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Paige Zadoo
“Are you taking enough pre-workout?”
“How much are you lifting?”
“I’m lifting twice what you are.”
East Athletic Trainer Dakota Gelsheimer-Orlando hears these comments on a daily basis working with teenage boy athletes in every sport from football to wrestling. While this conversation is typically referred to as “locker room talk,” she says the aspect of competition can lead to male athletes taking unhealthy measures to achieve their desired body, or even to just “outlift” their friends.
Dakota believes the root of these conversations comes down to something simple: competition. Competition with friends and teammates. Competition with their own perception of themselves. Competition to achieve the male body standard.
While Dakota, Carriage Club personal trainer Jake Albracht and sports psychologist Dr. Linda Sterling believe athletic competition within boys can spark a positive drive to perform better in their sports, all three of them acknowledge that competition can initiate the unhealthy mindset.
The unhealthy mindset of never looking good enough or muscular enough spirals into overexercising, consuming more pre-workout than the recommended amount or intaking 500-1000 more calories than healthy for your body type. All of these behaviors can turn into an obsession — one which leads to things like playing while injured, resulting in fractures or breaks.
However, a healthy relationship with fitness looks like recovery days, improvement of performance in one’s sport and adaptability.
According to Sterling, the competitive mentality in men’s fitness of never being “big” enough can lead to overexertion and overeating — two characteristics she most often finds correlated with unhealthy and toxic behavior in the fitness world with her patients, rather than lifting to your limits, and eating the right number of calories for your body type.
Whatever the goal may be, competition culture in the gym has led to unnecessary pressure to become muscular and built, according to sophomore Jack Kessler, who’s seen this effect firsthand.
“In gyms, [toxic comments] are a common thing,” Kessler said. “There’s always guys who just ruin it for others. There are guys in the gym when we’re working out who have the focus of needing to look bigger and more muscular than everyone there in the back of their head. They’re only focused on numbers, not watching a change in performance or their bodies.”
Kessler believes the competitiveness within teams and friend groups to be the most built brings competition and toxicity into the gym or sports practices, which should be focused on simply improving. This toxicity starts the spiral of unhealthy training and conditioning with things like overeating, overexertion or playing sports while injured.
“I see the pressure in boys to be that stereotypical-built, muscular athlete mostly through social media now,” Dakota said. “That creates a large impression on these boys that’s what they need to look like, which sparks the cycle of unhealthy, toxic habits and mindsets.”
Carriage Club’s Varsity hockey goalie and junior Edward Sih has a strict, hyper-focused routine for fitness. He thinks that while he works out to stay ahead of his competition, another big part of why himself and other teen boys work out is because they aren’t happy with their appearance.
East’s boys varsity soccer goalie and senior Blake Nunnelee agrees. After working out at the gym, he often looks in the mirror and sees a non-muscular, overweight kid and thinks, I don’t look good, I need to go back to the gym and fix that.
“In young male athletes especially, they’ll be making gains and progress but look in the mirror and still see the ‘skinny kid,’” Albracht said. “That’s when the unhealthy mindset starts to creep in.”
Albracht notices an unhealthy mindset amongst teenage boys when exercise and training is the only thing they ever talk about. They come to him about a pain in their shoulder after they’ve only worked on their arms seven days in a row. They hyperfocus and obsess.
Bulking is an example of overexertion and overeating, according to Dr. Sterling. This practice, commonly used by teenage boys, involves heavily increasing the calories consumed beyond the boy’s need while focusing on intense weight training, according to Healthline. In a poll from Instagram of 112 boys, 41 said they’ve bulked or actively bulk.
Varsity football center and senior Brian Heneger says he uses this bulking strategy before every football season. He lifts twice a day, eats three protein-filled meals of grilled chicken and peanut butter sandwiches as a protein-filled snack and takes one to two scoops of pre-workout before lifting. To him, this routine is healthy.
Comparable to Heneger, Sih spends 3-4 hours at the gym four days a week, eating 3,000 calories a day, more than 500 calories over a teenage boy’s average intake, according to Healthline. His diet centers around eating fiber and protein and avoiding all forms of sugar. He also takes pre-workout and creatine monohydrate before workouts.
Sih doesn’t see a problem with any of this.
“As long as you’re happy and you’re not causing your body too much significant harm, it’s not unhealthy,” Sih said.
However, according to Sih, he’s noticed negative effects from his routine. He faces insomnia that leads to 3-4 hours of sleep most nights, lack of energy when he’s bulking and a hyper-focus on his supplement intake and diet causing him to obsess when he doesn’t consume enough calories or meals for the day.
Dakota thinks the practice of bulking and overexercising roots in a psychological obsession of not looking good enough, or never doing enough, leading to the need to constantly lift more — she doesn’t advise either of these methods.
“What I see the most is boys will be told,‘You’ve got to stop and take a break,’ but they keep going,” Dakota said. “We’ll put a kid in a walking boot but they’re still lifting, they’re still going. Because at this point it’s become a psychological obsession. They feel like they can’t miss out, they feel like they can’t not look good. Sitting out isn’t an option to them.”
This obsession can lead to boys continuing to play on injuries, especially stress injuries, which she regularly witnesses in her job. These injuries are most commonly caused by overexertion on the body from working out or practicing too much without allotting recovery time in between.
Stress injuries are diagnosed before a fracture or break. When Dakota diagnoses one, she tells the boys to sit out for their next game to prevent a worsened injury. These directions are rarely listened to or reported to coaches by the players, according to Dakota.
It’s not uncommon for Dakota to put a cast on players for minor stress injuries to prevent them from playing their sport or exercising, despite being told not to. She’s even had to take players’ helmets on the sidelines during football games to prevent them from playing a game that will most likely turn their injury into a fracture or break. According to Dakota, athletes feel such a need to overperform that they’re willing to risk injury. The National Trainers Association also reported out of 43 high-school male athletes, 54% said they’ve played their sport while injured.
As she takes their helmets, Dakota is used to the boys pleading: “Let me back on, let me back on, I’ll be fine.”
“They start begging and begging for me to just let them play,” Dakota said. “That’s that psychological factor again of ‘I have to do more, I’m not doing enough’ [and] they start feeling really bad about themselves.”
It’s a chain effect, according to Dakota. When an athlete plays injured, their body breaks or fractures even worse, which can eventually completely prohibiting them from training or conditioning.
Sih has been part of this cycle, continuing to play hockey with injured knees during his November 2020 season.
Halfway through his season, the cartilage in Sih’s knees started completely wearing down. He played 12 games until finally sitting out in late December when he couldn’t lie down without shooting pain rushing to knees.
Despite the pain and injury as he continued to play the game, Sih didn’t think it was a disastrous choice.
“I didn’t want to leave the game,” Sih said. “I didn’t want to miss out or lose potential progress. I remember I just kept on saying to myself, ‘just keep going, just keep going.’”
Looking back now, Sih recognizes that was an unhealthy approach to treating his injury.
“Nowadays, I would’ve sat out earlier than I did last year,” Sih said. “Playing 12 games in pain was not a choice I should’ve made.”
Along with overexertion, Nunnelee thinks another unhealthy habit teenage boys take is an overuse of supplements, such as the powder creatine monohydrate.
“If you’re working out almost every day, and you’re hurting yourself and beating yourself because you want to look better, it’s become unhealthy,” Nunnelee said. “With supplements, it can be easy to go down a darker path. Most guys I know using steroids started out taking multiple supplements at a time.”
Between overexertion, injuries and overeating among teen male athletes, taking a simple “break” is rare for their bodies or mental states.
Sterling, Albracht and Dakota all agree that simple recovery days and rest periods are not only necessary for gym-focused students to prevent their bodies from injury, but to maintain a healthy relationship with fitness.
Taking a recovery day, sitting out of a game when injured or cutting down on the intake of supplements and pre-workout ingested and remembering progress is being made despite negative thoughts is key, according to Dakota.
“If you actually transfer performance, as in, are you getting better at something outside of the gym, if nutrition is on point, and training is going well, the vanity aspect will take care of itself,” Albracht said.
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