She can kiss that sports bra contract goodbye

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"What's your claim?" - Ben Gravy
"Your best work is the work you're excited about" - Rick Rubin

Am I missing something? If she didn't like his style of coaching get another one. I don't know him and maybe he is an asshat but if he's doing or saying something you don't like, move on......

that’s exactly what she did.

I'd get a boob reduction just to never have to deal with sports bras again. They're an unfortunate yet necessary evil.

(That said, I'm convinced most female cyclists have at some point wondered how much better our watts/kg would be sans gratuitous bosom.)

But took over 4 years to do so.
Moench had had two years (2016 and 2017) of 'also ran' race results.
Took Watt (Sutton acolyte) on as a coach (no idea why - was Crowley (also an accountant) already with him?) and stepped up a grade in 2018 and onwards (running past the collapsed True in Frankfurt with that season truncated by her accident (so no Kona)).
Under Watt the results were there, along with the weight shaming and those continued into 2019 and two good results post the early COVID phase (at Florida and Daytona Nov and Dec 2020). Sub 3 hour run in 2021 at Tulsa.
Suspect Moench is also the thoroughly/naturally loyal kind who would resist giving up on a coach who had helped her leap into the world top 10 and procrastinate dealing with his poor behaviour.

We don't really know the true details of their coaching/athlete relationship, so it is really not appropriate to comment beyond generalities. However, I do think my story is a perfect example of why cutting weight through caloric restriction is a bad idea. I was a collegiate runner who temporarily destroyed my body in pursuit of being faster so I know all too well what happens when you go over the edge. At 6 feet 2, my natural "fit body weight is about 175. My triathlete racing weight is about 165-167. My best running races were down at around 16-163 lbs, but I had cut my weight down to 147 pounds and had a body fat of 2.7 percent measured by hydrostatic weight testing. I was running around 120 miles per week, but probably undereating by at least 1000 calories per day. I would eat lots of fruit and veggies to "trick my stomach" into feeling full. I would often get really bad headaches at night from being really hungry. I went from being a 14 minute 5k runner to 16 minutes, developing anemia, depression and suicidal ideations. At 21 years old, I could barely even get an erection. It made me realize that I was not meant to have the physique of typical elite distance runner, and along the way I found triathlon which I was a better fit for anyway. I developed some iron rules for myself so that it would not happen again:

1. When you are training hard, you should never feel hungry. And I mean never. If you eat (mostly) healthy foods and appropriately consume carbohydrates during long hard sessions, your body weight will reach a natural homeostasis over time.
2. Weigh yourself at most once per month. There are too many things that can result in weight fluctuations that have nothing to do with body fat.
3. Ignore body fat measurements from scales. They are useless, especially for elite athletes.
4. NEVER compare your weight or physique to other athletes. Some people have a genetic predisposition for extremely low body fat/thinness. One of my collegiate teammates was close to 6 feet and 140 lbs. He was very thin, but ate well, drank beer and didn't ever obsess about his weight. He was (and is) also a very fast runner.

These apply to elite athletes who are usually training greater than 8-10 hours per week and burning 4k plus calories per day. Obviously if you are only training 3 times a week and carrying a spare tire on your belly, caloric restriction and dieting may be reasonable.

Big fluctuations are the reason it makes sense to weigh yourself more regularly! Assuming you don't have a history of disordered eating weighing yourself everyday is fine. Just don't overreact to one of two days measurement and look at the overall trends and averages.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I’m not fast at all but body wise, I’m pretty much like you.

I think some people can weigh themselves everyday without reacting to it inappropriately. I consider myself in general a very rational person, but if I weighed myself everyday, I would feel guilty about eating the burger and fries I had yesterday if my weight was up a few lbs. This is of course not rational, but it still happens. I do see your point about 1 data point for month being faulty. I should clarify that I will weigh myself for several days in a row every morning before eating anything and take the average to get an accurate measurement of my true weight. But then I will wait around a month before doing it again.

But what is the purpose of "weighing yourself everyday/more regularly"? If you wish to maintain an overview of "overall [aka long term] trends and averages" then a monthly weigh in will be quite sufficient (with your caveat of 'no history of disordered eating'). Weighing yourself (or encouraging others to weigh themselves) "everyday (sic)" seems itself 'disordered'. Ask yourself 'for what purpose/benefit? And eat well.

Because the more data points you have, the more apparent the trend will be. If you're only weighing monthly and your monthly weigh-in happens to be on an outlier day, that could give you a false idea of how your weight is trending. Having more data points insulates you from that.

Monthly weighing could be sufficient for seeing trends over the course of years, but if you're looking at say, 6 months, that's not very many data points along the way.

This is what I was getting at that I had never considered as a male. You're built in a way to have more body fat storage in a few different areas. It's a strength in many ways (presumed that lower body storage for fat in women lowers heart risk compared to men carrying it mostly around their trunk). Estrogen levels has some link with fat storage as well (so maybe the liposuction thought experience is both useless and foolish as it might just come back based on body hormones regardless of calories).

I had ever thought of any of these issues until Skye spoke up about it, so it's a first for me to think through what a desperate person would consider. I'm surprised her coach seems to be so ignorant of the reality of the female body considering he's coaching them. Just because Lucy Charles is chiseled bean stalk doesn't mean most women can get shaped that way. It would be like Blumenfelt looking at Frodeno, thinking, "what gives, I can't get my body to look like his no matter how hard I work." But with women it's even more "noticeable" as most tend to have a natural, healthy higher body fat percentage.

Let's say you weigh yourself on the first day of each month.

Month 1 - 170lbs
Month 2 - 174lbs

Have you gained weight? Perhaps the first weigh in was just a low fluctuation and the second just a higher? You are going to have to wait another month to find out. If your goal is to lose weight (which in of itself is likely a healthy goal for many) do you perhaps wrongly intervene and cut calories? Or wait another month by which time you could be up 8lbs?

On the other hand weighing more regularly could show a that on average you were 172lbs over the month, and the monthly measurements just happens to be at a natural dip and peak. Or it might show you were consistently going up each week.

Once a month is just not enough data points for something so easy to measure. All it takes is a couple of days sickness/injury or a few days indulgence or travel where you might not be eating so good to massively skew the numbers.

Like I said if you have disordered eating maybe weighing yourself regularly is not a good thing. For many of us it's just another metric to watch. If I said I check my HRV each morning would you suggest that is "disordered"? It's not like the number I see on a scale in the morning has any effect on what I eat that day, like I said it's about longer term trends.

For health I've heard plenty of people say things along the lines of "the weight just snuck up on me". Their 1-2lbs per week is 20lbs after a few months. Regular weighing might have gave them an indication their was a problem a little earlier.

If you're eating healthy and active you don't need these data points. It will take care of itself.

Pounding pizzas and cakes won't get you to your optimized body composition. It's simple really and doesn't require an eating disorder with daily weigh ins to get you there.

So he dropped her mid season? Did she get a team trucker cap?

Well, we're talking about tracking your weight, so yeah, weighing yourself is kind of an important part of that. Of course you can just eat well, be active, and let the chips fall where they may. But for someone who is interested in using data to track their progress, that approach is not going to work. And if you're going to use data, the more data you have, the clearer the picture becomes.

And I feel like this shouldn't need to be said, but weighing yourself every day doesn't mean you have an eating disorder.

At eating disorder is a way of controlling things. Instituting more control with daily weigh ins is disordered af.

As other posters have said, your weight naturally fluctuates daily. Daily weigh ins are disordered thinking which leads to disordered behaviors.

Furthermore, eating healthy and letting it take care of itself is perfectly good for a normal person, or someone trying to finish an IM, or most AG's. I can't imagine any professional endurance athlete not weighing themself on a regular basis. Not just to lose weight but to confirm all sorts of fueling and hydration questions. Losing/gaining 5lbs in a week is a red flag worth investigating and making a training/fueling intervention.

Again, substitute the word weight with power, speed, heart rate, and this whole thread looks kinda silly. "If you're cycling a lot you don't need to look at power, it will take care of itself".

Even worse, she didn't get to keep the bike chain and aero bars he left at her house.

Absolutely. That is exactly the point. This thread isn't about my next door neighbor trying to maintain their weight, or go couch-to-5K, it's about weight in relation to elite athletes.

It's all about what you do with the data. If you're weighing yourself every day and letting the number on the scale determine your mood, or sense of self-worth, then yeah, that's disordered and you need to stop. But there's a perfectly legitimate use for all that data...hop on the scale, record the number (or probably let an app capture the number). Look at the numbers (or graph, or whatever your preferred format) weekly or monthly to see what the trend looks like. That's just gathering and analyzing data, which elite athletes should be doing if they want to maximize their performance. (ALL sorts of data -- weight is just one example that may be of interest to some athletes).

I got the impression, some of the reason it took Skye to dump him was ignorance and education on her own part.

She mentioned how he told her to lose weight, but never did a dexa scan to see if there was any weight to lose. Yet later she says she's now working with a nutritionist to dial things in. So either Watt was stopping her from doing this stuff, she didn't know, or neither cared enough to pursue it.

So I suspect for much of those 4 years, she was improving enough to not begin to question the advise, and it was only as she was starting to really develop in the sport that she knew enough to question his advise.

One question is - are you refueling and rehydrating enough after hard sessions? Our training staff used to have us weigh in and weigh out before and after each practice during our training camps (soccer) to make sure we were replacing what we were sweating out and burning off during our sessions. So that's getting weighed four times a day. If we lost more than a certain % of our starting body weight we had to sit out. Just one example of how gathering ongoing weight data might be useful (and hopefully it's obvious here why only weighing once a week or once a month would not have helped us in this instance).

Weight is *one* thing an athlete may focus on. Certainly not everyone. For some (probably many at the elite level), their weight does work itself out without an extra effort beyond eating well. But if an athlete or their coach has identified weight as an area where they can improve, how could they possibly target that area in a serious way without taking regular weight measurements? We don't blink when athletes do aero testing (even though they're already pretty aero) to find gains, or do a big bike block to increase FTP (even though they're already crazy strong), or work with a swim coach to refine their technique (even though they're already a fish). They identify an area to improve, set a goal, make a plan to reach it, then gather data along the way to measure progress. The same can be done with weight *if* that's an area they have identified they want to work on.

But back to the original point of all this, no one should be shamed / abused into making any changes to themselves or their body.