Home/Blog/Weight cutting/Short notice
Short notice: can you actually make the weight?
The call comes, somebody has withdrawn, and you have 2 weeks. The question everybody asks is whether you want it. The question that decides everything is whether the arithmetic allows it, and that one has an answer before you reply.
Food removes 0.5 to 1 percent of body mass a week. Two weeks buys you 1 to 2 percent. That is the whole of what preparation can do.
That is why six days was never going to be enough for Max Holloway in 2018: over 180 to 155 for a title fight, by his own account, and the commission stopped him on weigh-in morning. The case study.
On top of that sits the acute water cut, capped at around 5 percent where a full recovery window exists.
Add them and 2 weeks reaches 6 or 7 percent. A fighter sitting at his ordinary off-camp weight is 12 to 15 percent above his own division.
Which means the honest answer is usually no at your own weight, and yes at a catchweight. Ask for the catchweight before you accept.
None of this is about how badly you want the fight. It is a subtraction, it takes 2 minutes, and doing it before you answer the message is the difference between a good decision and 8 weeks of regret.
Do the subtraction first
Three numbers. What you weigh right now, what the contracted weight is, and how many weeks there are. Everything follows.
| Weeks available | Through food | Plus acute | Total reachable |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0.5 - 1% | up to 5% | 5.5 - 6% |
| 2 | 1 - 2% | up to 5% | 6 - 7% |
| 3 | 1.5 - 3% | up to 5% | 6.5 - 8% |
| 4 | 2 - 4% | up to 5% | 7 - 9% |
| 8 | 4 - 8% | up to 5% | 9 - 13% |
Now put your own numbers against it. Take your current weight, subtract the contracted weight, divide by your current weight. That percentage is what the fight is asking for.
Read the last column as a ceiling rather than a plan. It assumes the acute part is fully available to you, which depends on how you arrive, and on a 2-week timeline you are running a deficit and an acute cut at the same time, which costs more than either does inside a full camp.
If your number sits at the top of that column, the honest reading is that it does not fit.
A fighter who competes at 77 kg is sitting at 88 kg between camps, which is normal and is what the published guidance recommends. He is 14 percent above his division.
Two weeks of careful eating removes about 1.3 kg and puts him at 86.7. Getting from there to 77 means taking off 9.7 kg acutely, which is 11 percent of his body mass, against a ceiling of about five.
It is roughly double what the evidence supports, and no amount of discipline changes that. What changes it is the contracted weight.
The acute cap does not stretch
The 5 percent figure is a conservative working ceiling rather than a number a tougher fighter can exceed. Above it the evidence on performance and safety stops supporting the practice, and what you gain in size you lose in the ability to use it.
It also moves with the recovery window you actually have. The published figures grade with time: around 4.4 percent where you have roughly a day to recover, 5.7 percent with two, 6.7 percent with three. Use the number that matches your event rather than the most generous one.
The reasoning is in how much you can actually lose in a week.
And it assumes a recovery window. If the event weighs in on the morning of competition, there is no 5 percent. There is almost nothing, and the arithmetic in the table above gets much harsher.
That case is in same-day weigh-ins.
Ask for the catchweight before you accept
This is the part fighters skip, usually out of a fear that asking looks weak.
A catchweight is a normal, negotiated arrangement, particularly when a bout is being rebuilt at short notice. The other side has a problem: their card has a hole in it. You are the solution to that problem, and that is the moment your position is strongest, not after you have said yes.
- Work out the weight you can genuinely reach using the table above, and add a margin.
- Ask for that number specifically. Not "a bit higher", a figure.
- Ask before agreeing, in writing.
- Check what the contract says about the other fighter missing weight, which happens more often on short notice than at any other time. The full list of terms to check is in what happens if you fail a rehydration clause.
If the answer is no and the number is out of reach, declining is the correct decision rather than a failure of character. A fighter who arrives depleted loses and takes damage doing it, and the opportunity that looked like a break turns into a result on a record that stays there.
If you take it, what the weeks look like
The reduction itself
The rate does not accelerate because the date moved. 0.5 to 1 percent a week is what the body does without cost, and pushing it produces lost muscle rather than faster progress.
The floors hold: carbohydrate not below 3 to 4 grams per kilogram and fat not below 0.5 to 1.0. Protein has a published floor of 1.2 grams per kilogram, but in a deficit on a compressed timeline I would hold it at 1.6 to 2.0 and toward the upper end, because protecting tissue is most of what you are trying to do.
The temptation to breach all three is highest here and the consequences arrive fastest.
The training
It is not your decision alone, and it still needs saying: a compressed camp means less training. Trying to fit 8 weeks of preparation into two while in a deficit is how people arrive injured as well as light.
Fight week
Unchanged. The last week does not compress: the same descent, the same protocol at the scale, the same refill. Everything in rehydration after the weigh-in applies exactly as written, and matters more, because you have less in reserve than you would after a full camp.
Do not reach for anything that promises to speed this up. Short notice is precisely when someone suggests a diuretic, and it is precisely when a fighter is most likely to listen.
They are prohibited at all times, they are one of the most common findings in testing, and the case is in diuretics.
The situation that makes them tempting is the situation in which they end a career.
The reverse situation, where a fight you had is taken away rather than offered, runs on different rules and is covered in when the fight is cancelled.
Why this keeps happening
The fighters who get caught by short notice are almost always the ones sitting at the top of their off-camp range, or above it, when the call comes.
A fighter who holds 12 percent above his division can consider a 3-week fight. One holding 20 percent cannot consider anything at all, and that decision was made months earlier by how he lived between camps.
The band and what it is for are in between fights.
That is the real preparation for a short-notice opportunity. Not a protocol for taking weight off quickly, which does not exist. A weight you were already holding when the phone rang.
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+. Weight cutting carries real risks including dehydration, electrolyte imbalance, impaired cognition and cardiac strain, and those risks rise on a compressed timeline. Nothing here replaces care from a physician.