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!
I am the only one who voted "over 1.40" so far, due to my 19 BMI (:banana:) and slow 50 free. :sad:An open turn 50 free can be very costly. Add being skinny to the mix and your JW-W 50 score will go sky high
WOO HOO... I'm obese! 6'1 and 250. So at 33 bmi, me swimming a 50 at 36 secs is equivalent to you going about 25.55... wow. I like this. Or you doing about a 21.4 50 equivalent... dang.... Maybe I don't want to lose weight! HA!
I will say i've lost 5 lbs in the last week and do feel quicker...
I do know there's some guys out there no taller than me and well over 200 lb. who can still bust a 22.x 50 free. Somebody who can swim a 22 with a BMI of 28 would make it into the .70- .79 range, which I personally consider pretty remarkable. Ditto for someone who can swim a 26 who has a BMI of 33. Either way, I think it would be very impressive.
Using a 50 free as a standard of health may not be particularly appropriate. I've seen guys at my college's alumni relays who were hugely overweight and well on their way to a host of health problems, but could still rip off a 22+ 50 free. However, using 500 free times instead would create a self-selecting sample group.
0.85 for my "score"
23.8 50 Free / 28 BMI (5'10, 195 lbs.)
I did the math wrong the first time and already put my score in the vote as 1.17, but I can't change it now...USMS thing only allows one vote and no changing.
My score is 1.14. If I swam my absolute all-time best time, I'd just barely hit par of 1. Then again, I weighed less when I swam that time, so I still didn't make par at that time. If I swam more than 3x/week, I might actually get closer, but I'd probably also lose a couple of pounds. It's like a paradox!
I too have bones to pick with BMI because of the crudeness of the measure for folks who are very muscular/large-boned and even moreso the over-reliance on the BMI as a measure of general health.
:soapbox:
As you mentioned in your original post, there are various biological reasons people may have trouble sustaining weight loss. I have a chronic illness and at times have had to take medications that made it very easy to gain weight and extremely hard to it, increasing my BMI - but they also stabilized my illness, which was at times almost completely disabling. It is absolutely infuriating to be told, "You're not healthy because your BMI is too high," when other factors of your health are not being considered at all. It sounds like your article is about benefits of exercise other than just losing weight. Refreshing!
You are absolutely correct. Actually, there are multiple medications that significantly contribute to weight gain, sometimes quite substantially so, but if the person goes off them, their condition can worsen. It's really a tough problem.
I don't know if you have read much about the so-called Obesity Paradox, but there are a number of conditions where, for reasons not yet well-understood, obese people actually have a survival advantage over "normal" weight individuals.
Dr. Stephen Blair has done a lot of excellent research on this as well as that when you factor in fitness, there is no excess disease/early death in the obese than other weight categories. If you're fit and fat, in other words, it doesn't negatively impact your health, and in some cases, it actually benefits it. The problem is that the percentage of fit people goes down as weight increases, perhaps in part because it can be difficult on the joints to do strenuous weight bearing exercise.
Hence another reason why swimming is such a great sport.
Dr. Blair, by the way, was one of the authors on several papers that came out a year or two ago comparing longevity differences between runners, walkers, swimmers, and sedentary people. His hypothesis was that swimming would be good for you, definitely better than staying sedentary and maybe even walking. What they found was that swimmers had a lower over all rate of death for any reason compared even to runners.
So, EKW, fight the good fight, which--I think a growing number of enlightened researchers are beginning to agree--is less about the battle of the bulge than the battle to stay fit regardless of your weight.
