How much weight can you cut (safely)?

Weight making done right... what is your weight making potential.

When it comes to making weight as an athlete there are A LOT of very bad practices that seem to be engrained into the culture of many sports.

In this article, we are going to discuss what practices are available to make weight, when they should be used and the things you need to consider at each stage of the weight making process.

This short term and rapid loss in body mass is primarily (but not only) achieved via losses of body water and here we refer to this as ‘acute’ weight loss.

Acute weight loss can be broken down into 2 broad categories. Active and Passive weight loss.

Active: Using exercise to cause sweating and depletion of muscle glycogen to cause weight loss. This reduction in glycogen (the storage form of carbohydrate in the body in the muscle and liver), is useful because when we deplete glycogen we also ‘liberate’ water that is bound to it.

In theory, this means that water losses in this way are ‘healthier’ as it is (partly at least) water that is bound in the body that is freed up. Rather than passive methods (outlined below) which must remove water entirely from other compartments of the body including the blood, which can reduce blood pressure and be a serious risk to health.

Of course, glycogen and associated water stores are limited, so at ‘some point’ we will start to reduce fluid from the bodies other stores especially if we are sweating heavily and/or we combine this with passive methods to squeeze out more water if needed.

Passive: Methods that do not involve exercise including heat induced sweating and removal of excess waste in the body. Waste removal is namely in the form of reducing the production of faecal matter in the large intestine by reducing fibre intake.

Ultimately, and as way of a disclaimer, this article is not meant as a guide to be blindly followed, it is an educational tool to show athletes and coaches the science behind weight cutting. All weight cutting (especially with body mass losses required of over 5% in the acute phase) should be conducted under experienced and appropriately qualified persons.

You can ‘get away’ with acute losses of up to around 5% of body mass with a same day weigh in. However, when you consider we can only put in ‘around’ 60-90 grams of carbs per hour and 600ml -1 litre of fluid per hour as well, it becomes easy to see why if weigh-ins are close to the start of competition then this needs a well thought out and practiced weight cutting AND refuelling strategy.

Levels of dehydration that become challenging to health are above 6%, beyond this it is important to monitor closely for signs of dehydration such as heart rate, which will increase and become erratic and blood pressure which will drop. 10% losses of water weight can get dangerous, fast, in normal situations.

Interestingly, this is usually when it is all through ‘passive’ dehydration. If we use active forms this is still potentially dangerous, but potentially less so as we are liberating stored water from glycogen… as long as we ‘know’ an athlete is fully hydrated and has fully stocked glycogen stores which may be a problem if an athlete has been dieting or following a low carb approach.

It is possible to accurately monitor hydration status using urine, but this is practically only useful to measure levels of hydration prior to and during early stages of acute losses when the athlete can still urinate, or after to ensure a return to proper hydration status.

Urine colour charts can be useful to assess hydration status, but also comes with its own limitations.

So how do we know how much weight loss relates to percentage changes in body fluid?

Although this isn’t an exact science because we might not just lose water weight (waste and glycogen etc), for passive forms of weight loss alone, then we know that 1 litre of water weighs precisely 1kg.

This makes converting desired weight loss into fluid amounts easy enough, to know how much we approximately need to put back in. This also creates some boundaries for making weight when it comes to both the total amount of body mass we might safely be able to use and what we can ‘get away with’ when it comes to a quick turn-around between weigh-in and competition.

Let’s put some numbers on this, working based on a completely ‘full’, non-glycogen depleted, no waste removed athlete, entering the final week of a weight cut.

Green Zones indicate a high probability weight can be made safely with limited impact on performance and would ‘generally’ be suitable for a same day weigh-ins with only a couple of hours to refuel.

Orange Zone is that weight can be made, but there is going to be an impact on performance and possibly health.  These could be same day weigh-ins if there is several hours between weigh-in and competition, but refuelling and hydration strategies would have to be very well thought out.

Red Zones are going to have a serious short-term impact on performance and there is an increased risk to health, this needs to have appropriate support in place and would only be suitable for a day before weigh-in.

When it comes to refuelling it is important to know what you have taken out, from where and when to determine the correct strategy.

For example, if you are only using passive forms as only 1kg of weight was required, then there would be no need to deplete carbohydrate levels as part of the weight-making strategy. Therefore, the only major consideration would be to replace those fluid losses.

This means that as a general rule, what you take out you need to put back in, with the priority being removal of any risk to health. For example, a heavily depleted athlete who then drops 4kg in ‘pure’ water weight then re-hydration (with fluid & electrolytes) would be the first priority.

Practically speaking, we rarely do things in isolation because, for example, sports drinks/mixes also contain carbohydrate, so we can ‘cheat’ our refuelling by using strategies that allow us to put back in a little bit of everything at the same time as they are not really competing (and often complementing) for uptake in the body.

For example, sodium and electrolytes enhance fluid and carbohydrate uptake. The biggest mistake people often make here is putting in too much, too soon, leading to digestive distress, bloating, and I have even seen vomiting and horrific stomach cramps. Even worse (as if that’s not bad enough) athletes holding excessive water from using ‘silly’, overly stressful, practices in both cutting and refuelling not only to the point of being sluggish & slow but having joints swell up with horrific water retention.

It is important, therefore, that if cutting weight that you follow and appropriate, well documented and monitored procedure, so that you know what to do, when to do it and most importantly when it is not going to be possible.

This is why under our expert guidance from nutritionists that have worked with elite athletes in the art of weight-making; our body composition profiling service for weight cutting athletes will show you exactly what your weight making capabilities are, the methods you should favour to make weight and how to refuel correctly.

If you need help with understanding your body-composition and your next weight-cut, please don’t hesitate to get in touch today here.