BODY STATS!

When it comes to body stats and measurements it’s hard to know WHAT to look at and then HOW to interpret them.

From a runner’s perspective we may have visions of what an ideal weight or body type is good for us. But you must question where these ‘ideas’ are coming from? If it’s from how someone you aspire to be like or emulate looks like on Instagram, then we have to change our viewpoint. If it’s from what the numbers in health magazines or training guides predict us to be, then again, we must take a better more rounded perspective.

Individuals body stats and individuals personal numbers should look very different to one another. Based on what works well for us and our lifestyle. What keeps our mood happy and healthy. What allows us to perform, work and importantly live. These objectives are all very personal to each individual person.

When I was young athlete, I was diagnosed with anorexia and I was letting the BODY STATS rule my life. I had a skewed perspective of what made me ‘fast’. Fast for sport. Competitive for sport. Strong for sport. This perspective was bought about for a whole host of reasons, too many to delve into right now and too intense for this light-hearted blog!!! I was defining my sporting performance purely on numbers and unfortunately as weight went down, my performance went up…until it didn’t. And I broke!

What I would have benefited from at the time was a coach that opened my eyes to how I could perform optimally for me. A clinician or coach that could make me see how numbers going down didn’t directly correlate to performance going up and that there were too many other contributors to disprove this. Getting measured on the scales week in week out to show my weight was severely detrimental and those numbers meant nothing to my global fitness and performance level. They drove a strange, warped competitiveness to lose weight and were useful for nothing other than showing a downward trend on a graph.

Today I had to get my BODY STATS checked at the GP. On the printout it says I have an average weight, and an average BMI and great Blood Pressure. A number of years ago, being average would not be good enough because to me ‘average numbers’ meant ‘average performance’ but you have to read around these numbers and interpret them for what they are (or are not). They do not measure my muscle mass? My body fat as a percentage? Nor do they take into account the time of day (month for a woman) measured and how much water intake I have had? My sweat loss from workouts or not working out. Along with that, what will be important for reading these numbers on a coaching and performance level is what will be advantageous for you performing optimally for an upcoming goal? It may be that to perform to your best at a marathon you may need to be considerably different than to perform well at a 5k. But at what point are you more prone to injury? to fatigue? to amenorrhea (for a women)? stress fractures? mental exhaustion?

There is a lot more to performance than numbers and BODY STATS. Now, at the age of 36, I am the heaviest I have ever been on the scales (by numbers), but the fittest and most mentally strong I have ever been too. Working with someone honestly and closely you can find a path to success and not get bogged down by your own vision of optimal!