Making weight during Ramadan

Last Ramadan an Olympic champion came to me about his weight, and then said we would start when the month was over. That is the normal answer and I understand it. It also means the 30 days where the most can go wrong are the 30 days nobody plans.

Everything written about making weight assumes you step off the scale and start drinking. For an athlete who is fasting, take that assumption away and most of the standard protocol stops being useful.

Whether to fast at all, and whether an exemption applies, is a question for the athlete and for whoever advises him on his faith. It is not one I answer.

What follows is the physiology and the scheduling once that decision is made.

What the timing actually does

Read the middle row, because that is the one worth fighting for. A weigh-in scheduled after sunset removes the entire problem. The fast is over, fluid and food are available, and the night runs the way it would in any other month.

The third row is the one to avoid entirely. A morning weigh-in during the fast means competing dehydrated with no legitimate route to fix it, and that is a combination I would not put an athlete into.

The general case for same-day formats is already unforgiving, and it is set out in same-day weigh-ins.

So the cut has to be smaller, and start earlier

If the refill cannot be run properly, the only safe answer is not to need much of one.

That pushes the whole job upstream into the weeks before, where weight comes off through food rather than through water. Nutrition moves body mass at roughly 0.5 to 1 percent a week, so the arithmetic is entirely a calendar question: 8 weeks of that removes what 2 hours in a bath removes, and leaves an athlete who can compete.

Which is precisely why waiting until the month ends is the expensive decision. The plan that would let a fighter get through the month intact is the plan that has to be built before the month starts.

What the eating window does to the descent

Two meals instead of five changes how a gradual reduction feels, and it changes what goes wrong.

The real risk runs the other way from overeating at iftar. Intake collapses without anybody deciding to reduce it: a rushed suhoor, a heavy iftar that sits badly, training in between, and a daily total well below what the work costs. That is low energy availability arriving by accident, and it takes strength and recovery with it.

What to protect and how to measure it is in training through Ramadan.

Protein is the thing to defend, because losing weight and losing tissue look identical on a scale and are not the same event.

What the combat sports research shows

Most of what is published on Ramadan and sport comes from football. The combat sports work is thinner and comes largely from judo, which makes it more relevant here than the volume of it suggests.

The findings are mixed and lean negative. Studies report reductions in jump performance, in repeated-effort capacity, in sport-specific judo tests, and sometimes in aerobic capacity. Some elite judoka hold their measures across the month while maintaining their usual training loads.

Most do not.

The practical patterns among fighters differ and all three are legitimate choices. Some move training to the evening after iftar and continue as normal. Some avoid competing during the month entirely.

Some prepare and compete through it deliberately.

What the research does not support is the fourth option, which is to keep the same camp, the same cut and the same schedule and expect the month to make no difference.

Four things that are off the table this month

• Water loading. It depends on drinking large volumes across several days, which is not available here, and the protocol has no meaning applied to two windows. The evidence for it in normal conditions is in water loading.
• Sauna or bath work during daylight hours. Sweating on top of a fast that still has hours to run is a different risk from sweating with a bottle in your hand.
• Anything pharmacological to move fluid. Diuretics are prohibited at all times and this month does not create an exception.
• A late decision to drop a division. The month has no slack in it for that.

If the weigh-in falls in daylight anyway

Sometimes nothing is negotiable. The rules of the promotion set the time, the athlete is fasting, and the fight is signed.

In that case the whole plan becomes conservative. Arrive at the scale close to your natural weight rather than at the edge of it. Take the last of the descent through food in the preceding weeks. Treat the hours between the scale and sunset as part of the competition rather than as a gap, and have everything ready to run properly the moment the fast ends, in the order set out in rehydration after the weigh-in.

And know the ceiling you are working against. Where a rehydration clause applies, there may also be a second scale in the morning, which is a separate constraint again and does not care what month it is.

Why this gets left until April

Almost every athlete I have met treats the month as a pause: get through it, start properly afterwards. It is an understandable instinct and it is backwards.

Thirty days of unplanned intake in the middle of a competitive year is a phase in its own right, and the one most likely to leave a fighter lighter, weaker and slower than he was in February. The month needs to be planned like any other block, and that planning is the part that has to happen before it starts.

A weigh-in inside Great Lent poses a different question again, because the timing is untouched and the composition is not. The two sit side by side in fasting and combat sport.