Home/Blog/Camp nutrition/Competing abroad
Competing abroad: the clock decides more than the food
The scale runs on local time. Your body does not. A weigh-in at nine in the morning can be three o'clock at night to a fighter who landed the day before, and everything that follows it happens on a clock he has never lived on.
The body clock realigns at roughly a day per time zone going east, and about half that going west.
Eastward is the harder direction because it asks you to shorten the day rather than lengthen it.
That gives you two strategies and they are opposites: arrive early enough to adapt fully, or arrive late enough that you compete before the shift catches you.
The worst option is landing somewhere in between, which is where most fighters land.
And for 2 or 3 days after a long flight the scale is not telling you the truth. Plan around that rather than reacting to it.
This is a different job from running a camp abroad, which is about food and control. That case is in travel and away camps, and if the destination sits well above sea level there is a third set of problems again: altitude.
This one is about a short trip with a weigh-in in it.
The rate, and the direction
The working figure is about one day of adaptation per time zone crossed. It is not symmetrical: flying east requires you to advance your clock, which the body resists, and flying west lets you delay it, which it accepts more easily.
Some work puts westward adaptation at roughly half the rate of eastward.
| Shift | Eastward, full adaptation | Westward, full adaptation |
|---|---|---|
| 3 hours | 3 to 4 days | about 2 days |
| 6 hours | 6 to 9 days | 3 to 4 days |
| 8 hours | 8 to 12 days | 4 to 6 days |
Published estimates vary and individuals differ, so read the ranges as an order of magnitude rather than a schedule. What is not in dispute is the direction of the asymmetry and the fact that a large eastward shift takes more than a week.
Look at the 8-hour row and then at how long you were actually planning to be there. Most fighters travel 2 or 3 days before a competition, which for a long shift is the least useful window available: too late to adapt, too early to still be on home time.
The two strategies
Arrive early and adapt
Land with enough days to cover the shift, and shift deliberately rather than waiting for it to happen. From the moment you board, live on destination time: meals, sleep and light. Eat at local mealtimes even when you are not hungry, and avoid daylight at the hours your body wants to sleep in the new zone.
This is the right choice when the trip is long, when the shift is large, and when there is competition on more than one day.
Arrive late and compete before the shift
The alternative is to land close to the event and stay on home time internally, treating the trip as an extended version of your own day. It works for smaller shifts and for a single bout, and it depends entirely on whether the local schedule lands at a reasonable hour in your body's time.
Take the weigh-in time and the competition time in local hours, and convert both to your home time. If they land somewhere between about eight in the morning and eight at night in your own clock, arriving late is viable. If your bout falls at two in the morning by your body's reckoning, it is not, and you need the days to adapt.
That is a 2-minute calculation and it is available the moment the schedule is published.
What the scale does after a flight
For a day or two after a long flight, body weight is unreliable. Fluid shifts with cabin pressure and immobility, salt intake changes, digestion slows, and the number on the scale reflects all of it rather than anything you did.
Two practical consequences.
- Do not react to the first morning's reading. If it is up a kilogram, that is not fat and it is not a failure. Reacting to it by restricting is how a fighter arrives at the weigh-in in worse shape than he left home.
- Do not use the flight as an unplanned fast. Cabin humidity sits far below what you are used to, which raises losses through breathing and skin. The effect is modest if you drink enough and considerable if you do not, and the temptation on a long flight is to do neither. Arriving already depleted uses up the margin you needed for the cut.
Weigh yourself, write it down, and wait for the trend rather than the number. By the second or third morning it means something again.
The travel day itself
- Drink more than feels necessary, and take salt with it. Fluid without sodium passes through you.
- Eat lightly and familiarly. Airport food in fight week is not the place for a first attempt at anything.
- Carry your own food. It is the only way to know what you are eating on a travel day, and it is the difference between a plan and improvisation.
- Move. Walk the aisle, and do not spend 8 hours in one position 2 days before you compete.
- Set your watch to destination time when you board, and start eating on it.
Food at the other end
The last week before a competition is the worst possible time to meet an unfamiliar cuisine, and the risk is a stomach upset that costs you 3 days, which matters more than anything it does to performance.
Where the water is not reliable, that includes ice, salad rinsed in tap water and anything from a stall you have not assessed. A gut infection in fight week does not merely make you feel bad, it takes fluid and food out of you at the exact point where you have none to spare, and it can end the trip.
The wider version of that argument is in travel and away camps.
The weigh-in on a foreign clock
Everything about the cut and the refill stays the same. What changes is when it happens relative to your body.
If you are still on home time and the weigh-in is early local, you may be running the final stage of a cut during hours your body considers the middle of the night. Sleep will be poor, appetite will be wrong, and thirst will not be a reliable guide. Work from the plan rather than from how you feel, because how you feel is being reported by a system that does not know what time it is.
The refill afterwards is unchanged and matters more, not less. The order and the volumes are in rehydration after the weigh-in.
The part that is not physiology
If you are in a testing pool, your whereabouts have to be updated before you travel, not after you land. The daily testing window moves with the time zone, and it has to be a window in which you are genuinely where you said you would be.
Doping control officers travel, and an athlete who has filed a hotel in one country while sleeping in another is exposed to a filing failure without anybody testing anything.
The rules are in whereabouts and ADAMS.
What I would put on a checklist
- Convert the weigh-in and the bout to your home time before booking the flight.
- Choose one strategy, early or late, and do not land in the middle.
- From boarding, live on destination time if you are adapting, and on home time if you are not. Not a mixture.
- Ignore the first morning on the scale.
- Carry food. Assume nothing about the venue or the hotel.
- Update whereabouts before you fly.
None of that is difficult and all of it is decided before departure. The fighters who travel badly are almost never the ones who ate the wrong thing at the destination. They are the ones who booked a flight without looking at what time the scale would be, in their own head, on the morning it mattered.
Crowds, unfamiliar venues and a hotel week arrive exactly when immune function is lowest, which is the strongest practical case for probiotics in this sport.
The larger effect, though, comes from what you eat and drink once you land.
Two complete sample documents are free to read before you buy anything.
The monthly email is sent through Substack, and its sign-up page opens in a new tab. Subscribing is optional, and every email has a one-click unsubscribe link. See the privacy notice.
Oleksandr Foka is a sports nutritionist with over a decade in professional sport. He wrestled freestyle from the age of 4 until he was 22, competing as a medallist and champion at Ukrainian and international level, and has worked with amateur boxers since 2017, including champions and medallists at world championships. He has worked in world title camps in boxing with Oleksandr Usyk, Oleksandr Gvozdyk, Denys Berinchyk, Vladyslav Sirenko, Murodjon Ahmadaliev, Israil Madrimov, Sergiy Bogachuk, Sabirzhan Akkalykov and Abylaikhan Zhussupov, and with the Kazakhstan national boxing team and with Kazakhstan judo athletes, and currently works on the WTA tour.
Oleksandr Foka — sports nutritionist. Questions: fokaoleksandr@gmail.com
Educational content, not medical treatment. For adults 18+. Nothing here replaces care from a physician, and any medication taken for travel, sleep or stomach upset should be checked against the current Prohibited List before use.