Making Weight in Amateur Wrestling: A Healthy Approach

Any physical activity requires a certain amount of fuel to be combusted in the body to accomplish various daily life tasks. When it comes to sports this process gets magnified and intensified, due to the desired precision, dexterity, competitive intensity and other surrounding factors, natural as well as artificial, such as the weather, and expectations of the coach, teammates, family, friends and, of course, fans.

Wrestling is not an exception. The age-old practice of making weight or weight management makes it more challenging and physiologically taxing on an athlete’s body. Wrestlers have been using various unhealthy methods, sometimes proving fatal, to simultaneously cut down their natural weight to wrestle in a lower weight category and to find some advantage during competition. Reduced daily calorie intake, training strenuously while wearing plastic suits in hot temperature to increase sweating, saunas, hot boxes, steam rooms, compromised fluid intake, use of laxatives and even sometimes donating one or two units of blood are some prevalent ways wrestlers all around the world use indiscriminately to cut down their weight to lower weight categories. While some studies found it advantageous as far as speed and agility are concerned, others found a loss of strength and endurance along with some serious life-threatening side effects.

Despite so much criticism, the malpractice of rapid and excessive weight cutting was practiced until 2017-18 when the United World Wrestling (UWW) framed new rules of separate weigh-in and matches on two consecutive days for each weight class. Now, to some extent, new weigh-in and competition rules discourage wrestlers from reducing excess weight, and this positive change has led to the overall good health of wrestlers.

Many researches have documented some advantages of a slow weight loss program, such as not more than 8% of total body weight at the pace of not more than 1.5% per week, , and this has ultimately led to some healthy and scientific practices under the supervision of a medical practitioner and a nutritionist.

This presentation will shed light upon various weight loss practices prevalent among wrestlers, their side effects along with nutritional strategies, and exercise regimes to counter those ill effects.