Little Mystery
This story, about overweight kids not being allowed to play football in a certain county, confuses me. When I was in high school, all the really big guys were football players. I've never heard of an upper weight limit for football in my life. Have I been mistaken all these years?
posted by mo pie at 9:03 AM
4 Comments:
I can't believe I have some info on football.... I am a play watching, ballet going, non-sports type of person. I actually dislike football. But I know the answer!
There are weight limits of sorts in football. I have read stories of pro-football players showing up for training camp over their weight limits, and their struggles to meet weights which are sometimes specified in their contracts, with penalties for not meeting them. Even if you are big, in a sport/position where being massive is a plus, if you are too big, then you are not going to perform at your peak, apparently.
In this case, the story is about kids, 11-14 they say. In which case, weight limits are in place (I believe, not being involved in this organization) for the safetly of the other kids. If your 250 lbs giant 14 year old tackles my not yet through puberty 90 lbs 11 year old; my poor dear's gonna be in for a whole lotta hurt and possibly seriously injured. So I think in youth leagues they have weight limits to protect all the other players. Just a theory. (These are hypothetical kids. I don't even have kids.)
Look: I googled for the benefit of all to find stories of pro-footballers who need to lose weight. Glad my job isn't dependant on my weight.
See "Hefty Hampton" portion of article
http://www.showmenews.com/2003/Jul/20030727Spor020.asp
"The Incredible Bulk"
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/sports/football/nfl/kansas_city_chiefs/8677248.htm
Check out this story above, they are reporting that this guy has 20% body fat, and they want him down to 18%, and he's in the neighborhood of 335lbs! Illustrating the reasons why BMI is not applicable to athletes, b/c they are outside the population norm because of the amount of muscle they have. (Refer to the Oblympics entry from a few days ago.) I searched and found he is 6'4". At 335lbs, that gives him a BMI of 40.6. But, as reported above, he has 20% body fat. BMI was developed as a metric for the general population, and isn't an effective metric for athletes.
Thanks for the info, Anon; that makes sense.
Also your comment about the BMI, I definitely get that "it doesn't apply to athletes" thing, but where is the line that separates an "athlete" from a regular person? I'm not saying for myself, I am clearly not an athlete, but it seems very murky.
The BMI gets applied to plenty of people who have a lot of muscle mass and are active. Just because they aren't in the NFL or whatever, the BMI applies there? It seems so broad and blanket and ultimately not so useful. Especially when stats like "such-and-such percent of Americans are obese" does not take the athlete/non-athlete thing into consideration at all.
Yeah, I don't know where the line is for "BMI doesn't apply to athletes" either. I'm with you in that I'm also not in that athlete category!
:-)
I know BMI was developed by studying large population samples and crunching data on them till they found a metric that seemed to correlate well to the idea of fit/healthy, based on some other harder to measure metrics, like body fat. I have read articles on how it was developed, and think it is sort of interesting in an academic way.
BMI calculators are so prevalent now, that it is hard to google and find articles on how it was developed any more (b/c there are so many google hits for basics of BMI and BMI calculators that you can't sort out the original studies on how BMI was developed), so I can't quote you anything. But the premise is basically that things like body fat are hard to measure for individuals. Weight/height isn't strictly accurate, it doesn't take into account things like body fat, framesize, etc.
Weight/height/framesize, or wrist measurement, or whatever, were other metrics that they tried to develop to easily let the average person have a number to use as a measurement of overall health. So someone came up with BMI as a metric which correlated well based on their studies of large populations of people (so think that it is a metric that applies to the average person well then).
All I can come up with is that this may mean the further you are from the average population, the less it will apply to you. Hence the reason it doesn't apply to the the elderly, as they store fat differently from the population it was based on, and the athletes, as they have much more muscle than the population that was used to develop the metric. So if you are 'athlete' enough that you are outside the population norm by some amount, then BMI probably isn't an effective metric for you.
But, I wonder, if this doesn't also mean that if you are very far from the average in other ways -- such as being very tall? being of a different ethnicity from most Americans, (Asian? Nigerian?), and so on -- then is it also a less effective metric for you? I really don't know.
I'm white, American, short but not much shorter than average so I figure I'm probably pretty well represented by the population used to generate the metric so I think it is probably pretty effective for me. You'd have to see some data on the original popluation used to develop the metric I think to determine when you are 'athlete' enough that you fall outside that data population.
Just chiming in to second First Anon's comment. In my cousin's elementry school league, there was an upper weight limit of 100 lbs. My Aunt and Uncle were constantly dieting and exercising my cousin so he would be thin enough to play.
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