Someone else could be short, light and yet heavily muscled (throwing up an out of kilter BMI Index). Someone can be tall, heavy and still relatively lightly muscled for their size. Every person is a combination of all three somatotypes based upon the complexities of their anthropometric make up. A study carried out by researchers at the University of Madrid showed that anthropometric measurements can determine physical performance in a subject which then can conveniently be classified into one of the commonly used somatotypes.ġ. There are a number of factors influencing anthropometric measurements: genetics, nutrition, environmental and cultural factors and, obviously, the sex of the person. Anthropometric factors include body breadth and length, body weight, bone density and even the ratio of the bones of the legs and arms in relation to the torso. The only area where somatotypes come into play in sports science and biology is when we need to take anthropometric factors into account to determine physical fitness and physical performance. So, in reality the visual elements that make a person fit into one or the other are actually wrong and likely to lead to more problems than solutions. Second, each person’s body is the result of a mix of characteristics that are traditionally ascribed to one of the Heath-Carter ‘body types’. First of all there is no single person who is adequately described by one of these classifications which means that at best they are an approximation and at worst flat-out wrong and you don’t want to base your training nutrition on something that is ‘almost right’. Science and our knowledge of how the body works has developed incredibly since the 60s and it’s time we started to retire the endo-meso-ecto classification for the myth it is. Anthropometric Measurements and Your Body The reason the fallacy persists to this day is because his original research assistant Barbara Heath, and later Lindsay Carter developed it further and popularized it in the 60s creating a convenient way for many fitness professionals to work with. In the early days of the Darebee project we tried using the classifications as a guide to the level of difficulty of our workouts and they were so restrictive and out of touch (as we found out once we started to test them with volunteer groups) that we abandoned them. Unfortunately the fallacy of the physical classifications persists to this day but it's a very poor way of looking at how the human body works or how it can put on muscle. His theory of Constitutional Psychology has since been discredited. Sheldon used subjective classification techniques based upon his visual appraisal of his subjects’ physiques. Despite the physical aspect of Sheldon’s theory his real aim was to tie his observations into psychological observations about the psychological makeup of people and associate that with each body type creating the theory of Constitutional Psychology. In the 1940s there was a strong social movement in the US that leaned towards Eugenics and Sheldon's Endo-Meso-Ecto classification fed directly and very conveniently into that. The theory behind somatotypes (the scientific term for body types) came in the 1940s from the American psychologist William Herbert Sheldon, who used visual examination to classify the human physique according to the relative contribution of three fundamental elements named after the three germ layers of embryonic development: the endoderm, (develops into the digestive tract), the mesoderm, (becomes muscle, heart and blood vessels), and the ectoderm (forms the skin and nervous system). Our bodies are the instruments we use to connect to the world and the places we all live in so it’s worth taking a little time to unpack this a little and understand where the myth ends and the science begins. There are still many forums, websites and even fitness instructors who use the convenience of the endo, meso, ecto classification for body types, perpetuating a myth that has no foundation in science.
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