Making the Weight: A Case Study From Professional Boxing

Abstract

Professional boxing is a combat sport categorized into a series of weight classes. Given the sport's underpinning culture, boxers' typical approach to "making weight" is usually via severe acute and/or chronic energy restriction and dehydration. Such practices have implications for physical performance and also carry health risks. This article provides a case-study account outlining a more structured and gradual approach to helping a professional male boxer make weight for the 59-kg superfeatherweight division. Over a 12-week period, the client athlete adhered to a daily diet approximately equivalent to his resting metabolic rate (6-7 MJ; 40% carbohydrate, 38% protein, 22% fat). Average body-mass loss was 0.9 + or - 0.4 kg/wk, equating to a total loss of 9.4 kg. This weight loss resulted in a decrease in percent body fat from 12.1% to 7.0%. In the 30 hr between weigh-in and competition, the client consumed a high-carbohydrate diet (12 g/kg body mass) supported by appropriate hydration strategies and subsequently entered the ring at a fighting weight of 63.2 kg. This nutritional strategy represented a major change in the client's habitual weight-making practices and did not rely on any form of intended dehydration during the training period or before weighing in. The intervention demonstrates that a more gradual approach to making weight in professional boxing can be successfully achieved via a combination of restricted energy intake and increased energy expenditure, providing there is willingness on the part of the athlete and coaches involved to adopt novel practices.

Dietary Regimens of Athletes Competing at the Delhi 2010 Commonwealth Games

“…Across all entire cohort, the most commonly reported nutrient-based dietary regimens were low fat (20%) and high protein (17%) diets, with athletes from power/sprint sports and those competing in aesthetic or weight category sports more likely to follow a high protein diet or low fat diet respectively. This is not surprising given the emphasis that power/sprint sports tend to place on protein (Phillips, 2004;Tscholl et al, 2010;Ronsen et al, 1999), and the focus aesthetic or weight category sports place on body weight (Hassapidou & Manstrantoni, 2001;Loucks, 2004;Morton et al, 2010). Similarly, a sample of weight category athletes competing at the Sydney OG were more likely to report following a specialized diet than endurance, power/skill and team sport athletes (Pelly, 2007).…”

Quantification of training load during one-, two- and three-game week schedules in professional soccer players from the English Premier League: implications for carbohydrate periodisation

“…This is especially important for the role of CHO given that high CHO availability will promote match day physical and technical performance while deliberately reducing CHO availability during training may promote training adaptations such as mitochondrial biogenesis (Bartlett, Hawley & Morton, 2015), increase lipid oxidation (Horowitz, Mora-Rodriguez, Byerley & Coyle, 1997) and hence, potentially maintain a desirable body composition (Morton, Robertson, Sutton & MacLaren, 2010;Milsom et al, 2015). Such data therefore suggest that a periodized approach to CHO intake may be beneficial in order to maximize the aforementioned factors.…”

Undergraduate UK nutrition education might not adequately address weight management

“…This was surprising considering that weight management and overweight are important and well-researched diet-related issues (33) and that dietary counselling and nutrition education are implicit components of weight-management interventions and programmes (38) . Indeed, Public Health Nutritionists and Sport and Exercise Nutritionists registered with the AfN might work with people with weight-management needs (2,39,40) and require specialist weight-management knowledge and skills. This initial finding is of particular importance in light of substantive population increases in obesity: it is forecasted that by 2030 over half of the UK population will have become obese (41) , which carries important health and economic implications for future society (41) .…”