The effect of unilateral training on contralateral limb strength in young, older, and patient populations: a meta-analysis of cross education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Cross education is the contralateral strength gain following unilateral training of the ipsilateral limb. This phenomenon provides an ideal rehabilitation model for acute or chronic rehabilitation; however, previous cross education meta-analyses have been limited to a handful of studies.Objectives: The present meta-analysis aimed to (1) be as inclusive as possible, (2) compare cross education in young able-bodied, older able-bodied, and patient populations, (3) compare cross education between training modalities, and (4) detail the impact of methodological controls on the quantification of cross education.Methodology: A review of English literature identified studies that employed unilateral resistance training and reported contralateral strength results. Studies were separated to examine the effect of population, training modality, limb, sex, and familiarization on the magnitude of cross education. The percent strength gain and effect size were calculated for ipsilateral and contralateral limbs.Results: A total of 96 studies fit the predetermined inclusion criteria and were included in the analysis. The included studies were further divided into 141 units employing separate unilateral training paradigms. These were separated into young, able-bodied (n = 126), older, able-bodied (n = 9), and neuromuscular patients (n = 6). Cross education was an average of 18% (standardized mean difference (SMD) = 0.71) in young, able-bodied participants, 17% (SMD = 0.58) in healthy able-bodied participants, and 29% (SMD = 0.76) in neuromuscular patients.Conclusion: Cross education was present in young, older, and patient populations and similar between upper and lower limbs and between males and females. Electromyostimulation training was superior to voluntary training paradigms.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".