Asian Journal of Sports Medicine
Peter C. Douris1,*, 
Teresa Ingenito1, Barbara Piccirillo2, Meredith Herbst1, John Petrizzo1, Vincen Cherian1, Christopher McCutchan1, Caitlin Burke1, George Stamatinos1, Min-Kyung Jung3Arterial stiffness increases with age and is related to an increased risk of coronary artery disease. Poor trunk flexibility has been shown to be associated with arterial stiffness in middle-aged subjects. The purpose of our research study was to measure arterial stiffness and flexibility in healthy middle-aged martial artists compared to age and gender matched healthy sedentary controls.
Ten martial artists (54.0 2.0 years), who practice Soo Bahk Do (SBD), a Korean martial art, and ten sedentary subjects (54.7 1.8 years) for a total of twenty subjects took part in this cross-sectional study. Arterial stiffness was assessed in all subjects using pulse wave velocity (PWV), a recognized index of arterial stiffness. Flexibility of the trunk and hamstring were also measured. The independent variables were the martial artists and matched sedentary controls. The dependent variables were PWV and flexibility.
There were significant differences, between the SBD practitioners and sedentary controls, in PWV (
The middle-aged martial artists were more flexible in their trunk and hamstrings and had less arterial stiffness compared to the healthy sedentary controls. The flexibility component of martial art training or flexibility exercises in general may be considered as a possible intervention to reduce the effects of aging on arterial stiffness.
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© 2013, Author(s). This open-access article is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which allows for unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited.
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