Example: A guy I used to know was working construction, he was holding a spike that was about to be hit with a sledgehammer. The sledgehammer hit his hand instead, but didn’t break any bones.
In selection for Delta Force, people would be asked to go on hikes carrying 40 pounds backpacks for several days, culminating in a 40 mile hike on the last day that would last about 18 hours. A friend of mine did a 11 mile hike (he was out in the woods when the weather started getting bad so he had to get back to his car) and he damaged his knee. He said the advice he got says it will take several months for the knee to heal up.
Some people seem like they can injure their bones and muscle way more and either they don’t get injured, or they recover faster. Has anyone explored why?
I know there are efforts to explore why some people age better (efforts to comprehend the physiology and genetics of healthy people in their 90s and 100s as an example), has anyone done the same thing with people who are extremely physically resilient in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, etc? It seems there could be some interesting research to gain there.
I know part of it is how fit you are to begin with. Someone whose muscles are well developed will absorb more abuse before the abuse is transferred to the tendons, ligaments and bones. But if there are disorders like Osteogenesis imperfecta or McArdles disease, I would assume there are genetic conditions that do the opposite and give you bones, ligaments, tendons and muscles that are very resilient to injury and that heal fast.
I am wondering why some people are more physically resilient, and if anyone has studied those people to see if any therapies can be developed. I know there are efforts to study people who age the best, but I don’t know if there are efforts to study people whose bodies are the most resilient and heal the best to see if anything can be learned to turn into medicine for the rest of us.
People develop greater physical strength through effort. Bones, muscle, ligaments, sinew, all develop under stress, something we don’t get all that much of in the modern life. So the ability to take a hammer blow to the hand is largely based on the strength of the hand as developed through the hard work of construction. Our knees are highly susceptible to injury because of poor design, but it’s worsened by the weak leg strength of modern humans who don’t walk or run 10 to 20 miles a day as a matter of course. Add factors like that to evolution, humans offer to support to those who are not the best physical specimens, we have a wide variety of genes allowing all sorts of body structures, including some not so physically resilient.
ETA: seeing the previous post, I think your definition of resilience is overly broad. Rapid healing is something much different than general resilience.
I guess that I should consider myself fortunate, then. It wasn’t till after I turned 40, that I started noticing a signifigant decline in ‘time to heal’.
It’s a definite fact though, I don’t ‘bounce’ nearly as well as I used to!
I think what you’re talking about is mainly the result of differences in conditioning. Your construction worker friend had performed hard manual labor for years, and so his hands were strong and tough. Your friend hurt his knees on a long hike because he pushed his body beyond its conditioning level, whereas the folks in Delta Force are the result of taking the creme de la creme of a professional army and putting them through an additional brutally rigorous physical and mental training regimen. Basically, it boils down to your friend being a pussy compared to some of the most elite soldiers in the world. Don’t worry, he’s in good company.
Keep in mind that things like manual labor or rigorous training don’t just give you more muscular strength, you also develop more robust connective tissue and stronger bones, which makes you literally harder.
Since the OP asked for cites of actual medical research on this issue, here’s one. It is focused on recovery from injury (particularly serious injury) in the elderly, but cites several more general studies of trauma recovery.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised as well if special forces types often are physically wrecked by the time they retire and/or hit their 40’s. Shot knees, damaged joints, early onset arthritis, that sort of thing.
Exercise certainly helps, but that still makes me wonder why some athletes are extraordinarily injury prone while others are iron men. And these athletes who are always injured, it’s not always the same injury, they’ll get a variety of problems.
One group of research comes out work trying to understand why female athletes are more prone to injury in the same sports like soccer and basketball as males are. Much of it is summarized in this excellent book - “Warrior Girls” by Michael Sokolove. Among the issues he discusses the most pertinent to this thread is that less muscle mass and more flexibility puts internal joint ligaments and bones at greater risk. Conversely of course more bulk and thicker/denser bones is a protective factor.
Related to that is variation in the nature of our structural proteins, in particular collagen. Collagen is what provides the shock absorbing struts in our subcutaneous tissues and is the main protein in our tendons. Here’s one article about that: people who have greater joint laxity secondary to possessing a collagen variant are also more prone to ACL injuries (and likely other injuries as well). Commonly I see a group of children who have relatively easy bruisability, general hypermobility, often a history of “growing pains”, and who get frequent sprains.
Another identified area of genetic variation associated with injury and healing rates are those related to the skeletal progenitor cells themselves (in mouse lines at this point).
Yet another studied possible sources of genetic variation impacting injury and healing are those associated with the inflammatory response. Diet impacts that as well.
So short answer is that yes, there do seem to be genetic and other variations that are relatively protective against injury risk and/or associated with more rapid healing from injury, but the factors involved are mostly still being teased out; it is an active area of study.
Your question is multi-dimensional. A lot of not being crippled when injured comes down to luck and physical robustness. Many modern people while in good health are in very mediocre physical condition so even slight injuries are traumatic. If you are very thin or very fat or simply have little muscle you are at risk of crippling injuries if you fall. I’m a large, tall man, age 54 and gravity is harsh mistress. I’ve had several spectacular spills in my life and the only thing that kept me from not being seriously injured, other than not landing on my head, was luck and my robust frame and musculature.
There was guy I knew age 30, in tremendous physical condition who did the local Seagull Century 100 mile bike rides. He fell off his bike at medium low speed wearing his helmet and still got such a hit he was in and out of the hospital for 2 years with cranial trauma issues, (he’s still not 100%) so being built isn’t going to save you if you land wrong.
The human body is very fragile.Some people can trip and fell down and brake bone only 10 foot fall!!!
It not like Hollywood movies.It does not matter how strong you are or how good you are :mad::mad:if you fall from two story building it very unlikely you will not be going to hospital for broken bone.You could even be paralyzed from two story building fall if it fall in wrong way.
Agreed. Some guys have all the luck. Some guys have all the pain. Some guys get all the breaks and some guys do nothing but complain.
DSeid - thanks for that. Have there been studies on people whose bones are harder to break (the opposite of Osteogenesis imperfecta) that you know of, or any research on some people whose muscles can undergo large amounts of stress without tearing?
I don’t think it’s any different than any other trait. Some people are smarter in certain respects, some people are natural athletes, some people have natural artistic or musical talents. But look at it as a continuum. In the OP’s example, take 100 people who’s hands are hit by a sledgehammer. They will all sustain some level of damage, from simple contusions to possibly a serious disability. But they are all within some parameters. Nobody’s bones were totally pulverized, nobody’s hand was flattened beyond recognition, and nobody sustained no injury at all, not even pain. So rather than ask why some are more resilient, perhaps we should ask why everyone’s injuries were within those parameters. Even taking our differences into consideration, we are more alike than different.
