Athletes must talk body issues
Every young athlete should be having conversations around body composition and disordered eating with their support team because ultimately your body is your vehicle to performance.
While stories brave athletes like Lani Pallister, Ellie Cole, Teagan Levi, Sarah Perkins and Kate McLaren share in today’s Insight Sport edition are confronting, as elite athletes it is important that hard, yet sensitive, conversations are had around these issues.
Female athletes have never been under more pressure.
They may not fit society’s beauty standards because they may be more muscular or have a bigger body shape ideally suited to sport.
They may also have their own insecurities and experiences absorbed growing up in their own families.
It is never acceptable to body shame anyone but elite athletes must be engaged in a level of honest conversation about their bodies to produce elite performance.
Information is power and sensitive discussions will reduce the issues women are now raising about what has happened to them in the past.
I know what it is like as a young female athlete and the pressure to perform at the highest level in the world.
It’s crazy for me to think from the age of 18 I was getting skinfolds in my togs or bra on the pool deck in front of the entire squad.
I never really thought much about it at the time, but looking back I can definitely see how that contributes to what I call the shame spiral – where you question everything, doubt yourself and get stuck in an emotional spin.
There were times my skinfolds went up and my coach, who was not perfect by any stretch of the imagination but was certainly one of the better coaches I saw in Australian swimming, had a way
of making me feel incredibly bad about that.
I definitely had some disordered eating. I emotionally ate and binge ate a lot in my career, but because of the amount of exercise and training I was doing it didn’t seem to have too much of an impact and thankfully I never developed long-term disordered eating.
It is great to see some of those things have now changed. I know swimming no longer does skinfold measuring, but that doesn’t change the importance of conversations about your body and while it’s not the same in every sport, it’s also not the same with every athlete.
Nutrition, recovery and how certain ways of training will impact your body and your performance are all key conversations.
Athletes need to be on the same page as their team and understand what their performance goals are and how the holistic plan will work to get them to their dreams.
Conversations should never be done in a way that is intimidating.
Coaches, sports scientists and anyone who works in highperformance programs should have to complete a course about talking safely to young athletes on these topics so at the very least they are not doing harm in those delicate conversations.
Every athlete strives for the ultimate success in their sport, but it should not come at a severe cost.