[calbear81]

I think most elite athletes already jeopardize their health from too much physical activity. Consider traumatic brain injuries in the NFL or boxing or wearing out your knees from running on pavement for hundreds of miles. My friends and I talked about this once, we believe there should be two leagues - a standard league with rules and a no-limit league where you can dope as much as they want. They will push the limits of the human body and my bet is that our first mutants will come from this league.

[perkee]

> My friends and I talked about this once, we believe there should be two leagues - a standard league with rules and a no-limit league where you can dope as much as they want. They will push the limits of the human body and my bet is that our first mutants will come from this league.

Thing is strength sports have this already and no one who doesn't themselves compete is really beating down the doors to watch them. Powerlifting is divided into drug tested and untested, but is there a meaningful difference to the casual Sports Center viewer seeing a clip of a dude squatting 477.5kg drug tested in knee sleeves vs 485kg untested in knee wraps? MMA has grown in popularity as the UFC has gotten really serious about in- and out-of-competition testing. A coworker joked that he wanted to see cage fighting with an "anything goes" drug policy but we already had that a few years ago and he was watching the same amount of it then as now: 0. The NFL for all intents and purposes has no drug testing and it basically owns a whole day of the week for 40% of the year in the U.S., but if it ever gets serious about testing I don't think that would really detract from the spectacle of it all.

Point is: I used to think this too but I don't actually see much of value prop in doing this.

[bo1024]

This is a side point, but the "knee damage" myth needs to be dispelled. The evidence does not support it and may even point the other way.

[bermanoid]

Do you have a source?

My own experience, as well as anecdotes from a lot of runners that I know, all confirm that running is very hard on the knees. Whenever I've had knee issues, the exercise that I have to cut out in order to make them go away is always running.

Or are you objecting to the "on pavement" bit? I don't really know whether that matters, I live in a city so all of my running is on pavement.

[pg314]

The studies [1] and [2] found no evidence of any adverse effects, rather the contrary (lower incidence of knee osteoarthritis in the running group). One possible explanation is that the runners were less likely to put on weight over the years, leading to lower day-to-day stresses on the knees.

[1] Eliza Chakravarty et al. "Long distance running and knee osteoarthritis: A prospective study," American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2008, 35(2), 133-138

[2] David Felson et al., "Effects of recreational physical activities on the development of knee osteoarthritis in older adults of different weights: The Framingham Study," Arthritis & Rheumatism, 2007, 57(1), 6-12

[bo1024]

Thanks to the other poster for linking some studies. My comment draws from discussion with a leading researcher in the area as well as background awareness of research developments, but I don't know studies off the top of my head without doing a search.

The question of pavement vs soft surfaces is AFAIK open from an injury standpoint. Many people would expect that soft surfaces lower injury rates but I don't think we have evidence to support that.

There's also a difference, which may play a role, between short-term knee problems like runner's knee and underlying damage like osteoarthritis.

What follows is just my opinion/interpretation, but might be helpful. Knees in running are a bit like bearings in a car wheel. They don't generally go bad on their own (unless they are overloaded when not ready), but instead because of imbalanced forces around them, like mis-aligned wheels or tire tread wear. The knee has a lot of outside forces acting on it, mainly from the quadriceps and the IT bands, and if these forces aren't in harmony, they will pull on the knee and affect the way it tracks/moves. Since the knee has to move thousands of times over the course of a single run, a small imbalance can add up and cause injury. So a lot of times the fix lies in stretching or strengthening the quads and IT bands (e.g. I find sometimes that a knot in my quads can cause knee problems in running that go away soon once the knot is worked out).

[nl]

I think most elite athletes already jeopardize their health from too much physical activity. Consider traumatic brain injuries in the NFL or boxing

NFL and Boxing are sports where brain injuries occur when doing the sport by the rules. I - and many others - think that is unacceptable, and in the NFL at least there seems to be at least a small amount of movement to improvement to this.

or wearing out your knees from running on pavement for hundreds of miles.

There's plenty of evidence showing this isn't really a thing. Humans evolved to run long distances and while modern high level sport is generally at a higher intensity this doesn't seem to cause "wearing out of knees".

OTOH, many "runners" (even healthy ones) are much much heavier than the weights we evolved at, and there does seem to be a link there.