PONE-D-22-24644Weekly percent 1RM gains are higher in the lower-body than the upper-body in resistance training experienced healthy young women - a systematic review with meta-analysis about female resistance trainingPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Jung,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE.  We have now received three reviews for your manuscript. While all three reviewers found your work interesting and of high standard, they expressed numerous concerns regarding various issues regarding content and details. Therefore, after careful consideration, we feel that your manuscript has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. We invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses all concerns raised by the reviewers. We look forward to your revised manuscript.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Mar 02 2023 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Hans-Peter Kubis, PD. Dr. rer. nat.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal requirements:

When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf

and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf.

2. Thank you for stating the following financial disclosure:

“NO”

At this time, please address the following queries:

a) Please clarify the sources of funding (financial or material support) for your study. List the grants or organizations that supported your study, including funding received from your institution.

b) State what role the funders took in the study. If the funders had no role in your study, please state: “The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.”

c) If any authors received a salary from any of your funders, please state which authors and which funders.

d) If you did not receive any funding for this study, please state: “The authors received no specific funding for this work.”

Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf.

3. Thank you for stating the following in your Competing Interests section: 

“NO authors have competing interests”

Please complete your Competing Interests on the online submission form to state any Competing Interests. If you have no competing interests, please state ""The authors have declared that no competing interests exist."", as detailed online in our guide for authors at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submit-now

 This information should be included in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf.

4. We note that you have stated that you will provide repository information for your data at acceptance. Should your manuscript be accepted for publication, we will hold it until you provide the relevant accession numbers or DOIs necessary to access your data. If you wish to make changes to your Data Availability statement, please describe these changes in your cover letter and we will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide.

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Partly

**********

2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: General comments:

The manuscript: „WEEKLY PERCENT 1RM GAINS ARE HIGHER IN THE 2 LOWER-BODY THAN THE UPPER-BODY IN RESISTANCE 3 TRAINING EXPERIENCED HEALTHY YOUNG WOMEN - A 4 SYSTEMATIC REVIEW WITH META-ANALYSIS ABOUT 5 FEMALE RESISTANCE TRAINING“, deals with real Research gap in sport science. I agree that there is a lack of women’s studies in resistance training, but the authors gathered articles by well-defined criteria.

There one issue in the conclusion statement. Authors are presenting that lower body gains in RM are higher than upper body. However, the difference 4.3% per week in the upper body and 4.7% per week in the lower-body exercises, does not seems to be relevant to this conclusion. Did you make statistics on this? What are minimal detectable changes for % of RM? (please reference this).

The introduction of the manuscript very briefly presents basic resistance training variables, where the main parameter is exercise selection. The exercise selection might be whole body training, upper/lower limb training, isolated training etc. Please define what you want to understand as lower body training. Many lower body exercise like deadlifting and squatting, includes a lot of back and trunk muscle involvement, how you can distinguish the upper and lower body training. This should be mentioned in the inclusion criteria and discussion (including muscle group size). The absence of full body training is one of the main limitations of this study, try to mention that in the discussion.

The conclusion of the study should be clarified by reporting separately on beginners and advanced resistance-trained women. This should be in the abstract as well since there are

The study discussion should mention all loading parameters of resistance training.

Therefore I recommend the article after major revisions.

Specific comments:

Line 53: the bullet point “Weekly percentage 1RM gains are higher in training experienced women in lower body rather than in upper-body exercises“ seems to be obvious to add by how much they can strengthen more in lower limbs.

Line 69: What about arterial stiffness?

Jurik, R., Żebrowska, A., & Stastny, P. (2021). Effect of an Acute Resistance Training Bout and Long-Term Resistance Training Program on Arterial Stiffness: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Journal of clinical medicine, 10(16), 3492.

In introduction or discussion, try to justify whether hormonal response of man and women really differ and how.

Hakkinen, K., Pakarinen, A., Kraemer, W. J., Newton, R. U., & Alen, M. (2000). Basal concentrations and acute responses of serum hormones and strength development during heavy resistance training in middle-aged and elderly men and women. Journals of Gerontology-Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences, 55(2), B95.

Bottaro, M., Martins, B., Gentil, P., & Wagner, D. (2009). Effects of rest duration between sets of resistance training on acute hormonal responses in trained women. Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 12(1), 73-78.

Line 132: Add the inclusion criteria for upper and lower body training.

Line 170: How did you manually recalculated data? Be explicit.

Line 261: The differences in beginners (Figure 3) show no difference between upper and lower limb. This should be also the bullet point of manuscript and in the abstract. This is however, due to only one study, how you want to deal with this in discussion.

Line 324: Does exercise TEMPO influence hormonal response?

Wilk, M., Krzysztofik, M., Petr, M., Zając, A., & Stastny, P. (2020). The slow exercise tempo elicits higher glycolytic and muscle damage but not endocrine response that conventional squat. Neuroendocrinology Letters, 41(5).

Wilk, M., Golas, A., Stastny, P., Nawrocka, M., Krzysztofik, M., & Zajac, A. (2018). Does tempo of resistance exercise impact training volume?. Journal of human kinetics, 62(1), 241-250.

Reviewer #2: General Response

This is an interesting and much needed meta-analysis. It has a few misinterpretations that could need attention.

Specific Responses

Page Line

2 34 It might be helpful to provide a better description of “advanced subjects”. Does that mean “previously trained” or “well-trained”?

2 35 What does “same load” mean?

3 67-69 This does not seem like a complete sentence.

3 79 Should this be “The current review…” to distinguish your work?

3 89 “…strength are increased more than ….”

3 94 What kind of “responses”? Could you be more specific?

3 95 A 25% increase in 15 weeks does not seem to fit the 4.3% per week.

4 109 Why only these two languages?

5 171 “The data from the meta-analyses were …..” in data is a plural word.

14 281 “…frequency per week o number of repetitions….”

14 23 “The data here are very difficult…..”

15 304 “The quality of the studies was considered good….”

15 320 No period after “repetitions”

16 358 Is this a separate paragraph?

16 379 “in addition, it should be noted that Jansen de Jonge, Thompson and Han [15]….”

16 386 “…women, not only are proteins ….”

16 391 LH has not been defined. It should probably be spelled out before using the LH abbreviations.

16 396 There was no reference 15 in the introduction.

17 430 “…studies, since other authors….”

Reviewer #3: Dear Authors,

Manuscript entitled Weekly percent 1RM gains are higher in the lower-body than the upper-body in resistance training experienced healthy young women - a systematic review with meta-analysis about female resistance training

Clarity of content and adequacy to scientific language was demonstrated throughout the manuscript. In addition, the manuscript is interesting, however it is necessary to make some considerations.

#GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

#I suggest that the authors change the title to Muscle strength gains per week are higher in the lower-body than the upper-body in resistance training experienced healthy young women - a systematic review with meta-analysis

#I suggest that the authors improve the research rationale. Only the scarcity of studies is not enough to justify carrying out this research.

#Methods

#Curiosity, why did the authors not search for the words resisted exercises?

#Although it was mentioned in the limitations, as there are many possibilities to manipulate resistance training variables, how did the authors make this equalization, considering the influence of possibilities on strength gain?

#i.g., different rest intervals between sets and exercises of the studies included in the analysis of this research;

#different volumes (number of sets x number of repetitions x training frequency) of the studies included in the analysis of this research;

#different contraction speeds, as well as range of motion of the studies included in the analysis of this research.

#Discussion

#I suggest that authors begin with the main research findings.

#I suggest that the authors clearly demonstrate the applicability of the research findings.

authors clearly demonstrate the applicability of the research findings.

#Conclusion

#While the findings are interesting, I am not sure the authors should claim the following.

The upper-body can be trained with lighter weights and more repetitions to increase the 1RM compared to the lower-body. The lower-body should be trained with a maximum of six repetitions per set. The lower-body should be trained two times a week, while in the upper body both two to three times a week resulted in similarly muscle strength gains.

#Further studies are needed to confirm these findings in view of the different characteristics of the resistance exercise protocols.

**********

6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

**********

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Muscle strength gains per week are higher in the lower-body than the upper-body in resistance training experienced healthy young women - a systematic review with meta-analysis

PONE-D-22-24644R1

Dear Dr. Jung,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Hans-Peter Kubis, PD. Dr. rer. nat.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

**********

2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors made apropriate changes in their manuscript. I have only one more minor note, that limitations on the line 432 should be referenced, as it is rest interval referenced in following sentence.

Reviewer #2: The study is an interesting and timely work. It should be useful to those working in the field of resistance training.

**********

7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

**********