Women and Sports in the United States: A Documentary Reader

UNDERSTANDING THE FEMALE ATHLETE TRIAD

114 WOMEN AND SPORTS IN THE UNITED STATES the air and then send it to the muscles. Men have proportionately larger hearts and lungs, enabling them to pump more blood to the tissues, and they have higher concentrations of hemoglobin, the oxygen carrier in the blood. It is still unclear to what extent these factors limit female endurance , or if they actually do at all, but it is at least true that in all comparisons so far between men and women with equal degrees of conditioning, the men’s maximum oxygen intake is higher. But far more significant than the “anything you can do I can do better” comparison game is the fact that when encouraged, women can shatter all the stereotypes about the gentle, weaker sex. Young 14- to 17-year-old female athletes are handling weights of up to 40 pounds without reaching maximum capacity, and female swimmers are covering 8,000 to 12,000 yards in two two-hour sessions a day. Women distance runners, limited in the Olympics to nothing longer than the 1500-meter race (approximately one mile), chalk up to 100 miles a week in training sessions. And after a few weeks in a conditioning course at Queens College in New York, sedentary coeds can do 200 sit-ups and run a half hour without stopping. “Women have been babied in the past,” says Dr. Frank Katch, their instructor. “They’ve never been pushed hard enough or given strenuous training. I predict there’ll be a revolution in the next five years in what women can do.” There may well be, for women are discovering that the secret of their physical intimidation by men is as simple as a saying of Mao and as close as the nearest gym: conditioning. By developing her powers to the fullest, any woman, from Olympic star to the weekend tennis player, can be a match for any man she chooses to take on. More importantly, she will inherit the essential source of human self-confidence—pride in and control over a finely tuned body. That alone would be a revolution. y UNDERSTANDING THE FEMALE ATHLETE TRIAD Irene McCormick With Olympic gold in her sights, gymnast Christy Henrich trained over several years with a goal of achieving contender status on the U.S. Olympic Women’s Gymnastics Team. But then a judge at a national competition From IDEA Personal Trainer 15:5 (May 2004): 28–33. Reproduced with permission of IDEA Health and Fitness Association, www.IDEAfit.com. told the 95-pound Henrich that if she expected to win Olympic gold, she would have to lose weight—“advice” that eventually proved fatal for the 15-year-old girl. Although Henrich believed that her intense training and disciplined diet would contribute significantly to her success, she developed the severe eating disorders known as bulimia and anorexia nervosa. She struggled with these eating disorders for 6 years before dying in 1994, weighing only 47 pounds. Henrich has been called a “poster child” for the syndrome that has become known as the female athlete triad (Porter 2000). Discovery of the Female Athlete Triad Gymnasts, figure skaters, runners and female athletes in other sports wherein body composition is perceived to play an integral role in performance, are under ever-increasing pressure to maintain specific weight and body fat percentage . Many female athletes are encouraged by coaches to be unrealistically thin. “In the early 1980s, I began to see women athletes at UCLA who came in and told me that they were vomiting, and they stated they had a lot of body dissatisfaction,” recalls Los Angeles–based sports medicine physician Carol Otis, a former UCLA team physician, chairperson on the women’s health initiative and the lead author of the 1992 American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) “Position Stand on Female Athlete Triad.” “We didn’t even know about bulimia then, but these women were talking about their experiences and conveying symptoms associated with bulimia, depression, eating disorders and other weight-related problems. We thought we’d better get a group together and talk about how we would deal with this issue moving forward,” she explained recently. In the early 1990s, researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and ACSM had a consensus conference simply to talk about the problem. Following the conference, research efforts were directed at uncovering the relationship between the prevalence of disordered eating and menstrual irregularities that occur in female athletes. It was revealed...