The fight is not in the weight cut

Now i think we can all agree that combat sport in itself is already hard enough as it is from the physical demands to the hours spent on the mats improving your skill set, so why would we wan’t our weight cut do be unnecessarily difficult ?

When we go through the process of making weight for a fight, the body is put under stress during this acute weight loss especially if there is a lot of weight to lose. This is why when i work with fighters we aim to stay within 10% of fight weight for example if we fight at 70kg then we would want to stay at around 77kg outside of fight camp.

With this in mind it’s important that fighters maintain good nutritional habits year round so that we don’t make our weight cuts harder than they need to be and also make sure that performance is kept up.

Making weight for a fight isn’t the same as general fat loss, we are trying to reduce weight purely to make the given weight cap the fighter has and after we make weight we rehydrate and refuel to that they can perform at their best.

As we aren’t focusing just on fat loss during a weight cut we can use other strategies to help make weight without reducing our calorie intake unnecessarily such as

• Water loading and manipulation

• Reducing stored glycogen through carbohydrate manipulation

• Reducing fibre content ( fibre causes our body to hold water in the digestive system)

• Controlled passive sweating ( sauna, bathing, infrared sleeping bag or towel

If we are smart about the way we use these methods we can safely and effectively make weight without putting our body under unnecessary stress so that we can then refuel and rehydrate correctly.

Remember our goal is to make weight easily, not suffer through it.