Heavyweights: no weight limit is not no target
Nobody writes for this division, and the reason is straightforward: the entire industry of combat sports nutrition is built around the weight cut, and you do not have one. You still have problems, just different ones, and nobody has bothered to name them.
The target stops being a number on a scale and becomes composition. Extra mass that does nothing for you is paid for in the third round and is not paid back.
Every published guideline is written per kilogram of body mass. At 125 kg the resulting figures are enormous, which turns a dietary question into a logistical one.
Heavyweights are routinely the least supported athletes in a gym, because attention follows the cut and there is no cut to supervise.
And in an absolute division you are solving something else again: lasting a day against people who may be 30 kilograms outside your own weight, with no weight to make at all.
The arithmetic nobody runs for you
Energy requirements for athletes training at moderate to high intensity are commonly given as 40 to 70 kcal per kilogram of body mass a day. Carbohydrate and protein targets are given the same way.
That works fine at 70 kg and produces something quite different at 125.
Carbohydrate guidance is itself a range rather than a single figure: roughly 5 to 7 g per kilogram at moderate training loads and 6 to 10 at higher volume. The column below uses 6 as a mid-range illustration, so read it as one point on a scale rather than as your target.
| Body mass | Energy at 40 to 70 kcal/kg | Carbohydrate at 6 g/kg | Protein at 1.6 to 2.0 g/kg |
|---|---|---|---|
| 95 kg | 3,800 - 6,650 kcal | 570 g | 152 - 190 g |
| 110 kg | 4,400 - 7,700 kcal | 660 g | 176 - 220 g |
| 125 kg | 5,000 - 8,750 kcal | 750 g | 200 - 250 g |
| 140 kg | 5,600 - 9,800 kcal | 840 g | 224 - 280 g |
If a 110 kg athlete took all of it from rice, that is around two and a half kilograms of cooked rice in a day. At 140 kg it is over three.
Nobody eats that, which is the point. The requirement is real and the delivery is the problem, and it is solved by concentrating rather than by trying harder: more meals, denser foods, liquid carbohydrate around sessions.
The consequence I see most often is that heavyweights are the most reliably underfuelled athletes in the room, while looking like the least likely candidates for it. Being large and eating a lot are not the same as eating enough, and the gap is invisible from the outside.
Composition, not mass
With no upper limit there is no number telling you what to weigh, and it is tempting to conclude that weight stops mattering. What stops is the scale's role in measuring it.
Alex Pereira's heavyweight debut in 2026 is the public case: 251 on the scale, no cut, and by his own account no exact number for what he weighed. What the record shows.
Mass helps you when it does something: when it is tissue that generates force, absorbs impact or holds position. Mass that does none of those is carried for the whole contest and paid for in conditioning. The heavyweight who fades late is almost never fading because he is heavy.
He is fading because a share of what he is carrying contributes nothing and costs oxygen anyway.
Which makes the useful question "what is this weight made of, and is it earning its place", ahead of "what should I weigh".
That is a body composition measurement, taken properly and repeated, rather than a morning number.
In one small study of professional MMA athletes, 13 in total, body composition did not differ significantly between the lighter and heavier groups. That is a single finding on a sample too small to settle anything, and I would not build an argument on it alone.
It points the same way as the broader picture, though. Across larger data sets body fat percentages tend to be similar or only modestly higher in the heavier divisions, while absolute lean mass scales with size. Which is to say the heavyweights at the top of the sport are not fatter versions of the lighter athletes, and a competitor carrying a great deal of non-functional mass is not typical of the division, he is at a disadvantage within it.
Why nobody is helping you
Attention in this sport follows the weight cut. The athlete who has to lose 7 kilograms in 8 weeks gets a plan, a schedule and somebody watching the scale.
The athlete with no limit gets told to eat.
I should be clear that this is my observation from a decade of camps rather than something anybody has measured. I am not aware of any published work quantifying how nutritional support is distributed by weight class.
Two consequences follow from it anyway.
- Heavyweights get less nutritional supervision than anybody else despite having the largest absolute requirements in the gym.
- When something goes wrong, it is attributed to conditioning or to genetics, because nobody was measuring intake in the first place.
If you are in this division, the practical move is to run the numbers yourself once and see where you actually sit. The energy availability calculator takes about a minute, and the thresholds it reports against are explained in how many calories does a fighter need in camp.
The absolute division is a different sport
Open weight in judo and jiu-jitsu is a different thing from heavyweight competition: a bracket in which the mass difference between two competitors can be 30 kilograms or more, and the nutritional problem changes accordingly.
What follows is reasoning from general physiology rather than from studies of open-weight brackets specifically, because those do not really exist. Treat it as a working model.
If you are the smaller athlete
You will do more work per exchange, generate more heat, and rely more heavily on positioning than on holding. The fuelling implication is that anaerobic demand is higher for you than for the same match at your own weight, and the gaps between matches matter more.
If you are the larger athlete
The temptation is to rely on the size, which works early and stops working when conditioning runs out. In a bracket rather than a single match, the largest competitor is frequently the one with the least reserve by the semi-final.
Either way the between-match structure is the same one that governs every tournament: small, repeated, familiar. Under 40 minutes, fluid only. Forty to 90, fluid plus 15 to 30 grams of carbohydrate. Over 90, the same plus something small finished an hour out.
The full day is in what to eat between matches at a tournament.
Where a heavyweight does have a weight decision
Two situations, and both are worth naming because people assume they do not apply.
- Divisions with a lower boundary. Cruiserweight in boxing, the 100 kg class in judo, 125 kg in wrestling. Sitting just under a ceiling is still a weight decision, and the arithmetic in which division you belong in applies exactly as written.
- Moving down. A heavyweight considering the division below is doing the reverse of the usual problem, and the rate is the same in both directions: 0.5 to 1 percent of body mass a week through food, as set out in how much you can actually lose in a week. At 120 kg that is a kilogram a week at the upper end, which sounds fast until you notice how much of it can be lean tissue if the protein is not held high.
The medicine cabinet, again
Higher body mass correlates with a higher likelihood of prescribed treatment for blood pressure and for metabolic conditions, and several of the most commonly prescribed blood pressure medications are thiazide diuretics, which are prohibited at all times under the WADA Code as masking agents.
Nobody's health is being judged here. The observation is that this division is disproportionately likely to be carrying a prescription that a tested athlete needs to check, and that a prescribing doctor will not think to ask. The same argument, with the detail, is in competing over 35, and the route where a prohibited medication is genuinely needed is a therapeutic use exemption applied for in advance.
Five things I would put in place
- Measure intake honestly, once, for 10 days to a fortnight. Not as a habit, as a single check on whether the total matches the requirement. Most heavyweights find they are well below it.
- Track composition rather than mass, and repeat it seasonally rather than weekly.
- Solve the volume problem with density and frequency rather than willpower.
- Hold protein at the usual figure per kilogram, which at your size is a large absolute number and is the one most often missed.
- Check every prescription against the Prohibited List.
The division that gets the least and needs the most
There is a reasonable argument that the heavyweight is the athlete with the most to gain from proper nutrition and the least likely to receive it, and that this has been true for as long as the sport has existed.
Not because the problems are hard. Because the absence of a scale to hit removed the one thing that makes coaching staff pay attention, and nothing replaced it.
What replaces it is a measurement you have to ask for.
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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+. Body composition assessment should be carried out by a qualified professional. Never start, stop or change a prescribed medication on the basis of anything written here: that is a conversation with the doctor who prescribed it. Nothing here replaces medical care.