Skin folds have been a hot topic this week after the AFL formally banned clubs from conducting the test that measures them on any athlete in its talent pathways.

This follows the sport’s decision to prevent draft prospects from being subjected to skin fold testing back in 2021 and removing player weights from any official AFL publication or website in January.

Body weights will now only be measured by qualified professionals in a safe and private setting, while women and girls in the system can opt out of being weighed entirely.

The ban on skin fold testing has been met with outrage, mostly from male figures within the media, who argue there is more to it than just “body shaming”. Some critics have even gone as far to suggest the sport had gone “soft” and “the world had gone mad”.

Former AFL premiership-winning coach Paul Roos was among those, telling the ABC’s new AFL Daily podcast that if players were worried about skin folds, they should “go and find another job”.

“Let’s put it into perspective,” Roos said.

“How many young 18-year-olds are going to line up if you put out a job advertisement that said: Play AFL football, free massage, free weight room, listing all the perks … but you have to get skin folds, and we’ll pay you an annual salary of $350,000 a year?”

“The line would be 10 miles long, so this is just farcical … they’re such a minor thing, to take them away seems ludicrous … There’s plenty more pressures in footy than worrying about that.”

The discussion has centred largely around how this may impact the development of aspiring male AFL stars, failing to prepare them for the big time, but a broader look shows other Australian sports have also been phasing out the test for a while.

For instance, in a female-dominated sport like netball, it hasn’t been recommended for anyone in the pathways under the age of 18 for at least five years.

Once netballers reach adulthood in the elite system, they still only partake in skin fold testing by choice – generally before the pre-season, during, and after the season – to check whether they have actually been under-fuelling and if they need to eat more.

At a national level, the Diamonds started to use skin fold testing less and less during former head coach Lisa Alexander’s tenure (2011-2020). This has continued under Stacey Marinkovich.

Instead, the world number one ranked team prefer to use DXA body composition data, a less invasive dual X-ray method that has a more accurate reading of body fat, bone density and lean muscle mass.

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The DXA machine does have its limitations.

It is more expensive and not as portable as the caliper instrument used for skin fold testing, which is why some Super Netball clubs still use the old-school method. In Victoria, you also need a doctor’s referral to go ahead with a DXA scan due to the small dose of radiation.

If players do opt-in for a skin fold test, then it is vital they receive education each year about what exactly they’re measuring and how it could be considered beneficial for their progress. These results are always kept strictly confidential.

Netball Australia’s national nutrition lead and Diamonds tour manager Kerry Leech has been linked to the sport since 1995 and said the national set-up had a good approach to this testing even back then.

Currently, Leech juggles her longstanding commitments in netball with her work in golf at the Queensland Academy of Sport, as well as her practice Eat Smart Nutrition.

Her career as a fellow sports dietitian (SDA) has spanned more than 30 years and involved consultations with a variety of elite sporting bodies, such as Queensland Cricket, Golf Australia, the Brisbane Roar, and the Brisbane Broncos.

Leech believes a widespread decline in skin fold testing began in roughly 2019 when the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) published two detailed resources alongside the National Eating Disorders Collaboration.

These triggered sports to review and assess whether the process was doing more harm than good.

The first is the AIS position statement on disordered eating in high-performance sports. The second is a set of considerations for body composition assessments that were developed after a train-the-trainer approach was taken to educate staff at sporting organisations.

Both have shaped Netball Australia’s policy.

“There is very little evidence in research papers that correlates exact skin fold numbers to performance,” Leech told ABC Sport.

“Every sport is approaching it differently, but they’re all working towards common goals with a focus on health and prevention of eating disorders without taking the performance lens off.

“When we talk about the AFL pathways, generally at that age an athlete is still growing and developing, and so many of those young male athletes will still not be in fully mature bodies.

“The actual application of the skin fold test, or anthropometry surface as we call it, is probably not as applicable during that time for that reason, because they’re still in a period of growth.”

Leech expects skin fold testing will still play a role for professional footy players at AFL clubs but hopes it is being conducted with care by those properly trained.

In an ideal world, Leech says they would receive education beforehand, have the ability to revoke their consent at any point, have it conducted by a trusted ISAK accredited anthropologist in a private setting and at a time where a battery of physical and strength measurements were also being done.

Then the overall trends – up or down – can be noted in correlation with other results to give the full picture of how an athlete is tracking.

This way, there is more focus on a range than on a specific number, taking into consideration that skin fold testing can be inaccurate and that bodies fluctuate day to day, week to week, particularly for women and girls during menstruation.

Asked for her personal opinion on whether it was an outdated method, Leech said skin fold tests are just one metric that really shouldn’t be focused on in isolation as it can lead to psychological trauma for athletes if handled incorrectly.

“From the male high-performance programs that I’ve worked with extensively, the way skin folds are done and the way those results have been treated do cause distress,” Leech said.

“There are many stories in sport where skin fold tests are done at a standard time within a club and that athlete knows it’s coming up so therefore starves themselves before it … That’s not going to be performance enhancing for anybody.

“The measurer should too be able to recommend certain athletes opt out if they think it is something they might struggle with, for their own best interests, because athletes are really good at looking at numbers and drawing conclusions from them, so we have to be considerate of that.

“It’s important you do the least harm you possibly can.”

As mentioned, Lisa Alexander was at the helm around the same time skin fold testing became less and less of a priority for the Diamonds.

Commenting on the response to the AFL’s decision to ban the test, Alexander told ABC Sport she couldn’t understand the outrage – particularly knowing this was just for the pathways – as in her lived experience, she had never once made the link between skin folds and performance.

During her playing years throughout the 80s and 90s in Victoria’s state league, at nationals and in the Australian squad, she was never asked to do one.

The other reason is she knew the pressures of the test could lead to issues with disordered eating.

“It wasn’t of interest to me at a Diamonds level as I’d already had experience with athletes that had eating disorders before I took on that role,” she said.

“As a coach, you haven’t got the expertise to deal with that, so I did not educate people on nutrition, diets, or anything relating to that, and I certainly didn’t need to know their skin fold test results because that was between the dietitian and the athlete.

“Food is part of performance, sure, but we were concerned about it from a fuelling and recovery sense, and more worried about players under fuelling.

“We didn’t necessarily need skin fold testing to determine that though … If a player had decided not to fuel themselves properly, then it would show up in their performance and they’d be unable to last a full game.”

Netball has also never published player weights, instead publicising heights.

This was important, because over the past couple of decades, as coverage of women’s sports, netball and the Diamonds grew, player priorities could be warped by the extra attention.

“We were trying to sell the sport and the girls had a thing about looking good in photos,” Alexander said.

“That was a powerful motivator to restrict their eating and so we had to use an all-encompassing approach from staff to help them understand and make it clear that we needed them to be strong and powerful.”