In a candid column as part of our Out Into the Open series on female athlete wellbeing, Olympic athlete Sarah Cowley Ross talks about her personal encounter with RED-S, and learning how to fuel her body differently.
In elite sport, millimetres matter. For execution on the training field and in competition, a millimetre could be the difference between clearing the bar in the high jump, flying cleanly over a hurdle or being flagged for a foul in the long jump.
For a lot of performance sports, a millimetre around the waistline can matter as well.
The conversation about an athlete’s weight doesn’t go down well in female athlete circles at times, and the prioritisation of athlete wellbeing versus performance can be difficult to navigate.
As a former Olympic heptathlete and high jumper, my body composition was something I was acutely aware of from a performance perspective.
My power-to-weight relationship had a dramatic effect on my performance. As I said, millimetres matter when you’re jumping over 1.90m.
But it’s the way you get to the point as a female (or male) athlete that has a significant bearing on the degree of success. And it needs to be discussed.
Throughout my sporting career, I didn’t always get it right.
One year, as a developing heptathlete, I lost 9kg from when I showed up to start training in September, till the end of a pinnacle event the following August. I was way too skinny for my own good and very hangry to go with it.
While I could jump higher, overall there was a negative impact on my performance and power across the events, and it was detrimental to my mental state and my zest for life.
And even though I was still strong enough to bench press 85kg (15kg over my bodyweight at the time), a few months down the track at a lighter weight, shit got real. And no matter how hard I trained, I couldn’t produce the power I needed to perform as I would have liked.
The problem is that when you cross that line, it’s very difficult and requires much more time to get you back into the green.
It’s also mentally very taxing. It takes great will not to eat (taking emotional energy that could be better spent on competing) and then great will to realise you won’t get better without fuelling correctly.
There is no doubt I would have been diagnosed during this time as having RED-S.
Relative Energy Deficient in Sport (RED-S) is a syndrome that would have impacted on my competitive future and had considerable long-term effects on my health, if I hadn't recognised something was wrong.
The periodisation of nutrition
It all came to a head when I realised I just wasn't progressing and I frustratingly felt quite weak despite all the training I'd done. When I saw a number on the scales that I'd never seen before, I got a bit of a fright and I knew I needed to change.
I was also amenorrheic – I went without a period - for a long time.
But when I periodised my nutrition properly and safely, my periods went back to normal, and we planned my training around my menstrual cycle. It helped that I had a female coach and that my husband is a performance physiologist who’s not afraid to discuss periods with his athletes.
Periodisation of nutrition is about dividing your training year into cycles, where you match the training load and intensity with nutrition to be able to meet the required demands on a day-to-day basis.
During heavy training, an athlete needs to fuel more to maximise the training effect and to recover between training sessions. But when you’re in competition mode and not training, your nutritional demands are different.
Christel Dunshea-Mooiji, a senior nutritionist with High Performance Sport NZ, says the periodisation of nutrition, if done properly with a holistic team, doesn’t have to be detrimental to an athlete’s health or wellbeing.
“There’s a misperception that you must under-fuel to get to the right weight,” says Dunshea-Mooiji, who’s responsible for taking care of the nutrition of our champion New Zealand rowing team. Three years ago, it was found only one woman in Rowing NZ’s high performance programme was eating enough.
To get the periodisation of nutrition and body composition right, it needs to be done responsibly with a team of people around the athletes to monitor loading and fuelling.
By fuelling well in conjunction with the athlete’s periodised training programme, the athlete can get through the training load they need to, Dunshea-Mooiji explains. They can increase their lean muscle mass and increase their basal metabolic rate (how many calories you burn when you're resting).
"I work with lightweight rowers who most come to a certain weight at a certain time. For a lot of my athletes, their race weight is not their natural weight," she says.
For elite New Zealand lightweight rower Jackie Kiddle, there’s a line in the sand for the weight she and her partner in the double scull need to meet to be on the start-line.
The crew’s average weight is measured two hours before the race starts, and world champion Kiddle says in the early years of her lightweight rowing career, it was much more of a struggle to get to the right weight because she didn’t understand her body.
“When I moved into lightweight rowing in 2012, I sought help from experts to be able to make weight safely,” says the Cambridge-based rower, who missed the Tokyo Olympics due to the retirement of her rowing partner, Zoe McBride.
Kiddle says the relationship she has with Dunshea-Mooiji and HPSNZ physiologist Caroline McManus in monitoring her training load and nutrition is critical – “I trust them with my life”.
Two months out from her pinnacle event, Kiddle prioritises the individual strategies around getting to her race weight.
“The older I get, the less struggle it’s been to get to the start-line in full health and peak performance,” Kiddle says.
"I trust my body because I know it knows what to do as long as I stick to the right steps."
When a number is just a number
When I converted to a straight high jumper later in my international athletics career, getting into that ‘red zone’, when I was intentionally under-fuelling, was something I was acutely aware of.
I was also aware there aren’t too many chubby champion high jumpers out there, so it became a process of figuring out what was a good training weight range and competition range.
At my final Commonwealth Games, my skinfolds (a standard body composition measurement) were in the 40mm range. Measurements are taken from eight different body sites – like calves and triceps – and the total sum is your score.
In training in the months before, that would sit between 50mm and 65mm with a regular menstrual cycle. A couple of months out, I would target being in this lower range for one to two weeks.
It’s really important to understand this was my normal, these metrics worked for me, but every athlete is different. Remember comparison can be the death of joy.
I learnt from experience to see this for what it was: a number, a data point. The number is information for you to use. It’s no different to a strength metric like a bench press or a bronco score.
Too often, I feel female athletes take this number and make it mean something else – ‘I’m too fat’, ‘I need to be skinnier’ or ‘If I’m this number, then I will be enough’.
The difficulty with this rationality is that as an athlete, you’re often very fatigued and with that, at times, comes a sensitivity or irrationality.
I’d like this to be more out in the open, so females take care of their performance details, but they do it in a safe way to soar to great heights. The moral of the story is you can have a performance outcome and still do it with your wellbeing intact.
