Our college program didn’t actively measure our athletes (as far as I know), but it was definitely brought up by some of the coaches. Our one jumps coach liked to tell the throwers that he wouldn’t accept any Shamu’s on the throwing team. We only really had one super heavy guy, but so long as we were throwing far we could tell him to buzz off and go back to his event area. Not sure if the runners were so lucky.
My university had regular “body composition analysis” or as our coach called them, “body fat scans” because that’s the only number they cared about. We were all defined by our body fat. I was 6’3” 175 pounds running the 400 hurdles and my coaches said I was overweight and would constantly grab the skin on my stomach, grab snacks out of my hands when I was eating them, and give us extra morning practices if our body fat went up at all. There’s correlations behind faster athletes having lower body fat, but correlation isn’t causation, every athlete isn’t the same. There’s effective ways to help people eat a healthier diet through inclusive eating instead of exclusive eating, and these outdated old school coaches need their shitty ways gone.
That sounds horribly unhealthy. We had enough eating disorders on our team without our coaches doing this type of thing, just bc the sport naturally leads some ppl down that path. I can't imagine how much worse it would be when you add this terrible coach behavior in.
I think it's more of people do wierd shit when there's money on the line.
If it came down to you making $500k or $50k your willingness to do some wierd shit would raise and it would have nothing to do with a fetish of power.
I think also their ways just had to work once and then they'll think they are faultless and continue to be assholes forever. Lots of coaches in every sport seem to have that 'rough angry dickhead' personality. So toxic and unnecessary.
It’s a tough balance. Most college students are oblivious to how the impacts of balanced nutrition, weightlifting, sleep, even stress from all-nighters affect the body. It’s important to learn and track changes to your body if you’re trying to increase performance. But, using the tool in a manner that causes stress can ultimately hurt performance for many athletes, not help.
Yeah the main problem here is just implementation, DEXA scans can be useful and coaches can absolutely try to get their athletes in better shape, that’s their job, but there’s too many old heads that work in extremes and just define you by your body fat percentage which leads to athletes defining themselves by that too which causes a slew of physical and mental problems.
Give a competitive athlete a number to beat, like BF% and watch them go to incredible lengths to do so. The saying goes “what gets measured, gets improved.”
Former college runner and my coach told me I needed to get from 9% to under 5% BF to be a successful distance runner. We were measured at least once a semester but those of us who needed improvement were tested more frequently. Did so in less than 5 months. Popped an amazing 10k and then my body completely shut down. Took me years (damn near a decade) to get my endocrine system and metabolism back to normal and years of therapy to work through the negative relationship I developed with fitness and nutrition within the sport specifically.
I totally bought the skinny=fast argument hook, line, and sinker at the time. Absolutely don’t now.
Luckily in a coaching position now where I can be part of the change in our sport. In the power to weight ratio, we focus on developing power and max velo speed in our distance athletes and teach and promote a healthy relationship with food. Emphasizing the importance of eating for performance, recovery…. And ENJOYMENT!
Wetmore is a legend. RTWB is one of my all time favorite books but this philosophy is dated and wrong. Glad we are broadly moving on from this mentality though there is still work to do.
Under 5% as a standard is basically suboptimal for literally any performance pursuit, that's insane. That's like IFBB pro bodybuilder levels and those folks are functionally ready to pass out from existing on stage.
That's great you were able to get away from that thinking. Nothing wrong with tracking such metrics if it's a clear and obvious target, but having it as even close to a primary variable in already trained folks isn't just risky, it's just downright antithetical to even short term performance.
The main problem is most coaches and athletes do not know how to optimize body composition in a healthy, sustainable manner. A common issue I see is aggressive caloric deficits. By cutting the caloric intake too low, you are not giving your body enough energy to support both health and performance. Consequently, low energy availability occurs, causing the athlete to get sick, injured and fatigued. Additionally, that aggressive caloric deficit is actually doing more harm than good for your body composition. By being in a state of low energy availability coupled with the stress of training, concentrations of IGF-1, testosterone and insulin decrease. Meanwhile, cortisol increases and T3 (the active form of thyroid hormone) decreases. These unfavorable hormonal changes in turn can cause an athlete to lose muscle while gaining fat!!
Another huge problem I see is reluctance to frequent resistance training. Body recomposition is very underrated tool to get lean without the nasty side effects of RED-S. This is espicially the case for athletes with low-normal BMI with a higher than ideal body fat percentage. However, many coaches and athletes are scared to weight train 5-6X week for fear that it would cause overtraining and cause them to get bulky. I went against the grain, doing this and I only got faster and more shredded. Coaches and athletes need to get in their heads, you could be doing crazy hypertrophy workouts but if you are in caloric maintenance, you will not gain weight. It's being in a caloric surplus not resistance training that causes you to get bulky. In addition, not eating enough is much more likely to cause overtraining than resistance training 5-6X, given that the athlete is sufficiently fueling him/herself and getting plenty sleep.
I agree with the statements on the issues of being in caloric deficit as being problematic and that in general coaches should not be the ones in charge of tracking body composition, especially because few to none are nutritionists who actually understand how it effects the body.
That being said while I also agree there are many old heads who still underutilize strength training, 5-6x a week is likely overkill. The worry here really isn't "bulking" because as you said in general that's not an issue, its more that lifting that many times a week would heavily limit running mileage and quality. For most athletes its ideal to lift on the same day they do hard sessions, which would likely be more 3x per week. This allows the runner to recovery on their recovery run days.
By resistance training, I am not just referring to weight-lifting, but also body weight and stability exercises. Doing a spilt alternating lower and upper body exercises one day and core the next day would allow for recovery of the individual muscle groups. Here's the resistance training spilt that got me shedded and signfigantly faster:
Monday
Core
Tuesday
Upper Body & Lower Body
Wednesday
Core
Thursday
Rest
Friday
Upper & Lower Body
Saturday
Core
Sunday
Upper & Lower Body
Got absolutely peeled doing this along running and other cross training( elliptical, swimming, XC skiing). No counting calories and macros.
I suppose if you’re just doing a small core session on those recovery days it’s not unreasonable. I think I’d personally still prefer to do it on the same day I’m running a hard workouts/lifting.
But theoretically I see no issue either way. I thought you meant lifting 5-6 times a week which of course would just torch someone. Tbf I’ve never met a distance coach that is worried about his athletes doing too much core.
Being skinny doesn't make you good at distance running. Being good at distance running makes you skinny. Instead of focusing on how make their runners more skinny coaches should focus on how to make their runners fast, skinniness will come as a side effect.
Tbh this is a mistake so many make, body fat% doesn't mean skinny, in fact it can mean the opposite in some cases since muscles can make some people look bigger, but it can also make people look smaller. But you can reduce body fat% without actually messes much with someone's weight(they might add on or lose 1kg or two at most, more like 0.5kg though). However most people don't know this, and will see 'body fat%' and equate it to losing weight and being skinny, and reducing food intake, which it's not and that's where you get problems.
I ran for Mark Wetmore at CU as a walk on in 2001. Alan Drake was the assistant coach at the time and I came onto the team at 129 lbs and they wanted me to drop 10 or 12 lbs, I was already a really skinny kid. I remember the weekly weigh ins and have a few other stories but I quit after the indoor season. They were national champs when I was a sophomore (I think) and the few females I kept in touch with through my 20s all had issues conceiving, but I think that’s really common for D1 runners at any school.
If there was an investigation into all distance running college coaches I think half of them would be out due to comments on weight and body. It’s truly astonishing and a shame that similiar things are happening everywhere.
I was at a program no where near the caliber of Colorado, but it’s the same plot. The amount of times my coach said I could use to lose 5 pounds to me and others and other snide comments about my body and performance was unbelievable and still haunts me to this day years later. I wasn’t the only one and I’d say over half my team developed eating disorders to varying degrees. It’s a horrible cycle and I have no idea how we improve it
I actually got super into collecting data at high school, but now I'm not that into it, I mean yeah, data is useful and all, but it's why better to just know what needs to be done and sticking to that. I eat healthily, getting in enough food to properly refuel and aid with recovery, I do decent training with strength training alongside my running. That's all you need really, no need to check body fat% or anything else, your tests will come in your races, if your improving and performing well, then you know to keep doing what your doing, else just make small changes to your training and adapt to your needs over time.
Focusing on various data points and numbers, is just distraction at best and a recipe for obsessing over it/leading to disorders at worst.
Tbh if you want to utilise science stuff, then take on all the recovery stuff that's come up over the last few decades, combing this with adequate nutrition will give way more of a benefit than looking at body fat% and other similar stat based testing.
>I eat healthily, getting in enough food to properly refuel and aid with recovery, I do decent training with strength training alongside my running. That's all you need really, no need to check body fat% or anything else, your tests will come in your races, if your improving and performing well, then you know to keep doing what your doing, else just make small changes to your training and adapt to your needs over time.
>Focusing on various data points and numbers, is just distraction at best and a recipe for obsessing over it/leading to disorders at worst.
As a exerise physiology PhD student specilzing in RED-S, I 100% agree that by fueling your body properly and training like an animal is will naturally allow you to reach an ideal body composition for performance. For a lot of athletes, counting calories and macros can make them become extremely obsessive and lead to disordered eating.
Many coaches and even some dietians do not relieze this. At the University I was at for my PhD program, the athetic department was forcing all their athletes to take pictures of all of their food in order to be able to track their caloric intake. However, the kinosiology department was not closly connected to our athletic department. We had all this exercise science testing equipment in our athletic facilities. Yet no exerise physiology professors were using it and no one even showed me it. The way I found out about it was from my apartment mate's mom! It completely boggles my mind how a huge D1 athletic school hired no sports physiologists. Thankfully, the program I will be transferring to is a sports physiology program which works very closely with the sports teams to ensure the performance, health and well-being of their athletes.
Coaches at Cal Poly may also have a problem with focusing on that stuff since Conover passed. I know a girl who went elsewhere after asking about that during a visit and got a non-answer.
I competed for Conover's alma mater and there was nothing but good things to say about him.
Meanwhile Colorado has it's own clown show with Coach Sanders and now this.
Regardless no coaches should be using body scanners like Bod Pod or Dexa scans, especially for female runners who are more likely to have eating disorders and body image issues. That's all fine for the general population who are interested in improving their health, but in sports these tools can lead to perverted outcomes.
I think it was more so one of the female coaches. I'm not sure to be exact the specifics as the conversation when I ran into her mom a year ago was brief. All I know is that they were getting a weird vibe and she instead went to a more welcoming environment.
We used body fat composition measurements as a tool to increase our performance. It’s useful data but obviously people can take it too far such as causing eating disorders
She was in the process of leaving the school team for a private coach. The private coach is well known in our state, so he contacted the governing board for public schools and told them - along with the photos he had my daughter take before she left. Idk what happened after that.
If you want to be a D1 distance runner you have to be fast*
Different bodies work in different ways, and what's healthy/aids performance for one body type may be unhealthy/harmful for other people.
My older brother ran for Wetmore and won a national championship with him. Said he was unconventional but the best coach he’s ever had. “He will be missed”
Don't care, he's objectively a bad coach. Good coaches don't create toxic environments that give their athletes eating disorders that athletic trainers notice and get worried about.
Our college program didn’t actively measure our athletes (as far as I know), but it was definitely brought up by some of the coaches. Our one jumps coach liked to tell the throwers that he wouldn’t accept any Shamu’s on the throwing team. We only really had one super heavy guy, but so long as we were throwing far we could tell him to buzz off and go back to his event area. Not sure if the runners were so lucky.
My university had regular “body composition analysis” or as our coach called them, “body fat scans” because that’s the only number they cared about. We were all defined by our body fat. I was 6’3” 175 pounds running the 400 hurdles and my coaches said I was overweight and would constantly grab the skin on my stomach, grab snacks out of my hands when I was eating them, and give us extra morning practices if our body fat went up at all. There’s correlations behind faster athletes having lower body fat, but correlation isn’t causation, every athlete isn’t the same. There’s effective ways to help people eat a healthier diet through inclusive eating instead of exclusive eating, and these outdated old school coaches need their shitty ways gone.
That sounds horribly unhealthy. We had enough eating disorders on our team without our coaches doing this type of thing, just bc the sport naturally leads some ppl down that path. I can't imagine how much worse it would be when you add this terrible coach behavior in.
Why is this such a common thing. Seems like so many coaches are insane like that. Such assholes.
people do weird stuff when they have power over impressionable people
I think it's more of people do wierd shit when there's money on the line. If it came down to you making $500k or $50k your willingness to do some wierd shit would raise and it would have nothing to do with a fetish of power.
I think also their ways just had to work once and then they'll think they are faultless and continue to be assholes forever. Lots of coaches in every sport seem to have that 'rough angry dickhead' personality. So toxic and unnecessary.
I’ve heard too many nightmares from women who were in programs that were too strongly influenced body composition and diet.
It’s a tough balance. Most college students are oblivious to how the impacts of balanced nutrition, weightlifting, sleep, even stress from all-nighters affect the body. It’s important to learn and track changes to your body if you’re trying to increase performance. But, using the tool in a manner that causes stress can ultimately hurt performance for many athletes, not help.
Yeah the main problem here is just implementation, DEXA scans can be useful and coaches can absolutely try to get their athletes in better shape, that’s their job, but there’s too many old heads that work in extremes and just define you by your body fat percentage which leads to athletes defining themselves by that too which causes a slew of physical and mental problems.
Give a competitive athlete a number to beat, like BF% and watch them go to incredible lengths to do so. The saying goes “what gets measured, gets improved.” Former college runner and my coach told me I needed to get from 9% to under 5% BF to be a successful distance runner. We were measured at least once a semester but those of us who needed improvement were tested more frequently. Did so in less than 5 months. Popped an amazing 10k and then my body completely shut down. Took me years (damn near a decade) to get my endocrine system and metabolism back to normal and years of therapy to work through the negative relationship I developed with fitness and nutrition within the sport specifically. I totally bought the skinny=fast argument hook, line, and sinker at the time. Absolutely don’t now. Luckily in a coaching position now where I can be part of the change in our sport. In the power to weight ratio, we focus on developing power and max velo speed in our distance athletes and teach and promote a healthy relationship with food. Emphasizing the importance of eating for performance, recovery…. And ENJOYMENT! Wetmore is a legend. RTWB is one of my all time favorite books but this philosophy is dated and wrong. Glad we are broadly moving on from this mentality though there is still work to do.
Good story, thanks for sharing
Under 5% as a standard is basically suboptimal for literally any performance pursuit, that's insane. That's like IFBB pro bodybuilder levels and those folks are functionally ready to pass out from existing on stage. That's great you were able to get away from that thinking. Nothing wrong with tracking such metrics if it's a clear and obvious target, but having it as even close to a primary variable in already trained folks isn't just risky, it's just downright antithetical to even short term performance.
Well said
Great points
The main problem is most coaches and athletes do not know how to optimize body composition in a healthy, sustainable manner. A common issue I see is aggressive caloric deficits. By cutting the caloric intake too low, you are not giving your body enough energy to support both health and performance. Consequently, low energy availability occurs, causing the athlete to get sick, injured and fatigued. Additionally, that aggressive caloric deficit is actually doing more harm than good for your body composition. By being in a state of low energy availability coupled with the stress of training, concentrations of IGF-1, testosterone and insulin decrease. Meanwhile, cortisol increases and T3 (the active form of thyroid hormone) decreases. These unfavorable hormonal changes in turn can cause an athlete to lose muscle while gaining fat!! Another huge problem I see is reluctance to frequent resistance training. Body recomposition is very underrated tool to get lean without the nasty side effects of RED-S. This is espicially the case for athletes with low-normal BMI with a higher than ideal body fat percentage. However, many coaches and athletes are scared to weight train 5-6X week for fear that it would cause overtraining and cause them to get bulky. I went against the grain, doing this and I only got faster and more shredded. Coaches and athletes need to get in their heads, you could be doing crazy hypertrophy workouts but if you are in caloric maintenance, you will not gain weight. It's being in a caloric surplus not resistance training that causes you to get bulky. In addition, not eating enough is much more likely to cause overtraining than resistance training 5-6X, given that the athlete is sufficiently fueling him/herself and getting plenty sleep.
I agree with the statements on the issues of being in caloric deficit as being problematic and that in general coaches should not be the ones in charge of tracking body composition, especially because few to none are nutritionists who actually understand how it effects the body. That being said while I also agree there are many old heads who still underutilize strength training, 5-6x a week is likely overkill. The worry here really isn't "bulking" because as you said in general that's not an issue, its more that lifting that many times a week would heavily limit running mileage and quality. For most athletes its ideal to lift on the same day they do hard sessions, which would likely be more 3x per week. This allows the runner to recovery on their recovery run days.
By resistance training, I am not just referring to weight-lifting, but also body weight and stability exercises. Doing a spilt alternating lower and upper body exercises one day and core the next day would allow for recovery of the individual muscle groups. Here's the resistance training spilt that got me shedded and signfigantly faster: Monday Core Tuesday Upper Body & Lower Body Wednesday Core Thursday Rest Friday Upper & Lower Body Saturday Core Sunday Upper & Lower Body Got absolutely peeled doing this along running and other cross training( elliptical, swimming, XC skiing). No counting calories and macros.
I suppose if you’re just doing a small core session on those recovery days it’s not unreasonable. I think I’d personally still prefer to do it on the same day I’m running a hard workouts/lifting. But theoretically I see no issue either way. I thought you meant lifting 5-6 times a week which of course would just torch someone. Tbf I’ve never met a distance coach that is worried about his athletes doing too much core.
Being skinny doesn't make you good at distance running. Being good at distance running makes you skinny. Instead of focusing on how make their runners more skinny coaches should focus on how to make their runners fast, skinniness will come as a side effect.
Tbh this is a mistake so many make, body fat% doesn't mean skinny, in fact it can mean the opposite in some cases since muscles can make some people look bigger, but it can also make people look smaller. But you can reduce body fat% without actually messes much with someone's weight(they might add on or lose 1kg or two at most, more like 0.5kg though). However most people don't know this, and will see 'body fat%' and equate it to losing weight and being skinny, and reducing food intake, which it's not and that's where you get problems.
I ran for Mark Wetmore at CU as a walk on in 2001. Alan Drake was the assistant coach at the time and I came onto the team at 129 lbs and they wanted me to drop 10 or 12 lbs, I was already a really skinny kid. I remember the weekly weigh ins and have a few other stories but I quit after the indoor season. They were national champs when I was a sophomore (I think) and the few females I kept in touch with through my 20s all had issues conceiving, but I think that’s really common for D1 runners at any school.
Isn’t that what happened to that great sprint coach they had at Oregon? They haven’t been the same since🤔
If there was an investigation into all distance running college coaches I think half of them would be out due to comments on weight and body. It’s truly astonishing and a shame that similiar things are happening everywhere. I was at a program no where near the caliber of Colorado, but it’s the same plot. The amount of times my coach said I could use to lose 5 pounds to me and others and other snide comments about my body and performance was unbelievable and still haunts me to this day years later. I wasn’t the only one and I’d say over half my team developed eating disorders to varying degrees. It’s a horrible cycle and I have no idea how we improve it
I actually got super into collecting data at high school, but now I'm not that into it, I mean yeah, data is useful and all, but it's why better to just know what needs to be done and sticking to that. I eat healthily, getting in enough food to properly refuel and aid with recovery, I do decent training with strength training alongside my running. That's all you need really, no need to check body fat% or anything else, your tests will come in your races, if your improving and performing well, then you know to keep doing what your doing, else just make small changes to your training and adapt to your needs over time. Focusing on various data points and numbers, is just distraction at best and a recipe for obsessing over it/leading to disorders at worst. Tbh if you want to utilise science stuff, then take on all the recovery stuff that's come up over the last few decades, combing this with adequate nutrition will give way more of a benefit than looking at body fat% and other similar stat based testing.
>I eat healthily, getting in enough food to properly refuel and aid with recovery, I do decent training with strength training alongside my running. That's all you need really, no need to check body fat% or anything else, your tests will come in your races, if your improving and performing well, then you know to keep doing what your doing, else just make small changes to your training and adapt to your needs over time. >Focusing on various data points and numbers, is just distraction at best and a recipe for obsessing over it/leading to disorders at worst. As a exerise physiology PhD student specilzing in RED-S, I 100% agree that by fueling your body properly and training like an animal is will naturally allow you to reach an ideal body composition for performance. For a lot of athletes, counting calories and macros can make them become extremely obsessive and lead to disordered eating. Many coaches and even some dietians do not relieze this. At the University I was at for my PhD program, the athetic department was forcing all their athletes to take pictures of all of their food in order to be able to track their caloric intake. However, the kinosiology department was not closly connected to our athletic department. We had all this exercise science testing equipment in our athletic facilities. Yet no exerise physiology professors were using it and no one even showed me it. The way I found out about it was from my apartment mate's mom! It completely boggles my mind how a huge D1 athletic school hired no sports physiologists. Thankfully, the program I will be transferring to is a sports physiology program which works very closely with the sports teams to ensure the performance, health and well-being of their athletes.
Coaches at Cal Poly may also have a problem with focusing on that stuff since Conover passed. I know a girl who went elsewhere after asking about that during a visit and got a non-answer.
I was like I don't remember that at Cal Poly and remembered I'm on the T&F sub not the CFB sub. LoL
I competed for Conover's alma mater and there was nothing but good things to say about him. Meanwhile Colorado has it's own clown show with Coach Sanders and now this. Regardless no coaches should be using body scanners like Bod Pod or Dexa scans, especially for female runners who are more likely to have eating disorders and body image issues. That's all fine for the general population who are interested in improving their health, but in sports these tools can lead to perverted outcomes.
With Van Hoy?
I think it was more so one of the female coaches. I'm not sure to be exact the specifics as the conversation when I ran into her mom a year ago was brief. All I know is that they were getting a weird vibe and she instead went to a more welcoming environment.
We used body fat composition measurements as a tool to increase our performance. It’s useful data but obviously people can take it too far such as causing eating disorders
I Ain’t ever met a skinny offensive lineman or a fat distance runner that was good
My daughter’s high school tracked the girls’ weights and their fasted speed on certain races.
Oh, hell no, I would never allow this. My kid would be off that team. WTAF? Way to fuck girls up.
She was in the process of leaving the school team for a private coach. The private coach is well known in our state, so he contacted the governing board for public schools and told them - along with the photos he had my daughter take before she left. Idk what happened after that.
Half of the coaches are the ones that are fat.
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One guy in high school was thick and still fast. We use to call him thunder thighs. In xcountry.
I mean, if you want to be a D1 distance runner, you have to be skinny.
If you want to be a D1 distance runner you have to be fast* Different bodies work in different ways, and what's healthy/aids performance for one body type may be unhealthy/harmful for other people.
There's a difference between fit and skinny.
Cross country has highest suicide rate of college sports
Cross country coach at USNA who has since retired had a saying: "Do you like salad? Good because that's all you're eating this semester".
Good riddance
My older brother ran for Wetmore and won a national championship with him. Said he was unconventional but the best coach he’s ever had. “He will be missed”
Don't care, he's objectively a bad coach. Good coaches don't create toxic environments that give their athletes eating disorders that athletic trainers notice and get worried about.
My bf dropped to 2.5 percent I was still healthy. But had nothing to do with my times.