Cutting weight for wrestling is notorious these days. He’s like the crazy cousin that no one wants to talk about in the family. There have been numerous attempts by wrestling’s governing bodies to stifle the weight cut. There is a good reason for this. When an uninformed person takes it to the extreme, bad things always happen. Wearing a plastic suit in a sauna while exercising is always extremely dangerous and you could die, as some have done in the past. However, there are weight-cutting methods that are effective, necessary, and most importantly, safe.
Losing weight and losing weight are not interchangeable terms.
When you are losing weight it is for a very short period of time and you are removing fluid from your body. It’s not actual weight. The four pounds you lose during the practice are water weight. It is simply the amount of water you sweat out of your body during that time. Sure you’re burning calories, but not enough to warrant a true four-pound weight loss in two hours. You’d have to burn about 14,000 calories when in reality you’re probably burning between 1,000 and 2,000. Those calories will add up over the weeks and eventually turn into true weight loss.
Weight reduction and weight loss complement each other. The better your eating habits, the less weight you will have to reduce. On the other hand, you don’t want to be fully hydrated with your wrestling weight. Cutting a few pounds of water before a game is a good strategy because you have time to get that water back after weigh-ins. Plus, if you’re fully hydrated and drop a few pounds, you’ll still have plenty of water in your body to fight through your six or seven minute match. And as soon as you can, hydrate completely.
Cutting Weight Methods/Tips:
-Go from a full tank of water in your body to half a tank as outlined in the FIGHTER’S DIET (During my senior season, when I was fully hydrated I weighed around 148 pounds. The last seven pounds would be the weight I dropped to make 141. I did it for a very short time before the weigh-in, usually no more than 12 hours).
-Never try to lose more than 5% of your body weight (if you weigh 150, that’s 7.5 lbs) and after the weigh-in, hydrate yourself.
-With good eating habits you will never have to reduce more than 5% of your body weight.
-Always stay hydrated as long as you can.
-Never wear a plastic suit/rubber suit/sunsuit, sweatsuits (except during warm up) or use a sauna (I recommend shorts, a compression shirt [Under Armour-type material] and a t-shirt that you constantly change once it’s sweaty. I usually did about four or five at each practice.
-If the weigh-in is the next morning, go to bed with an extra pound and your body should “float” the weight while you sleep. I would usually work out until I gained weight that night and then drink a pound of water before bed to help me sleep.
-I would not recommend losing weight or even losing weight to fight until the last year of high school. And even then it’s not really necessary. If you only cared about wrestling during high school and not how much weight you had to put on, you’d be much better off when it came time for college wrestling and beyond.
The truth is that losing weight has always been and always will be a part of wrestling.
It is an aspect of the sport that you have to learn to master, especially at the highest levels. The weight reduction principles I explained above are a great starting point.
