At 13, swimmer Cate Campbell did a 'skinfold' test. Her relationship with her body was never the same.

For Olympic swimmer Cate Campbell, her relationship with her body drastically changed from the age of 13. And it all began with a 'skinfold' test. 

Skinfold tests aren't as common as they used to be, but are often still used in elite sport contexts or gym settings. The test is used to calculate a person's body fat composition. A device called a caliper is used to pinch different parts of the body to estimate the amount of body fat.

"They strip you down to your undies and there's a couple of parts on your body where they get giant metal tweezer and pinch the fat that they can grasp in that tweezer and then measure it. They add up all the results and the final number is your total skinfold," Campbell explained on Mamamia's podcast Here If You Need.

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Throughout her career, Campbell has had a number of these tests done, saying they're often "invasive".

"You're in a vulnerable state in your undies, sometimes in front of a lot of people, having giant tweezers pinch any fat they can find on your body," she told her podcast co-host and sports journalist Hayley Willis.

"For a long time, I was comparing my skinfolds as a young girl versus when I was a young woman. Of course, they're going to increase as you become a woman. And there was this competition [among the young female swimmers] about who could have the lowest skinfolds," she recalled.

"I was so self-conscious about that for a long time and it led to me developing disordered eating when I was 18 or 19."

Now as a more senior athlete, Campbell said she has the standing to say no to doing a skinfold test. But for youngsters trying to make their way into the swimming world, it's far harder.

"If you're a young athlete and you're entering a high-performance program, you're not going to have the cognisance to say, 'No this isn't good for me.'"

"For a long time, it's been used as a justification of a performance indicator. You look at your body composition and the idea is skinniest is best. However, that isn't necessarily true for females. We know only six per cent of research conducted on sport looks at females specifically. As we know, men and women are very different," Campbell said.

The conversation came about amid a new study that found body composition has minimal influence on an AFLW player's performance.

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The peer-reviewed research paper argued the move to remove skinfold testing from elite sports teams, like the AFLW, using data from the Eagles AFLW team.

And incredibly, the study found no links between body composition and availability and match performance - meaning skinfold tests are likely now highly redundant. But not only are they no longer relevant from a performance perspective, we've also seen the harm they can cause, as in the case of Cate Campbell. 

"Over the years, there's been better understanding that women carry more fat naturally and it fluctuates throughout our menstrual cycle as well. The damage [skinfold tests] can do psychologically outweighs any potential performance benefit," Campbell said on Here If You Need. 

Now, many AFLW and AFL draft teams have banned skinfold tests, after acknowledging the body-shaming effect of the test.

As Hayley Willis said, it feels redundant to still be using methods like these given how body image conscious we are as a society today.

"I think having someone literally highlight the areas of your body that you have fat on - how is that still allowed and how is that still a thing? This study has found [skinfold tests] have minimal influence at an elite level of women's AFL. It just justifies the ban. But it still happens in a lot of women's sport still."

For help and support for eating disorders, contact the Butterfly Foundation's National Support line and online service on 1800 ED HOPE (1800 33 4673).

Feature Image: Getty.

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