So, it’s a Sunday morning and I find myself watching Baltimore vs. KC whilst I down some Pyramid Snowcap Winter Warm ales, and eating some guac and chips, and got to thinking “hey, maybe this isn’t all that healthy a practice.” (swear this is the first time I down three brewskies before noon.) I then proceeded to have this clear moment of clarity where I came to the realization that all this is because I’ve been brainwashed to behave this way by the nonstop advertisement of beer, fast-food, and beer, while occasionally interrupted by the seldom football play.
Ok, so all that was not really up for discussion, but this is: 1) do you believe that the showcasing of obese (and morbidly-obese) football players (in the US), and glamorizing of a sport that is designed from the ground-up to favor morbidly-obese individuals have any long-term effects (read 100-200 years) on society as a whole? 2) do you believe that the current morbidly-obese football player showcasing + glamorizing is merely of a reflection of where our society is at right now? 3) do you believe that there is any appreciable feedback loop between points 1 and 2 above? 4) do you believe that you’re tired of listening to Bud Lite and Doritos commercials when you just wanna watch a damn game? 4) do you believe that the football commissioner has the best interests of football in mind when he approves changing sport regulations that favor maximizing TV advertisement profit-taking instead of maximizing fan-enjoyment of a healthy sport? 5) what do you reckon will the rules of football be in 200 years from now? 6) prognosticate on the future evolution of football rules for the next 200 years such that your answer to (5) can come come true? 7) how can Sumo wrestling be be so popular in a country that has about the highest life-expectancy rates of the world?
In the interest of getting discussion started I will answer my questions as follows:
yes, our society’s life expectancy will will drop to about 50 years
partly
yes, the more we glorify and normalize clearly unhealthy behavior the fasternthe detriment on our society
eff-yeah
he only has the best interests of short-term profit-taking, no long-term vision of where will healthy football players come from.
while the rest of the world will continue to use the SI standard, the US will have to change the English Imperial system such that a quarter-back will be able to flick a guacamole-laden Dorito chip between two bottles of Bud Lite (incidentally amrican cars will be really cramped).
First, you’ll have to demonstrate that most pro football players are morbidly obese.
In fact, few of them are. In the case of the skill positions - running backs, defensive backs, receivers, none are obese. No linebackers are obese either. Players in these positions depend on speed to be effective. Extra fat, unlike extra muscle, slows them down without increasing their power for hitting, blocking, or breaking tackles.
The only positions where you can make the case for obesity are the offensive and defensive linemen. Some of them have at times been obese enough to require that their teams put them on weight loss regimens with fines for missing their targets. This just goes to show that both the teams and the players have a strong interest in making sure that no one is carrying any more weight than they have to to do their jobs on the field.
Morbid obesity means carrying excessive amounts of fat. Excessive fat is just as bad for football players as it is for the general population, perhaps worse. The extra weight puts more strain on joints, bones, and connective tissue, making injuries more likely. Since the body is under enormous strain as it is, with season ending injuries being routine, players and coaches want to do whatever they can to minimize the possibility of injury. Extra weight is something that no one can afford these days. Unlike extra muscle mass, which offsets the cost of greater injuries with greater power.
To extend my remarks above, there’s a big difference between an extra 50 pounds of muscle and an extra 50 pounds of fat. Pro football players will also tend to have bigger bones and higher bone density than average people, making them heavier without necessarily making them obese.
Where pro ball players do have an obesity problem is after their careers end. If they continue to consume the amounts of calories they did in their playing days, without maintaining the prodigious physical activity, they blow up.
There’s an excellent SI article that just came out about how hard d-linemen (specifically 3-4 NTs, the biggest guys on the field) work to maintain their weights and athletic ability.
Most plan to drop that weight quickly when they retire.
You wish you could be in as good a shape as these “morbidly obese” guys. They could probably run faster and further than you while carrying you over their shoulders. Some of the bigger linemen are carrying some fat which makes them appear huge, but (similar to sumo wrestlers) most of the mass under there is muscle.
These are guys at the top of the athletic ability of all people within their role. They aren’t fat slobs, they are excellent athletes.
You could point to a crappy life expectancy of lineman as a counterpoint, but that’s because many of them keep up the caloric intake after they leave the NFL without accompanying it with 3 hours of working out a day. Then they just become fat and out of shape.
Having all that extra muscle will make you stronger and faster but it will decrease your life. Having a lot of muscle around your chest area makes your heart work harder to pump the same amount of blood. This causes an enlarged heart which can cause cardiovascular disease. The way to live longer is to lightly exercise, eat reasonably (doritos and beer don’t count) and to have excellent genes. Living a sheltered life does not hurt either because the less you are exposed to carcinogens, pollutants, and other nasties in our modern world, the better chance you have of living longer. Of course you need to think if you could really call that living.
Personally I would rather live fast and die young.
In the future if we as Americans continue to live more sedentary lifestyles while eating only what is convenient then we will keep on declining in average lifespans. Now more than ever Americans are seriously out of shape. During winter snow storms the leading cause of death in American cities are heart attacks due to out of shape people, who would never break a sweat during the rest of the year, attempting to shovel snow. Thats says it all.
rulon gardner (sydney greco roman wrestling gold medalist, bronze medalist in athens) is now on the biggest loser. he’s at about… 450 lbs? and his wrestling weight was 265
Been a long time now so I may be remembering wrong but IIRC William “The Fridge” Perry who played on the '85 Bears Superbowl team could run a 50 yard dash faster than I could (and I was in shape then) and could supposedly jump onto a table from standing just in front of it (not as easy as it sounds). I recall him jumping high enough in one game to block a field goal.
That from a guy who weighed in somewhere north of 375 pounds. He was fat but under all that he was strong as an ox. The Bears were constantly at him though to lose weight. With all that strength if he shed 70 pounds he’d have been a monster.
As others have said, they’re large men, but describing them as obese is grossly misunderstanding the term. Yes, some of them are over 300 lbs, but of them, the vast majority of that weight is lean mass. There were times in the recent past when the NFL would have 380 or even 400 lbs men on the field, but they were prone to injury and had poor athletic skills. Now, you’re unlikely to see linemen above the low 300s, and those that are there are not only naturally big men, generally 6’5 or taller and probably couldn’t get under 260-270 if they tried, and they’re generally amazingly fit and powerful athletes.
Compare these linemen to other power athletes, and they’re not built a whole lot differently. Look at an Olympic power lifter, World’s Strongest Man competitors, Shot Putters, etc. They’re all huge men, who probably have more fat than most athletes, but they are enormously powerful and still in fantastic shape.
Moreso, the ONLY men on the field who have anything above an athletic amount of fat are the linemen, which consist of 8-9 out of the 22 players on the field. The quaterbacks, receivers, running backs, linebackers, and secondary players are all fairly typical of athletes you’d find in other sports.
No. It’s a reflection of the sport and sport technology. In times past, men couldn’t get that big because of poor understanding of nutrition, supplements, and training routines. Now, we understand it much better so we end up with bigger, faster and stronger athletes.
Only in that with more glamourization of sports, more kids are interested in it, and it’s a good thing. Kids being interested in sports means they are more likely to take the time to train and be active rather than participate in an increasingly sedentary lifestyle.
I know you think they’re obese, but this really is a separate issue. People watching sports are likely to drink beers and eat snacks, so they’re a target audience for those types of commercials. I don’t really notice these commercials since I will generally be doing something else when watching a game anyway, and so I tune out when the commercials are on. If you have issue with rising obesity, then you might have an issue with these commercials.
Inherently, yes. For instance, concussions had been a major issue for a while, but it’s finally come to the forefront because it was affecting the quality of the product. Healthy players means better performance which means better games which means better profit.
I suspect it won’t look a whole lot like it does not. With so many changes in sports technology in just the last couple of decades, it’s quite possible we won’t even recognize what it’s changed into.
Sumo wrestling is not so much a sport as we think about it. So much of it is about tradition and ritual, but the athletes themselves are very much like football linemen, in that they’re usually naturally large men anyway, because it is a sport that favors power rather than pure athleticism, they train for maximum mass and power, even if it means extra body fat. In fact, they usually specifically train and diet for a little bit of extra subcutaneous fat for a little bit of padding and minimize the visceral fat, which is the type that’s actually dangerous.
…Huh? Was does SI have to do with football? If you wanted to do an anti-American rant, you should have just done that. Otherwise, it sounds like you really aren’t very knowledgable about football, or power athletes in general.
Yes, football players tend to have shorter life spans, but that’s largely an issue with injuries, particularly to their nervous system. You’ll find that the lifespans of football players are lower across all positions, not just the ones that select for large men. Contact is a necessary part of the sport and it will continue to be the way it is until such a time that technology catches up.
And yes, power athletes in general will have shorter lifespans, but that’s mostly because of just having all that extra mass. However, comparing a 300 lbs lineman to a 300 lbs fat man, which most of them probably would be if they weren’t athletes, are miles apart. Pound for pound, fat is lower density, so it adds more blood vessels at the same weight and, thus, puts more strain on the heart than the same amount of mass as muscle. Similarly, because they’re athletes they’re going to have stronger hearts and lungs precisely because they put in so much training time, so they’re naturally going to be healthier. Basically, anyone who is that size is going to have a shorter life span than someone smaller, but someone who is that size as an athlete is probably going to be better off than someone that size that isn’t, and for a lot of these people, their body types are such that being 6’5 and under 270 would be borderline impossible without exercise and diet equally intense to what they do to train for their sports.
The fact that the heart has to work harder to push that muscle to pump. Try running vigorously for one minute and lie down. Your chest will be pulsating. That energy has to come from somewhere. If you have a large chest with a lot of muscle (female breasts do not count) your heart will encounter some resistance. Its not a lot more but it is enough to make a difference. This will cause tissue in the heart to tear and be repaired which will make the heart walls thicker. Just like a turkey baster is harder to squeeze than an eye dropper, a thicker heart is harder to pump.
There are two completely different kinds of muscle being discussed here: cardiac muscle, which is only found in the heart, and skeletal muscle, which is what grows when you lift weights. Your link refers to cardiac hypertrophy, which is bad, but you’re not distinguishing between that and skeletal muscle hypertrophy. As far as I know, there are no cardiac risks associated with the latter.
True that. Albert Haynesworth, who’s the butt of plenty of “fat lineman” jokes (http://www.onionsportsnetwork.com/articles/report-albert-haynesworth-just-a-mound-of-ice-crea,17976/) ran a 4.82 second 40 yard dash and hit a 39 inch vertical leap at well over 300 lbs. I would be very shocked if there was a time in my life when I could achieve either of those things or even come close and, like you, I was once sorta in shape.
Football players are “morbidly obese” only if that term is twisted beyond recognition. The BMI is a general diagnostic tool that has to take individual charactersitics into account when applied to individuals, such as athleticism. From the National Institute of Health Website:
yep. it always cracks me up when fatties look to football players and shriek that BMI is a flawed and useless metric since, if we calculated a lineman’s BMI, he would be considered “morbidly obese”.
no, fatty. you are not like a defensive lineman even though you tip the scales the same amount.
No, the social pressure against obesity is far far stronger than any pro-obesity pressure. But since bodyweight regulation is something that is largely out of conscious control it really doesn’t matter if cultural attitudes are pro or anti obesity. That is like worrying if we are a pro or anti tall culture, the human body does what it was evolved to do, not what this particular culture wants it to do.
The only fat-obese football players are the offensive linemen. Everyone else is reasonably lean, albeit with varying degrees of muscle from a minor amount (QB) to a huge amount (linebackers).
I have no idea about FB in 200 years. The reality is muscle building, speed increasing, endurance increasing, etc drugs are constantly getting better, so the game has to change for safety reasons. Linemen who bench press ~500 pounds are fairly common (have you seen photos of pro football players in the 1920s? They look like high schoolers). It used to be all anyone had was steroids, and those weren’t even around until the 50s or so. Now they have growth hormone, insulin, EPO, etc. Now myostatin blockers are in the works too. The rules have to change when linebackers are drug altered enough to squat 1000 pounds and run a 40 meter dash in under 4 seconds since that combo of strength and speed is probably going to break bones. Either the safety rules have to change or the rules of contact have to change and football becomes more of a ‘touch’ game than a tackle game. Banning the drugs will never work since there is too much incentive to use them.
Since we are actually are talking about NFL lineman I’d say the point about BMI and athleticism is a valid observation. I’m not sure what you mean, unless you’re actually calling me “fatty” personally, which would be sort of hilarious.
Obese people leading the “my weight and BMI doesn’t matter to my overall healthiness” brigade routinely point to athletes as proof that BMI is a completely useless metric when looking at one’s weight. They completely gloss over the fact that pro athletes are a few orders of magnitude in better shape than a comparably massive average person.
Nitpick: there are fewer and fewer QBs I’d describe as having only a minor amount of muscle – pretty much everyone hits the weights year round. These two guys I picked at random are big boys by any normal standard, and none of it’s fat.