Evidence Strong
Powerlifting at any age: your fountain of health? With Dan van den Hoek
I like watching golf as well, but other people will tell me golf is boring, cricket is boring. You need to be amazed, I guess, by the skill and the strength that it takes to do what these strength sport athletes do when you see somebody deadlift 400 kilos or squat 300 or 400 kilos. You know that's heavy, whether you've ever done it yourself or not. Imagine being under that barbell or lifting it off the ground is hard, but I think it's more engaging the more you watch. And if you look at our lighter weight athletes, you know, whilst the raw number being lifted, maybe it's 150 kilos on a bench press might not sound like much. When we look at an athlete who only weighs 50 kilos, imagine bench pressing three times your own body weight when you're that way, that's hugely impressive. So hi, Don, it's my pleasure to welcome you to Evidence Strong Show. If you could briefly introduce yourselves, that would be great. Yeah, thanks for having me, Alex. I'm Dan Vann, I'm a senior lecturer in Clinical Exercise Physiology at the University of the Sunshine Coast. And I've been an accredited Exercise Physiologist for the past 10 years. I've got a strong interest in strength sports and sports performance of the research area. I've been a practitioner, I've been a sports coach largely in team sports, all of my life. But I guess, yeah, my major role is as an academic. Awesome. We need more research. So it's important. So I invited to you today, because you are the author of the study, is powerlifting a viable method for engaging adults of all ages in resistance training, a retrospective longitudinal population analysis with comparison top population norms. So this is what I want to pick up your brain about. This study is about powerlifting, but all lifting and weightlifting, Olympic weightlifting in particular, are quite similar. So I'm super curious to know your thoughts. First, how you went about the study, then what you found, and then how it may relate to the bigger population and population has in general. Also, as you said, Alex, Olympic weightlifting and powerlifting are very similar in that, you know, obviously the goal is to move as heavy a weight as possible across three attempts or so, and obviously in powerlifting, you know, three different disciplines, the squat, the bench, pressing the deadlift versus a snatch or a clean and jerk in weightlifting. But largely our population's got a lot of similarities, the technicalities, the lifts might pull people one way or the other, but my background and interest is in powerlifting and some of my colleagues on this paper have been powerlifting coaches and competitors themselves. So I guess that's where our interest comes from, mainly in powerlifting, not to say that similar trends that we observe might also exist in weightlifting, but I guess overall, we just wanted to have a look at what has happened with participation in powerlifting in Australia since inception. So 1968, when the first competitions were held here, what does growth look like? Is it the number of competitors or is it people competing more often? How many competitions are held in a year? And what are these competitors look like? How old are they? How young are they? And is that changing over time? So obviously, you know, we're well aware that exercising aging is a massive issue and becoming more and more prevalent in research. But I guess we don't know whether or not older adults in particular participating in strength sports like this, or are they a young person's sport? And then I guess the overall question was, could we use powerlifting as an activity to engage adults of all ages? So that is from the very young sort of junior athletes right through to people in their 80s and 90s, which would be incredible that we can have this total lifespan activity that people don't enjoy too. They get stronger and three, and if they want it, there's competition there regularly they can participate in as well. Yeah, that sounds like a good plan, but let's see what evidence says. How did you go about checking what's going on? Yeah, so obviously this had to be a retrospective study. So we use data that's already collected and publicly available. So we use the openpowerlifting.org website. They call it almost every powerlifting competition in the world and produce those results publicly for dissemination, which is a huge advantage to us, rather than having to pick and choose from the hundreds of different federations around the world. In Australia alone, there's more than sort of 15 federations that involve powerlifting politicians. Because of those differences, it's really hard to make sure we capture everything. So this database, whilst not necessarily exhaustive, is the best available data we've got at the moment. We pulled all of our data from Australian competitions from the first ever held in Australia in 1968 till the end of 2022, and then we classified our participants based on World Health Organization age classifications. And that was just to sort of break them down into a globally acceptable age bracket. So I think those age brackets were, if I can pull them up. We had children, so one to 11 years old, so obviously very young, but there are some athletes participating at these ages, especially in school competitions, adolescents age 12 to 17 years, young adults, 18 to 35 middle age, 36 to 59. Sadly, I'm in the middle age category these days, although I don't feel middle age, older adults, 16 to 79 years, and then very old adults being 18 plus. So we classified athletes by these age group, and then we had a look at what participation looks like across that time span. And as you can imagine, more people have started participating over time, and those age groups become more apparent. And then we just reported descriptively. So how many people, how many times they compete, for how long do they compete? It was a really interesting question we looked at, and I can give you a bit of detail on that. So young adults represent 50% of the total competitors when we use their age of their first time competing. So typically, one in every two people, as they commence starting and powerlifting, will be aged 18 to 35 years, which probably makes sense to most of us young men and women, sort of getting into the strength training around that sort of 16, 17, 18 years old, starting to compete at 18 to 35 makes sense. We only had two competitors ever aged in their 80s when they first competed, but that's not to say we haven't had more that have been aged in their 80s as they've gone on to compete over time. We had a two to one ratio, males to females, which is probably unsurprising. So about 14,000 men, 7,000 women across our total data sets, so 21,000 people in total. And I'd imagine in weightlifting, the ratios are pretty similar for participation. So there's a real opportunity there to get more women lifting heavy and competing as well. Sometimes it's that these women might be participating in strength training. We just don't know why they don't carry on the competition, but I think there's a real opportunity for research to be done there, to find out what are the barriers or facilitators to enhancing participation for women in strength sports. Could we inject there? Because you also did compare the data you've got on participants to their norms. Yeah, so obviously part of competing in a strength sport is you want to get stronger. That's how we win competitions or how we measure our own benefit, even if not winning a competition. One of the really interesting things that we wanted to do was compare these powerlifting athletes who compete to population strength norms. So we took some previously published norms there from the ACSM handbook, and we compared the bench press and the squat as a relative to body weight, strength to weight ratio. And we found that pretty much all of our competitors live in the 90th percentile or above for strength or relative body strength for the bench press and for the squat. So that's probably unsurprising for a lot of people. They're competing in strength sports, they're training regularly. And so we would expect them to be stronger than your average male or female or an age batch knowns. But what's really important about that is that if we can build strength early in life, we get these strength reserves that can carry on into later in life. So whilst we accept that strength will probably decline with age without regular training, if you're stronger to begin with, that decline can be attenuated. And obviously you remain stronger relatively across your life set, which is really important for ongoing health. And 21,500 individual participants across those 54 years of power lifting in Australia, roughly 2,000 events have been held in that time, but only 63,000 competition entries across those 21,000 people. So there's only an average of about three participation per person before we lose them to the sport. And we don't know why people only compete sort of up to three times and then lead our longest lasting participant in the data set competed across 30 calendar years. So there are some people that are very long lasting, but the majority of our athletes are lost to the sport within five years. So we lose, I think about 96%. I can truly write a number. One in two athletes compete only one time and then they're lost to the sport. So maybe it's the being treaty goal. How strong am I compared to other strength-trained athletes? We don't know, we haven't done the analysis yet to find out. Perhaps those people who only compete once are not as strong as they thought. They score much lower relative to their sort of age, magic peers, and in their weight class, and maybe that's why they lost the sport. Or we don't know yet. You know, the only thing is, is a sport that requires years of preparation. You can't develop an athlete very quickly. So there is an amount of time that has to pass no matter how hard you train and what your age is. Like the development of strength takes a long time. So that may be a hard skill to swallow. Absolutely. I think sometimes people struggle and appreciate how long it does take to develop strength. And especially to compete in these sort of sports where everyone else has been competing or training for those same periods of time, different regimes. We've published some data previously on sort of 15 year strength gains and showing that we're talking about grams per day of strength gain, not kilograms for anything like that. So we know that it's very slow. We know that those people who are less strong to begin with gain strength more quickly. And there's sort of that sealing effect or diminishing returns with training. So essentially we lose some people to the sport just because they don't continue to gain strength as sort of rapidly or as much as they would like. And then if we look at five year participation with 96% of all athletes lasting less than five years in the sport, at some point there's got to be sort of some survey data or prospective data collection about why are we losing athletes within five years. Are they transitioning into other sports like Olympic weightlifting? Because there are opportunities for sort of more recognizable global competitions in the Olympic games and will wait this in championships even more so than powerlifting. And I guess the other thing with powerlifting is there are so many different federations and different rules amongst those federations that some people may not like one federation and then just don't understand that there's other options to go and participate as well. That's true, that's true. Yeah, I think ideally we can find a way to contact these people that are we'll say lost to the sport as competitors following them up. Are they still strength training? They just no longer choosing to compete. And what are the reasons for that is cost prohibitive is travel prohibitive. That way as a public health sort of format we can then help address some of those issues and make competition more accessible if that's the issue. Or it could just be the people trained for enjoyment and don't need the competitive nature because obviously you can monitor your own strength as you train. You don't need a competition like you do in a team sport where you don't know if your team is good unless you play against another team. Obviously strength sports we can do one-hour in testing, we can do three-hour in testing and we know whether or not we're improving without having to go to a competition. That's very true, yeah. And as for other sports I think that we might find some of these athletes use powerlifting as a building block into other sports. So if we look in Australia powerlifting logically would translate to some of the biggest sports in the country being football, soccer, Australian rules football, rugby league and rugby union, logically these athletes need a significant amount of muscle power, great strength, but they don't need to train for that all year round because there's a skill and an aerobic component that doesn't necessarily match well with year round training and competition for powerlifting. Are there any different? Yeah yeah go. Sorry. Yeah there's some data in the US that especially American football athletes use powerlifting as a preseason training program and competition to improve base strength before moving back into football specific training for them. So the same could be true here, but we don't have the data available to definitively answer that. Are there any differences between females and males in terms of how long they stay in sport and compete? In our data I don't think we've found any difference really. So the average lifespan is about 2.8 competitions for males and females across 1.8 years give or take. So it doesn't seem to be sex related. This is not the men's day in longer than women or vice versa. The reasons for leaving could be different, but again the retrospective picture of our study unfortunately can't answer that question, but it does help us pose more questions on what to find out. Oh this is fascinating. So it seems like powerlifting is raising in popularity. But how to now make people stay is the next stage I guess. Absolutely like we've seen exponential growth in participation and number of competitions across the 50 years that the sport's been in Australia. Even more recently, probably in the last 10 years we've really seen growth taking off. And maybe this is the advent of crossfit games and these sorts of things that these movements are becoming more normalised and people perhaps don't want to do crossfit. Or they understand that maybe the injury rates in crossfit are higher than in power lifting. So they might preference powerlifting, do that for a little bit and then become quite strong and resilient and moving on to the other sports. But we know that people enjoy powerlifting because there's more uptake. We know that it seems to be accessible with 2,000 competitions over 50 years, gives us an average of 40 comps a year. And obviously that's increasing more and more as we sort of get into the recent years. Yeah, I guess it's about us as sort of practitioners. How do we keep people engaged in the sport and wanting to strength trade? Because we know there's always going to be a drop off in any activity we do, whether it's strength sports or aerobic training. But also for the powerlifting federations is understanding why are they losing members or competing members at such a rate. If we can't keep an athlete for more than two years on average in three competitions, is it because our powerlifting federations, there's too many and they're sort of switching between different federations or what can the sport do to organise it themselves better to make the sport more enjoyable and increase longevity of athletes? Yeah, these are important questions. While on this topic, could you in general speak a little bit on the advantages of powerlifting or strength sports in general for keeping healthy and aging? I guess the advantage is that strength sport participation and strength training in general. The obvious one is a greater muscular strength and that's associated with a lower risk of mortality across your adult lifespan and even in young adult mortality. Total body strength is becoming recognised as a risk factor there as well. Some data sort of 10 years old now shows that high strength levels in younger athletes is associated with up to a 20% lower mortality risk and a 30% reduction in cardiovascular disease. I mean, a massive topic at the moment is suicide and 20 to 30% reduction in suicide rates when we've got athletes or people with high strength levels and they measure the extension and hand grip, probably because they're largely accessible in the clinical setting. But I think we can extrapolate that too. If you participate in strength sports, it's not just the strength that obviously helps reduce those risks. It's the social interaction, the camaraderie and the social support that we get from engaging in these sorts of environments. And then in older adults, as we sort of move through middle age and into older adult, older adult, we know that poor muscle strength is a massive contributor to health care costs, reduced balance, reduced power, resulting in greater falls. Falls obviously becoming a massive issue for older adults. And so muscular strength helps combat that and frailty preserves bone density, increases independence and mental health and quality of life. So, you know, we're probably a bit biased, but the longer and the more we can participate in strength sports, the better our life is typically. As for why strength sports and powerlifting over other sports, there's a really low risk of injury, more reported injury rate and power lifting. So powerlifting results in about somewhere between one and four injuries per thousand participation hours, compare that to soccer, which is about 15 injuries at four times the rate of injuries and even crossfit at nine and a half to 10 injuries per thousand hours. We're looking at very low risk, high reward activity here. And as I said before, maybe people participate in powerlifting and then build a stronger resilient body and can move more into those sort of soccer, football, crossfit activities, because we know that increased muscular strength reduces the risk of injury in most of those sports as well. But yes, other reasons for powerlifting being, I'll say a better option for some people. We talked about it before, measurable progress and outcomes. You don't need to compete to know whether or not you're getting better. So measuring your own progress on repetition, maximums or using your AH scores and these sorts of things to cover that a body mass calculated score is possible. You don't need much equipment, you know, a pair of shoes, a pair of shorts and a t-shirt is about all you need to turn up to the gym and you can start training and powerlifting. Obviously finding coaches and powerlifting specific gyms and these sorts of things could be a bit daunting to begin with. But I think the more people get engaged, the more they realize weightlifting, powerlifting, strength sports, they're actually really engaging and welcoming community. So perhaps removing the stigma around those sorts of things as well would help getting more people involved in strength sport. There's always a perspective in strength sports, I think, in this assumption that the sports have tainted largely around use of doping and these sorts of things. But these sports are drug tested. The federations are tested largely. There are some that are untested. But at the end of the day, these are athletes and people that train hard, compete well and really deserve to sort of be recognized for what they're doing. Did you have a look at your data? How, what is the rate of improvement? How people improve over the years? Of course, not the ones who are living the sport in a year and a half, but the ones who stay longer. We, we didn't look at that in this paper in particular, but there's another paper lead also by my colleague, Chris LaTella, where we looked at 15 year strength gains for powerlifting athletes. And as we said before, logically, the weaker or less strong athletes progress more quickly. That makes sense because they've got more room for improvement. The next step, that was to understand whether those athletes stay in the sport or not. But when we separate athletes by quartiles of strength, the least strong seem to gain strength more quickly than the, the most strong groups. And then it's pretty much the same between those middle sort of two quartiles. And I'd have to have a look back at the data again to see whether or not there was differences between males and females in that one. But I think females largely gained strength at about the same rate. Whereas males, there was a difference between the first and the fourth quartile. Interesting. Is there anything you want to add? It's great that obviously you've found the article that you've found that interesting. And I think the other comparison is to do something with weightlifting and whether or not the same trends exist. We've, we've spoken anecdotally with some people involved in weightlifting that we see participation in peaking trough in amongst Olympic cycles. For Olympic weightlifting, what happens to those athletes in the two years? Post Olympics before they come back and sort of move into qualification stuff. Again, we don't really know yet, but nobody's ever quantified what that dissipation looks like either. So I think seeing whether or not weightlifting or power lifting mapped together or whether there's sort of differences in the way that athletes participate in the two strength sports would be really cool. Yeah, I agree. I agree. Someone should do it. Okay. So I have two, two final questions. The one is what is your favorite color? My favorite color is orange. That is because my father is a Dutch immigrant and orange is the color of the Dutch national team. So I have always loved orange. Well, I'm asking because I have a strong dust infographics less now than you used to. Because I have less time, but I think it's just nice to have the study with the color the outer will enjoy. So that's why I'm asking what the, what your favorite color is. And the other question is if people want to find you learn more about your work, how they can track you down on the interwebs. Sure. So Twitter is @dan_hook or @strength_unit, I-N-I-T. So the strength initiative is our research collaborative, which includes most of the authors on this paper as well. Certainly search my name, Dan Vandenhoek on Google Scholar or LinkedIn. Or if anyone's interested, they can shoot me an email at dvandenhoek@usc.edu.au. Awesome. Thank you so, so much for the chat and thank you for the study. - Nice, thanks very much for having me, Alex. (clap) [BLANK_AUDIO]