I'm working on a piece about obesity and the biological factors that can make sustaining significant wt loss so hard for so many people. The benefits of exercise, however, are not limited to the lean and abdominally chiseled! Even if swimming only helps you shed a couple pounds, or none at all, getting in shape can make a huge difference in life quality.
I have been playing around with a motivational strategy to encourage more people to compete regardless of their weight. To wit, my still-in-the-works concept, Jim's Weight-Weighted 50 SCY Free. This is likely to require substantial refinement (suggestions welcome!)
But as of now, my new metric is the soul of simplicity.
Just take your current season's best 50 SCY freestyle time and and divide this by your BMI, or body mass index. I am using the 50 SCY free because almost all of us can come up with this. You can also easily calculate your BMI by feeding your current height and weight in here (no cheating, please!): nhlbisupport.com/.../bminojs.htm
Clearly there are flaws in my metric. The first to jump out at me is that women's times, on average, tend to be a bit slower, especially on sprints, so we need to correct for this.
The current SCM world record (no world records for yards) for the 50 free is about 3 seconds faster for men than women. For purposes of my poll, women who agree to participate should subtract 3 seconds from their current season best 50!
I am, also arbitrarily, designating 1.0 as "par"--and your goal is to get your number as low as you can.
The Weight-Weighted Metric Exemplified
For example: take four men--
A) one with a BMI of 22, which places him or her squarely in the ranks of the lean
B) one with a BMI of 25, which puts him or her right on the cusp of an overweight categorization
C) one with a BMI of 30 (beginning of obesity )
D) one with a BMI of 33 (beginning of morbid obesity)
Now assume all four of these men can swim a 50 SCY freestyle in exactly 30 seconds.
Person A's "Jim's Weight-Weighted 50" would be 30/22 or 1.36
Person B earns a better 1.2
Person C achieves an even better 1.0
and Person D wins the day with a magnificent .91
If you recalculate these values for women, i.e., same BMIs but subtracting 3 seconds from their in season 50 SCY times, you get:
A: time of 27/ BMI of 22 = 1.23
B: 1.08
C: .9
D: .82
For what it's worth, I am a man, and my (admittedly lackluster) best 50 SCY free so far this year is 25.55.
I currently weigh 178 lb. and my height is 6' 1", which gives me a BMI is 23.5.
Thus my Jim's Jim's Weight-Weighted 50 is 25.55/23.5, or 1.087
There are two ways for me to get closer to par: swim faster, or gain weight.
Given the tremendous stigma on weight in our country, I don't think very many folks are likely to opt for the latter, or, for that matter, use my new metric as an incentive to eat more.
What I do think it could conceivably do is allow quite a few people now struggling with their weight to lay some legitimate claim to being--pound for pound--among the elite ranks in USMS swimming!
Give it a try!
Hmmm. My weight went down and 50 scy time went up slightly due to injury last year. I used my best recent 50 scy time of 32.3 and current BMI of 27.8 (5'-8" and 183lbs). By 9/2012 i was down to low 170s and swam a 33.1 with a badly pulled calf and no warmup. At any rate i wind up in the 1.1 to 1.19 range, which seems average.
It does seem to me that there is a large variance in weight and speed amongst masters swimmers at all levels i.e., there are some guys that appear overwieght but are still pretty fast, probably cause they were fast before they got overwieght and have stayed reasonably conditioned. Although, you don't see that in elite swimmers. I think we tend to continue those old eating habits from HS and college, but metabolism takes a nose dive in our late 40s and 50s. Some may have been "big" shaped to begin with.
While height seems to provide a clear competitive advantage due to wing-span, overweight doesn't seem to have a similar negative impact. Weight is reduced in the water, and although drag increases with size/shape, swimming velocities are all pretty low (even for elite swimmers), so size/shape don't seem to have the kind of impact that one associates with weight in running and to some degree in cycling where it really matters, hence Clydesdales and Athenas in tri's.
That said, what about bigger body = bigger muscle mass, which i think is clearly the reason that women's times are slower (generally women have or can develop less muscle mass from the same amount of conditioning as compared with a man-unless they are taking male hormones, as with the east germans in the '80s). I read somewhere the typical differences in muscle mass between men and women, and the disparity is far larger for the upper body than lower body. For swimming, im wondering if the relationship between height and muscle mass may better correlate to 50 scy times than height and weight (BMI) with 50 scy times. I guess muscle mass it harder to determine and not generally known by most people. Then there's variables like genetics, age, work ethic, training, years of experience, technique, the pool, swim suits, and a host of others TNTC (too numerous to count) that impact times. My $0.02
Hmmm. My weight went down and 50 scy time went up slightly due to injury last year. I used my best recent 50 scy time of 32.3 and current BMI of 27.8 (5'-8" and 183lbs). By 9/2012 i was down to low 170s and swam a 33.1 with a badly pulled calf and no warmup. At any rate i wind up in the 1.1 to 1.19 range, which seems average.
It does seem to me that there is a large variance in weight and speed amongst masters swimmers at all levels i.e., there are some guys that appear overwieght but are still pretty fast, probably cause they were fast before they got overwieght and have stayed reasonably conditioned. Although, you don't see that in elite swimmers. I think we tend to continue those old eating habits from HS and college, but metabolism takes a nose dive in our late 40s and 50s. Some may have been "big" shaped to begin with.
While height seems to provide a clear competitive advantage due to wing-span, overweight doesn't seem to have a similar negative impact. Weight is reduced in the water, and although drag increases with size/shape, swimming velocities are all pretty low (even for elite swimmers), so size/shape don't seem to have the kind of impact that one associates with weight in running and to some degree in cycling where it really matters, hence Clydesdales and Athenas in tri's.
That said, what about bigger body = bigger muscle mass, which i think is clearly the reason that women's times are slower (generally women have or can develop less muscle mass from the same amount of conditioning as compared with a man-unless they are taking male hormones, as with the east germans in the '80s). I read somewhere the typical differences in muscle mass between men and women, and the disparity is far larger for the upper body than lower body. For swimming, im wondering if the relationship between height and muscle mass may better correlate to 50 scy times than height and weight (BMI) with 50 scy times. I guess muscle mass it harder to determine and not generally known by most people. Then there's variables like genetics, age, work ethic, training, years of experience, technique, the pool, swim suits, and a host of others TNTC (too numerous to count) that impact times. My $0.02
