Article: For young female athletes, losing weight may not improve performance
20 July 2021 - Article written by Lucy Hicks for sciencemag.org
Coaches often encourage young female athletes to lose weight, expecting the dropped pounds to improve their performance in athletic events. Indeed, several female runners came forward last year saying they were bullied about their weight by a Nike coach. Now, research suggests the strategy may do more harm than good.
“People equate fitness with thinness,” says Nieca Goldberg, a cardiologist at New York University’s Langone Health who was not involved with the work. “This study shows that we really need to rethink that.”
The belief that lighter is better may have come from small studies of athletic performance and body mass index (BMI), says James Guseh, a cardiovascular physician-scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital. BMI is a measure of height and weight, and some studies have shown that endurance athletes, such as long-distance runners or rowers, with low BMI outperform their heavier colleagues. But Guseh says most of this work has focused on male athletes.
