Whilst it's absolutely possible to be both fit and healthy, we often see exactly the opposite. A narrow focus on performance, the belief that training grants a licence to eat whatever we please & an adherence to dietary guidelines that do not promote optimum health all deliver athletes who can perform at a good or even excellent level but whose underlying health is far from good.
Simply identifying yourself as an athlete immediately puts you at risk of some habits and behaviours that could damage your health.
- Athletes tend to value training over health and will often train despite clearly being ill. Training with a viral illness can make things far worse &, in some cases, can even be fatal.
- A narrow focus on performance can cause us to train through injuries. Initial niggles, untreated, can quickly develop into minor injuries and progress to be chronic damage that can take years to repair. I've known athletes who retired years before I met them and who were still suffering from hip, knee and back problems that had been the reason they gave up sport.
- Over-reaching becomes over-training if you don't back off. If you then still continue "smashing it" despite being tired, it's possible to develop full-blown chronic fatigue. In the late 1990's, a friend of mine became so ill from overdoing his training that a 15-minute run after 3 months off put him back in bed for 3 days!
- The scenario that distresses me most is when an athlete has done their best to follow the advice they've been given, to eat large amounts of carbohydrate-rich food, believing that they are doing their best for health and performance. That so many then go on to develop metabolic diseases seems particularly unjust. Many people with existing metabolic disease come to sport in order to get healthier, only to take advice like this that worsens their condition.
It's important to realise that unless you develop healthy habits around food and other necessary activities, you are risking your health by seeking performance. There's an old saying that "what gets measured improves". The opposite is also true. What you ignore will always decline, it's the law of entropy.