Nicotine pouches in combat sports: not banned, still the wrong tool

A tin of nicotine pouches is not on the Prohibited List, and that is the first thing every fighter learns about them. The second thing usually takes longer.

I am not writing this to moralise about a habit. I am writing it because the specific reason fighters give me for using them is the specific reason they undermine a camp.

The rule, and the word that matters

Nicotine sits on WADA's Monitoring Programme, monitored for in-competition use as a stimulant, and it is not prohibited.

Monitoring means the agency is collecting data on how widely and how heavily a substance is used, and that data informs whether the status should change later.

The obvious comparison is caffeine, and the history needs getting the right way round. Caffeine was on the Prohibited List with a threshold until 2004, was removed from it, and has sat on the Monitoring Programme since. So the precedent runs toward relaxation rather than restriction. What it demonstrates is simply that these categories move, on an annual cycle, and that a substance's status is a description of this year.

Separately, WADA governs anti-doping and nothing else. A promotion, a federation, a league or a venue can impose its own rules on product use, and those are not the same rules.

Permitted under the Code does not tell you permitted where you are fighting.

How common it actually is

The numbers surprised me, and I have been in changing rooms for 20 years.

A joint study by the Professional Footballers' Association and Loughborough University found 18 percent of male and 22 percent of female professional footballers in the United Kingdom currently using snus or nicotine pouches, with lifetime use at around 42 and 39 percent respectively.

That study is self-reported. Laboratory monitoring data is a separate stream and gives a wider range, with positivity in football reported anywhere from roughly a fifth to substantially higher depending on the year and the sample.

The two numbers measure different things and should not be read as one.

Prevalence is described as broadly comparable in ice hockey and rugby, and lower in endurance sport for reasons that are not difficult to work out.

Combat sports appear in the same conversations, but with far less formal data behind them than football now has.

One distinction worth holding, because it makes survey figures confusing. Snus contains tobacco. Nicotine pouches do not. Locker-room language blurs the two, and they are not the same product.

Why fighters specifically use them

The reasons athletes give, across the research, are relaxation, fitting in with teammates, focus, pain management, quitting cigarettes, and appetite suppression.

In a weight-class sport, that last one moves to the front of the queue.

A pouch kills hunger for an hour or two, costs no calories, and can be used in a car or a corridor without anybody noticing. For a fighter 3 kilograms over with 9 days left, the appeal is obvious and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Which brings us to the actual problem.

The reason to use it is the reason not to

The published work on snus in professional sport states the mechanism plainly: nicotine increases metabolic energy expenditure, reduces body weight and suppresses appetite, and may therefore compromise the nutritional support required for performance and recovery.

Read that as a fighter rather than as a reader.

Everything on this site about making weight rests on one idea. You lose weight through a planned deficit while protecting the training and the tissue. The enemy of that plan is not hunger.

The enemy is under-fuelling you did not intend and cannot see.

What a pouch removes is the signal telling you that you need energy, while the need itself stays.

So a fighter using nicotine to get through a camp is not managing an appetite. He is disabling the instrument he uses to know whether the plan is working, at the point in the process where that instrument matters most.

There is a sleep problem underneath it as well. Chronic use has been linked with impaired sleep, and impaired sleep degrades recovery independently of everything else in the plan.

The one that worries me most

Among the health risks catalogued for snus use in athletes, alongside gum disease, impaired cardiovascular function and metabolic syndrome, is heat intolerance.

And there is now a mechanism attached to it rather than just a listing. Work published in 2024 reports that nicotine reduces skin blood flow and increases thermal strain during exercise in the heat.

Skin blood flow is how you shed heat. Reduce it and the same session runs hotter.

Now put that next to what a fighter does in the final week. Sauna work. Hot baths. Sessions in layers. Deliberate hyperthermia in a dehydrated body, which is already the highest-risk practice in this sport before anything is added to it.

I have not seen this quantified in combat athletes during a cut, and I am not going to invent a figure. But of everything on this page, it is the item I would want a fighter thinking about before the last week rather than during it.

What the performance evidence shows

Since somebody will ask whether it works at all.

The short-term cognitive effects appear real but modest: alertness, attention, reaction time. WADA's own research programme has funded work on snus in aerobic and high-intensity exercise, precisely because the question was open.

What the literature does not establish is a consistent, reliable athletic performance benefit. The effects that appear are cognitive and mild, and they arrive attached to a dependence risk, a sleep cost, a thermoregulatory cost and the nutritional problem above.

The part nobody plans for

Nicotine is addictive. That sentence is unremarkable until you attach it to a fight camp.

A dependent athlete who runs out during fight week, or who decides to stop because somebody told him to, is now in withdrawal across the most stressful 7 days of his year.

Irritability, poor concentration, disrupted sleep, and increased appetite arriving exactly when appetite was the thing being suppressed.

If a fighter wants to stop, the week of a fight is the worst possible time to do it. That is a conversation for the start of a camp or the off-season, with support, and with a doctor rather than a corner man.

A smaller thing that still matters

Periodontal disease and gum recession are established risks of these products.

For a fighter that is not only a dental problem. A mouthguard sits against those gums for every round of every session, and receding gums change how it fits and how comfortable it is to wear properly.

A fighter who stops wearing a mouthguard correctly has created a much larger problem than the one he started with.

What I tell fighters

• Do not use it as a weight tool. It hides the deficit rather than managing it, and every article on this site about making weight properly is an argument against needing it.
• If you already use it, say so when we build the plan. I would rather know that hunger signals are being masked than build around numbers that mean something different from how they read.
• Check your promotion's and your federation's own rules, because they are separate from the Code.
• Watch the annual list announcement. Monitored status describes the present, not next season.
• If you want to stop, do it between camps, with help, and not in the week you are trying to make weight.

The honest position

I am not going to tell you a permitted substance is doping, because it is not.

What I will tell you is that the case for it in this sport rests almost entirely on appetite suppression, and appetite suppression is a way of losing weight without a plan. That is the thing this entire site exists to argue against, and arriving in a tin rather than a tub does not change the argument.