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Deaths in the NFL

August 22, 2005 01:44 PM

It is too soon to say how Thomas Herrion, the latest NFL football player to die, died. Mr. Herrion died soon after the game. The single most important factor contributing to sudden athletic deaths is a preexisting heart condition. Most are undiagnosed. There is a lot of impact and bruising in a big time football game. But, there is a great underlying cardiovascular stress. The rushing and extreme bursts take time for recovery and the pace of the game often does not allow for this.

A very large person, in terms of body mass, has less vascular volume per unit of mass. And they have less heart mass and pumping volume as well. Organs do not scale fully with body mass. Height is also a factor because a tall person has a high column of blood whose mass must be supported by the heart.

NFL players are big, but they are fat too. Fat is a burden and adds no motive power. It does add shock absorbing tissue in football, but little else. The inertia it adds may be of some help to a defensive tackle. They become harder to move by others as well as on their own volition.

Most athletes are too fat to perform optimally. Lance Armstrong dropped fat and added lean body mass over the years, see my post, and this added about 10% to his power to weight ratio. In an earlier post, I showed that lean body mass was the underlying factor in the performance of superior high school wrestlers. And, I mentioned some time ago that Ivan Lendl ascended to his superiority when he dropped body fat.

And now comes this brief note in JAMA by Dr. Joyce Harp...

Using publicly available stats on height and weight, she calculates that BMI (mass in KG divided by height in meters squared) of NFL football players puts most of them in the obese class. I can't get the doctor's article but here is a brief restatement of its calculations (and that is all it can be in a 2 page note) Dr. Hart's BMI stats for the NFL.

Now a caution about BMI. It is an easy to do stat, but it doesn't measure lean body mass, the determining factor in performance, or fat. Yet, it does indicate obesity when the numbers get large. But, it is not so good at lower BMI, where a lot of people who work out or are athletes will register. A BMI of at least 25 is common in an athlete. Mine is almost 28.

Muscle weighs a lot more than fat, something like 1.5 times as much. Dr. Forbes, who did the earliest and possibly best work on body mass measured the Washington Redskins (who I watched in their workouts at Georgetown University as a child) and found them all to have a high body mass index. He cautioned long ago against applying BMI to athletes.

But, pro football players are too fat, as Dr. Hart documents. A few years ago, the LA Rams trained at UCI and I often watched their practice and weight lifting (they lifted outside in a tented compound). Only the running and defensive backs looked to be muscular and lean. All the rest, particularly, the offensive line men were fat.

Don't keep track of your BMI. Keep track of your body composition; muscular and lean beats anything else. True in endurance athletes and high performance sports. But, this is even more important as you get older. There the risks are from too much body fat and too little lean muscle tissue. Aging individuals tend to lose muscle mass and gain fat. When their BMI rises, then their body composition must be changing in a highly unfavorable way. Sacropenia, too little muscle mass, is a risk for older individuals. That is why the BMI stats show this perplexing (to those who are ill-informed) pattern of decreasing mortality risk with higher BMI among the aged. These individuals have higher lean body mass and less sarcopenia.

If you use the wrong measure, you do get paradoxical results. Stay lean, but keep your lean body mass.

· Endurance Training: Death, Injury, and Risk ~ · Sports

Comments

Posted by: Flower Online [TypeKey Profile Page] at September 27, 2006 8:40 AM

Professor,
Don't get me wrong I do think most of these high paid athletes are fat but, I do not totally agree with BMI calculation formula.
As you may know that Bodybuilder and Power Weightlifter all show high fat to Muscle ratio regadless of other means of measurement disagreeing with BMI calculations. Take for instance Clearance Bass, where do you think the BMI calculation will put him at?

Sattar

Posted by: Sattar [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 22, 2005 9:15 PM

ART,

I would love to buy your book Chapter but I refuse to sign with Pay Pal and have my card on their file. A friend of mine had a bad experience.

If there is an other way I would more then gladly purchase the book chapter.

Sattar

Posted by: Sattar [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 22, 2005 9:05 PM

Hello Art,

I have been reading your site daily for about 4.5 months and I believe it has been a great contribution to my 40lb loss of weight over the same period. I have gone from ~240lbs down to 198lbs and my strength and speed has gone up significantly so hopefully most of that weight has been fat loss. I have followed the paleo eating style and gone from basically sedentary for 10 years (I'm 29) to short intense weight training 1-2 times/wk, along with regular mountain biking (which I find to be wonderfully varied in intensity throughout a given ride) and walking. I wanted to ask what your practical recommendation was for tracking body composition? I have done the online calculators and recently purchased a Tanita scale with bodyfat%. Both put me near 15% but my progress seems to be steady so I am continuing to lean down. Thanks for your insight.

Posted by: Jordan [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 22, 2005 4:48 PM

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