MichaelMc wrote:
In brief, Ideal for an Elite 5'7 woman would be ~115 lbs and for a 5'7 man would be ~126 lbs.
The article also overlooks one of the main reasons Elite distance runners tend to be short: heat dissipation. Running extremely fast generates a huge amount of heat which you have toget rid of: when equally slim, shorter people have more surface area per pound. Hot races favor smaller runners (like Wanjiru).
Yah but.....5'6-5'7, for a woman, is *not* short. Short for a man, yes, but not for a lady. It does make sense that a shorter frame would have an easier time finding efficient running form - less vertical mass to manage and balance.
Maybe it's because I'm obviously on the very petite end of the scale (5 feet even on a good day
).....but I always want to know the lower limit of said 'ideal' height.
Good point, Michael, about ideal 'racing' weight and ideal 'healthy' weight aren't even remotely close to the same thing. I tell people that at this point, to lose any more weight I'd have to lose muscle mass - which is, clearly, NOT healthy. However, as excess cardio will cannibalize muscle, the more I run the more I tend to slim down even more as I never seem to have time to fit in weights/musclebuilding work like I probably should. Heh.
Funnily enough, ever since my mileage got back up to 40km+/week, my dad keeps asking if I've lost weight again. Actually I haven't lost an ounce, but the running *is* making me more compact and slimmer.
I'd love to see a study with parameters of body measurements - ie. ideal femur/leg length, muscle measurements (ie. slim thighs good? bad?), waist/hip ratios (obviously men/women would differ), etc.....BMI alone is kinda broad and not very useful to depict body composition. After all, you could be 100lbs of solid muscle, or 100lbs of skinny but jiggly fat.