Here you will learn the scientific approach to fuelling performance and cutting weight for MMA, boxing and other combat sports.
This textbook will allow you to know exactly how to:
Whether you’re a nutrition professional or combat sports athlete looking to optimize the weight cutting process, then this is the book for you.
Evidence-based strategies
Real-world case studies
Expert-led breakdowns
Practical tools & guides
Danny Lennon has a master’s degree (MSc.) in nutritional sciences and is the founder of Sigma Nutrition.
Sigma Nutrition is a company that creates evidence-based educational content about nutrition science.
Danny is the long-time host of the popular podcast Sigma Nutrition Radio and is also a respected educator in the field, presenting at conferences all over Europe, the United States, and Australia.
Outside of his nutrition science work, Danny is a blue belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and avid MMA fan.
Jordan Sullivan is a registered sports dietitian and the founder of The Fight Dietitian (TFD).
Jordan’s academic back- ground includes a Masters of Dietetic Studies (MDietSt) and an undergraduate degree in Exercise & Nutrition Science.
Jordan has been the performance dietitian for several years to Israel Adesanya, Alexander Volkanovski, Leon Edwards, Dan Hooker, Kai Kara-France, and many other well-known names.
TFD’s client list includes UFC world champions, Olympians, and many international and national champions, across a range of combat sports.
In this first phase, the focus in on how to implement nutrition, hydration and supplementation strategies that will optimally fuel workouts, maximize recovery and allow fighters to weigh what is the best “walk-around weight” for them.
This phase is one of the most underappreciated, yet most crucial for fighters. The focus on building strong nutrition habits that allow every training session to be entered with the best preparation.
Given the training workload of the modern day MMA athlete, a rock solid diet is vital. Maybe you have a Muay Thai session in the morning and then need to recover in time for a grappling session that evening. This leaves little room for making mistakes with your nutrition if you want to be optimally recovered.
In order to sharpen the skills required to improve performance, fighters need to be able to complete many workouts at their best, over and over again. Doing so with a poor diet just isn’t possible.
So in Making Weight, you will be guided through exactly how to design your day-to-day diet that will fuel your training year-round.
Whilst many fighters may no longer do a typical “fight camp”, this phase simply relates to the time period leading up to a fight when the athlete needs to gradual diet down to bring their weight from their “walk-around weight” down to something closer to competition weight.
In Making Weight, you are shown how to dial in your diet strategy to begin the weight making process, without negatively impacting your performance in the gym.
This will require making sure that you have an appropriate dietary intake to still perform well in all your workouts, despite having to diet on less calories. It will be vital that an appropriate rate of weight loss is set in order to both fuel workouts and to get to a weight that is close enough to make the final acute cut in phase 3 safe and effective.
In this phase, weight has to be acutely cut in order to make competition weight. This is the phase that most people associate with cutting weight. This phase will include manipulating glycogen, electrolyte intake, body water and gut residue, in order to rapidly decrease scale weight.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of poor and dangerous advice typically given on this topic. Either they use unnecessarily low calorie or low carbohydrate diets, or they require too much water weight to be cut in the sauna or hot bath. The result is that fighters may make weight, but at best, they feel depleted in the fight, or at worst, they are hospitalized with severe negative impacts on their health.
Making Weight educates you on the strategies that are likely the safest to use in order to cut weight, whilst ensuring that your weight cut is predictable and smooth. The system walks through how weight can be cut acutely, and how to ensure any weight cut is made as safe as possible.
The additional tools and spreadsheets that you get with this system, allow you to map out how much weight you should cut based on your own context (weight class, competition type, etc.).
Making weight is only one part of an effective weight cut. It’s useless unless you can actually go and perform at your best. You will see an exact blueprint of how one can rehydrate and refuel after the weigh-in in order to be at their best come fight time.
Got Questions? We’ve Got You Covered
This is ideal for combat sport athletes, coaches, nutritionists, or anyone who wants a science-backed approach to weight cuts and fueling strategies — from amateur to elite level.
You can purchase the book in your region via Amazon here.
Or alternatively you can find it on many other online bookstores. For example: Barnes & Noble (US), Blackwell’s (UK), BookTopia (AU & NZ).
This is primarily aimed at combat sports athletes who need to weigh-in before competition.
Specific case studies from MMA, BJJ, and other sports are included.
It can be used for athletes in other combat sports such as boxing, muay Thai, wrestling, submission grappling, judo, tae-kwon do, etc.
The principles of sports nutrition will apply to other sports. And the content related to making weight could also be applied to sports with a weigh-in, such as powerlifting or weightlifting.
That is one of the primary reasons for the existence of this book. We want athletes and coaches to have sufficient knowledge so that they can implement a risk-reduction model in their attempts to make weight, which is a process that carries inherent risks.
