Helping competitive athletes make weight in an effective and scientific manner is my principle area of practice with my own coaching clients. Currently, my personal roster of clients is about 90% made up of such athletes, so pro MMA fighters, boxers and then also powerlifters and weightlifters.
And for today’s episode I wanted to get into some of considerations for performance nutrition and weight cutting with fighters specifically. Both in terms of nutrition to support training and to allow them to make weight and refuel appropriately.
So what I’m going to get into is really in relation to competitive fighters, training 5-6 days per week, generally with double sessions on most of those, and who have 24 hours or more between the weigh-in and their fight. So please bear in mind that context for anything I may say.
There’s lots of routes we could go down, but for today I just wanted to highlight 6 mistakes that I find to be very common in how many fighters, and even their coaches, apply and think about their nutrition.
6 Mistakes:
1. Under-fuelling (too hypocaloric)
2. Eating too few carbohydrates
3. Thinking Eating “Healthy” Foods matters more for performance than total calorie/macronutrient intake
4. Cutting Weight Too Early
5. Inadequate refuelling strategy after the weigh-in.
6. Not realizing that making weight isn’t the goal. Winning is.
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