Issue 020

December 2006

Making Weight in the name of Good Journalism

By Hywel Teague

Making weight, weight cutting, drying out, dropping down. Whatever you want to call it, weight cutting is part and parcel of any professional MMA fighter’s life. Pro fighters will often drop enormous amounts of weight for the official weigh-in, and then 24 hours later step in the ring or cage far higher than their ‘fighting’ weight. 

Fighters cut down from their natural walk-around weight to a chosen category so as to gain an advantage over someone who is naturally that size – if I was to cut from 77kg to 70kg for a weigh in and then step into the cage back at my natural weight, I would have quite a size advantage over my opponent. But when everyone cuts weight, the advantage is decided by who can cut the most weight, and it is here that many fighters fall down. 

Cutting weight is hard work – the strict dieting, strenuous exercise routines and mental anguish you go through can all be for nothing if you push your body too far. Performance can suffer greatly if you cut too much, cut in the wrong way or are simply not used to how it feels. Fort this reason, fighters often go through a test weigh-in (done in the relative comfort of their own gym) so as to assess how low they can go without suffering adverse effects. 

A couple of members of the fight team from my gym were doing just this, so in the name of Good Journalism, I decided to join them and report back on how it felt to go through the process. My normal walk around weight is usually about 76kg (168lbs), but that’s not a particularly fit 76kg. Long nights, takeaways and the stress of running an international magazine all conspire to keep me far from peak physical condition. I’m not unfit, still managing to get into the gym a good four or five times a week, but I’m nowhere near the fitness levels of even a part-time fighter. 

Still, I wanted to see if I could get down to as close to the weight category below my natural weight as possible. That would mean I would be aiming for lightweight, which is 70.3kg (155lbs), meaning a drop of 5.5kgs, or roughly 13lbs. The only problem is I had left it a little late to start cutting – I had given myself only four days, in fact. 

How low can you go? 

My schedule would look like this: I would check my weight on the Wednesday, diet as much as possible until Saturday (where upon I would stop taking on all food and fluids until after the weigh in). I would then dehydrate myself to get my weight even lower on Sunday morning with the ‘official’ weigh in at approx 1pm. A training session the following evening would gauge performance levels. 

My weight on the Wednesday was 75.8kg, or 167.1lbs. By altering my diet (smaller, more frequent meals, no starchy carbs, no dairy, lots and lots of water) I started to regret my bright idea of cutting weight. I hate being hungry, and I could see this wasn’t going to be fun. The desire to get in a Chinese takeaway or pop down to Nandos was ever present in my mind. This really wasn’t funny. 

Friday evening I had to address not what was going into my body, but what was coming out. A couple of herbal laxatives were taken with the idea of ‘flushing me out’ and eliminating as much waste from my body as possible. This may seem extreme, but when you’re cutting weight you need to think about these things – your intestines can hold a lot of waste (jokes about me being full of shit were ever present) and it all adds to your body weight. 

Saturday

In my notebook, the first thing I write about how I felt on Saturday was ‘This sucks’. My final meal was eaten at 1.30pm Saturday lunchtime. Normally the cut off point would be earlier, but I snuck a training session in from 12-1 and needed something light post-training. A small chicken salad and a cup of black coffee was the final meal, and I relished it like it was my last ever. 

I complained to one of my trainers that the herbal laxatives, taken at about 6pm on the Friday night, didn’t seem to be doing much. I didn’t think they were working at first, but about halfway through the lunchtime training session I started to feel a rumbling in my stomach. At first I thought it nothing more than hunger (and I was really hungry). An hour later and my arse was running like a tap, and for the next two and a half hours I couldn’t go further than a few moments walk away from a toilet just in case there were any little accidents. I tried to stick to my usual Saturday routine, and while out and about and browsing through shops, there was more than one arse-clenching moment. 

One thing I was surprised at was that the reality of being hungry wasn’t so bad – once my body realised it wasn’t going to get fed, it stopped bugging me. I knew my resolve wasn’t that strong though and foresaw myself cheating, so I took the precaution of putting tape over my kitchen cupboards and my fridge door. Not that it would stop me, but that it would act as a reminder that food or drink was out of the question. I kept myself as busy as possible on Saturday night, doing a little work, watching DVDs and packing my stuff for the next day. 

A large army rucksack was filled with the various layers of clothing I would need to wrap myself in to go through the dehydration process the next day. The list of items I would be wearing for the weigh in included: One thin pair of socks, one thick pair of socks, one pair of underpants, one pair of athletic shorts, one pair of tracksuit bottoms, a skin tight t-shirt, a long sleeved t-shirt, a short sleeved t-shirt, a towel to go around my neck, a hoody, a woolly hat, a non-breathable anorak and a pair of woollen gloves. 

Remembering to stock plenty of water, snacks, and most importantly, my camera and notebook, I set out everything I would need come for the following day and tried to get an early night’s sleep. 

Sunday

The day of the cut – I woke up Sunday morning and for the first time in my life I didn’t go straight to the toilet. Thanks to not eating or drinking anything for close to 24 hours, there was just nothing there to come out. I’d completely gone past the point of hunger at this point, but the thirst was the worst feeling of all. You’ll never know how tempting it was to just open my mouth in the shower and let the water pour down my throat. 

I went to fill my water bottle up ready for straight after the weigh in but I spent a couple of minutes trying to work out why I couldn’t open my fridge. It was still taped up from the night before, and as I was almost embarrassed by my fuzzyheaded actions, I left it and got some from the shop around the corner as I make my way to the gym. I got to the gym at about 11.30am, and though my stomach was as empty as it has ever been, strangely I didn’t feel bothered. Maybe it was the anticipation of the next hour that was keeping my mind off it. 

Within a few minutes of getting into the gym I had layered up with a ridiculous amount of clothes and began working out. Skipping, shadow boxing, pad work and callisthenics were all on the menu as I sweated off those last few pounds. A quick check prior to this had told me that thanks to the dieting, laxatives and starvation, my weight had gone down to 72.6kgs, so that meant I only had a few to drop a few more pounds to reach my target weight. 

Working out wasn’t as difficult as I’d though, but neither was it easy. My legs felt heavy and wooden, my arms the same. My stomach cramped up and I suffered constant stabbing pains. I suffered no dizziness or headaches, but my fine motor skills all but disappeared when it came to tying shoelaces or zipping up my anorak. I felt pretty cheerful throughout the whole process, laughing and joking, but those who joined in the cut with me were all in foul moods. They were snapping at each other and complaining almost the entire time. 

An hour or so of sweating later, I peeled off my dripping clothes and jumped on the scales. They flickered between 70.8 and 71.0kg (156.5lbs). I was slightly disappointed – I was a pound and a half over the weight I had set myself as a target, but still, I consoled myself with the fact I’d dropped almost 11lbs in only four days. If I had kept going for maybe another half an hour or so, I could have made the target weight of 155lbs, but this was a test after all, so we left it there. 

Straight after weighing in I sipped water constantly, avoiding chugging it down, as this would only have resulted in being sick. Some low-glaecemic popcorn and fruit snacks followed, along with pretty much anything I could get my hands on over the next couple of hours. I was surprised that after my enforced fasting I would be dying to eat, but I wasn’t as hungry as you might think. My stomach became very full very quickly, and I relied on smaller snacks and meals to fill me up. 

The training session

Monday evening, almost 30 hours later, and I was back in the gym, this time to be put through a gruelling 15-minute circuit. Designed to simulate the physical demands of a fight, I worked my way through the three five-minute rounds of bagwork, plyometrics, grappling and so on with as much effort as I could muster. My performance wasn’t too bad, although I noticed my mouth, nose and throat felt drier than usual and my legs cramped up almost immediately when I finished the entire circuit. 

Final thoughts

I had been given a taste of the process professionals go through when they fight. It is easy for us as pundits and spectators to ignore the preparation and self-sacrifice that fighters put themselves through prior to stepping into the ring, but after going through only a small portion of what is required to step up, I feel more comfortable than ever on the other side of the fence. Now the weight cut is over and done with, I’m off to go get some chicken, and chocolate, and ice cream, and biscuits, and…