I have a fight in 26 days and I’m doing just fine on weight. But just in case, does anyone have any experience with rapid weight loss and the use of a sauna suit. I’m just curious how much water I could really lose and how quickly I could rehydrate myself. The weigh-in is the night before the fight. I am lingering around 181 right now and must weight 178 lbs. I have tapered my training down quite a bit due to a major case of overtraining (i thought it was a myth but I feel like I have mono again) Any help would be great.
For 3 lbs, I would only use it if it is absolutely necessary. Unless you have a professional fight trainer, who knows how to handle rapid weight loss i would stay away from it. going into a fight after dehydrating, then rehydrating almost always leave a fighter weak, and with less stamina, like how you felt when you overtrained.
As you’ve said, you have lots of time to lose the 3 lbs. But if for some reason you don’t, the fact that the weigh in is the night before gives you some time to drop water without hurting performance too much. Dropping the water with diet manipulation instead of marathon aerobic sessions in sweat suits, will impact performance negatively much less. What I would do is drop carbs slightly about five days out from the weigh in. I don’t know what your diet is like now or how many grams of carbs you are consuming each day, buy I would say cut your carbs by 50-100g/dy and moniter your weight each day. Don’t cut your water intake, keep it high. On the day of the weigh in you should be o.k. If your still too heavy that morning, drop your carbs completely til the weigh in and do some low intensity cardio without the suit. As soon as you weigh in start carbing back up. I would use Protein shakes or meal replacement with added carbs like maltodextrin and glucose. I would also take in some lower GI carbs that night and the next morning, like oatmeal. The day of the fight keep taking in carbs and protein, but moniter yourself so you don’t get bloated and gassy. I prefer almost totally consuming liquid protein and carbs on the day of a fight, but it’s a highly individual thing and you must do what works well for you. An example of someone who does this quite successfully is Tito Ortiz of UFC fame. He weighs in as a light heavyweight the night before at about 198lbs. By fight time the next night he has often gained 15-20lbs. This gives him a huge advantage as he is now basically a heavyweight beating on a light heavy. This probably has a lot to do with how he is able to overwhealm so many of his apponents and gets so many knockouts. In fact for this reason, the UFC is considering changing the weigh in to the day of the fight to keep guys from fighting in a lower weight class than they should be. By the way, what type of fighting are you involved in? Just curious. Good luck.
You can drop about 6 pounds in an hour with a sauna suit. You will be miserable! I used them extensively in college for making weight wrestling. Put on long sweat pants and a hooded sweat top, on top of that put on your sauna suit. On top of that put on another pair of sweats. Skip rope until you sweat, continue for 2-3 minutes. Crawl totally under a heavy blanket until you have enough energy to do it again. You should be able to drop your three pounds in about a half hour. If you decide to go this way, test yourself about a week out to see how much weight you can drop. I would advise using normal diet first. Sauna suits can be dangerous, you could pass out from the above routine.
Thanks for the info. The fight is called the Sabaki Challenge. It’s a bare knuckle full contact karate open in Denver. I usually laugh at those things because I figure, World Open, yeah right. Last year though I went to watch it and there were fighters from Sweden, China, Japan, etc. I’m excited for it but nervous as hell. Check out www.sabaki.com for more info.
If you need to lose serious amounts of weight try the Warrior diet. I use to drop 30lbs in 4 days to make weight for wrestling in highschool. I would gain all the weight back over the weekend though. As soon as you’re done weighing in, pop a few grams of ribose. After I depleted myself like this it was the only time I felt ribose recharge me.