The life of a UFC fighter is not one for the faint of heart. Pounds of sweat are shed, injuries are all too frequent, and you’re always one fight away from tumbling down the rankings.
A man or women’s journey to fight day isn’t complete without going through weigh-ins and the road one takes there is often times the road less traveled. Take Bellator middleweight veteran Brian Rogers for example.
Rogers has competed professionally at 185 pounds for the last seven years. His latest cut, which was for a bout against former UFC heavyweight Joey Beltran, required him to drop 26 pounds in five days. Not something that you necessarily want to be putting your body through too often.
“I get the call when somebody has the worst weight cut in their life,” says former fighter and current nutrition guru George Lockhart. “Some guys are really damaging their metabolic systems. Later on down the road, their metabolic systems are going to shut down; the thyroid; their hypothalamus.” The 32-year-old Lockhart was tasked with helping Rogers reach the 186-pound threshold; a goal all middleweight fighters need to meet. Rogers lost the weight, but also lost his bout with Beltran at Bellator 136 via majority decision.
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Fighters putting their bodies through hell is an all too common occurrence in mixed martial arts. As recently as January, two fighters on the main card of UFC 183 missed weight. One of them, former flyweight-turned-bantamweight contender John Lineker, was forced to move up a weight class by his boss, UFC President Dana White, after his fourth infraction.
According to Lockhart, the problem begins in a fighters’ camp. “Camps have them cut out salt and carbohydrates three weeks out. They will lose a lot of weight initially,” says Lockhart. That, however, only hinders the body’s ability to sweat because it will start to retain water. Keeping both water intake and sodium levels balanced is the key to a healthy weight cut, Lockhart says.
In order to tip the scales at the appropriate weight in the safe way, his fighters are brought down gradually in what is known as a pre-cut. Lockhart prescribes diets for each of his clients to follow that ensure them a healthy and efficient weight cut. He strategically maps out a daily meal plan, which includes plenty of carbs and protein. However, this is different for each fighter. One of his longtime clients, Dustin Poirier, recently made a memorable return to the lightweight division at UFC Fight Night 63—something that his improved diet had a large hand in.
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Fighters who skip this important step and make a beeline for the sauna come fight week are doing their bodies a huge disservice. Not only are they “cooking their insides” according to Lockhart, but they’re also increasing their ability to get knocked out. “You'll see guys where it will hurt for them to walk. Their joints; everything hurts,” says Lockhart. “Three percent dehydration equates to a 30 percent decrease in performance. You're starting to pull things from your major organs.” When the body feels like it has lost too much water, the hormones Vasopressin and Aldosterone are secreted. The former closes up the bodies’ pores, while the latter deals with sodium intake. Both lead to water retention, which counteracts a fighters’ ability to lose the remaining pounds. Tricking the body into thinking that it has already stored enough water (Lockhart calls this a waterload) will deactivate the vasopressin, which will allow the body to keep sweating.
Women don’t have the same ability to cut weight like men do; mainly due to the female hormone estrogen. “It [the female body] doesn’t have the same amount of muscle mass and ability to pull water,” Lockhart says. “If you stick a pretty lean man and woman into a sauna or hot tub, that man will lose significantly more weight in the same amount of time.”
But that didn't stop UFC women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey from losing 17 pounds in the span of a day, just to prove a point. While filming The Ultimate Fighter season 18, the 28-year-old reportedly went into a sauna for five hours to show a contestant who had missed weight just how easy it is, or difficult.
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Eating disorders, such as Bulimia, are unfortunate bi-products of combat sports and something “Rowdy” Ronda dealt with at an early age. “Any sport that involves weight divisions is going to make you super conscious of your weight,” Rousey told Jonathan Snowden of Bleacher Report. “I had a lot of issues eating healthily and having a healthy self-image. It was something that I struggled with for a very long time.”
Fellow bantamweight Holly Holm notably trims 10 pounds on the day of weigh-ins. The former decorated boxer will walk around at 155 pounds, but fight at 135 pounds. It’s not the worst of weight cuts—former welterweight (who can weigh no more than 171 pounds on weigh-in day) champion Johny Hendricks walks around at upwards of 200 pounds—but for someone with such a low body-fat ratio already it can be particularly frightening.
“If I have somebody that's fighting at 125 [pounds] and they come to me and say "Hey George, I'm at 145 right now" we'd have some serious problems,” says Lockhart. “You're losing like 10 or 20 percent of their freaking body weight. That's too much.”
In the short-term, a significantly drastic weight cut can hurt one’s performance in the cage, or even worse; they may end up being separated from their senses. According to the Association of Ringside Physicians, a recent report showed that 39 percent of MMA combatants enter competition in a dehydrated state.
The long-term effects are costly. According to the same ARP report, brain, kidney and vision problems are side effects of rapid weight loss.
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Lockhart, who’s been involved in MMA for 12-plus years, has visited a multitude of gyms, as well as the nation’s top wrestling colleges.
“It’s funny how primitive the weight-cutting procedures are. I see that they haven’t evolved at all,” says Lockhart emphatically. To lose fat, you have to cut calories. "So it's like okay, we've got to feed him less. If you look at the math, one pound of fat is 3,500 calories. If you need to lose 10 pounds that's 35,000 calories you need to make weight by say, Friday. Maybe if in your normal diet, you eat 7,000 calories a day and then you didn't eat anything for the next five days, maybe it's possible to lose those 10 pounds." Otherwise, you'd have to revert to some of these other more dangerous, performance-inhibiting measures (like sitting in a sauna.)
"The real weight that's being lost [when you drop a lot of weight very quickly] is through glycogen and water [rather than actual fat]." Glycogen is what fuels your muscles, hence why these quick cuts often do more harm than good.
Needless to say, Lockhart vehemently wishes for more studies to be done on the importance of cutting weight correctly. Well Mr. Lockhart, it appears that UFC Vice President of Regulatory Affairs Marc Ratner is on board with you.