One of the most classic ceremonies in fighting sports, be it boxing or mixed martial arts, is weighing. Fighters have to adjust their weight as much as possible to match their category, which makes preparation in the previous weeks essential. The case of Ilia Topuria is no less.
For what is going to be, the consecration fight, the Hispanic-Georgian has been looking at the scale for weeks. Featherweight, its category, has a 145 lb (65.8 kg) maximum weight limitsomething that for a person of his height, 1.70 meters, and the muscles necessary to be an optimal combatant, is not easy. Therefore, before the fight he has to adjust as much as possible, to the point that a strict diet is not enough.
The importance of dehydration
And, in addition to minimizing carbohydrate consumption as much as possible and having a nutritionist to help you, you still have to dry yourself even more. Literally: you have to dehydrate.
“It’s like drying a grape, weighing it, and re-hydrating it.” This is how he sums it up, in simple words, David Rojasnutritionist and sports advisor to the Spanish fighters Joel Álvarez (lightweight) and Dani Barez (flyweight).
«It’s like drying a grape, weighing it, and re-hydrating it»
David Rojas
Topuria nutritionist and sports advisor
«The first phase of dehydration is calorie reduction. The athlete starts from a weight and has a few weeks until the event. With a specific physical condition and fat percentage, the athlete reduces his caloric intake as any person who wants to lose weight would do: eat a little less per day and the body burns fat. That is not enough, because much of the weight is in glycogenwhich is the carbohydrate that we consume and that is stored in the liver and muscles. That glycogen drags its own weight 3 times in water and mineral salts like sodium. Our muscles are like jugs of water,” explains the trainer.
That glycogen is what Topuria must reduce as much as possible. In total, it is estimated that between caloric reduction and a rapid and extreme dehydration process, the fighter can lose between 6 and 7 kilos at a time.
Normally, fighters arrive the week of the event with about 4 or 5 kilos above their maximum required weight.
How to dehydrate: clothing, blankets and saunas
Losing water from the bodyIn addition to urine, it can only be done by sweating. And that is what fighters like Topuria do on the day before the weigh-in.
«The dehydration process begins by removing carbohydrates so that the body stops storing that glycogen and starts burning the one it has inside. Once this is removed, there is still a lot of water in the body and it has to be removed for a sweating process» explains Rojas.
To do it effectively, there are several methods, all of them with a time window of just a few hours:
-
Cover yourself with plastic or sauna suits and train with them. Due to temperature, the body begins to sweat.
-
Do sauna rounds, with periods of sweating for a specific amount of time inside, before going out and covering yourself with towels and blankets to continue sweating even with the high temperature.
-
Enter a bathtub with water above 40ºC to sweat. You should enter with water at 36-38ºC until it rises to 40-42, and stay in the bathtub for a few minutes. Sweat is controlled and released, until the temperature is overwhelming for the athlete, go out and cover yourself with a towel or blanket to continue sweating.
These operations, especially those in the sauna and the bathtub, must be repeated until the necessary weight to be reduced is covered but only for a few hours: the risk of possible cardiac arrest due to extreme dehydration is high.
«You cannot be dehydrated for many hours. Knowing that It is not something positive, nor good, nor healthy.“We weight loss experts minimize the time the athlete is dehydrated,” explains David Rojas.
Once the weighing is done, the opposite process occurs: that of rehydration. In this case, the body helps: it is much easier to recover lost water.
#Ilia #Topuria #prepares #weighin #loses #kilos
