Losing body fat is often an issue for athletes and there are various and sundry (yes, sundry) reasons that they either want or need to do this. Clearly for the physique sports (bodybuilding, fitness, figure), it’s an issue of appearance. For performance sports (everything else), losing fat or weight can often improve performance. Either the athlete can get into a lower weight class (if their sport has such) or they can improve their strength or power to weight ratio, improving performance.
I’d note, and this would be a topic for an entirely separate article, that leaner is not always better. Most sports end up having an ideal level of leanness where higher and lower levels aren’t consistent with optimal performance. Many athletes will over train or lose muscle mass and performance in the quest to get as lean as possible and this often does more harm than good.
Unfortunately, athletes often approach the goal of fat loss in an absolutely awful way.… Keep Reading