It is undeniable that African runners, especially Ethiopians and Kenyans, exercise their dominance in many of the athletics events.
Now, science has you tried to find out more about the physical conditions of these exceptional athletes. It has just been published in the Journal of Sport Sciences, a new study that has analyzed the bone density of Kenyan athletes, and its results have baffled researchers.
The usual thing is that the lower a person’s bone density, the greater the risk of suffering an injury. But what the authors of the study have discovered is that Kenyan athletes are inferior to the average person. Even 40% of them have such low levels, according to the parameters of the World Health Organization, they would be at risk of suffering from osteoporosis.
It must be specified that the bone density is not as low in its entire skeleton. It reaches normal levels in the femur, but decreases pathologically in the lower back. This means that these athletes have a very high risk of injury, but statistics show that the number of injuries suffered is lower than the average of elite athletes. What happens then?
Researchers still do not know for sure, but they handle two hypotheses. The first, the fact is that these runners exert a lower pressure than other athletes when stepping on the ground, which reduces the stress to which the bones of a runner are subjected. And, the second, that the parameters that are used to measure bone density are not applicable to Kenyans. That is, there are only (perhaps genetic) factors that explain this particularity.
