Weight loss: Impact of rapid weight fluctuations on athlete's performance
By Team Asianet Newsable | First Published Sep 4, 2024, 4:02 PM ISTWeight classification is significant in wrestling. Recent news has spurred concerns about urgent weight-changing tactics, challenging sports and healthcare personnel's capacity to preserve an athlete's limited range margin.
Body weight is an important categorization for athletic sports, chiefly wrestling. Recent news has sparked discussions on techniques to alter weight urgently, thereby questioning the ability of sports and healthcare personnel to maintain a narrow range margin for the athlete. Multiple factors affect an individual’s weight, from their genetic constitution and intrinsic factors like food habits, psychology, and daily work and exercise routine to their body functioning and the effect of hormones, including stress levels and monthly cycles in females. The effects of injuries contribute largely in terms of a change in exercise routine rather than the injury itself, which in turn affects metabolism and body mass.
Training for specific athletic sports requires developing different types of muscle—white muscle fibre and anaerobic metabolism for rapid acceleration required in short sprinting and hurdles, to red muscle fibre and aerobic metabolism predominance for endurance and agility required for long-distance running.
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Training at the athletes’ respective home grounds might entail different climatic conditions from the environment at the competitive event. This is an important factor that requires acclimatization and performance with added effects of hydration (body water maintenance) and salt balance that hence need rapid adjustment, along with addition of performance anxiety.
High-performance professional sportsmen, hence, require continuous monitoring and acute attention to detail. Heavy workouts in preparation for the event can lead to dehydration and poor performance. Weight fluctuations with water loss by sweating and resultant intake may be minimal but can precipitate drastic measures like injections of fluids to maintain levels, haircuts, and minimizing clothing in desperation to maintain narrow limits, as cited recently.
All in all, the importance of structured training and adequate pre-planning for the event can never be understated. If all-around factors are carefully maintained months in advance, drastic steps need never be undertaken. We need to be vigilant and categorize in the right sectors for competition rather than manipulate intrinsic body factors. The organizational level needs to be strong, with all-around guidance from a team including sports nutritionists, psychologists, counsellors, physiotherapists, and trainer coaches in addition to the sports physician doctor.
There is a need to recognize and develop structured training with access to equipment and assessment and counselling services from team members cited above to our sportsmen at all levels when their potential is recognized. This will also prevent the younger generation who get influenced with fad diets and exercise schedules for various events and revert to poor lifestyle habits following their stints, which in turn adversely affects their health in the longer term.
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A sports clinic is not one equipped with modern technical equipment for diagnosing and treating injuries – the respective surgeons will do this but comes into play only at one end of the spectrum. We need to develop comprehensive care with early recognition and all round attention to details.
- Dr Yogeesh D Kamat, Consultant - Orthopaedics, Hip & Knee Joint Replacement Surgeon, Sports Injury, KMC Hospital, Mangalore
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