...The standard typically used in medicine to measure obesity is body mass index, and it often is misleading where athletes are concerned....BMI is body mass divided by the square of height. If you're an ordinary person, and you have a BMI over 30, you are severely obese. If you have a BMI over 40, you are morbidly obese, and in serious trouble.
"It's an inadequate judge, but it's easy," said Dr. Edward Snell, director of sports medicine at Allegheny General Hospital and team physician for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
BMI can be misleading for athletes who do a lot of strength training, as football players do, because BMI does not distinguish between muscle and fat. To determine whether a football player is obese, he must also be tested to determine what percentage of his body weight is fat (anything over 25 percent is not good)....
I consider that to be a basic flaw in the analysis. I got on a Body Mass Index website and saw that the following was the BMI standards:
Underweight=<18.5
Normal weight=18.5-24.9
Overweight=25-29.9
Obesity=BMI of 30 or greater
It had a calculator and I put in wrestlingparents' son statistics of 6'3" and 235 pounds. It came up with a 29.4 reading or borderline obese. My son is around 5'11.5" and his average weight was 220 this season. That came up 30.3 so that is in the obese category. I know an another young wrestler in this area who is close to the 6'3" and 235 pounds that my son and wrestlingparents's son competed against this year. These three young athletes are muscular and I don't think anyone who knows them would consider any of them severely overweight or obese.
Are there football players and 285 wrestlers who are overweight and possibly even obese? Yes, without a doubt there are. But again I would like to know how all these very low weight classes in high school wrestling are helping to prevent that problem or the general overweight problem with young people? If anything I would think you would help all these overweight and possibly obese football players to lose weight by throwing in a 230 to 240 weight class. It might encourage some of them to lose some fat to make that weight class. I wonder if you are really worried about that or are you more concerned about losing some of the lower weight classes or heaven forbid maybe wrestling would extend the lowest weight class differential from 5 pounds to 6 or dare I even suggest it 7 pounds. How can a 140 pound wrestler compete against a 147 pound wrestler? No problem with a 220 pound wrestler going against a 270 pound wrestler though is there?
It really bothers me that a couple of you are choosing to discourage more weight classes for the wrestlers over the 50% median weight by bringing up the overweight problem in America today. If you want to find out what is really considered the weight problem in wrestling today go to a search engine like google and type in this phrase: Wrestling Weight Problems. See what kind of articles come up. I don't think you are going to find too many articles that take the postition that wrestling has too many weight classes for wrestlers over the 50% median weight. I think you will find plenty of articles about the dangers of too much weight cutting, weight fluctuation during the season and the problems of too low of a body fat percentage in teenagers.
