Adil Sajjad reports on a disturbing and confusing sport phenomenon…
If you tuned into the live streams of the weigh-ins prior to what many had billed as our generations equivalent to Ali vs Frazier, you will have noticed the curious amount of time that was spent speculating on the ‘true’ weights of Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao. Though ‘Money’ Mayweather was only believed to have cut around 10lbs, and Pacquiao was actually believed to have put on weight, the fact that the effects of their ‘fighting’ weights were comprehensively explored is testament to how rooted the practice of weight-cutting is in the culture of combat sports.
Historically, fighters have made a routine of dehydrating themselves or undergoing other questionable methods to temporarily stretch down to weight divisions that they wouldn’t be able to compete at. The idea is to agree to a weight class that, through rigorous ‘weight-cutting’, you can show up to the scales at, before rapidly packing back on as much mass as possible in a bid to get one’s nutritional/water levels back to a relatively healthy state. By doing this, one is able to put themselves in a theoretically advantageous position as it gives them the chance to enter with a physical advantage come fight night. However, the extent to which fighters are willing to try and ‘cut’ raises questions over not only the crudeness of some methods but also the medical consequences of such drastic weight-cutting cycles.
It should be noted that, though also a factor in boxing, the value of a physical advantage in mixed martial arts is amplified by the grappling aspect of the sport, where such an advantage could prove vital. The importance of that aspect is compounded once again if referring to purely grappling sports such as variations of wrestling or judo.
Former freestyle wrestler and current coach Piotr Gieral is an eight-time national wrestling champion from Poland. His professional career spanned roughly twenty years of full-time training and competing, among the travails of which are the dreaded weigh-cut: “I weighed when I was a young kid maybe 76-78 kilos, like regular weight.”
He held his hand up to about shoulder height to indicate height: “I would cut that weight to 65 kilograms before the tournament…We would use the sauna a lot! Salt baths, really little food, y’know?”
Gieral argued that beyond the physical strain, it was the mental struggle of pushing yourself to keep sweating off those last pounds that was the hardest to overcome. “There would be days, y’know, where we would have to run for miles as, like, kids and we would be crying the whole time and the coach would have to fight with us. He would shout, ‘Keep going if you want to be champ!’ to get us to lose the weight.”
Though the post-weigh-in process of rehydration and consumption of key nutrients does slightly help re-energise the fighters before the contest, the weight gained is still usually a very small fraction towards what the fighter’s healthy weight likely is. Therefore, the question at this point revolves around whether the athlete in question values long-term cardiovascular health over results or vice versa.
However, according to Dr Jon Gelber, founder of fightmedicine.net, the opposite effect is also possible if such an extreme approach is taken, “Usually about 3% is what is recommended as a safe weight cut. When the Canadian wrestlers did a study and looked at all of their guys, the guys who medalled cut about 1 or 2%. So in fact, cutting weight to an extreme is not only bad for your health, but it can hurt your performance.”
It remains to be seen then whether the crudeness of some methods will slowly be phased out as further research is conducted or whether it will take an incident serious enough to spark change – hopefully the former.