Evidence Strong
Weight class and body composition in Olympic weightlifters - with Monica Nelson
why is it that even Olympic weightlisters who gone up a weight class and gotten stronger because of it? Why is it that they're still scared of what if I outgrow this weight class? What if I have to go up in body weight? Do I actually think I would get stronger if I put on body weight? And the answer is no. I'd have weightlifters who said, you know, I put on a kilo of body weight and I PR'd my back squat. Do I think I would get stronger if I went up a weight class? Absolutely not. And it's like, wait, what? All right, Monica, welcome to evidence strong. I'm super excited to have you. Yeah, I'm super excited to be here. So if you could introduce yourself and what you do in your research then, so my name is Monica Nelson. I am an Olympic weightlifter. I've been involved with Olympic weightlifting as an athlete. I've got a couple coaching certifications. I've worked in a couple of different roles relating to it for about eight years total now. It's the kind of length of my involvement thus far with Olympic weightlifting. I'm currently in between my masters and my PhD. I got my undergrad degree in sociology, master's degree in kinesiology from the University of Maryland. Finished that up last year and right now I'm kind of in a awkward gap year between my masters and PhD, which will be at the University of Waikato where I'll be studying in the health and human performance department under my PhD advisor, Dr. Holley Thorpe. Now in terms of what I research, I think I mentioned I've got my undergrad degree in sociology. And so basically what I do is I study kind of the social and cultural dynamics of strength sports. I'm particularly interested in gender and strength, which is, you know, particularly fun because the way we talk about physical strength and also strong bodies is extremely gendered. And while some of the barriers have kind of come down between women and strength sports, there are still some ways that those play out. And so that's what my research focuses on. The study we're going to talk about today talks about both male and female Olympic weightlifters. And so we'll talk about the gendered nuances there. But for the most part in future research, looking at studying female Olympic weightlifters and ideas about what women's bodies are capable of and how that comes through in Olympic weightlifting. So very exciting. So the paper we will be talking about today is down with the thickness male Olympic weightlifters negotiations of weight loss strength and body composition. So to start that, I think it would be useful to discuss what is social theory? Yeah, and that is an excellent question. So a social theory is effectively a lens of trying to look at the world and understand what is going on effectively. How do we relate to each other? What is the way that our society is structured? Why is it structured that way? Most important part of social theory is it looks at how do people end up in positions of power and other people ended up being marginalized? How do people get pushed to the sidelines? And so there are a large number of different social theories and they focus on different things. Looking through social theory, you might look at the world's through a lens that focuses on like, okay, how is gender playing out here? Or you might look at how is capital money playing out here? You might look at how race plays out. Each social theory comes with a different perspective. It's like it gives you a different lens to look at the world's all kind of overlap, but one at a time you're looking at, okay, what am I interested in pulling a park here? And the goal of social theory is always to make those power relations evidence, focusing on why is this group ending up on the sidelines here? And how do we make this better? Awesome. So if you could now bring it. So this is the lens we're looking at. How it would relate in the context of weightlifting? Yeah. So the way it relates to weightlifting, I'll just kind of talk really quick about the lens that I take for this male weightlifter article. And I came at it from what's called a post-structural list, theoretical framework. And that's based on the idea that culture and the way we think about what ways of being and doing things are acceptable is very much done through the lens of language. So basically what do we think is sayable and doable within Olympic weightlifting within strength sports? And so the example I tend to give as to the power of language and its relationships to like what do we think is okay and not okay is to try to find a word that describes unlimited female or feminine muscularity that is not sexualized or associated with masculinity. And I actually put that question up on my Instagram last summer and I got you look like a man that wonderful Instagram account who used it. And I didn't get a single word that actually fit that. There is no existing word in the English language that describes unlimited female muscularity in a way that isn't dragged down for either its sexualized nature or its masculinity. And so immediately there are carriers as a female strength athlete. How do you describe yourself? Do you fall into that? It's like, well, I guess I guess I'm masculine. Okay, like I'll run with that. Or do you fall into the like, I guess I'll I'm okay with the sexual component of it. Maybe that makes me feel powerful and you just go with it that way. But there's no way to not be either of those things. And so the interest here with post structuralism is to go like, okay, so what are the words we use? What is the language we use in the case of Olympic weightlifting and the study I did? What are the words and language we use to describe what bodies are functioning in Olympic weightlifting? And from then in what ways are those drawn from ideas maybe about what the ideal male body looks like? In what ways are those drawn from more societal ideas about the functionality of body fat, you know, and muscle mass, for example. And then to what extent is it drawn from Olympic weightlifting itself with the really big focus on like, okay, I have to be as strong as I possibly can. What are the ways that I'm going to be able to do that and how does body composition relate? So post structuralism as a theoretical framework is all about trying to parse out like, what do we think is okay to look like and to be and to do just trying to really pull apart the way that people talk about their bodies and the way they translate that into the things they actually do. That's a really roundabout answer trying to get at what does social theory tell us about Olympic weightlifting? I've just focused in on one lens. You can also look at it from race, from gender, so on and so forth. Let me just reiterate and I will check whether I understand correctly. So social theory is a lens to look at, okay, we have females and layers in weightlifting and how that gender influences how they function or what they think about themselves in the sport. And now the concept you specifically look at is within this, what is okay, what is not okay, that I'm getting it right? Exactly, exactly. So it's all about these systems of ideas by which people try to make sense of, in the case of Olympic weightlifting, and weight classes, how bodies work, what sets of knowledge are people trying on here? And there are ones that just appear as common sense knowledge in Olympic weightlifting. Like, oh, you know, if I look at a super heavyweight Olympic weight lifter, I see there's so much stronger than I'll ever be or that I could possibly be at my current weight class. So, okay, so gaining weight in some way will make me stronger. But at the same time, you kind of got these ideas about which are which are fair, you know, okay, if I can just make it down a weight class, but maintain all the strength I have now, I'll be more competitive. And maybe I can still keep on getting stronger while I'm at that lower weight class. And those are common sense cultural ideas that are very specific to Olympic weightlifting. And at the same time, you've got a female Olympic weight lifter, and she's trying to have these ideas about like, okay, so what do I want to do with my body? What weight class am I going to choose? What strategy am I going to take to get stronger over time? At the same time, she might also be thinking, it's like, oh, okay, so I don't fully subscribe to the female body ideal. I don't want to be barbed, you know, I want to have muscle muscles important to me. But at the same time, you know, I had one interviewing with if I go up to the next weight class, if I gain weight, I'm gonna get cat called, my butt's gonna get bigger. I am gonna get cat called more than I already am. And so it's like, it's kind of these thoughts about like, what does a female body look like? And how do I navigate that in while also getting at the performance aspect of Olympic weightlifting that pulls people back and forth and frames the way that they work with their bodies? And so this lens, this particular social theorem looking at is really all about parsing out. Where are people getting their ideas? There's the culture of Olympic weightlifting, there's culture of masculinity, femininity, there's a culture of health and fear body fat. So where are people drawing from? And it sounds like it's complicated. And yeah. So could you tell us how long did it take you to run the study? I mean, in terms of running the study, it's, you know, I did 16 total interviews for the study and if you talk to any quantitative scientists, you're just going, oh, yeah, end of 16 okey-dokey, that doesn't tell us anything. But I was working with a couple of hundred pages of transcribed interviews between those 16 Olympic weight lifters. Each interview lasts between about 40 minutes and I think the longest was about 80 or 90, just talking back and forth out, you know, how the Olympic weight lifter understands weight classes and body composition. And then I think I've analyzed that data kind of gone through and tried to understand it, thematize it. I've done that three times, three or four times at this point. And each one of those probably took at least a dozen hours, if not more. I actually definitely want to take me like two hours to read through each interview, repeat like three or four times. So it ends up taking a pretty sizable chunk of time to try and analyze the data and then turning it into, you know, something written, something publishable is tens of hours more. So it ends up taking a while. I think it's important to understand that it's, it is a process and it takes time and it takes repetition from a researcher who tries to figure out what is going on. Yeah. And the scariest part is that with qualitative research, the point is to get as close to your participants understanding as you possibly can. And so the big fear is misrepresenting their experiences. You know, something I was really scared of doing was publishing something where it seemed like I was kind of condemning weight lifters for their choices, especially when they chose to cut weight for a really long time. And that's something that I personally just go like, yeah, I've been down that road. That's not a good idea. But it's kind of like trying to hold back that gut reaction of like, you're doing something disordered. When it's like, it's something that makes sense for what they want to do and try not to like interpret every action they've taken as disordered somehow when they don't see that way. That's the really scary hard heart about publishing this kind of research. Huge responsibility. Yeah. Yeah. And there are some ways to do it better. And we do something called member checking where we'll send off the article to anybody whose data is in it and be like, hey, what do you think of these interpretations to these seem right to you? And accepting that if the participant says, no, you have to change it. Like, you can't keep it as is because the participant says, no, that's not what I was doing. And you have to start over and that's the point of qualitative research. And so it's, you know, another thing that I really do appreciate, qualitative research, like I love talking to people. Being an Olympic weight lifter myself, it does help to bridge that gap. It's like, we have like a common language, like we have a baseline understanding. Here's how we think things work. But at the same time, it's like needing to be aware that the way that I think about things isn't how everybody thinks about things and trying to be aware of that. I think it's not only knowledge, the lived experiences you had as a weightlifter. Which one? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No, it's, it got to a point where actually, especially when I was interviewing male Olympic weightlifters, where it's like, you know, I talked to them for and run through my interview questions, get their history of their choices of weight class and things like that. And then talk through the rationale of the study covariant where it's like, hey, the reason why I was really interested in this topic in particular is because my weight class choices, like over the course of a couple of years, it left me making really bad decisions based around like aesthetics and based around like, you know, if I just keep on cutting weight, then I'll be more competitive and I ended up extremely broken and also having extremely disordered eating. And then it's like, once I kind of told my story, weightlisters with male weightlisters, especially would start totally changing or at least adding on to the way they think about weight classes, be like, oh, yeah, you know, I've kind of felt like that as well. Like, I've had the temptation to cut weight when I shouldn't or like, yeah, there's a certain component of aesthetics to it that I really wasn't talking about before. As someone who's been there, done that, I've experienced all these things. I know the negotiation of body composition and strength is super hard to come to a personal conclusion on and you're always negotiating it. But having that shared experience, that shared language does make a world difference. I'm sorry to hear that blend like that with your own stuff. Thank you for sharing. Oh, sure. Absolutely. No, I'm always happy to share my own process for getting where I am. And it's like, I'm not totally free of bad body image, so on and so forth. But it's the thing that I was kind of come back to, especially with this study is like, how do I keep people from making the same mistakes I did? How do I keep people from being strength plateaued for years, getting super injured? Where is the system going well? And how do we fix it? How do we make it better for people? So I think you are saying two very important things. One is, there is a system, so there is something there exists and influences how, wait, if there's make these decisions. And the second thing is, there is hope and the more we can navigate it and hopefully change it for the better. Yeah, agreed. Absolutely. Very exciting. I think so too. I wish that I wasn't on the early side of talking about how Olympic weightlifters think about their bodies, make choices about their body composition, and sometimes end up in very disordered territory. It's 2022. And when I was doing background research, I'm like, has anybody ever done this before? You talk to Olympic weightlifters about things like body image and body composition. There are no quantitative studies on the number of Olympic weightlifters who have eating disorders, disordered eating, so on and so forth. It just doesn't exist. So I wish I wasn't on the early end of that. But no, I hope you can do to make it better where we are. I will not let you think like that. You desperately need research and you are doing it like you can't do more. You are just one person. So thank you. Thank you for your work. Really? Yeah. I'm happy to share my knowledge in whatever way I can and also to be corrected. If someone thinks I've got it wrong, then I want to hear it. I want to hear how it needs to be expanded. All the places that I didn't look so much more to be looked at. I didn't even address race in my studies. It's like, but I know that people's experiences are different and that research needs to be done. And hopefully, reading my research, somebody will go and say like, she didn't really look at race here. I'm going to go out and do that. That's all I could possibly hope for. Maybe this kicks off something bigger. It will. It will definitely just have to wait for it if it's not happening already. So I know exactly exactly. Please let me know, everyone. So before we get into what you have found in your study, I think we have to go back and could you tell us before you started giving your study, what was already published in the literature? So we have the view of the science you had when you were studying your study. So the view of the science I had when I started was actually just a general exposure to one, body image, body image in sports, athletic body ideals, so on and so forth, as well as trying to look at actually how female athletes specifically think about their bodies and the choices that they make. And I had a decent bit of exposure to, you know, like, oh, you know, women who strength train weightlifting or weight training, at least is super empowering. You know, it lets you be muscular. And like 90% of those studies are body building and female body building is a problem for all kinds of reasons. And the number one issue in my, you know, the literature I was looking through is like, none of these women are really coming at it with the interest in being strong. And so it's like, this isn't really fitting what I'm looking for. And so I actually initially designed the studies being like, I won't even interview female Olympic weight lifters about their choice of weight class. I made it through those first eight interviews and I went, okay, but somebody also has to talk to the male Olympic weight lifters. I found some interesting things with gender going on here. Like, I need to talk to men as well. Like, where are the differences? Where are the similarities? I know that instances of male Olympic weight lifters more cutting too much weight is absolutely still a thing. So this needs to be done. And while there's literature around like female athlete to strength train or women who strength train in general, looking at that in comparison to female body ideals, the stuff on men who weight trains all very much, oh, you know, a bigger rexia men who always want to get bigger and bigger and bigger and more muscular that it's that same, like, everything in the literature comes back to body building. Always. There's there's almost nothing about strength athletes. And so that's that's really where I start. Seriously, does nobody talk about strength athletes in kind of the more socio cultural body image aesthetic body ideals kind of literature. And once I kind of started from there, I was starting to look into the literature about low energy availability, more of the physiological side of things. But it really does start from really does nobody talk about strength athletes? I know from personal experience that there's some weird stuff going on here. Why does nobody talk about it? And is it happening as much as I think it is? Can I study this? Start it out. Okay. So you decided, okay, someone you have to research it and how it went from there. Once I got review board, you know, ethical approval to the study was I posted on my own social media, an advertisement for the study, you know, hey, I want to talk to Olympic weight lifters about their weight class, feel like an interview about 45 to 60 minutes long and looking for anyone who's interested who has been competing in Olympic weightlifting for at least three years. And I wanted that because people who've been in the sport for enough time have competed enough, have had a chance to work through. Okay, like, how do I work the body composition weight class strategy? I only wanted people who were 18 years or older. And you know, that's primarily because the fear of coming across somebody who has a severe eating disorder and they're like 16 years old and they're in Olympic weightlifting and also getting parental permission gets to be an issue below 18. And I wanted people who had competed in at least three competitions of any level of difficulty. So again, that's like, you need to be thinking about the weight class strategy. After I posted it to my own social media, I got a decent number of hits from people who were connected to me. I had a one coach in particular to share it out and I got a couple of interviews that way. I also had a feminist strength scored Olympic weightlifting account, share that and I got a couple more interviews for women from there. But the thing that I was really missing from my data was I wasn't really getting elite Olympic weightlifters who I find as anyone who's competed at an international competition at the senior athlete level. And so I didn't have any of that. So I started thinking, who do I know? Who was elite? Who's had a weight class change over the last like couple of years? And so I just started reaching out to Olympic weightlifters at the elite level saying, Hey, you know, will you talk to me about how you've chosen your weight classes over your athletic career? And it's like, for the most part, basically about 90% of the people I reached out to were like, Yeah, sure, I'll talk to you about it. And people were really excited to share their journeys, their athletic journeys, talking through like, here's why I started, you know, and then over the course of my lifting career, like this happened, this happened, I ended up here or like, I went down and things got better. I went up and things got better. I interviewed eight male and eight female Olympic weightlifters from across the weight class spectrum. So I really tried to recruit everyone from the lightest weight classes all the way up through super heavyweight. And I had four female amateur Olympic weightlifters and four elite and then five amateur male Olympic weight amateur and elite. So it's like, it shook out pretty evenly, more or less on purpose. So those are the those are the people I ended up talking to knows everyone from I've only competed in local competitions to really top tier looking at trying to compete at the Olympics. So these are all us. Yes, important clarification. Yes, these are all American Olympic weightlifters. I really wanted to hone in on, okay, so different cultures, different countries are going to have different understandings of how the body works and narratives about like what the ideal body looks like. And that is something that can and should absolutely be broken down by race. I didn't do that super well. It is very important to note that in my research, I primarily talked to white Olympic American Olympic weight lift. One woman was Latina. I had a couple of black Olympic weightlifters, but it was very much white. And that's something that should be thought about in relation to the conclusions that I drew. Okay, fair enough. You did your studies done. And now the other investigations will have to come from either you later or from someone else. But yeah, exactly. Definitely important to to flag what exactly is going on. Is it? Absolutely. We're going to exciting part. So you did all the work of analyzing these data. Your weight lift is offered graciously. And what have you found? Let's start with what they thought about their bodies. Yeah, exactly. So you know, the main thing that was really constant across both male and female Olympic weightlifters is that the number one thing they thought about when choosing their weight class has been trying to really strategize why do I want to look one way versus another? The number one was how do I get more competitive in Olympic weightlifting? And so people who use these two different ideas, like I end up calling this system of calculations of like, if I go up and bodyweight, I might get stronger. But if I go down and bodyweight, it's like, okay, so I'm going to have to keep on my strength. And maybe I'll be more competitive. And okay, so where are the really competitive people? How much are they lifting? How much am I lifting? What are the qualification totals? There's like this like nice little balancing act of five, 10 different factors that Olympic weightlifting is constantly weighing against each other. In my research, I called the performance algorithm. I hadn't seen a term for anything like that. So Olympic weightlifters use the performance algorithm to primarily to choose their weight class. It was less aesthetics. It was less other ideas about how bodies work than it was, you know, Olympic weight lifting. How do I get more competitive in Olympic weightlifting? And how do I use my bodyweight, my weight class to do that? So that was the number one way. And what was really interesting about this across both male and female Olympic weightlifters is that there was a little bit of a contradiction in how Olympic weightlifters talked about body composition and strength. And this is the article that I'm working on getting published when it was hopefully getting close. So what this article is really about is the one hand Olympic weightlifters would use the bodies of other elite athletes to kind of go like, okay, so here's what successful Olympic weightlifting bodies look like. And the examples were almost without exception. You got Lasha Tala-Cadze on the super heavyweight mass mood mass kind of side where it's like the heavier you are, the more weight you can look. Okay, so not being super lean is in some way attached to being strong and getting stronger. On the other hand, Lu Zhaozhoon. And so those were like, those were like the two different, you know, Olympic weightlifting, like how we think body composition relates to strength games. So you got Lu Zhaozhoon, super lean, very strong sets world records. Other hand, we got Lasha Tala-Cadze, definitely not lean, gets bigger every year, sets world records every year. And so weightlifters pulled this kind of oppositional, like, okay, my gain weight, I think it's stronger. If I lose weight, I can get stronger. There's kind of like this balancing act going on. I'm not even going to bring steroids into it because you can make an argument for steroids either side of the body composition spectrum that you're on. And so what ended up happening is that weightlifters had like these body ideals, these like examples of here's what maximal strength looks like on both sides. But what they ended up doing was that when they talked about the kind of bodies that were successful in Olympic weightlifting in general, citing Lasha Tala-Cadze until the end of time, when it came down to actually choosing their own weight classes, it was never the right time for them to gain weight, never, never, never. It was always a great idea for their teammates, for other athletes to go up a weight class, but it was never the right time for them to go up a weight class. What ended up happening a lot of times was these Olympic weightlifters would refuse and refuse and refuse to go up a weight class until something really bad happened. And so that looked like getting injured, that looked like a strength plateau that lasted for years, that looked like bombing out at really high level important competitions, that looked like failing to make weight by this much after just an absolutely devastating weight cut. But a lot of these things weren't just one offs. You know, again, it's like, we have a strength plateau that's going on for years. How long can you just say it's your technique? I found this stuff in both elite and amateur Olympic weightlifters. This wasn't just like, okay, elite Olympic weightlifters have to do this because they have to be competitive. And it wasn't just, oh, amateur Olympic weightlifters are doing this because they don't know how this works or they're too determined to cut weight so they can qualify for the American Open or for nationals just one time. This was happening to everybody all across the gender and weight class. And so the thing that really came home through roost was really important about what I found was like, so why is it never never okay for Olympic weightlifters to gain weight? Why is it only okay for anyone else? Why is it that even Olympic weightlifters who've gone up a weight class and gotten stronger because of it? Why is it that they're still scared of what if I outgrow this weight class? What if I have to go open body weight? Do I actually think I would get stronger if I put on body weight? And the answer is no. I'd have weightlifters who said, you know, I put on a kilo of body weight and I PR'd my back squat. Do I think I would get stronger if I went up a weight class? Absolutely not. And it's like, wait, what? So there's disconnect that I see in, you know, among the American Olympic weightlifters that I interviewed where body fat is in theory associated with higher strength, with higher athletic performance. But in reality, they don't seem to think that it is. So there's a contradiction going on here. So what I'm hearing is that the athletes in terms of the body image, they have these two, two views using because they are contradicting views of how the weightlifter, the model weightlifter should look like. Then they try to go with their own body more into that being leaner rather than heavier. And then so could you tell us how the athletes in your study decide weight costs to compete in? Yeah, it's like usually the process of them choosing their weight class, called the same trajectory, which is that vast majority athletes, you know, they start with a coach who's like, it doesn't matter what your weight classes don't cut weight. You're not going to cut weight for at least a couple of competitions, just compete wherever you are, which was great. You know, it starts people off on a good track, whether or not just using, you know, weight classes is like weight loss goals where people come in, they're like, you know, what? I've always wanted to weigh, you know, X amount of weight that's close to this weight class. Guess I'll just use the weight classes like an ideal body weight, how most people kind of choose a, it's not really that kind of motivating factor. But after a few competitions, people kind of gotten settled into the sort, they start thinking about really competing. They want to make it to a national level competition. They want to make it to American Open Finals. They want to make it to nationals. And so they start thinking strategically. What are my numbers? What are the qualifying totals? And you know, if say they're above average, they're already both the qualifying totals they're looking at, maybe trying to get into that A session, how strong are the other people in my weight class? And so people would, you know, kind of start making decisions around around that, you know, about the time that they started getting competitive and the higher level of competition, the more focused it was around, how do I make it on to podium? How do I, how do I win goals? And so it's like, it was kind of parallel processes for the amateur and the elite Olympic weight letters, where it's just, how do I get more competitive? How do I make my way up in the sport? Where things started getting dicey was a couple of years in, generally, where they'd start, I was like, I don't want to say getting desperate, but you start thinking about like, I can never leave this weight class. You kind of get not necessarily attached to it. And that like, oh, for me, I used to be a 58. And then, you know, and then I was a 59. And, you know, trying to make that like personal transition up to like, I'm a 64. And I was like, it took a little bit of like personal convincing, but that's not really what the weight listeners in this study were doing. It was more along the lines of just constantly thinking about, oh, no, if I go up in weights, I'm going to stop being as competitive, because I'm going to have to get so much stronger to kind of equal these other people who are in that next higher weight class who are already lifting so much more weight than me. And so looking at that next higher weight class was scary. You know, the weight class they're in was okay. The next lower weight class was like, Oh, I can lift those numbers. Look how close I am to the podium. If I can just cut all that weight and then manage not to lose any strength. And so that's, that's generally how people were doing it. It was always based on competitiveness was the number one thing. How do I get more head of aesthetics work there? And they did make an impact. And ideas about like the non functionality of body fat that, you know, weren't necessarily true, you know, even based on their role models, I was also there and pulling people in different directions. That number one thing was, you know, just always competitiveness and that place where I can never go up in body weight, because look how much stronger I would have to be. And I don't trust that I can get stronger if I gained weight. That was kind of like the dominant thing that people were thinking about where things got a little bit funky was that no matter how much weight they were going to have to lose to cut down to a lower weight class, Olympic weight lifters generally were scared that they wouldn't get any stronger if they gained weight, but they also didn't think they were going to get weaker if they lost weight. Oh, so their hierarchy of values was very skewed. It's like, I could never possibly get any stronger than I am right now if I gained weight. But also, even if I lose 20 pounds and cut down to a lower weight class, I'm going to be just as strong as I am right now. They didn't see cutting weight as having physiological impacts. Just because you choose to cut weight, I know I come at this from a very like cutting weights, like not functional, guys, it's like it can be functional, like it can be functional for a large number of people. So many Olympic weight lifters do cut weight to make it down to their weight class and really don't suffer any more effects from it. My concern was the tendency for weight lifters to totally overlook bad mental health as a result of cutting aches and pains that just wouldn't go away as a result of cutting, always feeling tired, always being hungry. It's like weight lifters were beyond willing to overlook all the bad physiological and psychological things that were happening because they never stopped either maintaining that weight class, you know, doing that last bit of cutting or, you know, we're just constantly in a state of losing weight. The physiological symptoms that they would get from cutting weight were just glossed over. But when it came to gaining weight, they'd gain a pound of kilo. And they'd be like, my pulps feel slow. I don't think I'm getting stronger. It's been like two months since I started this, you know, mass increase plan. And I don't think it's working, so I need to go back. You know, so it's like, it was just this constant willingness to overlook bad stuff that happened when they were cutting weight and really amplifying the bads, you know, the bad stuff that happened when they gained weight. Is it not what we expect from the especially elite athletes, though? Do we know that I could then do anything it takes for the sport? Oh, yeah, absolutely. But the problem ends up being that the things get so bad that they want out of the sport, or they end up hurt, or they end up, you know, they're no longer getting stronger, they're no longer getting competitive. It's like, I feel like there needs to be a different way of looking at the life cycle of an athlete in the sport where some amount of weight gain, almost regardless of what level you're at, whether it's recreational amateur or it's elite, where it's like coaches and athletes didn't really have an escape plan, you know, from their weight classes, it was like be forced into them or nothing. It's like there needs to be a point where coaches and athletes sit down and they say, be honest, how does your body feel doing these cuts, maintaining this body weight for so long? And is this a point where we need to think, okay, here are the competitions coming up. Here's our career long goal. Are we going to need to gain weight? Should we gain weight? Should we take that chance to get as strong as we possibly can to really take a couple of years, fill out that weight class, get as strong as we possibly can, show up at that next competition a couple of years down the line and be a stronger for it and not have to cut weight, you know, and not feel like your body's just screaming at you all the time. There's no exit strategy for anyone. There was never a point where athletes and coaches were like, what if this weight class is starting to get to the point where it's not working? That's an important conversation. It's good that you're researching it because it would be useful to know. So we hardly tell anything about how exactly they are managing their weight. A little bit. So for the most part in my conversations with lifters about wanting to stay in a weight class that they had to either cut a little bit or a good bit of weight down to, they would always talk about their, you know, they're cutting weight procedures and it's, you know, things like saunas, carbohydrate restriction, water loading and things like that. When it came to, and weight lifters would do almost anything. It's like, you know, get, you know, stand in a handstand for a minute and then, you know, get on the, get on the scale, cut off all your hair, sauna like crazy. It's like, oh boy, when it came time to gain weight, weight lifters had really interesting ways to make sure they were doing it right. And so that usually looked like relying on ideas about like, okay, I have to clean bulk. I have to gain weight in a way that maximizes muscle mass as much as possible. And one person was like, yeah, I was just housing protein like 200, 300 grams of protein every day, which is interesting because when you look at the most recent literature about protein intake and strength gain, after about, what is it, one gram per pound of body weight, it's like the effect that protein has just kind of, at a certain point, you just need it, eat it a caloric surplus. And some amount of that weight gain is going to be body fat. But people felt like they had to come to a point where they were comfortable with the fact that they were gaining weight. And they often did that through diet or by doing more bodybuilding kind of accessories so they could still be able to see muscle mass or they'd have to kind of talk them through themselves through gaining weight every day, they're like, look, okay, I've only gained like one pound per like, I don't know, foot of height that I am. So, you know, if I'm six feet tall, I gained six pounds. That's not that much weight, you know, by my height, it's fine. And also my squats gotten stronger. Like, look at this PR I hit. Okay, it's working. Whereas on the other end, if people started unexpectedly gaining weight, it's like the immediate recourse is like, oh, I got to eat less. I'm not going to tell my coach how I'm eating. I'm also going to start doing like cardio to kind of like pull my body weight down. And again, not going to tell my coach like, I know how to lose weight. It's by, you know, doing this, this, this, but my coach doesn't need to know about it. And that was, that was striking was that usually the coaches of the athletes in the study like, yeah, go up and body weight if you need to, like if we need to go up a weight class, we'll go up a weight class, but they wouldn't ever talk about it. Or about the fact that as weight lifters kind of progressed to their careers, they might need to gain weight to do so. And so these coaches be like, yeah, like, don't cut weight unless you're, you know, need to qualify for this big competition. And let's just say like, okay. And then they proceed to like try to maintain or lose body weight forever, but they wouldn't actually tell their coaches about it. So I'm hearing that they are two words. One is the relationship between athlete and the coach and how they decide and navigate weight classes. And then there is another. So this is one thing. And it may go in the direction we should gain some weight when the athletes should gain some weight, but the athlete has different ideas and sometimes is willing to sacrifice the decisions and the relationship with the coach to some degree, because they do one, but the athlete decides actively going in the opposite direction. Exactly. Yeah. So athletes would often, I mean, usually when weight lifters talk about how they chose a weight class, they'd always like frame it as like, we decided as in like they and their coach had had some kind of a conversation. They decided that this was the best weight class for them in a couple of instances. Weightless was kind of more overtly be like, Oh, yeah, I'm going to change a weight class. I'm going to go down and bodyweight. And they wouldn't tell their coach and it was, it was like, um, it was like a blow to the relationship. Like coaches was like, why would you talk to me about this? This changes everything. This massively impacts your performance. Why wouldn't you tell me? And so there's kind of like that, there was the like overt version where weightless was like, I'm going to actually go down and weight class and not tell my coach. That was a lot more rare. What happened more regularly was that athletes would get in their head, I have to stay in this weight class, or I have to, yeah, by staying in this weight class, I'm, you know, continually cutting weight to it. And so if their bodies are doing something that involve them gaining weight, it's not like they were talking to their coaches about it. They would just say, Oh, I know how to lose weight. Okay. This is what I'm going to do to like make sure I stay in this weight class forever. But their coach never had any idea that it was going on. The athlete just either didn't think it was important, didn't think it was unmanageable and thought they knew how to handle it. And so they just would all on their own. Oh, interesting. So I know. Did you notice any differences between female and male athletes in them? So how they decided and how they manage their weight class? Yes. Yes. So I feel like the the common way of thinking about how male and female and big weightless just use their weight class is like, Oh, women are never willing to go up and body weight. Actually, what ended up happening is that women would be more willing to go up a weight class than men would. And the reason is that I kind of came back to is that women had this approach to their bodies where they're like, I cannot fully predict what my body is going to do on a month to month basis. Sometimes my period hits and I bloat like crazy and there is no possible way I could make it down to my weight class. So I just have to go up like I cannot fight this. They would kind of be they were just a little bit more attuned to those bodily signals of this weight class is not going to work than men were. The men on the other side just had this perception that they could make their bodies do whatever they wanted them to do. And for a large number of instances, they were right. So men tended to have this perspective of I can make my body do whatever I want it to do, including cutting weight forever. I can stay in this weight class as long as I want. I can only gain muscle mass and never body fat if I do it right. And so they would just resist, resist, resist going up weight classes until things got bad. The women in the study tended to be slightly, not amazingly, but slightly more attuned to that stuff. And more willing to be like, my period hits the wrong time I'm screwed. Like I cannot cut what five kilos, you know, the two kilos I have planned plus another two or three from bloat. If my period hits the wrong time, I just have to go up a weight class. Okay, so all very interesting things. Before we go into what to do with all this information, I wanted to talk a little bit about that and how it relates to performance and how athletes male and female think about how it relates to performance. Yep, absolutely. Yeah, so this is, this is really the big thing that I kind of keep coming back to in this, which is how do Olympic weightlatures actually think body composition relates to maximal strength. And like we talked about earlier, there's that lash out telecos they lose your June kind of model where it's like body fat, they think has some maybe relationship to strength gain, but they really prefer the model. Yeah, they prefer to look like lose out June at the end of the day. And he's a good example of, you know, you can be lean and super strong. So physiologically speaking, it's like, and something that I really do hope to do in the future is to be able to kind of talk between physiology and culture, like how do ideas about how the body works like do they actually work with, you know, what we know about exercise physiology and the physiology of strength. So there are two ways in general that you get stronger. One is through hypertrophy. So increase size of muscle fibers. And the way you go about increasing the size of your muscle fibers, you know, really increasing your baseline level of strength, you got more contraction, more muscle contraction that's possible. But when you really go about that, and you know, increasing the size of your muscle fibers, assuming you're not on steroids, is to eat at a caloric surplus, you're going to need to gain some weight if you're going to actually increase the size of your muscle fibers. And according to the most recent research, there's no perfect way to do that in a way that does not involve some gain of body fat. You cannot control it's like, it's like the same thing like spot tuning or whatever is like just because you do a million crunches, you're not going to have abs. It's the same thing with my pertrophy, it doesn't matter how much protein you eat, it's never a hundred percent going to be muscle mass. And things that things get a little different across the body composition spectrum and maybe, you know, slightly different for people who are starting out on their strength training journey with higher body fat percentage, or maybe they lose some body fat while at the same time gaining muscle mass. And it's the same thing with newbies where it's like you may gain muscle mass a little more quickly when you're getting started out. The other way that you gain strength is through neuromuscular control, improving the brain body connection, connection between impulses, signals that you're sending from your brain to the muscles, making them contract more strongly in particular patterns better more quickly. And you can do that regardless of what you're doing with your nutrition, you can get better at neuromuscular control when you're cutting weight, maintaining weight, or gain weight. And so we've got this physiologically speaking, we've got a system where both cutting weight, in theory, you can get stronger and gaining weight, you can get stronger. The problem is that at a certain point, you're gonna level off your neuromuscular control. You'll never, you know, 100% max out, but it's like, it's diminishing returns. It's like improving your technique. You can see a big difference from when you just start out about the time you really start getting competitive, maybe a few years in, massive changes. If you've been working hard at it, you've maybe got faster your techniques a lot better. And again, you can continue improving that forever. But if you never increase your baseline strength, it's like, again, you're just, you're just fighting for kilos at best over a period of years. And so, basically what I, what I found in terms of how Olympic weightlifters think about body fat was they didn't quite have that perspective of if I want to get stronger, I am going to have to gain mass. When I gain mass, not all of that is going to be lean muscle mass. And so what tended to happen was weightlifters would start, maybe they finally accept like, okay, I need to go up a weight class, or at least I can't cut weight to that lower weight class anymore. They'd start gaining weight, they'd gain body fat, and they think, oh, no, I messed it up. I shouldn't be gaining any body fat. I should be able to do this in a way, right? Only gain lean muscle mass. And then they would stop, and then they'd pull it back. And then they'd end up being like, well, you know, I guess I'll fill out this weight class eventually, or maybe I should just go back to cutting weight. And so, you know, in the male weight lifter article, I also talk, I talk about kind of the multiple meanings that male weight lifters assigned to body fat. And you know, they thought of body fat as ugly, you know, and that was kind of like the aesthetic component of it, right? It's like, they'd rather look like lose out on them lash at all, I'd say, in general. But that was kind of like, it was like a small component of their thoughts about body fat. It's like, okay, so body fat, and not my aesthetic choice. But the thing that they really kept on coming back to was that they had all these beliefs about how body fat was non-functional, or was unhealthy. And for weight lifters who are actively training and competing, you know, they're training for hours a day, you know, maybe up to like, you know, six days a week, multiple sessions, gaining a little bit of body fat is not going to actually make an impact on your health. But it was kind of a buzzword. I can't gain body fat because people are going to think I'm unhealthy. I'm going to feel unhealthy. I'm going to feel like I'm gaining non-functional mass. So the male weight lifters that I talked to kind of assigned all these meanings to body fat. And they also didn't really seem to have, it's like, you know, trying to speak for other people's like knowledge of physiology, you know, I don't know if it's the best argument to be made. But it's like, they didn't seem to think that if they, you know, needed to gain muscle, they'd have to gain some body fat on the way. So there's, there's just this very strong perception that body fat is a hundred percent non-functional and big weight lifting regardless of, you know, your role models. And so it ends up with people kind of either pulling back from weight gain if they ever end up in the position of needing to, or really like fighting it. Okay, so we learned a lot. If you could bring it together to have some advice for athletes and advice for coaches, the things either they should be aware of, or they should pay a pension, or even do, like maybe you have something. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so my first recommendation is that, first of all, you know, there's never going to be one singular ideal of what the perfect, most successful Olympic weightlifting body looks like. So trying to say like, oh, everyone should gain weight, or oh, everyone should lose weight is never going to work. But what can work is athletes learning what the symptoms are of things like low energy availability and relative energy deficiency in sport. And those are two very quickly growing fields of academic research about athletes who are chronically under eating and over training. And the things that start happening physiologically and psychologically when they do that. And so that, can you point out this, could you point out a few of these factors people should or symptoms? Oh, yeah, absolutely. So it's things like dramatically changed resting heart rate. It's things like waking up all the time at night because you're hungry. It's having low energy. It's particularly not feeling like you're actually improving your athletic performance. It's all these symptoms that are we kind of think of being related to under eating, you know, if you're just generally dying, but you're not working out when you add under eating and over training in the athletic context together, you end up with severely plateaued performance. You're always tired. You're always hungry, or you're never hungry, actually, is another one of them. For women, you start ending up with menstrual dysfunction, where you straight up just don't have your period anymore. And so those are all things that's pretty easy to be aware of. And these are symptoms that I noticed weight lifters like really over looking. We have data from the research on how successful weight if there's progress through the career in them, so changing weight usually going up and improving their performance at the same time. Now, do we have data to navigate how to work around all these thoughts and expectations and... Oh, that's the hard part. If the intervention is education, how well do we know that the education is working? And it's hard to say. Weight lifter that I interviewed had been forced up to a heavier weight class in order to compete internationally. And they were feeling really terrible about the fact that they had to go up to most like, "Ah, that's like my numbers haven't changed." Because they were really forced up at the last minute. They had to gain a lot of weight very quickly. They were feeling terrible about it. And then at this international competition, a researcher was going around to a bunch of the different athletes and being like, "Hey, can we take some measurements? We're just trying to kind of look at like what body compositions are good for different Olympic weight lifters?" And they came up to this weight lifter who had been feeling so terrible about gaining weight and said, "Now you, you have the perfect proportions for an Olympic weight lifter. After this weight lifter gained a lot of weight." And they just kind of sat there and they went, "Well, okay." And then they were okay with going up the weight class. They're like, "This is how I'm going to get stronger. This is how I'm going to get more competitive." So it's like the educational interventions. It's one thing. It's just there is some amount of promise that access to new kinds of information about how bodies work and maybe that it's okay to gain weight. And maybe that is necessary to gain weight as an athlete. It's like there's some hands that it won't save everyone. It won't keep every person from cutting which the point of injury or plateau or bombing out. But it might help enough people to push for a bit of a cultural change away from so much weight cutting and maybe to a state where people feel like it's not the end of the world if they have to go up the weight class. So we don't have the data, but it's promising. Okay, fair enough. We have time. We have time. But with these interviews, I also want to make this person research a little bit closer to human because we're like running a website and an Instagram account with summaries of research is that researchers are not seen as humans. So my mission is to change it a little bit. So my question would be to you, why do you research? Why you spent a few years bringing us new knowledge? I think for me, it's in question of how do I keep people from making the same mistakes that I made. And there's also a fascination of curiosity with some of the contradictions that are inherent in Olympic weightlifting. Or as I found with this study, the contradiction between we can absolutely gain weight. Look, you know, they're heavy, super heavy weight Olympic weight lifters and then just never being willing to gain weight. There's a fun little combination of fascination with some really interesting things that are going on and also kind of going at it from a I know we can do this better. I love this sport. I love it dearly. I've been doing this for eight years. I've been involved in a bunch of different capacities. And I remember the very first time I walked into an Olympic weightlifting gym and it was just really strong people doing really cool things. And they're all so friendly and so excited to watch me take my first crack set doing the Olympic lifts and getting stronger. And there's such a how do I make this accessible to everyone? How do I get everyone to do strength sports? How do I get them all to love strength sports? The way I felt when I first walked into the gym, you know, on the way that I still feel like Olympic weight lifters are my people. The way I make friends is through Olympic weightlifting. It's a shared language. It's a shared feeling of this struggle, the desperate desire to put just one more keel on the bar, the way of seeing the world. So it's like, these are my people and I want everyone to love it the way that I love it. Yeah, there are some problems, but we can we can fix those, right? If only someone would do the research. And so I like the research. I love the people. That's why I'll always and forever be happy to do the research. Yeah, so I know that you're about to start your PhD, which is the next step and that's what your research is. You don't have to go into videos, but in general what the research will be about. What I will be researching in New Zealand is how ideas about what women's bodies are capable of physically comes to end up producing the strength gap between men and women. And so, you know, that's not to say that if all social conditions were equal, men and women would be exactly as strong as each other. It's like, I'm not trying to pretend that there are no physiological differences. I'm going to point out maybe some of the similarities as well as the ways that, again, things can be done better. We talked pretty early on about how long men have had Olympic weightlifting and strength sports. Olympic weightlifting has been in the Olympics since 1896. Women weren't allowed in until 2000. What happens when you start to give people highly competitive outlets, when you really start to challenge them, you start pulling up those world records at a time and a bit at a time. What happens? Well, the level of competition goes up. And as you get more women into strength sports, it's like you end up finding those super strong people and the level of competition just goes up and up and up. But at the same time, my interest is in how do women and coaches think about how strong female Olympic weightlifters can be and how does that maybe create some limitations? So that my dissertation will be very gender heavy, but I think it'll be a fun time looking at strength from an angle and taking strength seriously from a socio-cultural angle that really hasn't been done before. So it'll be great fun when I can get around to it. Bring my fingers crossed for you. Thank you. Watching and cheering from the side. And last question, I guess. I know what your favorite color is, but I still need to ask you because I will make another infographic for your next study. So what will be the second favorite color you have? Oh, that's right, because we already used, we already used here on the male Olympic weightlifters. Oh, let me think, let me think. It means like green and blue are absolutely my favorites. Tell you what, let's go with a forest green. Forest like like super deep green. All right, it's noted. That's beautiful. The next infographic will come with forest green. Thank you so much for your time. Yeah. Oh, thank you for so much your research. Thank you for letting me talk about it at length. This absolutely just makes my day. This is what I love to do and I wish I could do more of it. And I'm just so thoroughly honored. And also, I'm just thrilled to see where evidence strong goes. You're gonna do so many great things. Whatever is new that I would say. Absolutely agreed. All right. Where are people can find you if they want to learn more or follow what you're doing? I am relatively active on Instagram and Twitter. If you search my name, Monica Nelson, I'll pop up. My Instagram handle though is emcee, m-o-n-i-k-e-r, McMonicker. And then I believe my Twitter handle is some variation of the same. I'm actually checking it out because I can't remember myself. Yep, it's exactly the same. Perfect. Why does it help? Is there a story? I'll only a little bit. I always loved that Monica was so close to Monica, which is Nickname. And so when I was trying to think up handles for social media, I was like, what would be better than like Nickname? And so my first and middle initials are MNC. So it's like perfect. So Nick moniker. I think I need a different Instagram handle one of these days that is a little bit more academic to figure that out someday. Perfect. It has a story. So it's great. It does have a story. All right. Thank you so much. And I guess yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Happy to talk. And again, thank you so much for having me on. It was an absolute pleasure. [BLANK_AUDIO]