Muscle-To-Bone Ratio in Female College Track and Field Athletes

Muscle-To-Bone Ratio in Female College Track and Field Athletes

We recently published a paper in the International Journal of Sports Medicine (Westerberg et al., 2025) on muscle-to-bone ratio (MBR) in over 459 NCAA Division I collegiate male and female track and field athletes. There is a wealth of information in the article and I encourage you to read it if you want a more detailed look at the data. This blog post is a companion to another blog post that I wrote examining the body composition in NCAA Division I male track and field athletes from that article (Westerberg et al., 2025). For this blog post, I am going to focus on the female track and field athletes players’ data from that article.

Female track and field athletes face unique challenges when it comes to balancing performance, training load, and long-term bone health. Different events place vastly different stresses on the body, and how muscle and bone adapt together can influence both performance and injury risk. Recent research examining MBR and soft tissue-to-bone ratio (SBR) in NCAA Division I female track and field athletes provides valuable insight into these adaptations.

Rather than looking at muscle or bone in isolation, MBR and SBR describe how much muscle and soft tissue an athlete carries relative to bone mass. These ratios help indicate whether bone is adapting appropriately to the forces generated during training. When muscle and bone develop together, athletes are better able to tolerate impact and loading. When bone adaptation lags, the risk for bone stress injuries increases.

Total, arm, leg, and trunk muscle-to-bone ratio (MBR) (Figure 1) and soft tissue-to-bone ratio (SBR) (Figure 2) between event groups.

Among female athletes, clear differences emerged between event groups. Throwers demonstrated the highest total and regional MBR and SBR values. This reflects the large amounts of lean mass and overall soft tissue required for throwing performance. While these athletes are well adapted for force production, the high ratios also indicate substantial stress being placed on the skeleton, reinforcing the importance of progressive loading, recovery, and movement quality in training.

Figure 1 consists of four violin plots displaying total, arm, leg, and trunk muscle-to-bone ratios across seven female track and field event groups (Jump, LD, MD, ME, PV, Sprint, and Throw). Lowercase letters denote statistical significance at p<0.05. The graphs visually demonstrate that Multi-Event (ME) athletes consistently maintain the lowest total, arm, and leg muscle-to-bone ratios values, while long-distance (LD) runners exhibit a significantly elevated trunk muscle-to-bone ratio value compared to all other event groups. Throwers exhibit the highest regional muscle-to-bone ratio values in both the arms and the legs, with their leg muscle-to-bone ratio being significantly higher than nearly all other disciplines.

Figure 2 consists of four violin plots displaying total, arm, leg, and trunk soft tissue-to-bone ratios across seven female track and field event groups (Jump, LD, MD, ME, PV, Sprint, and Throw). Lower case letters denote statistical significance at p<0.05. The graphs visually demonstrate that Throwers consistently maintain the highest total, arm, and leg soft tissue-to-bone ratio values, with their total soft tissue-to-bone ratio being significantly higher than all other event groups. Multi-Event (ME) athletes exhibit the tightest distribution and consistently low SBR values across all regions, while long-distance (LD) runners and Throwers exhibit significantly elevated trunk soft tissue-to-bone ratio values compared to the Jump and Sprint groups.


Multi-event athletes showed the lowest total MBR among females. Unlike throwers, multi-event athletes train across a wide range of movements that include sprinting, jumping, and throwing. This combination of high-impact and strength-based activities may promote greater bone adaptation relative to muscle mass. For coaches, this suggests that varied, concurrent training may be especially effective for supporting skeletal health in female athletes.

One of the most important findings involved female long-distance runners. This group showed elevated trunk MBR and SBR values that were driven by lower bone mineral content in the spine and pelvis, not by increased muscle mass. This pattern aligns with previous research showing that female endurance runners are at increased risk for low bone mineral density and bone stress injuries. High running volume alone does not appear to provide enough stimulus to maintain or improve bone health in these regions.

These findings emphasize the importance of strength training for female distance runners. Building and maintaining muscle mass particularly in the trunk and hips may help absorb impact forces and reduce skeletal strain. Coaches should also be mindful of overall training load, recovery, and energy availability, as insufficient fueling and chronic fatigue can further compromise bone health.

Overall, the female-specific data suggest that bone health in track and field is strongly influenced by how training stresses are distributed across muscle and bone. Female athletes may benefit more than males from intentional combinations of strength training and impact loading, rather than relying on event-specific work alone. Monitoring trends in performance, fatigue, and injury, especially bone stress injuries can help identify when muscle and bone adaptations may be out of balance.

For coaches, the key takeaway is that supporting bone health in female track and field athletes requires proactive planning. Ensuring that strength training, recovery, and nutrition support the demands of each event group may help reduce injury risk while supporting long-term performance and athlete availability.

Reference: Westerberg HE, Stanforth PR, Carbuhn A, Bosch TA, Dengel DR: Muscle-to-bone and soft tissue-to-bone ratios in track and field athletes. International Journal of Sports Medicine 46:90-96, 2025.

About the Author
Donald Dengel, Ph.D., is a Professor in the School of Kinesiology at the University of Minnesota and is a co-founder of Dexalytics. He serves as the Director of the Laboratory of Integrative Human Physiology, which provides clinical vascular, metabolic, exercise, and body composition testing for researchers across the University of Minnesota.

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