My comments here are as a competitive runner who ran the 1500m, 10k and cross country as a university student in Ontario, Canada.
Women are not mini men. Unfortunately, what I have observed for many years is the idea that women's physical anatomy is very similar to that of men, and therefore, that our training, diet and body fat composition as competitive athletes should be similar to that of men. Many coaches for women at the high school and university level are men who treat their female athletes as mini men.
In reality, teen girls often struggle with puberty and take a while to adjust to their menstrual periods and changing muscle / fat composition as they develop in the teenage years. Runners sometimes struggle with nausea during intense training and races. It is my observation that girls and young women struggle with this more than males. Most coaches are not accommodating of this reality and otherwise competitive female athletes drop out of running and track programs because of this.
In university programs, unrealistic expectations about BMI are placed on female athletes that force them to lower their BMI to unrealistic levels.
The physical anatomy of teen girls and women is optimized to have enough fat to nourish a developing fetus, and once the baby is born, to feed that baby until it can start eating regular food. In most parts of the world, babies are still breast fed until they are at least two years old.
I have a body mass index of about 20. It hasn't changed much since I was a competitive runner in the 1980s. I'm still a very fast walker and walk about five miles a day. When I was breastfeeding, I would get so ravenously hungry that I once ate an entire 1 pound salami in one sitting. Breastfeeding requires a certain amount of body fat and a nutrient rich diet. True that many women no longer breast feed, but that is what the female physical anatomy has evolved for: pregnancy and breast feeding.
When female athletes are asked to lower the amount of fat on their body to a level similar to men, coaches are asking athletes to fight against biology and evolution. Seems not worth it to me. On competitive sports for women, when we force them to adopt the physical anatomy of men, we've lost the plot about what athletics are really about.
From Tom Wigley. Is there any scientific evidence that body composition (BC) is related to performance (Perf) when sampling across a group of individuals ... or, more to the point, is there credible evidence that for any specific individual, d(BC)/dt is, with statistical significance, related to d(Perf)/dt? If not, then the focus on BC would be hard to justify.
The test apparently works well in distinguishing couch potatoes from Olympians, but as we would expect, has little to no predictive power among a group of elite runners.
There is no one right way to run a railroad. Intercollegiate athletics are voluntary. Every year student athletes find that the athletic program which attracted them to a particular college or university was for a variety of reasons too intense or not intense enough to suit their needs. Some transfer to other schools, some find that inter mural sports provides an acceptable outlet, others shrug their shoulders and stick it out. If team performance suffers because of the way it is run, the coaches are asked to succeed elsewhere.
The same of course can be said of the academic programs. Is too much pressure brought to bear on junior faculty to publish? On graduate and undergraduate students to master the material? I don’t doubt that there often is.
I repeat “There is no one right way to run a railroad.”
There may be no one “right way” to run a railroad, but this definitely sounds like a wrong way. I think we should put ourselves in the situation of these athletes and their parents. Would we want our children subjected to this abuse? Also, are they thriving in their academic pursuits (?), which is the primary reason for their attendance at school in the first place.
I agree completely with your last sentence, but the number of varsity athletes enrolled in any given major or course within that major is typically inversely related to the average GPA in that major or course. To be sure some varsity athletes are exceptions, I had them in my classes, and they were every bit as good as my best. They were, however, the exceptions among their teammates.
As to what we as parents want for our children in an athletic program, that depends upon what our children want. What is abusive to one student athlete is what is required to win conference and national championships to another. Hence my earlier comments about student athletes picking programs consistent with their goals.
It would be interesting to compare this to football. Training tables and body composition analysis have been part of top tier NCAA football programs for decades. Compare what the distance team does to what the football team does. Perhaps the running coaches could learn something from the football team dieticians.
Women don't play football. It appears that most of the problems are with the women's running program. So I doubt that much can be learned by studying men's anatomy within the NCAA football program to understand body composition in female runners.
My comments here are as a competitive runner who ran the 1500m, 10k and cross country as a university student in Ontario, Canada.
Women are not mini men. Unfortunately, what I have observed for many years is the idea that women's physical anatomy is very similar to that of men, and therefore, that our training, diet and body fat composition as competitive athletes should be similar to that of men. Many coaches for women at the high school and university level are men who treat their female athletes as mini men.
In reality, teen girls often struggle with puberty and take a while to adjust to their menstrual periods and changing muscle / fat composition as they develop in the teenage years. Runners sometimes struggle with nausea during intense training and races. It is my observation that girls and young women struggle with this more than males. Most coaches are not accommodating of this reality and otherwise competitive female athletes drop out of running and track programs because of this.
In university programs, unrealistic expectations about BMI are placed on female athletes that force them to lower their BMI to unrealistic levels.
The physical anatomy of teen girls and women is optimized to have enough fat to nourish a developing fetus, and once the baby is born, to feed that baby until it can start eating regular food. In most parts of the world, babies are still breast fed until they are at least two years old.
I have a body mass index of about 20. It hasn't changed much since I was a competitive runner in the 1980s. I'm still a very fast walker and walk about five miles a day. When I was breastfeeding, I would get so ravenously hungry that I once ate an entire 1 pound salami in one sitting. Breastfeeding requires a certain amount of body fat and a nutrient rich diet. True that many women no longer breast feed, but that is what the female physical anatomy has evolved for: pregnancy and breast feeding.
When female athletes are asked to lower the amount of fat on their body to a level similar to men, coaches are asking athletes to fight against biology and evolution. Seems not worth it to me. On competitive sports for women, when we force them to adopt the physical anatomy of men, we've lost the plot about what athletics are really about.
From Tom Wigley. Is there any scientific evidence that body composition (BC) is related to performance (Perf) when sampling across a group of individuals ... or, more to the point, is there credible evidence that for any specific individual, d(BC)/dt is, with statistical significance, related to d(Perf)/dt? If not, then the focus on BC would be hard to justify.
The test apparently works well in distinguishing couch potatoes from Olympians, but as we would expect, has little to no predictive power among a group of elite runners.
Unfortunately, in major college sports at the majority of Division 1 Schools almost anything is tolerated in the pursuit of a winning program.
There is no one right way to run a railroad. Intercollegiate athletics are voluntary. Every year student athletes find that the athletic program which attracted them to a particular college or university was for a variety of reasons too intense or not intense enough to suit their needs. Some transfer to other schools, some find that inter mural sports provides an acceptable outlet, others shrug their shoulders and stick it out. If team performance suffers because of the way it is run, the coaches are asked to succeed elsewhere.
The same of course can be said of the academic programs. Is too much pressure brought to bear on junior faculty to publish? On graduate and undergraduate students to master the material? I don’t doubt that there often is.
I repeat “There is no one right way to run a railroad.”
There may be no one “right way” to run a railroad, but this definitely sounds like a wrong way. I think we should put ourselves in the situation of these athletes and their parents. Would we want our children subjected to this abuse? Also, are they thriving in their academic pursuits (?), which is the primary reason for their attendance at school in the first place.
I agree completely with your last sentence, but the number of varsity athletes enrolled in any given major or course within that major is typically inversely related to the average GPA in that major or course. To be sure some varsity athletes are exceptions, I had them in my classes, and they were every bit as good as my best. They were, however, the exceptions among their teammates.
As to what we as parents want for our children in an athletic program, that depends upon what our children want. What is abusive to one student athlete is what is required to win conference and national championships to another. Hence my earlier comments about student athletes picking programs consistent with their goals.
It would be interesting to compare this to football. Training tables and body composition analysis have been part of top tier NCAA football programs for decades. Compare what the distance team does to what the football team does. Perhaps the running coaches could learn something from the football team dieticians.
Women don't play football. It appears that most of the problems are with the women's running program. So I doubt that much can be learned by studying men's anatomy within the NCAA football program to understand body composition in female runners.