Warning signs a club handles weight badly

Nobody is going to hand you a document. What a club believes about weight is visible in the room, in the calendar and in the way people talk about food, and none of it is hidden from a parent who knows what to look at.

Say plainly what is at stake here, because the numbers are not small. In the sport where this has been studied most, estimates of how many competitors use aggressive methods to make weight run from about a quarter to two thirds of them. Having this problem is ordinary for a club. Having solved it is what makes a club unusual.

What you can see in the room

• Plastic suits, bin bags, heated rooms, saunas used by juniors. Youth guidance names these as practices to prohibit rather than supervise. A club that owns the equipment uses the equipment.
• Weigh-ins as an event. Children queuing, numbers read out, other kids watching. Weight becomes a public performance at exactly the age when the relationship with food is forming.
• Spitting, in a corner, into a bottle, as a normal fixture of the week before a tournament.
• Supplements handed out by anybody at the club. Whatever the intention, the exposure is the club's and the athlete's. Why that matters even for adults is in supplement contamination.

What you can see in the calendar

Two patterns give away more than anything that happens in a single week.

This is one part of a larger set of things a staff owns, and the rest is on the coaches page.

The first is a child who has stayed in the same category for two seasons while visibly growing. No rulebook names that as a red flag, and I will say plainly that this one is my own read rather than a citation. But healthy growth normally moves an athlete up, so a category that has not moved in 2 years is a descent that has been running quietly underneath it the whole time.

The second is a competition schedule dense enough that the athlete is never out of a cut. If there is a tournament every 3 or 4 weeks, there is no phase in which he is simply eating and training. The idea of an off-camp weight has been designed out of his year, and the published band that should govern it is in which division you belong in.

What you can hear

Language is the least deniable signal, because nobody manages it.

• Cutting described as character. Discipline, toughness, wanting it more. The moment weight loss becomes a moral quality, a 13-year-old will pursue it past any limit an adult sets.
• Food sorted into good and bad. Children take that framing literally and keep it for decades.
• Comments about an athlete's body in front of other athletes, however lightly meant.
• A coach whose entire authority on nutrition is that he competed himself. He may be an excellent coach. It is not a qualification for setting a growing child's intake.

The signs in your own child

These matter more than anything you observe at the gym, and they are the ones to act on rather than monitor.

Persistent tiredness outside the last day or two before a competition. Getting ill often, or minor injuries that take a long time to settle. Dizziness. Strength or endurance going backwards over a season rather than forwards. Irritability or low mood that arrives with the schedule. School slipping. Training beyond what the coach actually set. Preoccupation with the scale.

Secrecy about eating, or unwillingness to eat with the family before an event.

One of these on its own is a week in a teenager's life. If several appear together, or one persists, the right next step is a doctor or a registered dietitian rather than a conversation with the coach. Speak to your child too, and separately from the sport.

Do not wait for the season to end.

Where these signs shade into something a coach is not equipped to handle, and how to raise it without making it worse, is set out in when a weight cut stops being a weight cut.

If you run the club

None of this is an accusation. Most clubs that handle weight badly are not careless, they are simply doing what was done to the coach 20 years ago, and no federation has given them anything better.

The fix is not expensive. Assess each junior once a season on an ordinary week, set a lowest permitted category, put it in writing to the parents, and refuse entries below it. That is the whole of it, and the model it comes from is described in the minimum weight rules nobody enforces.

A club that does that is protecting itself as much as the children. The first serious incident in a junior programme is not a nutrition problem, it is a safeguarding problem, and the question afterwards is always whether anything was written down.

What 10 years later looks like

I work with the other end of this. Adults, professionals, people who have been making weight since they were 12 or 13.

The ones who struggle most are rarely the ones who cut hardest last year. They are the ones who never had an off-camp weight, who learned at 14 that eating normally was a failure of will, and who arrive at 25 without ever having known what their body does when it is fed.

That is not repaired quickly and sometimes it is not repaired at all.

What you are protecting in a junior programme is the athlete's twenties, far more than any one tournament.