BMI and Rowing

There was a post today over at Row2K of an article from a newspaper about the BMI or Body Mass Index. It mentioned rowing only briefly, referring to the GB 4+. The article was skewed to the viewpoint that the BMI is not a useful measure for athletes. That had generally always been my belief. Last year though, I had an opportunity to look at it differently and presented it in this post. I calculated BMIs for US National Team Rowers and a Cambridge University Men's Crew. In both cases BMIs were normal, in contrast to the article posted today.

For more information see my post and wikipedia.

Note that the article points out several athletes as "overweight" according to BMI, but the GB rowers just squeek into this definition. Of all the athletes mentioned in the article, only two came in as obese - aside from the entire offensive line of a university football team - and who would question their status?

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