Safe, healthy weight loss tips for wrestlers

Safe, healthy weight loss tips for wrestlers

Tip #1: Eat the right amount of protein

The energy you get from your food goes into the muscles of your body. They are what moves you on the wrestling mat and allows you to do the physical things that you do; Your muscles are where your metabolism lives. When you're on a calorie-restricted diet (when you're trying to lose weight), your body is forced to rely on energy stores because you're no longer getting enough gas. This is in the form of body fat and glycogen (stored carbohydrates/sugar) in the muscle cells. When glycogen is depleted, the body turns to body fat and then protein for energy. Because muscles are made of protein, if you don't consume enough dietary protein while losing weight, your body will use its own muscle tissue for food. Not only does this make you weaker and cause poor performance on the mat, but it also causes some sort of temporary damage to your metabolism.

This is why eating protein is super important when losing weight, but it's not the end of the story; You need to eat the right amount to be effective. This is determined by a simple body fat test that not only shows your body fat percentage, but also your lean body mass. To avoid muscle loss on a calorie-restricted diet, you must consume at least the same amount of protein (in grams) as your calculated lean body mass. Given the excessive amount of exercises wrestlers perform daily during training, you should also add 10-15 grams of protein (in addition to your lean body mass) to aid recovery and avoid overtraining. For example, a 145 pound wrestler who has a lean body mass of 138 pounds. should eat between 150-160 grams of protein per day. Once you've established your protein needs per day, control your weight loss by manipulating the amount of carbohydrates you eat per day.

Tip #2: Load up on your calories on the front end

The best way to reduce body weight and still maintain high performance levels is to reduce body fat and water weight while maintaining muscle mass. Once you've determined the right amount of protein, it's best to keep dietary fat to a minimum and choose only clean, natural carbohydrates as your primary source of calories. The majority of your carbohydrates should come from starches like rice, sweet potatoes and oatmeal, with bread and pasta as a second choice. Mix fibrous carbohydrates like leafy green vegetables with starches in as many meals as possible. In addition to breakfast, eat 1-2 servings of broccoli, Brussels sprouts, asparagus or green beans at each meal. Remember that corn, peas and beans can be eaten but are treated as starches and should not be counted as fibrous vegetables when trying to lose weight. Fruit can be eaten, but if body fat loss is your goal, fruit should be eaten in limited quantities in the first half of the day.

For the easiest and best weight loss, stagger your calories from largest to smallest, starting with the first part of your day. In other words, breakfast is the largest meal of the day, the second meal is the second largest, the third meal is even smaller, and the fourth and fifth (if you eat that much) are just protein and vegetables. When you stagger your calories this way, your body becomes an extremely efficient machine. After eating this way for a few days, you'll find yourself getting hungrier and hungrier at night and absolutely craving breakfast - which works out well since it's your biggest meal of the day. Eating all your starches in the first half of your day will provide the body with plenty of fuel for after-school workouts. If you consume the fewest calories at night, your stomach will remain empty before bed, which precedes the 8+ hour fast that your body goes through while sleeping.

Tip #3: Water loading

Water is an essential nutrient for every wrestler. If you become even a little dehydrated, performance will suffer. No matter how much wrestlers sweat in training, they have to constantly push water down to prevent dehydration. Removing water from the body is also an essential part of losing weight, as it is primarily water weight that is lost. If you drink very little water so that the body is borderline dehydrated, it will try to hold on to the water it has instead of losing it. Conversely, if you steadily increase the amount of water you consume over a short period of time, the urge to urinate to pass the water will also increase. This is the principle used in a method called water loading. Water loading is simply loading drinking water 3-4 days before weighing and then removing it right before weighing. Water loading is an effective natural diuretic method but should be done in moderation. The amount of water you build depends on the size of the athlete, but attempting to drink 3-4 gallons of water in a day is NOT wise exercise and can lead to injury. Most athletes get the best effect from building up to 1-2 gallons in a day.

Here's how it works. If you weigh yourself on Friday at 4:00 p.m., start water loading on Tuesday. On Tuesday, increase the amount of water you drink to get at least 3/4 to 1 gallon throughout the day. On Wednesday, try to drink more than a gallon of water. On Thursday, try to drink more than a gallon of water by your last meal of the day. After your last meal on Thursday and until your weigh-in on Friday, limit water intake to only sips when you need them. By dramatically increasing the amount of water you drink, it acts as a natural diuretic and the body begins to urinate much more frequently. After water restriction on Thursday evening, the body will continue to urinate because it has effectively lost several pounds of water weight throughout the week by the time it weighs itself. Drink at least 16+ oz after weighing. to supplement what was lost through this process. If you drink so much water throughout the week, you will notice that you also lose more water during exercise. This method is safe and easy to do and also ensures that you do not come close to dehydration.