Introducing tight bands in socks around the ball of the foot seems to make walking and running easier. The effects of these socks, which stiffen the feet, are equivalent to the reduced energy expenditure that the average person would experience if they lost 2 kilograms, according to the researchers behind them.

at the University of Texas at Austin says he hopes to see elite runners in the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics using these socks, which he developed with , also at the University of Texas at Austin. “Our back-of-the-envelope estimates suggest that wrapping the foot in the new socks could improve marathon performance by 1 to 2 minutes,” says Beck.

Since diverging from chimpanzees around 6 million years ago, human feet have become much stiffer than those of other apes, which assisted our bipedalism. Beck and Tang first wondered if they could take this stiffness further by tweaking footwear. However, previous attempts to reduce walking and running effort using shoes with stiffer midsoles or inserts have failed, so then the pair turned to socks.

They are made of a common synthetic yarn blend, typical of athletic socks. Beck and Tang tightly knitted three 1-millimetre wide bands at a 30-millimetre-wide region around the ball of the foot. This results in 24 times more pressure being applied to feet compared with regular, control socks.

To test them, they recruited 12 adults of both sexes who had no known health conditions. The researchers analysed how they walked while wearing the foot-stiffening socks, control socks and no socks.

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Participants then walked on a treadmill while wearing shoes with the stiffened socks and control ones for 5 minutes. Beck and Tang measured their VO2 max, the maximum amount of oxygen the body can absorb during high-intensity exercise. This allowed them to determine how much energy they burned in each of the walking experiments, known as metabolic expenditure.

The foot-stiffening socks reduced this expenditure in 10 of 12 of the participants by 2 per cent more than the control socks. That is equivalent to the average person losing 2 kilograms, according to the researchers.

This reduced expenditure probably doesn’t mean the socks lead to wearers getting fewer health benefits, such as weight loss, from walking or running compared with those wearing regular socks, says Beck. “Reducing the whole-body metabolic rate means we have better walking endurance, we sweat less during hot days and we can walk faster for the same effort [that we would use] using commercially available socks.”

The socks work by enabling the ankle and its muscles to push off at a slower velocity, he says. This requires less activation and less metabolic energy, leading to more economical muscle contractions. Unlike a stiffened shoe, the socks allow the toes to flex and the arch to recoil more freely, he says.

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at the University of Oxford says the idea that a stiff foot makes walking less metabolically costly has been around for a long time, but nobody had managed to show it in people while they were walking until now. “The team’s clever insight was that those earlier attempts [with shoes] also stopped the foot moving when it needs to, right at the end of the step.”

The applications of the socks are yet to be tested. But Beck says that, in theory, anyone whose feet have lost some of their shape, say through old age, could benefit. The researchers already have a sponsored research agreement with the shoe company New Balance to commercialise the socks, says Beck.

However, Püschel warns that other explanations for the results cannot be ruled out, such as the volunteers changing how they walked when they knew they had the socks on. “It’s a promising first demonstration, rather than evidence that these socks will change anyone’s daily life,” he says.

Some of the benefits of a rigorous workout might one day be achievable without any physical exertion. A study in mice shows that injecting muscle cells beneath the skin creates a patch of these cells that continuously contracts, delivering some of the benefits of exercise around the clock. While this should never replace physical activity, it may be helpful for people who are unable to exercise, such as those in hospital.

Initially, at the Beijing Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine in China and his colleagues injected muscle cells into mice with the aim of increasing their muscle mass, but this had an unexpected result. “This thing was contracting under the skin continuously, and we thought, ‘This thing is like non-stop exercise’,” says Ng.

They started by taking samples of muscle stem cells from live mice, which they cultured until the cells differentiated into mature, contractile muscle cells known as myocytes. They then injected these just beneath the skin on the backs of the same mice. “The original intention was to increase muscle mass by injecting muscle cells,” says Ng.

With an injection of about 6 million myocytes, a patch of cells formed, creating its own network of mini blood vessels. This then began to pulse continuously, even when the mice were asleep.

Various experiments showed the patches had widespread effects around the mice’s bodies. For instance, the mice given the muscle patches had a higher whole-body muscle mass and better immune function compared with those that got a sham injection. All the mice were free to move around their cages as normal during the study.

What’s more, in mice that were 18 months old (roughly equivalent to a person in their late 50s or 60s) and those fed to induce obesity, the patches improved muscle mass, bone density, physical strength and endurance.

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These mice also showed reversal in signs of liver damage, as well as reduced inflammation and the ability to navigate a maze faster. “So, it also has effects on its brain,” says Ng. “This is known from exercise, but here, we’re seeing it from a small muscle graft.”

The patch’s wide-ranging effects may be due to it mimicking how . “What I find particularly interesting is that the effects appear to go beyond the graft itself,” says at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore. “The study suggests that the contracting muscle can act as an endocrine organ, with changes in circulating factors that may contribute to effects in other tissues.”

Imaging showed that the muscle patches survived for at least 81 days, when the researchers stopped taking measurements, but Ng says that follow-up work indicates they are still stable after six months. “So far, there’s no limit to its lifespan as far as I can tell,” he says. There also seems to be very little reduction in volume over time and no evidence of tumour growth, which can be a risk after implanting stem cells.

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Ng hopes the patch could help people with medical conditions that stop them from exercising. The researchers are talking to several hospitals about starting clinical trials in people with limited mobility, which could begin within a year, he says. “We always say we should exercise to keep muscle mass, but the folks that need exercise the most are actually the ones least likely to be able to exercise,” he says.

“The idea of mimicking exercise for people who can’t exercise is amazing,” says at King’s College London, but he questions how comfortable a continuously contracting graft like this would be.

Tang stresses that the patch should be thought of as mimicking some aspects of exercise, rather than replacing it. “Exercise has many other effects – including cardiovascular, neuromuscular, mechanical and bone-loading effects – that a small subcutaneous muscle graft cannot fully reproduce,” he says.

Running with a pram or stroller might make parents less susceptible to ankle pain and injuries to their calf muscles, foot arches and Achilles tendons. A survey of parents suggests there is a 37 per cent drop in injury risk with pram use. This may be partly due to changes in vertical forces – how much force our legs absorb with each step – when pushing a child.

“You get a little bit of a walker effect where you’re leaning and putting some weight on the stroller,” says at Pennsylvania State University, who ran with a pram after the births of her two children. “That led me to wonder, you know, is this actually protective?”

Previous research suggests that people running with a pram tend to have . They also lean forward more, with . Last year, Altman Singles and her colleagues found there is a when running with a pram, but whether this affects injury risk was unclear.

To learn more, Altman Singles and her team analysed self-reported running and injury data from 196 parents who used any kind of pram on at least some of their runs while their children were younger than 3 years old. These individuals were compared against another 53 mothers or fathers who ran when their children were the same age, but without prams. All the participants had some running experience before becoming parents.

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The two groups of parents covered similar total distances and were relatively well matched in terms of factors like age, height and weight. But there were many more women than men in both groups, particularly the pram one.

Overall, 30 per cent of the non-pram runners reported having had running-related injuries, compared with 19 per cent of the pram runners. These included a higher incidence of ankle pain, calf muscle injury, plantar fasciitis (heel pain that occurs when the thick band of tissue on the bottom of the foot becomes irritated or inflamed) and Achilles tendinitis (injury of the Achilles tendon).

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“Generally, stroller running involves rapid steps with short stride lengths,” says at Seattle Pacific University. “Although this can increase metabolic cost, it can also decrease the force production at each foot strike, which might explain some of these injury reductions.”

Wall-Scheffler says we should see this paper as a “great start” to understanding an important topic. However, future work should include a more balanced mix of men and women, she says. For instance, oestrogen and progesterone , which could affect a woman’s injury risk.

Future studies should also collect injury-related data more regularly over time and could even investigate the effects of different pram-pushing styles, such as using one or two hands, says Wall-Scheffler.