Oakland2002 wrote:

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25kg weight loss pretty impressive! Massive improvement his BMI at 117 kg > 30 made him obese, my kids school would have sent his mum a letter telling her off.

BMI of close to 26 means he just hanging onto the overweight category but that's some achievement, few more kilos and you will have yourself a lean mean fighting machine with a monster serve, what's the long term target? To stay consistently under 90?

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BMI is nothing more than a guide and the statistic should never be considered as a hard and fast rule.  Everyone is built differently. Muscle is heavier than fat.  One of my favourite stats to quote when BMI comes up is the one about former England rugby captain, Martin Johnson.  On the day he captained England to World Cup glory in 2003, his stats according to BMI index made him technically "obese".  I doubt very much that anyone would have described him as overweight, and certainly not said it to his face

I agree BMI is flawed for muscular athletes, and personally "historically" being a much better rugby player than tennis player ( says more about my tennis than rugby) it becomes uncomfortable to sit down because of a boney butt if my BMI Is less than 25 hence my generosity in terms of suggesting 90kg, an analysis of tennis players (like footballers) though would probably put most of the elite players in the very low 20's given the importance of stamina, mobility and height.

It says a lot for the immense natural ability of Marcus that he competed at all on the world stage at 6ft 3 and 117 kg and wasn't meant in any derogatory way but merely to emphasise that if he can keep his weight stable at 92 Kg with a sensible and consistent diet and then lost a little more body fat through training, metabolically in terms of his capacity to deal with anaerobic debt and athletically in terms of his power to weight ratio and mobility he will be a completely different beast.

As I said a great achievement for Marcus and those that work with him but perhaps still scope for a little fine tuning to give him every edge he can get and hopefully success so he can show off his new cheek bones when lifting trophy after trophy.

-- Edited by Oakland2002 on Thursday 3rd of September 2015 05:51:26 AM

Good luck to the GB youngsters taking part in the Youth Commonwealth Games in Samoa this week.

I don;t believe that the English are sending a team but the Scots and Welsh definitely are.

So good luck to:

Scotland:

Ewen Lumsden and Louie McLelland, and

Wales:

Matthew Story, Ricky Hernandez Tong, Joely Lomas and Rebekah O'Loughlin

Guess it might have been a financial thing.

Although, to be honest, if you're taking a squad of other athletes over, the incremental costs of a few tennis players is hardly major (although not completely insignificant if going to Samoa).

But, overall, yes, it seems a shame that a rich country like England can't put its hand in its pocket for a tennis team, in a real world team event, especially when most of the others have.

By the way, I haven't seen any official announcement that there is no english team - just on the list of all competing English athletes and events, there's no mention of tennis, so I'm assuming that says it all.

Milts into the main draw at St Remy