance.

It's not entirely true that the tongue isn't involved, because of breathing patterns. If differential tongue strength/endurance is just an incidental effect of different breathing patterns, I'm not sure there's much further to go with this.

Not just breathing patterns, but during the brief but intense period of a lift, the muscles of your tongue are engaged in a way they are not normally.

According to yogis and qigong teachers I’ve met The tongues energetic circuit connects to the heart and actually runs down the spine and ends at the anus . I could totally see how exercising one part frees up and strengthens another through reflexology

Hard to confirm without studies on anus strength cross correlation.

Potential confounders abound. I'll wait for the randomized experiment...

I don't find any mention of screening for steroid use. My understanding is that steroid use is much more common in weightlifting than running. I would have expected them to rule that out as an alternative cause of the effects they are measuring.

I am a runner and i play Hindustani flute.

I also use a technique called tonging. Good to know that i can perform a song which heavily depends on tonguing.

From the viewpoint of the endocrine system and how the body reacts the different type of stresses you put on it, this makes perfect sense. A stressor in the form of a heavy weight is going to induce a different hormonal response than a stressor in the form of a long run. A hormonal response won't localize to just the muscle groups involved, but affect everything, so even your tongue gets some degree of adaptation to the stressor. Bodies are awesome.

This makes a lot of sense. A lot of muscle strength / endurance is learned, meaning the gains are realized through motor cortex changes rather than muscle changes.

I think this is right up the Ignobel's alley.

ROFL. "Iowa Oral Performance Instrument". Those cunning linguists at University of Iowa need an IG Nobel.

Or it could just be a side effect of weightlifters / bodybuilders eating more than normal people and thus “working out” their tongue more?

Cue Mark Abrahams: "The medicine priiize. . . "

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