What a wrestler eats in season

A wrestler's day is built around a school timetable he does not control, with training fitted in where it can: lunch at half past eleven, last class at three, practice at four. Everything that goes wrong in a season goes wrong in that gap, and no amount of good food at dinner fixes it.

The school day decides the plan

Look at the clock rather than at the food.

Between school lunch and the first whistle there are four to five hours. A wrestler who eats nothing in that window arrives at the hardest session of his day on food he ate before noon. He is not tired because he is weak. He is tired because the tank was filled at 11 and the session starts at 16.

That pre-practice feed does not have to be complicated: a sandwich, fruit, a carton of milk, in the twenty minutes between the last bell and the warm-up. What it has to be is regular.

The one number that does not move

Protein spreads across the day rather than landing in one evening plate. Position stands from the International Society of Sports Nutrition and from the American College of Sports Medicine put daily protein for exercising people at roughly 1.4 to 2.0 grams per kilogram of body mass, and both say to spread it: about 0.25 grams per kilogram per feed, or 20 to 40 grams, every three to four hours.

For a 65 kg wrestler that is around 16 grams a feed, four or five times a day. Two eggs. A carton of milk and a piece of fruit. A chicken thigh with rice. Cottage cheese before bed. This is the part of the plan that does not change on any day of the week, in or out of season.

Carbohydrate is what moves. It rises around practice and on competition days, and it drops on the days with nothing on the schedule. The mechanism, and how it looks across a week, is in hard days and rest days.

Practice day

The frame for an ordinary Tuesday:

• Breakfast. Oats or eggs on toast, milk, fruit. Both work, and the one he will actually eat at seven in the morning wins.
• School lunch. The biggest carbohydrate feed: rice or pasta or potatoes, meat or fish, something to drink. If the school lunch is inedible, he brings it from home, and that is a decision the family makes in September rather than in December.
• Before practice. A sandwich or a banana and a carton of milk, twenty minutes before the warm-up.
• After practice. Dinner within an hour: protein, carbohydrate, vegetables, fluid.
• Before bed. Cottage cheese or yoghurt if dinner was early.

Two sessions in a day, which happens in preseason, changes one thing: the feed between the sessions stops being optional.

Dual meet day

Under the NFHS rule a dual meet weighs in no more than an hour before it starts, on the same day. The plan is short.

Before the weigh-in, eat and drink lightly, so that the number on the scale is the one certification allows. After the weigh-in, and this is the part most wrestlers get wrong, eat immediately: something that digests fast with fluid alongside it, and a second small feed if the mat is running late. One hour is enough to put fluid and fast carbohydrate back. It is not enough for a burger.

If he wrestles more than one match that evening, the rule is to top up between them rather than to eat a meal. The tournament page has the structure for the gaps, and it holds for a dual just as well.

Saturday tournament

Four or five matches, gaps decided by other people's bouts, a weigh-in no more than two hours before the first session of the day, and a second weigh-in on the morning of the second day. This is its own problem, and it is set out in what to eat between matches at a tournament and in wrestling: the second weigh-in decides it.

The one rule worth repeating here: what goes in the bag on Friday night decides Saturday. Nothing bought at the venue is part of the plan.

Sunday

The day after a tournament is the day the week is repaid: three or four full feeds, fluid, and no scale.

A wrestler who spends Sunday under-eating to make Monday's weigh-in easier starts the new week already behind, and by January that pattern has cost him more matches than any single bad cut.

What changes across the season

• Before certification. Eat normally and get the test done. The number that comes out of it decides everything else, and it is not negotiable afterwards.
• First half of the season. Hold the class. Food follows the training week: more carbohydrate on hard days, less on empty ones, protein steady.
• Postseason. The matches matter more and the recovery windows get shorter. This is the worst time of year to start eating less, and the time of year most wrestlers do.
• Growth. A 15-year-old who grew three inches since August is not the same athlete who certified in November. Growth is the reason a class that fitted in the autumn can stop fitting by February, and the answer is to move up, not to eat less.

For parents

Three things are worth watching, and none of them is the scale.

1. The gap before practice. If nothing is eaten between school lunch and the mat, fix that before anything else.
2. Sunday. If he is not eating properly on the day after a tournament, the week is starting with a debt.
3. The language. Skipping meals, spitting, running in a plastic suit and hiding food are not training methods. If any of them appear, the conversation is with the coach, and six questions to ask your child's coach about weight is the way to have it.

The free minimum weight calculator shows the kind of number certification works with, and high school wrestling weight classes covers the class sets and the rules that sit behind it.

Common questions

What should a high school wrestler eat in a day?

Four or five feeds: breakfast, school lunch, something before practice, dinner after it, and a small protein feed before bed if dinner was early. Protein at every feed, carbohydrate concentrated around practice, fluid across the day.

What do wrestlers eat to lose weight?

That is the wrong question in scholastic wrestling, where the lowest class a wrestler may compete in is set by certification and descent is capped at 1.5 percent of body mass a week. What food can and cannot do inside those rules is in how to cut weight for wrestling.

What should a wrestler eat before a match?

After the weigh-in rather than before it. Something that digests fast, with fluid alongside, as soon as the scale is done, and a small top-up if the mat is running late.

What should a wrestler eat after practice?

A full meal within about an hour: protein, carbohydrate, vegetables and fluid. If dinner is going to be late, something small on the way home and the meal after it.

How much protein does a wrestler need?

Position stands put daily protein for exercising people at roughly 1.4 to 2.0 grams per kilogram of body mass, spread across the day at about 0.25 grams per kilogram per feed. For a 65 kg wrestler that is around 16 grams four or five times a day.

Is the plan different for girls?

The structure is the same. Two things need more attention across a season: iron, and eating enough on the days with the heaviest training. Both are covered in the female fighters section.