Questions fighters actually ask

Short answers, no hedging. Where the honest answer is "it depends", I say what it depends on.

Weight cutting

Most of it should come off over weeks through nutrition, at roughly 0.5–1% of body weight per week . Only a small amount should come off as water at the end. The number itself matters less than the time you gave it: the same 8 kg is routine over 10 weeks and dangerous over 5 days.

It changes everything. With a day-before weigh-in you have around 24 hours to rehydrate and refuel. With a same-day weigh-in that window collapses to a few hours, and whatever you take out you cannot realistically put back. The safe range narrows sharply.

It is a real protocol used at the highest level, and it is also where unsupervised cuts go wrong. Manipulating fluid and sodium intake without supervision risks a dangerous drop in blood sodium. This is not something to copy from a video.

The sauna is what happens when the plan already failed. As a small controlled tool in the final hours it has a place. As the plan, it is how fighters end up in hospital.

Because you probably arrived at that weight differently. Fast weight loss empties glycogen, your stored fuel, and every gram of it carries around 3 grams of water. The scale drops quickly and so does your power.

Fluid with sodium first, in small repeated volumes rather than one big bottle. Carbohydrate next, because it pulls water back into the muscle along with the fuel. Then normal, familiar food. Plain water alone does not rehydrate a dehydrated fighter.

Urine specific gravity, which is how concentrated your urine is, with the threshold usually set at 1.025 or below. It reflects fluid status rather than what you drank an hour ago, which is why drinking heavily on the morning does not reliably fix a poor reading. If you are only mildly down, around 600 ml can move it within about three quarters of an hour. If you have dried yourself out to make a number, it takes hours you do not have.

There is a reference table on this site covering every weigh-in format: when you weigh, what is checked, what tolerance exists and what happens if you miss. It carries a date, and if something in it is out of date for your organisation I would rather you told me so I can correct it.

Severe headache. Dizziness when you stand. Dark urine. Cramps at rest. These signs mean it has stopped being a weight cut.

Camp nutrition

Guidance is given per kilogram of body mass, commonly 40 to 70 kcal per kilogram a day for moderate to high training loads. The figure that matters more is energy availability: what is left after training, per kilogram of fat-free mass. Below 30 is where problems start and 45 is where nothing is being taken out of you. There is a calculator for it.

Intake minus the cost of training, divided by fat-free mass. It is the single measurement that predicts most of what goes wrong in this sport, and almost nobody takes it. Below 30 kcal per kilogram of fat-free mass is where hormones, bone and immunity start paying.

1.6 to 2.0 grams per kilogram of body mass a day, toward the upper end while you are reducing weight. Spread it across four occasions rather than two. That figure does not change with age if you are training, and it goes up rather than down during injury.

Something you have eaten before, mostly carbohydrate, low in fat and fibre, 2 to 3 hours out. If the gap is shorter, make it smaller and more liquid. Nothing new on a hard day and nothing new in fight week.

If it suits you and you are not in the closing weeks of a cut, keep doing it. Fasted work does burn more fat during the session and it does not produce more fat loss, because fat balance is settled across a week rather than inside a session. Where it costs you is any session where intensity is the point, and late in a camp when you are already depleted. More here.

More than you are getting, and it is the first thing surrendered when a schedule tightens. Sleep is where most repair happens, and no supplement substitutes for it. If you are training twice a day on 6 hours, that is the problem rather than your programme.

Yes, and the number is larger than people expect. It impairs the processes that rebuild you after training, and the effect is dose-dependent rather than absolute. In camp the honest answer is that there is no amount that helps and a clear amount that hurts.

Sit at 12 to 15 percent above your division limit, which is published guidance rather than my opinion. That band decides whether you can take a short-notice fight at all, and most fighters have never heard the figure.

The 72 hours afterwards decide how the next camp starts, and almost nobody plans them. Fluid with sodium first, then carbohydrate, then protein, and no training decisions made in the first 2 days.

Supplements

Yes, and it is one of the most common ways clean athletes get sanctioned. The supplement industry is one of the least regulated in the world, and independent testing keeps finding undeclared stimulants and steroids in products whose labels mention neither.

Programmes such as Informed Sport and NSF Certified for Sport test individual batches for prohibited substances. The important word is batch. Certification applies to the specific batch that was tested, and never works as a permanent badge on a brand.

That is the situation for most of the world, because the batch-testing programmes operate from four countries. Importing works if you buy from the certifier's list and check the batch on arrival, because a brand name is not a formulation and certification does not cross borders with it. Where importing is impossible, the practical answer is fewer products, single ingredients over blends, and food wherever it will do the job. Set out properly here.

Pre-workouts and fat burners, consistently. They are the categories where undeclared stimulants show up most often, and they are also the ones fighters buy most casually.

They are sold as the same thing and they are not. Ecdysterone has been on the WADA Monitoring Programme under anabolic agents since 2020, because a controlled human trial suggested it works and a toxicology paper argued it should be prohibited. Turkesterone is not monitored, and two randomised trials found it did nothing. The one with evidence is the one under scrutiny, and that is not a coincidence. The full case is here.

Pooled across 61 trials, body mass rose 0.89 kg and fat-free mass rose 1.39 kg. The lean tissue went up by more than the scale did. It is one of the better-evidenced supplements in sport, and vegetarians tend to respond to it more because they start with lower stores.

It has good evidence behind it at sensible doses, and two things get overlooked. It affects sleep for longer than most people assume, which matters when the fight is at night and you compete again tomorrow. And habitual intake changes the response.

No. Under strict liability, whatever is in your body is your responsibility. "My coach gave it to me" is not a defence anywhere, under any programme.

A loose scoop from someone's gym bag. Powder decanted into an unmarked tub. A coach's own blend. A tub bought abroad with no batch number. If you cannot trace it, you cannot defend it.

Doping tests

It depends on your level and your bout, and you should know before you need the answer. It may be your national anti-doping organisation under the World Anti-Doping Code, a private testing body contracted for the event, or the commission licensing the fight, and sometimes more than one at once. Ask in writing which programmes apply to your bout.

You have the right to a representative with you. Check the seals and equipment before use, and keep the doping control officer in sight throughout. Most important: write every supplement and medication you have taken on the form. An undeclared product cannot later explain where a substance came from.

Check every active ingredient first. Many cold medicines contain pseudoephedrine, which is prohibited in competition above a threshold concentration. Ask your doctor for a permitted alternative rather than guessing.

Intravenous infusions above 100 ml per 12 hours are prohibited as a method regardless of what is in the bag, including vitamin drips and rehydration. Permitted only with a therapeutic use exemption or during a documented hospital admission.

Do not panic and do not speak publicly. Request analysis of the B sample. Engage a lawyer with anti-doping experience immediately. Preserve every container, all packaging, receipts and your supplement log, and discard nothing.

Female athletes

The popular version of this has run well ahead of the evidence. What is well supported is the reverse use: the cycle is a measurement. When it changes during a period of hard training or weight loss, that is information about energy availability, and it is the earliest signal you get.

It changes what you can read from your cycle, which matters because that was your early warning system. The distinction that counts is between preparations that suppress your own hormones and those that do not. It is a medical decision, and the sporting question is a separate one worth asking your doctor.

Not on assumption. Iron deficiency is common in female athletes and it hides as bad training, but it is assessed with a blood test and treated on that basis. Supplementing without knowing your status is guessing with something that can do harm at the other end.

Young athletes and parents

The answer is that he enters the class he already fits, and if he does not fit it, he enters the one above. No international federation publishes a minimum age below which weight may not be manipulated, so that rule has to come from you. There is a page written for parents with the questions worth asking a coach.

Persistent tiredness outside the last day or two, frequent illness, slow recovery from small injuries, mood changes that arrive with the schedule, school slipping, or secrecy about eating. One of those is a week in a teenager's life. Several together, or one that persists, goes to a doctor.

Your situation

Compete at what you weigh. You have no information about yourself yet: you do not know what you lose overnight, how you feel at a lower weight, or how the day runs. The first event is where you collect that, and the information is worth more than 2 kilograms.

For a full camp plan, yes. For a weight cut plan, 4 weeks is my minimum. Under that I will tell you honestly that there is no plan left to build.

It depends which of four situations you are in, and people confuse two of them. If it is off entirely, come back up starting immediately. If it is postponed to a known date, the longer the delay the more completely you should return, which is the opposite of most people's instinct. If it is postponed with no date, treat it as cancelled, because holding a fight weight for a phone call is how months get spent depleted. The four cases are set out here.

Longer than most people plan for. Aerobic capacity falls faster than strength, so you come back feeling strong and gassing early, and that mismatch is where injuries happen. Rebuild first at a maintenance intake, then reduce weight, then start a camp. After 6 months or more out, 3 months before putting a date on anything is a sensible minimum.

Usually not. Most fighters who move up simply stop cutting so hard, because their walk-around weight already sits inside the band for the division above. If you genuinely are below it, a trained athlete adds lean tissue at roughly a quarter to half a percent of body mass a month, which makes it a year of work rather than a camp.

Do the arithmetic first. A serving carries somewhere between 800 and 1,300 kcal, and the daily surplus a trained athlete should be running is 200 to 300. One serving is several times the entire daily figure, and what arrives beyond the surplus becomes fat that has to come off again before the next weigh-in. The full breakdown is here.

Less than you have been told. The advice that older athletes need far more protein comes from research on people who do not train, and it does not transfer to a competitor. What does change is recovery from hard sparring, and one thing nobody mentions: several common blood pressure medications are prohibited at all times. Competing over 35 covers both.

Most of it, and one part more than you would expect. Every published guideline is written per kilogram of body mass, so at 125 kg the absolute figures are enormous and the practical difficulty becomes delivering them rather than knowing them. Heavyweights are frequently the most underfuelled athletes in a gym, because being large is mistaken for being adequately fed. With no upper limit, the target moves from body mass to body composition.

Yes. The obstacle is not protein quality, it is volume: hitting the target from filling food while also getting lighter. And the diet pushes you toward six or seven supplements where an omnivore takes two, which multiplies your contamination exposure. Plant-based fighters sets out both.

Yes, and the answer is to move the training day rather than to fight the fast: main session after the fast ends, technical work in the fasted hours, nothing hard in the middle of the day. Whether you fast is your decision alone. There are pages on training, on competing during the month, and on running a whole squad through it.

No, and it will mislead you. Altitude increases fluid loss, blunts thirst and suppresses appetite, so weight falls for reasons that are not fat and that reverse when you come down. Weight taken at altitude is only comparable to other weight taken at altitude, and I would not run an acute water cut there at all.

It decides more than the food does. The body clock shifts at roughly a day per time zone going east and about half that going west. Either arrive early enough to adapt fully, or arrive close enough to the event to compete on home time. Landing 2 or 3 days before a large shift is the worst of the options.

Then the individual guides are the wrong shape for you. The Squad Handbook is the system: which decisions the staff owns, how to set a lowest permitted weight class without a federation, what to measure weekly, the supplement rule, and seven registers to run it. For work on your actual roster there is a team supplement audit, on the services page .

Partly, and I would rather say which parts. The rate at which food alone moves body mass, the case against dehydration and everything about bone all transfer. What does not transfer is anything involving rehydration after a weigh-in, because the post-race weight rule prevents it, and the standard energy targets, because measured expenditure in racing is much lower. There is a page setting out the differences.

Working with me

No. The services and everything written here are sports nutrition and performance consulting. I do not diagnose or treat medical conditions. Anything medical, including blood results, medication and disordered eating, goes to a doctor.

Yes, and often more so. Amateurs carry more risk than professionals, because nobody is watching the cut and same-day weigh-ins leave no recovery window.

The physiology does not change because you have a job. What changes is what you can execute, so adherence becomes the constraint that binds and everything else comes second to it. Front-load the work into the weeks where your schedule is your own, keep heat work off work days, and choose a division you can hold while working rather than one you could hold if fighting were the job. Written for this properly here.

No. I wrestled freestyle for 18 years at national and international level, and I have worked with amateur boxers since 2017 and with judo athletes on the Kazakhstan programme. Grappling formats and striking formats differ in the rules rather than in the physiology, which is why the material on this site is organised by weigh-in system rather than by sport name.

The one written for your weigh-in system. There is a competition guide for boxing, MMA, judo, wrestling, BJJ, Muay Thai, kickboxing and amateur boxing, because those formats are not variations of one job. Weighing in the day before, every morning, or minutes before your first match are three different problems. They are on the guides page .

You enquire, I confirm I can take the job and by when, then you pay. Nothing upfront before I have looked at your situation.

No. If the timeline is unsafe or the job is outside what I do well, I will say so and refund anything already paid.

On whether professional input is worth it for you specifically, and what to do before paying anybody: do you need a nutritionist.