To Compress or Not to Compress

In this Rundown, the "best of" lists name their favorite gear, research finds that fit people like a drink, and a study concludes that compression garments work, if you think they do.

New Gear for a New Year. To probably no one’s surprise, “exercise more” is the number one resolution for a new year and manufacturers of fitness gear are here for it. Along with digital home gym set-ups, a few of the products making “best of” lists for 2022 include a smart water bottle, temperature-regulating fabric, and shoes to make fast runners faster.

The people behind HidrateSpark Pro, the digitized water bottle that pairs with an app to remind you to hydrate and tracks your progress, now make the HidrateSpark TAP, which basically does the same as the Pro but costs a lot less. Like the original, TAP has a base that glows to remind you to drink and pairs with AppleWatch, Fitbit and other trackers, but as the name implies, you have to tap your phone to the bottle to track water consumption.

Asics, using findings from its Institute of Sports Science, has developed the MetaSpeed Sky running shoe. It’s designed to facilitate the extended stride length that occurs when many runners increase their speed. Features include a full-length carbon fiber plate embedded into the sole, light and responsive midsole foam and technology that helps to smooth transitions from stride to stride, which all adds up to improved performance the faster you go.

LifeLabs CoolLife Tee promises to make your next sweat session cooler with temperature-regulating fabric. The secret is polyolefin, which lowers body heat by allowing 100 percent transmission of infrared radiation. The result is a 1.9 degree Fahrenheit drop.

Cheers? According to a study published in the journal, Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, fit people drink more alcohol than people who don’t exercise (read it here). The research examined data from 38,000 healthy patients ranging in age from 20-86 who underwent preventative testing at the Cooper Clinic and were enrolled in the Cooper Center Longitudinal Study in Dallas, Texas. Alcohol consumption was assessed by a questionnaire and cardiorespiratory fitness was estimated with a treadmill test, where the results were then classified as low, moderate or high fit according to the participants’ age and sex. Light drinkers were categorized as having three or fewer drinks per week, and moderate drinkers were identified as having up to seven drinks for women and 14 for men per week. Above these numbers were considered heavy drinkers, in the 18-64 age range.

The study found that both men and women (average age 46) with moderate and high fitness levels were one and half to two times more likely to engage in moderate to high alcohol consumption than their non-exercising peers. The researchers suggest that the reason could have something to do with a psychological phenomenon called the licensing effect, which proposes that people allow themselves to indulge after doing something virtuous.

To Compress or Not to Compress. Compression garments have been around for awhile, but do they actually work? Researchers have looked at their impact since 1987 and a recent paper in the journal Sports Medicine (read it here) by academics from Australian Catholic University looks at the results of 183 studies to determine what, if anything, compression clothing does.

Here are some of their findings. In studies measuring lactate levels with and without compression, 40 out of 49 found no effect. In 39 studies that looked at a blood marker of muscle damage (creatine kinase), 27 found no effect. For impacts on heart rate, 53 out of 68 studies found no effect. Where positive effects were found in all these studies, it was generally small. The outcome is similar for performance measures including jump height and time trial and for swelling and inflammation measures. The authors also note that “the research to date does not suggest that compression garments have a negative effect on performance.”

Subjective measures were a little different. Looking at perceived muscle soreness days after a hard workout, 29 out of 50 studies reported positive results. For perceived muscle pain, six out of nine studies were positive.

The takeaway is that if you like wearing compression garments you should wear them but scientifically, the evidence for their effectiveness in most non-subjective measures is small.