Establishing a "healthy" body weight

[Entity]

After three long years of being away from my favorite competitive sport to play (Ultimate Frisbee), I've started training seriously to try to get back on the field again. A few years back inadequate training led to a series of hamstring and knee injuries mostly sustained while playing in tournaments (playing 4-8 hours per day for 3 days sustained takes a toll quickly). Now I'm trying (link to running thread) to get back into top shape. I'm concerned about the overall health of my knees as degenerative disorders may run in my family (both my dad and my uncle have had multiple knee surgeries, but this may stem from working as loggers for 20+ years of their lives).

As much as I've got general fitness goals, like sustained mile times, distance runs without dying, etc., I'd also like to be the appropriate weight for my body. Unfortunately, I have absolutely no clue what range I should weigh. I'm 6' tall and currently weigh somewhere around 205-210lb. Last I checked it was 205.5, but I don't consider that highly accurate as it wasn't much of a baseline, just a single measurement done in the morning.

Obviously if I go by the BMI scale I'm overweight. I don't dispute that at all. But according to BMI calculations, I can't remember the last time I was actually sub-25. Around 18 years old in high school would be my guess, but that was before my musculature was developed, etc. Even when I was going through extreme physical stress, hiking the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada in 2001, I generally hovered around 188-190lb, and I was burning well over 7000calories/day (our average was ~27mi/day for a 3+month stretch). I've had various "phases" including weightlifting, long distance hiking, etc., and different bodytypes have come along with the training necessary for those.

Basically what I'm trying to do is ensure that I'm not putting my knees and joints through more stress than they should endure -- and that I'm at a very healthy weight -- but I have no real idea how to best establish a healthy baseline. Body Fat Testing via immersion? Guesstimates based on BMI? I'm not looking to spend a ton in the process of finding this out, but since I am aiming to be involved in a very competitive sport and it's going to stress my body a fair amount, I'd like to have an idea of what to shoot for, before the big training begins.

I know, I know. tl;dr. Any comments for anyone who has made it this far?

Rob

[SmileyEH]

If you want to be able to run for a long time it basically comes down to genetics for a lot of things. If you are in great biomechanical shape (very lucky) it won't matter what you do your knees should be fine. However, if you are like most people then you will need to keep your weight down to lessen the pounding on your knees. Honestly though it sounds like you are more interested in overal functional fitness. Running for a long time is a very very small part of that goal. Running a 5 or 10k two or three times a month is really plenty and will have no negative effects to your joints. But again, if you want to run a lot then you either need to be lucky or you will have to lose quite a bit of weight imo.

If your overal goal is Ultimate then I really really encourage you to run very little. www.crossfit.com is without doubt the best sort of training regime for a sport like Ultimate (high sustained power output, sprinting, explosive functional strength, and flexibility). A typical program of lifting a few times a week and running a few times a week is not going to meet those goals at all.

edit: what does your torso look like? Can you grab a handful of skin/fat around your stomach or can you see the outlines of your ab muscles? AFAIK most men's 6-pack begins to become visible around 12-15%bf so if you can't really see it than you have lots of room to drop weight. A well defined 6-pack on most men usually corresponds to a bf <10%. Getting to that is a pretty managable (and very healthy) goal.

[guids]

One of the most common things I hear from people who ask my advice, or what I do to train etc, is "I have a bad..." knee/shoulder/back etc. 99% fo the time, they dont and are over analyzing things, Im of the school, if you arent 100lbs overwieght, if you havent had surgery, suck it up, and workout, done right, rarely will you get hurt.

[SmileyEH]

[ QUOTE ]
One of the most common things I hear from people who ask my advice, or what I do to train etc, is "I have a bad..." knee/shoulder/back etc. 99% fo the time, they dont and are over analyzing things, Im off the school, if you arent 100lbs overwieght, if you havent had surgery, suck it up, and workout, done right, rarely will you get hurt.

[/ QUOTE ]

I pretty much agree with this. For most people a bad something usually means a weak something. Train that joint/muscle (maybe with very low weight and carefully but do it) and almost always you will improve.

[guids]

Also, when I say you wont get hurt...you will pull some muscles eventually, you will have some tendor ligaments, sore muscles, etc, these are part of the game, and make you stronger.

[Entity]

[ QUOTE ]
One of the most common things I hear from people who ask my advice, or what I do to train etc, is "I have a bad..." knee/shoulder/back etc. 99% fo the time, they dont and are over analyzing things, Im of the school, if you arent 100lbs overwieght, if you havent had surgery, suck it up, and workout, done right, rarely will you get hurt.

[/ QUOTE ]

The "bad" knees I've mentioned come from injuries sustained in tournaments, unfortunately to both knees. MCL on one knee (sprain), and LCL on the other. Neither required surgery.

The main thing I'm inquiring about, I guess, is what the best way of actually establishing a target weight is so that I can minimize the long-term strain on my knees. Basically it's my way of saying "I'm going to run, I'm going to play ultimate, and I'd like to minimze the strain." I've just never really had an idea of how to establish where I should be weightwise -- it's much easier to measure fitness.

Just read your edit about grabbing skin around the torso, which I can definitely do. Good baseline for knowing that I need to lose weight for sure.

Complicating matters a bit more is that I'm also a type-1 (insulin-dependent) diabetic, so I've had issues with weight loss due to the lack of production of amylin. Hopefully in the next couple of months I'll start on a synthetic version of that (this is all really an aside but I guess goes into why I have no clue what I actually should weigh, given my bodytype, etc.).

Rob

[gumpzilla]

Yeah, I'd forgotten how brutal ultimate tournaments are. I've been out of shape for a while, and was playing with a summer league team with some of my friends. The final weekend was a 4 game tournament, and I definitely strained my hamstring pretty good trying to play all 4 games. I was pretty much reduced to quarterbacking and non-existent defense by the end.

No idea what to tell you on the weight front.

[skunkworks]

I'm starting to realize that there aren't very many practical and accurate ways for us to gauge body composition/weight/health.

Body weight is misleading because of day-to-day fluctuations. BMI is pretty useless since people have different sized frames. Body fat percentage is notoriously inaccurate unless you use calipers properly or find a place with some fancy equipment. It would be crazy silly to get weekly immersion tests done.

I'd recommend learning how to properly measure yourself with a good, accurate body fat caliper. Since I don't do that, I go with tape measure and the size of my waist (not hips). Or if you don't want to bother with that, just take a look in a full-length mirror with good lighting (or take pictures). To be honest, I think going by appearances is probably better than weighing yourself.

[SmileyEH]

While BMI is pretty much useless I don't think it is due to the differences between different body types (that is accounted for by the ranges), but because of relative fitness/strength level. The test was designed for measuring sedentary people. If you are sedentary or at least close to it (playing an intramural sport once a week doesn't count) and your bmi is outside of the "healthy" range than 9 times out of 10 you are overweight. It doesn't really matter if you have broad shoulders, that simply doesn't account for enough extra muscle mass to mean you are a healthy weight.

[skunkworks]

Smiley, I can show you two guys that are both 5'10", both healthy and not overweight, that weigh 150 and 180. According to BMI, the guy that's 180 is "overweight." I just think that the correlation between height, weight, and body fat is loose enough to make something like BMI pretty useless for a lot of people, possibly even some sedentary people.

But I will concede that BMI will tend to be right about a lot of sedentary overweight people, but it's not really useful or meaningful then, is it? It's sort of like the idea of the food pyramid: it's a very loose and fast guideline to let fat people know that you can't eat meat in buns all day and expect to be healthy.