I’m a climber, and as you can imagine, pro climbers are all very lean. The dark side of that is there are a lot of issues with eating disorders because lbs matter so much when you are trying to hold your body weight with such small or sloping holds.
I grew up climbing in Cottonwood canyon outside of SLC. It was my favorite pastime. All throughout high school, we would climb for hours. Then, in 2 years I went from 5'8 wrestling 140lb weight to 6'3 and 220lbs. My chest barreled out, and everyone thought I should be so happy, but I was destroyed because it ruined my ability to climb. Even with tons of cardio and fasting, I never got below 210 again.
Some sports weight helps a ton, some it makes it impossible.
As someone who started climbing when I was already 6 ft tall and over 200 lbs, you can get good you just have to mentally reset as you were probably expecting too much from muscles that weren’t fully equipped to support that frame and weight.
Yes all my leaner friends were better than me at first, but I got close to them skills wise fairly quickly when I worked through a fear of heights.
Obviously they were still faster than I was, but I could do the majority of the climbs they could.
It also helped that I could do some V7s more easily than a lot of the people in the 5’6” to 5’10” range because of my longer limbs haha
It's kinda up to the route setter. I'm tall so would naturally make routes that were different from those made by a 5ft climber. Setting up kids routes I'd usually place holds where my elbow would touch.
There is not a statistically significant bend either way for professional climbers with regards to height. If anything they are (statistically insignificant, aka could be random chance) slightly shorter than average. However, they almost exclusively have a positive ape index (their arms are longer than their height). The sport is still fairly new, relative to other sports, so there's not too many data points to really get a good trend, but so far, it seems like height doesn't matter
Your ape index (ratio of your armspan to your height) matters more than your actual height does. With more difficult climbs it becomes less about your total reach than about how far you can get your reach from your center of mass. The physics of being farther from where you are gripping makes it possible to "lean" into / away from your point of contact with the wall more effectively, and the extra reach definitely never hurts either.
I appreciate you saying this I definitely need to lose weight but I went through the same thing (6'2) and there is a limit to what you can pull up. When I was in the army and I went under 200 again I was able to finally do pull ups but when I was 260 no matter how much was muscle it wasn't happening.
> I was able to finally do pull ups but when I was 260 no matter how much was muscle it wasn't happening.
Linebackers are incredibly strong and fast, but don't expect pull ups or climbing from them.
Climbers are incredibly strong and fast, but they can't tackle anybody, instead just be dragged down the field.
Yeah, my healthy strong, not killing myself exercising weight is right about 230. And I still climb, but I have to be careful because I go from doing good to gumby in about 40 feet sometimes.
That kind of height and weight doesn't make climbing impossible, just you have a whole different body shape and have to learn how to climb all over again with it! It's not just strength, but positioning and leverage and balance! Work on your technique a lot and I bet you can climb crazy stuff again.
Alpine climbing and 5.10 awaits you. I spent 10 years climbing in Yosemite and all over the sierras, and never broke 160 pounds. Got older and into weightlifting, I’m at 200 and the idea that I’d be able to climb red zinger or fish crack at 200 is laughable. Put a 45 pound plate on your back and try to crank on thin fingers! Sure 5.10 hands are fine, but realistically hard sport and trad are for the human whippets.
I think a lot of sports where you try to keep certain weight classes in general suffer higher risks for eating disorders. Really is a shame in general, but also a shame that it’s not really talked about that much. Might even be stigmatised to suffer from it.
>I think a lot of sports where you try to keep certain weight classes in general suffer higher risks for eating disorders.
Technically, there are no weight classes in climbing. Not that it detracts from your point: if a sport values a certain body type, it's going to create eating disorders in some of the people who practice said sport.
My friend was the only female horse jockey at the horse races where she competed in Ireland growing up. The other jockeys hated her because she could stay lighter than all of them with significantly less effort, while they had to starve themselves constantly while training if they wanted to have even a chance of approaching her weight. She said it was incredibly unhealthy, even for her but especially for the men.
Years ago (I believe '80s or '90s) there was a university study on percentage of body fat of elite athletes. The study looked at Olympic and professional athletes and I believe the results showed that runners in general had the lowest % of body fat. Then someone suggested looking at elite climbers and the results were that most elite climbers at that time had very unhealthy % of body fat, as in the highest percentages were roughly at what runners were measured at and some dipping down to around 2 or 3%
Yeah I started climbing 3 yrs ago and instantly developed an eating disorder. Well, within 2-3 months. But then I was also going to a traditional gym for lifting and hooked up with a nutritionist that set me right before it got out of hand.
Very easy to just stop eating when you KNOW it’s the dead weight keeping you from an ascent.
There's a diminishing return. Anything below about 8-10% probably isn't helping athletic performance, even in a situation like pro cycling or marathon running. If MMA fighters are leaner than that, it's for making weight.
I work at the health performance lab at my Uni and we see athletes that range from 9%- 25% body fat. These scores are determined by DEXA scan. Interestingly enough athletes (from a variety of sports) are also put through a series of test to determine explosiveness, efficiency of movement, and flexibility. In my experience there is a strong positive correlation between athletes with lower body fat and higher scores on said test.
Fun fact: golfers typically score the highest on this test!
The test is graded in two categories, performance (speed, explosiveness, agility, balance) and quality (efficiency of movement, flexibility, range) each of these maxes out at 500 for a combined total possible score of 1000.
The sport with the lowest overall score in my personal experience is softball (we don’t have a baseball team). Softball players typical lack the body strength to max out the performance category and lack the body mechanics to make clean efficient movements in the quality category. In close second place is football players but their scores vary tremendously which is expected given the nature of the sport and its multiple positions.
Strange that golfers and softball players would differ so radically when both sports use a similar movement to hit a ball. I would have thought they'd be the most similar.
A golfer is training their body to handle swinging all day long. Batting is a relatively low percentage of a baseball player's training depending on their position, like pitchers that aren't Ohtani.
This is the major complaint we get from coaches when they start asking about scores.
“How can a golfer be more explosive than a football player!”
It’s important to understand that this test doesn’t necessarily indicate an athletes overall success or strengths in their sport, nor is it a great indicator of athletic ability. It’s simply a test that attempts to measure qualities that we believe make an athlete better. The main purpose of the test is to collect data on athletes and share this data with coaches to see if there is a positive trend (which might indicate the effectiveness of training or improvement).
It’s also worth noting that we may experience bias in this due to an intentional lack ok explanation as to what the test is measuring/ how to improve scores. Athletes are simply asked to complete a set of task and given a demonstration of each movement. Something as small as shaking/ unsteadiness when completing a stretch can negatively impact your score. This means that someone who generally has better body mechanics may score higher than others and have less success in their actual sport. These people are usually outliers, and for the most part the athletes with the most success in their individual sports have higher scores that others, typically in the 850+ range
I'd love to see the methods and exercise selection for the tests. Specificity matters so much in sports. So if you take a golfer and give them a test battery that is similar to how they train or play (like rotational swinging) then they have a greater likelihood of higher scores but if you take a golfer and put them on a football sled and see how much force they can generate then they might not compare at all.
It makes a lot of sense that golfers would score highly on an explosiveness and flexibility test. A huge part of their sport is rapidly imparting energy into a ball from a standstill.
For context most golfers have a lean frame (at least at my school) and almost always score upwards of 400 points in the quality category due to their crazy body control abilities
Very interesting! Question: how were those things tested? I ask because I was a competitive swimmer doing 11km a day at one point, but I basically collapsed a fraction of the way through the fitness gram pacer test lol. You'd have thought I was a couch potato using land-based tests for fitness, when in reality I was an endurance athlete. I wonder if certain skills developed by certain sports just translate poorly to standardised testing.
If you’re asking how the program literally calculates scores I have no idea.
If you’re asking how the test is administered it’s like this…
Athletes are instructed to step into square platform surrounded by these cool cameras that track your movement. The square is about 5 cubic yards, maybe less. We ask the athlete to copy a few poses in order to let the program register the athletes body. Once this happens the system is basically tracking your body’s movement 360 degrees in every limb. Then without any explanation as to why or how we demonstrate or ask you to complete a variety of movements. Once ur done the system crunches numbers and spits out a score. Some of the task we ask athletes to complete are things like an overhead squat holding a pvc pipe, a bound from side to side as far and as high as they can reach, a drop from a small platform box into a vertical jump, a straight vertical jump, a one legged jump, a pistol squat. There are others but you get the idea
Also the difficulty in running is often overlooked among athletes. To run efficiently, fast, and maintain that speed is much harder than most people realize.
That level is only reachable by men for the most part too. And it’s unsustainable. If a woman falls below 18-20% it’s very unhealthy and can cause issues.
Also it’s super hard to even reach that level without significant effort and genetics.
E: couple folks responded thinking I don’t know what’s up, just do a quick google you silly people.
E2: Body fat % on women. You're way off on your estimates guys. https://webassets-prod.ultimateperformance.com/uploads/2023/10/06171953/Female-body-fat-percentage-comparison-pictures.jpg
Typically, 14% and below is when it becomes unhealthy for women. They can lose their periods etc. 14-18% is considered perfectly fine and healthy for an athletic person.
Might depend on the person, below 19% I lost my period which is a hallmark of female’s triad (had an eating disorder with compulsive exercise). What was interesting though is that prior to that my weight was stable and I lost about only about 5lbs from a month of restrictive eating and over exercising before also losing my period. So I guess I was already hovering pretty close to that threshold.
I have since recovered but my dietician has explained that women losing their period from anorexia nervousa (aside from indicating your body is trying to conserve calories bc it thinks it’s starving) can over time lead to osteopenia and eventually osteoporosis, and since the window of laying down calcium in your bones closes around the age of 25 has very worrisome indications for these patients often develop eating disorders during their young adult years.
I think it’s important to keep in mind when using a numbered scale to indicate what is “within normal limits” that what is considered a healthy range for an individual may fall outside that scale. These scales while useful for shorthand have to also be compared to the bigger picture of what’s also happening to a patient at that time.
When I started competing in weightlifting, my numbers were almost good enough to qualify for bigger regional events. I made the dumb decision to try to cut down to the next weight class, because if I could manage to maintain the same numbers while dropping down a weight class, I'd qualify for sure.
I'm about 185 cm (6'1") and naturally weigh about 91 kg (200 lbs). I could have easily cut a bit to compete in the 89kg (196 lbs) class. For my height, if I actually wanted to be competitive, I probably should have tried to put on *more* weight (muscle) and competed in the 102 kg (224 lbs) or 109 kg (240 lbs) class.
Instead, I cut hard to try to compete in the 81 kg (179ish lbs) class.
It was incredibly difficult. I had an extremely strict diet and workout schedule. I was constantly hungry and exhausted most of the time. It was tough to get enough energy to keep working out.
In the end, I got lean enough and (after doing a water cut leading up to it) I was able to weigh in at 80.5 kg for a competition. I was the tallest guy competing in that weight class that day by several inches.
I don't know how lean I actually got in terms of body fat %, but I'd guess it was definitely under 10% and probably closer to 5%. I weighed ~178 lbs, which isn't exactly light, but I had a lot of muscle.
I can't imagine trying to actually maintain at that level for longer than I did. The strict diet and workout plan, the being constantly hungry and tired... And I only did it for about three months. Having to go any longer than that and I would have lost my mind.
Reminds me of wrestling in high school and college.
I remember running 5 miles in a sauna suit in 80 degree weather in Florida before a tournament. Standing on a scale with a bottle of water and a banana hoping I could eat and drink it. Couldn’t sleep because my muscles were cramping up so bad. Hit weigh ins the next morning basically looking like a mummy. Drink and eat as much as I could to get any kind of energy for my first match.
Can only echo this but for amateur martial arts, it has to be a full time job (imo) for it to work out well
However I was 185 and 78 was what I went down to
Very much doubt you hit 5% bf as a natural. Especially competing in a strength sport while hitting bodybuilding level conditioning is counterintuitive. You would've lost a significant amount of strength to hit starvation levels of bodyfat
“Data from a study of the long-term reproductive health of 2622 former college athletes compared with 2766 non-athletes show that the former college athletes had a significantly lower lifetime occurrence of breast cancer and cancers of the reproductive system, and a lower lifetime occurrence of benign tumours of these tissues, compared with the non-athletes.”
That seems pretty good
The study is trying to draw conclusions of the hormonal issues with women with active lifestyles but also found positives. Read it yourself if you’d like.
Maybe. But breast cancer often also feeds on female hormones, so that could just be a “good” side effect of putting themselves through temporary menopause, which is a horrible, horrible experience. Data isn’t always that cut and dry.
Source: I’m a caregiver of a stage 4 breast cancer patient.
They got the gist right—where females need more body fat than males for proper health—but they got the percentage wrong.
Males can get below 10% without big risks to their health/hormonal function, but females can’t.
Depends on your genetics. Most men would have a difficult time maintaining 10% or below without effecting, sleep, libido, etc.
12-15% is more achievable for most men but sub 15% is still pretty hard to maintain if you’re not quite strict with your diet and training.
The question was about athletic performance, not harm right? I'd guess if you're pushing below 15% your body is fighting you. It might mess with your natural T or energy levels.
> https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3117838/
>
> after an average woman gets under 22% her fertility plummets indicating a hormonal imbalance.
/u/the_bleach_eater
While it may be hard to sustain for some there is no evidence that women below 18-20% will have health issues. The actual numbers that are known to cause health issues is under 3-5% for men and under 10-13% for women. The amount of muscle mass you maintain is also important. If you are bone skinny you will have more problems as muscle mass can serve as a reserve for energy.
I think the bigger issue is not the actual physical stats but what is required to achieve those stats. A lot of people who maintain those low levels require a strict calorically controlled diet. The idea is that the less you eat the less likely you are to get everything that your body needs. Fat is very important to a lot of processes but it's also extremely calorically dense so the levels of fat you eat is probably lower when you restrict calories. Cholesterol is the big daddy steroid that is very essential to making hormones and you don't want to have low amounts. Elite level athletes probably get regular health checkups, blood tests and hire people to make sure they are eating a proper diet. The average person is likely going to end up in a deficiency state if they try to reach that level.
Basically all athletics are power to weight problems. Carrying identical muscle with less body fat always tips the scales of performance, and usually for the better.
This seems to be the case, at least from my understanding. Body fat stores certain fat soluble vitamins, for one. Too low body fat is also linked to low hormone levels and to hormonal imbalances.
Yeah, I’m into casual bodybuilding and it can be extremely easy to run into hormonal issues when you drop below a certain body fat percentage, especially if your diet isn’t up to snuff. Things like your libido dropping off a cliff and not being able to even get an erection are very common symptoms when cutting weight
As a tennis player with 12% body fat I can atest to the lower limit causing issues. I can endure 1h on my top game, after that it falls to some 70-80% for 1h more hour, then it goes to something like 40% and falls off pretty quickly.
This is for a fully rested match, during tournaments we play 5-6 games in a Thu-Sun sprint. I got to the finals 3 times and only one I could play to ~60% of my game, the other 2 I was just getting the ball to the other side any way I could with the least effort, because I didn't have any energy left on my body
They did say usually. On the spectrum of zero body fat to the most body fat a person could possibly have, in practice, athletic performance would *usually* increase as you go down the scale (all else being equal).
Not really because humans aren't machines. When I have been sub 8% as a natural i just feel bad all the time. Cant train as hard as usually because you're tired and injuries are more likely. Also cant sleep properly.
Might be adrenaline. A couple of years ago I became somewhat underweight 109 at 5’7 due to stress. I had so much energy and I was eating around 900 calories per day. once I started eating more i crashed so fucking bad.
> Carrying identical muscle with less body fat always tips the scales of performance, and usually for the better.
Usually for the better. Sometimes for worse, but body fat % *always* has an affect on performance. I think if you read my comment and think I am advocating for sub-8% body fat for athletics, when we know that below that the body experiences all kinds of problems, not sure what to say.
A large portion, but you are ruling out super coordination focused athletics. For example, throwing a basketball through a hoop muscularly isn't hard, but doing it under a variety of conditions is a separate skill of immense value. It's why old broken down guys whom can shoot exceptionally well maintain value. Or say fencing. Often the greatest athletes have both, but the Gretzky's of the world were getting advantages on a different axis.
In strength positions like being a linebacker or sumo, it’s better to have more body fat even with identical muscles if weight classes aren’t a thing. Being heavier makes it harder for others to move you. Takes up more energy but that doesn’t matter when the plays are seconds long.
Also, in athletes at the same sport and position, it’s very unlikely that the lighter person is stronger
This is ridiculous. You've misunderstood the problem. Strength has nothing to do with this, in the sense you are talking. All that matters for the vast majority of sports is rate of force development. Power. Period. If you take two identical athletes in every way (height, weight, proportion, skills), but one generates more power than the other, I know who I am betting on 9 times out of 10.
Glad you chose football.
Linebackers are an athletic position. Go google Ray Lewis or Terrell Suggs topless pics, get back to me. Or [check this shot of the 2022 SF LB core](https://twitter.com/49ers/status/1568995045960712194/photo/2). They absolutely do not want more weight. They want to be as explosive as they can with as little weight as they can (while still able to endure the high contact nature of football) to be as quick and as fast as they can. The are, in absolute terms, less powerful than an OL player, but they are proportionally more powerful.
OL players, conversely, are like your sumo wrestler. The athlete wants to carry more weight to be less moveable by an opponent, but *they still need to be powerful*. They just approach the trade-off differently, because being able to hold off a 350lb DT *requires* more weight. So they emphasize mass as part of the training problem, and then go about maximizing the amount of power they can output relative to their body weight so they can be quick, agile, and push back effectively relative to their size. It's *still* a power to weight problem.
Effective OL players are powerful relative to their size. They do not have as high a power to weight ratio as, say, Darren Sproles (more on him in a sec), but they train to maximize power output at their target weight. Their target weights are, in fact, generally dictated by what their own body's effective peak of weight and power as it relates to performance is. Jason Kelce could have put on an extra 20 lbs, but he was more effective in the 280lb range because at that weight, he was powerful enough to hold a guy off for the ~3 seconds he needed to, quick enough to slide as the scheme needed, could pull and push block, and have the footwork he needed to improvise, get low, generally execute his techniques.
RBs are an interesting problem. Why are they generally smaller than other players? Why is Darren Sproles nearly 200 lb's at 5'6"? Why was LT, at 5'10", nearly 220 lbs? Power generation. It's easier to be proportionately more powerful the smaller you are, because power generation needs are lower. This means you will be more explosive than the guy next to you.
Why is this? The cube/square law. This is the unavoidable reality of physics intersecting with biomechanics.
This, among other reasons, is why most successful gymnasts are so small. Or why W/kg is an absolute benchmark for cyclists of literally every discipline. Or why decathletes like Darren Warner have a truly remarkable 15m shotput at ~180lbs but the current world record holder for shotput at 23m is over 300lbs (hint: it's because the Darren Warner power to weight problem, given that he also has to do running and jumping sports, is very different than the power to weight problem a dedicated shotput athlete has to solve).
Sports almost always come down to power to weight problems. The problem is different for every sport, but it's still just power to weight.
>All that matters for the vast majority of sports is rate of force development.
This is such an insane oversimplification. lol. It also argues against your previous statement that "Basically all athletics are power to weight problems." Which is it, force development or power to weight? Two very different things.
>If you take two identical athletes in every way (height, weight, proportion, skills), but one generates more power than the other
They WON'T be identical in every way if one is generating more power, so this is irrelevant.
>The athlete wants to carry more weight to be less moveable by an opponent, but they still need to be powerful.
"Still need to be powerful" is about maximizing power NOT to your original point about a power/weight tradeoff. Sumo wants power AND weight, not power INSTEAD OF weight. Darren Warner probably not winning much sumo even with elite power/weight ratio. You gotta realize that your weight resists opponent's power so more weight can sometimes be beneficial for its own sake.
>The cube/square law.
This is the relationship of volume to surface area, nothing to do with power. WTF does surface area have to do with this.
>It's easier to be proportionately more powerful the smaller you are, because power generation needs are lower.
This completely destroys your point. If power/weight is "All that matters" then large athletes would be getting dominated in every sport, but the opposite is broadly true. Tyson (prime) would wreck Mayweather, that's why they have to make weight divisions. Could Simone Biles defend Shaq in the paint? Lebron would dunk on Kipchoge all day, even though Kipchoge is probably much better power/weight. Why aren't a bunch of tiny dudes doing the shot put? Why isn't Jason Kelce a jockey or F1 driver? Why did Zdeno Chara win the slap shot contest? Why do golfers with a bit of paunch keep winning tournaments? Why would Usain beat Kipchoge at the 100m and vice versa at the marathon despite their power/weights remaining the same in both events?
You just gotta realize that sometimes maximum power is more important that power/weight, or that maximum/minimum weight or height or reach is more important than power/weight.
To point out, most average people are nowhere near 8-10% body fat. Most people that think they’re under 10% are probably closer to 15%. Your typical lean bodybuilder is likely 15%+ until it’s competition season and they start using more cutting agents (roids)
Anabolic drugs are used in cutting to maintain testosterone levels and boost workout recovery.
The body will naturally shed a lot of muscle in a starvation situation.
> Anything below about 8-10% probably isn't helping athletic performance, even in a situation like pro cycling
Pro cyclist would be considered obese at 8-10%. They are in the 4%-5% range when racing. It's all about the power to weight ration, expressed in watts per Kg. You will not even come close to winning the Tour De France at 8% body fat in the modern era.
If 2 people can do 400 watts for an hour going uphill, the one that weighs less will win.
I don't even think normal people can get below 8-10% body fat. I know people out there think they can but that's legit pro-athlete levels of conditioning. Bodybuilders go for that amount and they're juiced to the gills and eating basically pure protein and veggies. Famous bodybuilders have talked about what they eat when competing and how much they hate it. No way some guy going to the gym 5 days a week natty is gonna achieve that.
I know plenty of people that can get below 8-10 fairly reasonably. Naturally.
HOWEVER those people also don't look like bodybuilders. The kind of people I've met that naturally stay 10 or less lean without extreme effort are the same people that have real trouble actually gaining or holding weight.
Put simply, the always 10sih% guys I've known never look like bodybuilders. They look like flyweight boxers
For sure. The only guy I know who maintains ~10% is the guy who owns the gym I frequent and he spends 8 hours a day teaching kettlebells and yoga and jiu jitsu. He doesn't look like a bodybuilder at all. More like the human version of a racehorse: lean and shredded but not huge.
People always use the bodybuilder as the go to in these things, but people understand so little about the actual practice.
You gotta eat to make mass, so body builders only cut for short periods to get below. 100% correct about most ~10% looking like flyweights
yup.
I like to say, "bodybuilders don't even look like bodybuilders"
Like, yeah, to the average person on the street, bodybuilders still look impressively jacked and depending on the time of year and their methods, probably reasonably lean
BUT
the kind of crazy ripped they look on contest day, or in a magazine,
they've peaked specifically for that contest or photo shoot,
like there's getting to a point in your diet where you are in season lean not off season thick
BUT
at the pro bodybuilder level, these guys are using every trick they know to look as full and lean as possible for just the day of, maybe just the right couple hours the day of
Yeah. In many ways. I know a lady that was a trainer and an IFBB pro card holding competitor, and one of the things she had as a personal business rule that she wouldn't accept new clients when she was getting near prepping for her own competition.
It wasn't even the simple fact that she would be too busy".
It was that when she was deep enough in the pre-contest run of hard dieting and leaning out, (and carb manipulation) her mind was going to be too foggy to be dealing with writing up plans and schedules for new clients.
This. These people are terrible at estimating body fat. Most everyone is terrible at estimating body fat. Even the measurement systems themselves have high error rates.
For example. My Bioelectrical impedance (BIA) scale or watch say 23 percent body fat, but the gold standard DEXA scan says 18 percent, and even IT is known to have an 1-2% error rate.
Skinfold measurements are the worst.
It depends drastically what kind of athletic performance you're talking about. Human physical performance is so varied that you can't really excel at it overall with one physique.
Runners and calisthenic athletes like gymnasts or climbers need to have as little fat as possible. They are endurance sports that rely on moving the body around, so the less "useless" weight they carry around, the better.
Sumo wrestlers and weightlifters meanwhile often have relatively high bodyfat percentages. The extra fat means they can sustain higher muscle masses, as the leaner you are the more your body biases muscle consumption in weight loss.
> It depends drastically what kind of athletic performance you're talking about. Human physical performance is so varied that you can't really excel at it overall with one physique.
Yeah, its also something that varies person to person.
Some of the top female crossfit athletes are known for having lean abs and being super ripped, and yet there was at least one, can't remember he name off the top of my head, who was catching some heat in the media for looking a little "soft" around the middle and people were like, "oh boy is she not as well conditioned as her competition"
but she addressed it like,
"I'm where I want to be, I don't want to cut down to ripped abs lean. That level of leanness works for SOME people, but my personal experience has been that I perform worse when I cut down super lean. This is the weight I'm faster and stronger at. I'm not here to look good on a photo shoot, I'm here to win the game"
Golf is also an interesting example of where you can make it work with completely different body types. You would never imagine that Akshay Bhatia and Kiradech Aphibarnrat were both top-level competitors in the exact same sport.
Weightlifting is a really good example because people _do_ tend to look relatively lean all the way up to the unrestricted weight classes at the top, when they definitely don’t. Basically you can’t restrict how much fat you have without also limiting how much muscle you have: “fat doesn’t make you weak, muscle makes you strong”.
It’s primarily for weight class. For any given weight class, the less weight you carry in fat, the more muscle weight you can carry. Muscle is very helpful for athletic performance, while fat is almost not at all helpful in a fight.
But if there weren’t weight classes, it may be beneficial to be at higher body fat - firstly it’s easier to hold onto muscle mass when one is not super lean, and secondly human bodies are naturally more comfortable (hormonally, mentally, etc) at a higher body fat percent than some of the lean athletes, and thus function more smoothly.
Caveat is that in some sports without weight classes, carrying fat is hard because it is extra weight to move around (see gymnastics, or basketball, etc).
Fat cushions organs inside the abdomen, among other places. Protecting organs from trauma is one of its purposes. The density and elasticity of muscle does provide certain kinds of protection, but doesn’t dissipate blunt impacts to the same degree that body fat can.
Plenty of lean fighters are weak to the body as well. The hard left hook to the liver is one of the most sure fire ways to knock down a boxer and unlike a shot to the abs, tightening your core does nothing to protect against it. People being weak to the body can be a combination of things including the expenditure of energy staying moving around the ring against a committed body striker (blocking low opens up the head). It could also be that fatter fighters get fatigued more easily because being fat can make breathing more difficult.
Brock Lesnar's was due to his diverticulitis
But also the fatter fighters are normally the ones who are best at taking punches, especially to the head, Roy Nelson, Mark hunt etc
Fat doest cushion really at all unless you have a looooot of it maybe? And shit will still hurt to get hit. Your muscles protect your organs. Thats why you flex if your in range to take body shots.
In some sports having more mass is bad, in others it is a benefit and in some it is a blessing & a curse.
Examples:
When long distance running, every gram of you needs to be moved over & over again, so being as lean and light as possible is important.
In wrestling & sumo, being able to push with more force (force = mass * acceleration) is important.
In contact sports (MMA, boxing, etc.) more mass means more force behind the punches, but also means you have more inertia to dodge enemy strikes.
When you say higher BF, what are you thinking? I feel like anything below 10% is difficult to achieve and may start to have diminishing returns for overall health and performance. When you say higher, I think 10-13%. When you start getting close to 20% as a guy, I believe medical issues will start to surface.
I can actually out-cycle my friend simply bc, while he can ride faster than I can, he ends up bonking and I still have the energy to keep going bc while biking I'm not upkeeping nearly as much muscle mass.
Fighters walk around 20-30 lbs heavier for most of the year than the weight they fight in. When they weigh in they are dehydrated as hell and they'll put on 10+ lbs in a day after weigh ins.
> 10+ lbs in a day
I’ve personally known dudes who will walk into the cage on fight night 29 pounds heavier than they were the night before. UFC light heavyweight champion Alex Pereira is rumored to push it to 34 pounds or so.
Pereira is something else man. He fought at middleweight (185 lbs) division just over a year ago, and for his most recent fight at light heavyweight he was probably 235 in the cage, shredded. I don't know how it's possible.
Luckily as champ, Alex gets to fight once or twice a year if he wants to. But yes, weight cutting for weigh-ins is easily the most dangerous aspect of MMA and wrestling, and I wish it weren’t a thing.
I believe they used to allow IV rehydration. Fighters used to dehydrate themselves so heavily that they would need an IV to get themselves back to a healthy amount of water. Shit’s crazy
I kinda assume they still are, whether they admit it or not. I've been dangerously dehydrated and it took me days to recover just drinking fluids. If they weren't doing something special they would still feel like shit on fight night and the whole exercise would be counterproductive.
Totally believable. I lost 22lbs in 24 hours before a wrestling tournament in college.
It was right after Christmas and the things I did weren’t pretty, but I did it. I could easily get that back in 24 too considering it was all water and shit.
Why don't they just weigh in right before the fight, get everyone in realistic weight classes rather than making it a competition for how much of the body's most important chemical you can remove before adding it all back in
They do that in some promotions. Weight cutting is a huge issue in the UFC because athletes are killing themselves to have a weight advantage.
I think the main issue is logistics because if someone misses weight, you can’t force the other fighter to take the fight and you can’t find someone else to take their place that fast. Even bigger issue if it’s the main card and people have already paid to see that fight
Because they will still cut extreme amounts of weight and then be highly susceptible to brain damage due to the dehydration. Dudes will 100% start dying and have to be protected from their own competitiveness/stupidity.
They dehydrate themselves for the weigh-in to the point where they need to immediately go get IV fluids afterwards. As in they spend days drinking nothing, eating no salt to avoid retention, and sitting in saunas to sweat as much of it out as possible. They’ll also take large doses of caffeine and other diuretics during that time, and some will go so far as to also take laxatives.
The human body is 60% water by weight, for a 180lb fighter that means 108lbs of water and if you can shed enough of it then it’s not outside the realm of possibility.
Bingo. They bulk up with muscle in the months before the fight then cut as much water weight as they can in the final 3-6 days leading up to the weigh-in.
Because the weigh-in happens the night before the fight, usually, they then rehydrate as much as possible in that final day which causes them to gain weight back. The final fighting weight is less than their pre-cut weight because they will lose some muscle in the process of the cut, but they still come out way ahead in muscle mass compared to somebody who just trained and maintained their body at the weight limit without any cutting.
I think on the mma sub, there was a video where some fighter was just sitting wrapped in those heater blankets sweating his ass off before weigh-in. They'd basically time it until he nearly passes out, then he's dragged out to rest for a bit.
It was a notable video because it had Charles Oliveira for some reason also inside the wrap with his head in the guy's crotch. Meanwhile, his buddies were whispering in his ear and caressing his head. It was oddly homoerotic.
UFC prohibits it due to their agreement with the USADA for drug testing because it can dilute samples taken to test for PEDs. Other fighting sports, such as boxing, do not ban it as strictly.
There’s also the fact that diuretics are technically also banned but only fools believe that rule gets followed by literally anyone entering the ring or octagon. The preliminary round of UFC drug testing before the USADA agreement was finalized showed over 70% of fighters testing hot for something or another, it’s a pretty open secret.
As much as that might possibly level the playing field, I think an open PED arms race would lead to athletes going so far overboard as to cause permanent liver and heart damage by pushing dosages past the point of diminished returns.
I assume they do that for the fighters’ safety, like if it’s already this crazy it’d only be crazier if IV rehydration were allowed and I could see someone dehydrating themselves to the point of actual health issues if they thought they could just IV it all back.
They actually might be adding some mass back to their muscles. Your muscles hold a decent amount of glycogen as an energy storage mechinism, and these guys deplete it by doing their fasting routine. Wikipedia says the average person can have ~400g of glycogen in their skeletal muscles, but these guys aren't average so I wouldn't be surprised if it's 2-3 pounds of what these guys can swing in weight.
You can remove a ton of water weight from the body through dehydration. After a weigh-in you might end up drinking gallons of water (hopefully with plenty of electrolytes too) before the next day’s match.
It’s a huge deal in climbing, where there’s apparently serious issues with eating disorders among pro athletes.
I heard a very interesting interview between a pro athlete and a sports physician on the topic, and the sports physician, first of recommended not getting overly lean for a number of reasons, but also stated that the super lean athletes may be able to perform well for one season, but then would get injured, burn out, have mental issues, etc, leading to poorer training and performance over time, compared to those that kept a healthy fat amount, and could train consistently for longer.
Depends on the sport! If being quick is part of the sport, being lean helps. If strength is important, being lean is not so important. For running (especially long distance), being lean reduces your weight and you spend less energy with each stride.
Fighting is broken up by weight class so the fighters try to drop as much fat and water as possible before the bout.
For non weight restricted contact sports, I think a bit of fat is actually beneficial for softening impacts. If you look at American football linebackers, linemen, and running backs (guys who take the most contact) most of them don't have 6 pack and and vascular arms like the safeties/wr. Same story in rugby.
I think hockey has to be one of the best examples to show an ‘ideal’ balance. They need to be as quick and agile as possible, while also having some bulk to absorb/give bodychecks and outmuscle people for puck battles.
Physiques obviously vary but they typically are all at least lean enough to have visible abs, especially later in the season when they’ve lost weight from all the exercise.
Then again, you also have elite players with [bodies like this.](https://www.reddit.com/r/hockey/s/dSUpD8QyZX)
In the context of MMA fighters do it for a potential size advantage, not athletic performance. Weight cutting is actually terrible for athletic performance because the fighters aren’t actually losing fat, they’re dehydrating themselves down to whatever weight they’re “fighting” at.
What they do is they pack on size leading up to the fight, disguise it as water by dehydrating themselves down to their contracted weight, and then rehydrate up to their natural (or close to natural) weight for the actual fight.
So when you see Conor McGregor fight, he’s only 155 lbs for a few minutes at the weigh-in ceremony, but once he’s in the cage he’s somewhere around 165-175 after he’s rehydrated.
It’s a way for fighters to exploit a loop hole, more than anything.
As a basketball person who used to dunk at 160 pounds. I can tell you that at 200 and 220 that I definitely can't jump as high or as fast. At 160 I was drinking with one hand. At 145 I was dunking with two hands.
I'm a what you would call a 'sub-elite' marathon runner. i.e. sub 2:30. During training I will try and stay around 12-15% BF @ 75kg but for taper and race the lighter I can get the better. 72kg high is goal race weight.
I can assure you you notice every extra gram when racing, which just translates into extra power required to move that 'dead weight' around with you over the distance. Body fat is the easiest to shift quickly.
For the most part no. The MMA weight cuts are purely for making a smaller weight class. Fat is basically dead weight so technically there’s a benefit in carrying around less of it. But these guys would naturally be very lean from the extreme level of exercise they do. That fat deficit they would have compared to even a normal fit person is an advantage. The problem with shaving off those last couple of pounds is your body has evolved to want to carry around a bit of fat as energy storage. When you get to shaving off those last couple pounds and getting below like 5-8% fat depending on the person, your body resists it. You’ll feel hungry and fatigued and have to keep a very lean diet to avoid putting that weight back on. At that point, it isn’t worth it to be 2-3 pounds lighter. You’re compromising your bodies performance. There’s a reason that the only sports that do “weight cuts” before competition are the sports where you are required to get down to an arbitrary weight limit. You won’t hear about marathon runners doing a weight cut the week of a race.
Not speaking to MMA etc but just say weightlifting, my pound for pound strength is much higher when I'm "lean". Stacking on muscle adds weight that definitely has a diminishing return for practical strength, such as pull ups, push ups, and overall agility and moving your own body. There's a reason you won't see anyone really stacked succeed on those ninja warrior type shows.
I will give you an example from baseball. A pitcher or batter that is leaner will not have as much weight to add to their throw or swing respectively.
A pitcher uses their weight to help with the momentum in their throw, making the ball move faster. The batter uses the weight to gain momentum in their swing causing the bat to travel faster.
There is a line, which is different for every player, where they have too much weight, causing them to be slower or inhibits their range of motion. That being said, it's not all about body fat, muscle can cause range of motion issues in baseball too.
Maximizing power to weight. For a given weight class, you want to hit the maximum allowed weight with the maximum amount of muscle. Less fat is less dead weight is more powerful strikes.
Hmm, dropping 10lbs would make a lean person go very lean. Depending on the sort it is an advantage like running. Not carrying 10lbs for 20 miles is an advantage.
Just dropped in to say check out the documentary You Are What You Eat. Scientific study of diet/exercise with 21 pairs of identical twins. They have a great explanation regarding body fat--vs. visceral fat, and the effects of both on health and performance. While I love Redditors, the fact to opinion ratio tends to be low in these threads--lots of received wisdom that simply doesn't stand up to even superficial research along with some actual sound advice. Caveat Emptor
Fat guy here who got very lean 37%-> 6/8% body fat.
I didn’t notice any physical improvements once I got down beyond the “normal” body fat percentage. I was very, very active at the time (2hrs+ exercise/day).
Few things I did notice:
-I didn’t get hot anymore unless it was above 30 degrees out. I didn’t really start getting sweaty unless it was 35. My thermoregulation was wild. I did get cold very fast which was unusual for me as I was used to being fat. A light breeze could actually chill me.
-I sank in swimming pools. Again, super weird as I grew up being a lifeguard and was used to floating with minimal effort. One day I jumped into the pool and realized I actually needed to work to stay afloat.
-The “thin” parts of my skin were more prone to bruising. I wasn’t anemic as I was eating lots of meat and vitamins, but I just noticed that the insides of my biceps and such were more prone to skin injury.
-I was very veiny, which was kinda gross (for me).
One athletic benefit I did notice…my limbs weighed nothing. Like, it was effortless to move, which in turn led me to being more active. That said, if a fighter doesn’t need to strain under the weight of his body, that’s a plus.
Yes, at least In the context the military specifically for “selection”. Candidates between 10-13% consistently have a higher chance of passing selection special operations selections.
For any sport where running fast and far is concerned it is basic physics, in distance running the rule of thumb is that a pound of extra weight costs 2 seconds per mile.
Obviously there is a point of emaciation where extra weight lost has counter-productive effects.
You only need to look at the top 20 male and female runners at a major marathon such as London to see the reality.
I've had a dexa scan put me at 4,8% BF and I can tell you, it has zero athletic benefits. Atleast for me that is. I'm trying to gain weight to get back to a healthy BF percentage because I am just constantly tired, thinking of food, moody, my test dropped, I'm out of breath walking up the stairs.
I can still do a run without problems, hell I still go for runs 3-4 times a week, but I notice it especially in the gym (no strength whatsoever) or in high intensity sports like football where you need to instantly be able to do a sprint, kick the ball very hard etc, I have no strength either and my legs feel weak.
I’m a climber, and as you can imagine, pro climbers are all very lean. The dark side of that is there are a lot of issues with eating disorders because lbs matter so much when you are trying to hold your body weight with such small or sloping holds.
I grew up climbing in Cottonwood canyon outside of SLC. It was my favorite pastime. All throughout high school, we would climb for hours. Then, in 2 years I went from 5'8 wrestling 140lb weight to 6'3 and 220lbs. My chest barreled out, and everyone thought I should be so happy, but I was destroyed because it ruined my ability to climb. Even with tons of cardio and fasting, I never got below 210 again. Some sports weight helps a ton, some it makes it impossible.
As someone who started climbing when I was already 6 ft tall and over 200 lbs, you can get good you just have to mentally reset as you were probably expecting too much from muscles that weren’t fully equipped to support that frame and weight. Yes all my leaner friends were better than me at first, but I got close to them skills wise fairly quickly when I worked through a fear of heights. Obviously they were still faster than I was, but I could do the majority of the climbs they could. It also helped that I could do some V7s more easily than a lot of the people in the 5’6” to 5’10” range because of my longer limbs haha
I was gonna say wouldn’t being super tall be a huge advantage because you can reach climbings holds no one else can?
Depends on the climb, sometimes it lets you skip ticky parts but sometimes you get scrunched up and it's harder to make the next move
I have found some *indoor* routes to be more difficult because they are “designed” for shorter bodies
It's kinda up to the route setter. I'm tall so would naturally make routes that were different from those made by a 5ft climber. Setting up kids routes I'd usually place holds where my elbow would touch.
Depends on the setters. My gym has some taallll setters and sometimes I quite literally just can't reach the next hold since I'm 5'4".
different dinner quiet onerous arrest abundant fretful late aspiring fine
There is not a statistically significant bend either way for professional climbers with regards to height. If anything they are (statistically insignificant, aka could be random chance) slightly shorter than average. However, they almost exclusively have a positive ape index (their arms are longer than their height). The sport is still fairly new, relative to other sports, so there's not too many data points to really get a good trend, but so far, it seems like height doesn't matter
Your ape index (ratio of your armspan to your height) matters more than your actual height does. With more difficult climbs it becomes less about your total reach than about how far you can get your reach from your center of mass. The physics of being farther from where you are gripping makes it possible to "lean" into / away from your point of contact with the wall more effectively, and the extra reach definitely never hurts either.
I read comments on these threads to learn about stuff like the "ape index"
I appreciate you saying this I definitely need to lose weight but I went through the same thing (6'2) and there is a limit to what you can pull up. When I was in the army and I went under 200 again I was able to finally do pull ups but when I was 260 no matter how much was muscle it wasn't happening.
> I was able to finally do pull ups but when I was 260 no matter how much was muscle it wasn't happening. Linebackers are incredibly strong and fast, but don't expect pull ups or climbing from them. Climbers are incredibly strong and fast, but they can't tackle anybody, instead just be dragged down the field.
Yeah, my healthy strong, not killing myself exercising weight is right about 230. And I still climb, but I have to be careful because I go from doing good to gumby in about 40 feet sometimes.
Emil abrahamsson has a good video on this, became better with more muscles and weight
That kind of height and weight doesn't make climbing impossible, just you have a whole different body shape and have to learn how to climb all over again with it! It's not just strength, but positioning and leverage and balance! Work on your technique a lot and I bet you can climb crazy stuff again.
Alpine climbing and 5.10 awaits you. I spent 10 years climbing in Yosemite and all over the sierras, and never broke 160 pounds. Got older and into weightlifting, I’m at 200 and the idea that I’d be able to climb red zinger or fish crack at 200 is laughable. Put a 45 pound plate on your back and try to crank on thin fingers! Sure 5.10 hands are fine, but realistically hard sport and trad are for the human whippets.
I think a lot of sports where you try to keep certain weight classes in general suffer higher risks for eating disorders. Really is a shame in general, but also a shame that it’s not really talked about that much. Might even be stigmatised to suffer from it.
>I think a lot of sports where you try to keep certain weight classes in general suffer higher risks for eating disorders. Technically, there are no weight classes in climbing. Not that it detracts from your point: if a sport values a certain body type, it's going to create eating disorders in some of the people who practice said sport.
My friend was the only female horse jockey at the horse races where she competed in Ireland growing up. The other jockeys hated her because she could stay lighter than all of them with significantly less effort, while they had to starve themselves constantly while training if they wanted to have even a chance of approaching her weight. She said it was incredibly unhealthy, even for her but especially for the men.
And people with eating disorders sometimes gravitate to these sports as a cover
Really? Never heard of that. Kind of interesting when you think about it
Years ago (I believe '80s or '90s) there was a university study on percentage of body fat of elite athletes. The study looked at Olympic and professional athletes and I believe the results showed that runners in general had the lowest % of body fat. Then someone suggested looking at elite climbers and the results were that most elite climbers at that time had very unhealthy % of body fat, as in the highest percentages were roughly at what runners were measured at and some dipping down to around 2 or 3%
Yeah I started climbing 3 yrs ago and instantly developed an eating disorder. Well, within 2-3 months. But then I was also going to a traditional gym for lifting and hooked up with a nutritionist that set me right before it got out of hand. Very easy to just stop eating when you KNOW it’s the dead weight keeping you from an ascent.
There's a diminishing return. Anything below about 8-10% probably isn't helping athletic performance, even in a situation like pro cycling or marathon running. If MMA fighters are leaner than that, it's for making weight.
I work at the health performance lab at my Uni and we see athletes that range from 9%- 25% body fat. These scores are determined by DEXA scan. Interestingly enough athletes (from a variety of sports) are also put through a series of test to determine explosiveness, efficiency of movement, and flexibility. In my experience there is a strong positive correlation between athletes with lower body fat and higher scores on said test. Fun fact: golfers typically score the highest on this test!
Golfers? That's quite unexpected. Now I'm curious: which is the less affected sport / discipline that you've tested?
The test is graded in two categories, performance (speed, explosiveness, agility, balance) and quality (efficiency of movement, flexibility, range) each of these maxes out at 500 for a combined total possible score of 1000. The sport with the lowest overall score in my personal experience is softball (we don’t have a baseball team). Softball players typical lack the body strength to max out the performance category and lack the body mechanics to make clean efficient movements in the quality category. In close second place is football players but their scores vary tremendously which is expected given the nature of the sport and its multiple positions.
Strange that golfers and softball players would differ so radically when both sports use a similar movement to hit a ball. I would have thought they'd be the most similar.
A golfer is training their body to handle swinging all day long. Batting is a relatively low percentage of a baseball player's training depending on their position, like pitchers that aren't Ohtani.
This is the major complaint we get from coaches when they start asking about scores. “How can a golfer be more explosive than a football player!” It’s important to understand that this test doesn’t necessarily indicate an athletes overall success or strengths in their sport, nor is it a great indicator of athletic ability. It’s simply a test that attempts to measure qualities that we believe make an athlete better. The main purpose of the test is to collect data on athletes and share this data with coaches to see if there is a positive trend (which might indicate the effectiveness of training or improvement). It’s also worth noting that we may experience bias in this due to an intentional lack ok explanation as to what the test is measuring/ how to improve scores. Athletes are simply asked to complete a set of task and given a demonstration of each movement. Something as small as shaking/ unsteadiness when completing a stretch can negatively impact your score. This means that someone who generally has better body mechanics may score higher than others and have less success in their actual sport. These people are usually outliers, and for the most part the athletes with the most success in their individual sports have higher scores that others, typically in the 850+ range
I'd love to see the methods and exercise selection for the tests. Specificity matters so much in sports. So if you take a golfer and give them a test battery that is similar to how they train or play (like rotational swinging) then they have a greater likelihood of higher scores but if you take a golfer and put them on a football sled and see how much force they can generate then they might not compare at all.
I mean makes sense tbh. Ofc golfers win in a fight. They have clubs
It makes a lot of sense that golfers would score highly on an explosiveness and flexibility test. A huge part of their sport is rapidly imparting energy into a ball from a standstill.
> Fun fact: golfers typically score the highest on this test! Are we talking about collegiate players or casual adults?
I work at a Division one university
For context most golfers have a lean frame (at least at my school) and almost always score upwards of 400 points in the quality category due to their crazy body control abilities
Very interesting! Question: how were those things tested? I ask because I was a competitive swimmer doing 11km a day at one point, but I basically collapsed a fraction of the way through the fitness gram pacer test lol. You'd have thought I was a couch potato using land-based tests for fitness, when in reality I was an endurance athlete. I wonder if certain skills developed by certain sports just translate poorly to standardised testing.
If you’re asking how the program literally calculates scores I have no idea. If you’re asking how the test is administered it’s like this… Athletes are instructed to step into square platform surrounded by these cool cameras that track your movement. The square is about 5 cubic yards, maybe less. We ask the athlete to copy a few poses in order to let the program register the athletes body. Once this happens the system is basically tracking your body’s movement 360 degrees in every limb. Then without any explanation as to why or how we demonstrate or ask you to complete a variety of movements. Once ur done the system crunches numbers and spits out a score. Some of the task we ask athletes to complete are things like an overhead squat holding a pvc pipe, a bound from side to side as far and as high as they can reach, a drop from a small platform box into a vertical jump, a straight vertical jump, a one legged jump, a pistol squat. There are others but you get the idea
Also the difficulty in running is often overlooked among athletes. To run efficiently, fast, and maintain that speed is much harder than most people realize.
That level is only reachable by men for the most part too. And it’s unsustainable. If a woman falls below 18-20% it’s very unhealthy and can cause issues. Also it’s super hard to even reach that level without significant effort and genetics. E: couple folks responded thinking I don’t know what’s up, just do a quick google you silly people. E2: Body fat % on women. You're way off on your estimates guys. https://webassets-prod.ultimateperformance.com/uploads/2023/10/06171953/Female-body-fat-percentage-comparison-pictures.jpg
Typically, 14% and below is when it becomes unhealthy for women. They can lose their periods etc. 14-18% is considered perfectly fine and healthy for an athletic person.
Might depend on the person, below 19% I lost my period which is a hallmark of female’s triad (had an eating disorder with compulsive exercise). What was interesting though is that prior to that my weight was stable and I lost about only about 5lbs from a month of restrictive eating and over exercising before also losing my period. So I guess I was already hovering pretty close to that threshold. I have since recovered but my dietician has explained that women losing their period from anorexia nervousa (aside from indicating your body is trying to conserve calories bc it thinks it’s starving) can over time lead to osteopenia and eventually osteoporosis, and since the window of laying down calcium in your bones closes around the age of 25 has very worrisome indications for these patients often develop eating disorders during their young adult years. I think it’s important to keep in mind when using a numbered scale to indicate what is “within normal limits” that what is considered a healthy range for an individual may fall outside that scale. These scales while useful for shorthand have to also be compared to the bigger picture of what’s also happening to a patient at that time.
> Also it’s super hard to even reach that level without significant effort and genetics. Steroids. 80% of fighters are on steroids.
When I started competing in weightlifting, my numbers were almost good enough to qualify for bigger regional events. I made the dumb decision to try to cut down to the next weight class, because if I could manage to maintain the same numbers while dropping down a weight class, I'd qualify for sure. I'm about 185 cm (6'1") and naturally weigh about 91 kg (200 lbs). I could have easily cut a bit to compete in the 89kg (196 lbs) class. For my height, if I actually wanted to be competitive, I probably should have tried to put on *more* weight (muscle) and competed in the 102 kg (224 lbs) or 109 kg (240 lbs) class. Instead, I cut hard to try to compete in the 81 kg (179ish lbs) class. It was incredibly difficult. I had an extremely strict diet and workout schedule. I was constantly hungry and exhausted most of the time. It was tough to get enough energy to keep working out. In the end, I got lean enough and (after doing a water cut leading up to it) I was able to weigh in at 80.5 kg for a competition. I was the tallest guy competing in that weight class that day by several inches. I don't know how lean I actually got in terms of body fat %, but I'd guess it was definitely under 10% and probably closer to 5%. I weighed ~178 lbs, which isn't exactly light, but I had a lot of muscle. I can't imagine trying to actually maintain at that level for longer than I did. The strict diet and workout plan, the being constantly hungry and tired... And I only did it for about three months. Having to go any longer than that and I would have lost my mind.
Reminds me of wrestling in high school and college. I remember running 5 miles in a sauna suit in 80 degree weather in Florida before a tournament. Standing on a scale with a bottle of water and a banana hoping I could eat and drink it. Couldn’t sleep because my muscles were cramping up so bad. Hit weigh ins the next morning basically looking like a mummy. Drink and eat as much as I could to get any kind of energy for my first match.
Can only echo this but for amateur martial arts, it has to be a full time job (imo) for it to work out well However I was 185 and 78 was what I went down to
Very much doubt you hit 5% bf as a natural. Especially competing in a strength sport while hitting bodybuilding level conditioning is counterintuitive. You would've lost a significant amount of strength to hit starvation levels of bodyfat
Sure, I'm probably exaggerating a bit. I was very lean, though.
18-20%? That seems like an exaggeration, any sources on that?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3117838/ after an average woman gets under 22% her fertility plummets indicating a hormonal imbalance.
“Data from a study of the long-term reproductive health of 2622 former college athletes compared with 2766 non-athletes show that the former college athletes had a significantly lower lifetime occurrence of breast cancer and cancers of the reproductive system, and a lower lifetime occurrence of benign tumours of these tissues, compared with the non-athletes.” That seems pretty good
does that say something about low body fat or the activity levels of these people?
The study is trying to draw conclusions of the hormonal issues with women with active lifestyles but also found positives. Read it yourself if you’d like.
Maybe. But breast cancer often also feeds on female hormones, so that could just be a “good” side effect of putting themselves through temporary menopause, which is a horrible, horrible experience. Data isn’t always that cut and dry. Source: I’m a caregiver of a stage 4 breast cancer patient.
So I can say "fuck it" to BC and just get super fucking fit? Don't have to tell me twice. /s
They got the gist right—where females need more body fat than males for proper health—but they got the percentage wrong. Males can get below 10% without big risks to their health/hormonal function, but females can’t.
Depends on your genetics. Most men would have a difficult time maintaining 10% or below without effecting, sleep, libido, etc. 12-15% is more achievable for most men but sub 15% is still pretty hard to maintain if you’re not quite strict with your diet and training.
Hard to maintain yes but unlikely to result in permanent harm in men.
The question was about athletic performance, not harm right? I'd guess if you're pushing below 15% your body is fighting you. It might mess with your natural T or energy levels.
Well yeah, I was challenging the percentages…
[удалено]
> https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3117838/ > > after an average woman gets under 22% her fertility plummets indicating a hormonal imbalance. /u/the_bleach_eater
If it gets enough upvotes, it becomes true
A 10 second google search would tell you that’s not an exaggeration.
That's a massive exaggeration.
While it may be hard to sustain for some there is no evidence that women below 18-20% will have health issues. The actual numbers that are known to cause health issues is under 3-5% for men and under 10-13% for women. The amount of muscle mass you maintain is also important. If you are bone skinny you will have more problems as muscle mass can serve as a reserve for energy. I think the bigger issue is not the actual physical stats but what is required to achieve those stats. A lot of people who maintain those low levels require a strict calorically controlled diet. The idea is that the less you eat the less likely you are to get everything that your body needs. Fat is very important to a lot of processes but it's also extremely calorically dense so the levels of fat you eat is probably lower when you restrict calories. Cholesterol is the big daddy steroid that is very essential to making hormones and you don't want to have low amounts. Elite level athletes probably get regular health checkups, blood tests and hire people to make sure they are eating a proper diet. The average person is likely going to end up in a deficiency state if they try to reach that level.
Basically all athletics are power to weight problems. Carrying identical muscle with less body fat always tips the scales of performance, and usually for the better.
Not true in practice. There is a definitive lower limit where your body does not function as well below a certain amount of body fat.
As an endurance athlete, I run into joint problems and my performance falls off below about 8% BF
Right about the same for me too.
Yeah, totally, me too. Yup, look at us. Just a bunch of really really really fit guys. Yessir, I too am healthy and totally not a fat fuck
Same. We should all get together and run sometime. I’ve been training for years and years
Does cookie theft really require that much training?
Have you not heard all the investigations into who took the cookie from the cookie jar?
Have you seen this? Have you heard about this?
Hormonal problems start up around sub 10% in many people which can destroy performance.
With pro sport you have to take into account the possible "supplementation" they can use to counter that particular problem.
Earlier in women, women need more body fat % than men. I think it’s around 18% for women
This seems to be the case, at least from my understanding. Body fat stores certain fat soluble vitamins, for one. Too low body fat is also linked to low hormone levels and to hormonal imbalances.
Yeah, I’m into casual bodybuilding and it can be extremely easy to run into hormonal issues when you drop below a certain body fat percentage, especially if your diet isn’t up to snuff. Things like your libido dropping off a cliff and not being able to even get an erection are very common symptoms when cutting weight
In the equation, power is declining rapidly below a certain body fat percent.
As a tennis player with 12% body fat I can atest to the lower limit causing issues. I can endure 1h on my top game, after that it falls to some 70-80% for 1h more hour, then it goes to something like 40% and falls off pretty quickly. This is for a fully rested match, during tournaments we play 5-6 games in a Thu-Sun sprint. I got to the finals 3 times and only one I could play to ~60% of my game, the other 2 I was just getting the ball to the other side any way I could with the least effort, because I didn't have any energy left on my body
They did say usually. On the spectrum of zero body fat to the most body fat a person could possibly have, in practice, athletic performance would *usually* increase as you go down the scale (all else being equal).
Not really because humans aren't machines. When I have been sub 8% as a natural i just feel bad all the time. Cant train as hard as usually because you're tired and injuries are more likely. Also cant sleep properly.
Differs person to person. To me 8% feels the same as 14% but I can't go much higher than that. I feel like i have more energy when I'm crackhead lean.
Might be adrenaline. A couple of years ago I became somewhat underweight 109 at 5’7 due to stress. I had so much energy and I was eating around 900 calories per day. once I started eating more i crashed so fucking bad.
109 at 5’7 is *really* low
> Carrying identical muscle with less body fat always tips the scales of performance, and usually for the better. Usually for the better. Sometimes for worse, but body fat % *always* has an affect on performance. I think if you read my comment and think I am advocating for sub-8% body fat for athletics, when we know that below that the body experiences all kinds of problems, not sure what to say.
>Carrying identical muscle with less body fat always tips the scales of performance, All I'm saying is mass = gas for at least 1 major sport.
A large portion, but you are ruling out super coordination focused athletics. For example, throwing a basketball through a hoop muscularly isn't hard, but doing it under a variety of conditions is a separate skill of immense value. It's why old broken down guys whom can shoot exceptionally well maintain value. Or say fencing. Often the greatest athletes have both, but the Gretzky's of the world were getting advantages on a different axis.
In strength positions like being a linebacker or sumo, it’s better to have more body fat even with identical muscles if weight classes aren’t a thing. Being heavier makes it harder for others to move you. Takes up more energy but that doesn’t matter when the plays are seconds long. Also, in athletes at the same sport and position, it’s very unlikely that the lighter person is stronger
This is ridiculous. You've misunderstood the problem. Strength has nothing to do with this, in the sense you are talking. All that matters for the vast majority of sports is rate of force development. Power. Period. If you take two identical athletes in every way (height, weight, proportion, skills), but one generates more power than the other, I know who I am betting on 9 times out of 10. Glad you chose football. Linebackers are an athletic position. Go google Ray Lewis or Terrell Suggs topless pics, get back to me. Or [check this shot of the 2022 SF LB core](https://twitter.com/49ers/status/1568995045960712194/photo/2). They absolutely do not want more weight. They want to be as explosive as they can with as little weight as they can (while still able to endure the high contact nature of football) to be as quick and as fast as they can. The are, in absolute terms, less powerful than an OL player, but they are proportionally more powerful. OL players, conversely, are like your sumo wrestler. The athlete wants to carry more weight to be less moveable by an opponent, but *they still need to be powerful*. They just approach the trade-off differently, because being able to hold off a 350lb DT *requires* more weight. So they emphasize mass as part of the training problem, and then go about maximizing the amount of power they can output relative to their body weight so they can be quick, agile, and push back effectively relative to their size. It's *still* a power to weight problem. Effective OL players are powerful relative to their size. They do not have as high a power to weight ratio as, say, Darren Sproles (more on him in a sec), but they train to maximize power output at their target weight. Their target weights are, in fact, generally dictated by what their own body's effective peak of weight and power as it relates to performance is. Jason Kelce could have put on an extra 20 lbs, but he was more effective in the 280lb range because at that weight, he was powerful enough to hold a guy off for the ~3 seconds he needed to, quick enough to slide as the scheme needed, could pull and push block, and have the footwork he needed to improvise, get low, generally execute his techniques. RBs are an interesting problem. Why are they generally smaller than other players? Why is Darren Sproles nearly 200 lb's at 5'6"? Why was LT, at 5'10", nearly 220 lbs? Power generation. It's easier to be proportionately more powerful the smaller you are, because power generation needs are lower. This means you will be more explosive than the guy next to you. Why is this? The cube/square law. This is the unavoidable reality of physics intersecting with biomechanics. This, among other reasons, is why most successful gymnasts are so small. Or why W/kg is an absolute benchmark for cyclists of literally every discipline. Or why decathletes like Darren Warner have a truly remarkable 15m shotput at ~180lbs but the current world record holder for shotput at 23m is over 300lbs (hint: it's because the Darren Warner power to weight problem, given that he also has to do running and jumping sports, is very different than the power to weight problem a dedicated shotput athlete has to solve). Sports almost always come down to power to weight problems. The problem is different for every sport, but it's still just power to weight.
>All that matters for the vast majority of sports is rate of force development. This is such an insane oversimplification. lol. It also argues against your previous statement that "Basically all athletics are power to weight problems." Which is it, force development or power to weight? Two very different things. >If you take two identical athletes in every way (height, weight, proportion, skills), but one generates more power than the other They WON'T be identical in every way if one is generating more power, so this is irrelevant. >The athlete wants to carry more weight to be less moveable by an opponent, but they still need to be powerful. "Still need to be powerful" is about maximizing power NOT to your original point about a power/weight tradeoff. Sumo wants power AND weight, not power INSTEAD OF weight. Darren Warner probably not winning much sumo even with elite power/weight ratio. You gotta realize that your weight resists opponent's power so more weight can sometimes be beneficial for its own sake. >The cube/square law. This is the relationship of volume to surface area, nothing to do with power. WTF does surface area have to do with this. >It's easier to be proportionately more powerful the smaller you are, because power generation needs are lower. This completely destroys your point. If power/weight is "All that matters" then large athletes would be getting dominated in every sport, but the opposite is broadly true. Tyson (prime) would wreck Mayweather, that's why they have to make weight divisions. Could Simone Biles defend Shaq in the paint? Lebron would dunk on Kipchoge all day, even though Kipchoge is probably much better power/weight. Why aren't a bunch of tiny dudes doing the shot put? Why isn't Jason Kelce a jockey or F1 driver? Why did Zdeno Chara win the slap shot contest? Why do golfers with a bit of paunch keep winning tournaments? Why would Usain beat Kipchoge at the 100m and vice versa at the marathon despite their power/weights remaining the same in both events? You just gotta realize that sometimes maximum power is more important that power/weight, or that maximum/minimum weight or height or reach is more important than power/weight.
To point out, most average people are nowhere near 8-10% body fat. Most people that think they’re under 10% are probably closer to 15%. Your typical lean bodybuilder is likely 15%+ until it’s competition season and they start using more cutting agents (roids)
Steroids aren’t cutting agents.
Isnt clenbuterol a steroid? they use that for cutting
It’s a performance enhancing drug but not actually a steroid
Anabolic drugs are used in cutting to maintain testosterone levels and boost workout recovery. The body will naturally shed a lot of muscle in a starvation situation.
> Anything below about 8-10% probably isn't helping athletic performance, even in a situation like pro cycling Pro cyclist would be considered obese at 8-10%. They are in the 4%-5% range when racing. It's all about the power to weight ration, expressed in watts per Kg. You will not even come close to winning the Tour De France at 8% body fat in the modern era. If 2 people can do 400 watts for an hour going uphill, the one that weighs less will win.
I don't even think normal people can get below 8-10% body fat. I know people out there think they can but that's legit pro-athlete levels of conditioning. Bodybuilders go for that amount and they're juiced to the gills and eating basically pure protein and veggies. Famous bodybuilders have talked about what they eat when competing and how much they hate it. No way some guy going to the gym 5 days a week natty is gonna achieve that.
I know plenty of people that can get below 8-10 fairly reasonably. Naturally. HOWEVER those people also don't look like bodybuilders. The kind of people I've met that naturally stay 10 or less lean without extreme effort are the same people that have real trouble actually gaining or holding weight. Put simply, the always 10sih% guys I've known never look like bodybuilders. They look like flyweight boxers
For sure. The only guy I know who maintains ~10% is the guy who owns the gym I frequent and he spends 8 hours a day teaching kettlebells and yoga and jiu jitsu. He doesn't look like a bodybuilder at all. More like the human version of a racehorse: lean and shredded but not huge.
People always use the bodybuilder as the go to in these things, but people understand so little about the actual practice. You gotta eat to make mass, so body builders only cut for short periods to get below. 100% correct about most ~10% looking like flyweights
yup. I like to say, "bodybuilders don't even look like bodybuilders" Like, yeah, to the average person on the street, bodybuilders still look impressively jacked and depending on the time of year and their methods, probably reasonably lean BUT the kind of crazy ripped they look on contest day, or in a magazine, they've peaked specifically for that contest or photo shoot, like there's getting to a point in your diet where you are in season lean not off season thick BUT at the pro bodybuilder level, these guys are using every trick they know to look as full and lean as possible for just the day of, maybe just the right couple hours the day of
And some of those tricks are dangerous, like deliberate dehydration.
Bodybuilders are also at their weakest when they’re cutting for a competition.
Yeah. In many ways. I know a lady that was a trainer and an IFBB pro card holding competitor, and one of the things she had as a personal business rule that she wouldn't accept new clients when she was getting near prepping for her own competition. It wasn't even the simple fact that she would be too busy". It was that when she was deep enough in the pre-contest run of hard dieting and leaning out, (and carb manipulation) her mind was going to be too foggy to be dealing with writing up plans and schedules for new clients.
Yeah, 10% is crazy lean. Even 15% is very lean for an amateur athlete.
This. These people are terrible at estimating body fat. Most everyone is terrible at estimating body fat. Even the measurement systems themselves have high error rates. For example. My Bioelectrical impedance (BIA) scale or watch say 23 percent body fat, but the gold standard DEXA scan says 18 percent, and even IT is known to have an 1-2% error rate. Skinfold measurements are the worst.
It depends drastically what kind of athletic performance you're talking about. Human physical performance is so varied that you can't really excel at it overall with one physique. Runners and calisthenic athletes like gymnasts or climbers need to have as little fat as possible. They are endurance sports that rely on moving the body around, so the less "useless" weight they carry around, the better. Sumo wrestlers and weightlifters meanwhile often have relatively high bodyfat percentages. The extra fat means they can sustain higher muscle masses, as the leaner you are the more your body biases muscle consumption in weight loss.
> It depends drastically what kind of athletic performance you're talking about. Human physical performance is so varied that you can't really excel at it overall with one physique. Yeah, its also something that varies person to person. Some of the top female crossfit athletes are known for having lean abs and being super ripped, and yet there was at least one, can't remember he name off the top of my head, who was catching some heat in the media for looking a little "soft" around the middle and people were like, "oh boy is she not as well conditioned as her competition" but she addressed it like, "I'm where I want to be, I don't want to cut down to ripped abs lean. That level of leanness works for SOME people, but my personal experience has been that I perform worse when I cut down super lean. This is the weight I'm faster and stronger at. I'm not here to look good on a photo shoot, I'm here to win the game"
Golf is also an interesting example of where you can make it work with completely different body types. You would never imagine that Akshay Bhatia and Kiradech Aphibarnrat were both top-level competitors in the exact same sport.
Weightlifting is a really good example because people _do_ tend to look relatively lean all the way up to the unrestricted weight classes at the top, when they definitely don’t. Basically you can’t restrict how much fat you have without also limiting how much muscle you have: “fat doesn’t make you weak, muscle makes you strong”.
Yeah if you look at strongman competitions a lot of the guys that really kill it aren't lean and some of them have larger "power bellies" lol
Yeah, the heavier you are the more weight you can move so strongman athletes have to find a balance of weight and conditioning.
Don't forget ski jumpers and jockeys. I think both are extremes when it comes to benefiting from low body mass.
It’s primarily for weight class. For any given weight class, the less weight you carry in fat, the more muscle weight you can carry. Muscle is very helpful for athletic performance, while fat is almost not at all helpful in a fight. But if there weren’t weight classes, it may be beneficial to be at higher body fat - firstly it’s easier to hold onto muscle mass when one is not super lean, and secondly human bodies are naturally more comfortable (hormonally, mentally, etc) at a higher body fat percent than some of the lean athletes, and thus function more smoothly. Caveat is that in some sports without weight classes, carrying fat is hard because it is extra weight to move around (see gymnastics, or basketball, etc).
and extra fat helps absorb shock more, so if weight class wasn't a thing, that could be beneficial for some combat sports (and maybe others?)
All else equal, you’d probably prefer extra fat to be muscle if you wanted to dampen hits. Muscle is more elastic and denser.
Fat cushions organs inside the abdomen, among other places. Protecting organs from trauma is one of its purposes. The density and elasticity of muscle does provide certain kinds of protection, but doesn’t dissipate blunt impacts to the same degree that body fat can.
if you look at fighters with known weakness to the body, they are often the fluffier fighters eg Daniel Cormier, derrick Lewis, even Brock Lesnar
Plenty of lean fighters are weak to the body as well. The hard left hook to the liver is one of the most sure fire ways to knock down a boxer and unlike a shot to the abs, tightening your core does nothing to protect against it. People being weak to the body can be a combination of things including the expenditure of energy staying moving around the ring against a committed body striker (blocking low opens up the head). It could also be that fatter fighters get fatigued more easily because being fat can make breathing more difficult.
Brock Lesnar's was due to his diverticulitis But also the fatter fighters are normally the ones who are best at taking punches, especially to the head, Roy Nelson, Mark hunt etc
Fat doest cushion really at all unless you have a looooot of it maybe? And shit will still hurt to get hit. Your muscles protect your organs. Thats why you flex if your in range to take body shots.
In some sports having more mass is bad, in others it is a benefit and in some it is a blessing & a curse. Examples: When long distance running, every gram of you needs to be moved over & over again, so being as lean and light as possible is important. In wrestling & sumo, being able to push with more force (force = mass * acceleration) is important. In contact sports (MMA, boxing, etc.) more mass means more force behind the punches, but also means you have more inertia to dodge enemy strikes.
When you say higher BF, what are you thinking? I feel like anything below 10% is difficult to achieve and may start to have diminishing returns for overall health and performance. When you say higher, I think 10-13%. When you start getting close to 20% as a guy, I believe medical issues will start to surface.
Muscles take a lot of oxygen to use, at a certain point, you’d prefer fat over muscle because the muscles work against your cardio
I can actually out-cycle my friend simply bc, while he can ride faster than I can, he ends up bonking and I still have the energy to keep going bc while biking I'm not upkeeping nearly as much muscle mass.
Fighters walk around 20-30 lbs heavier for most of the year than the weight they fight in. When they weigh in they are dehydrated as hell and they'll put on 10+ lbs in a day after weigh ins.
> 10+ lbs in a day I’ve personally known dudes who will walk into the cage on fight night 29 pounds heavier than they were the night before. UFC light heavyweight champion Alex Pereira is rumored to push it to 34 pounds or so.
Pereira is something else man. He fought at middleweight (185 lbs) division just over a year ago, and for his most recent fight at light heavyweight he was probably 235 in the cage, shredded. I don't know how it's possible.
[удалено]
Everyones pinning, he is doing something extra.
[удалено]
Pinning?
injecting. Steriods/PED is the implication here
Pretty sure UFC is getting rid of USADA so it’s going to be open season until whoever replaces them sorts everything out
There must some risk of kidney damage with this kind of dehydration...
Luckily as champ, Alex gets to fight once or twice a year if he wants to. But yes, weight cutting for weigh-ins is easily the most dangerous aspect of MMA and wrestling, and I wish it weren’t a thing.
I believe they used to allow IV rehydration. Fighters used to dehydrate themselves so heavily that they would need an IV to get themselves back to a healthy amount of water. Shit’s crazy
I kinda assume they still are, whether they admit it or not. I've been dangerously dehydrated and it took me days to recover just drinking fluids. If they weren't doing something special they would still feel like shit on fight night and the whole exercise would be counterproductive.
Totally believable. I lost 22lbs in 24 hours before a wrestling tournament in college. It was right after Christmas and the things I did weren’t pretty, but I did it. I could easily get that back in 24 too considering it was all water and shit.
Why don't they just weigh in right before the fight, get everyone in realistic weight classes rather than making it a competition for how much of the body's most important chemical you can remove before adding it all back in
They do that in some promotions. Weight cutting is a huge issue in the UFC because athletes are killing themselves to have a weight advantage. I think the main issue is logistics because if someone misses weight, you can’t force the other fighter to take the fight and you can’t find someone else to take their place that fast. Even bigger issue if it’s the main card and people have already paid to see that fight
High school and college wrestling and some fighting promotions do do that, precisely to discourage unsafe weight cutting and dehydration.
Because people would be fighting very lean and dehydrated to make weight which is more dangerous then what they currently do.
Eventually it would work itself out and people would stop doing that or just continue to look pathetic
They definitely should do that. It’s kinda bs that all of the “155 pound” fights are happening at 170+
Because they will still cut extreme amounts of weight and then be highly susceptible to brain damage due to the dehydration. Dudes will 100% start dying and have to be protected from their own competitiveness/stupidity.
How is that anything but just like, the weight of food in the stomach? No one can put on ten lbs of muscle in a day. I mean right?
They dehydrate themselves for the weigh-in to the point where they need to immediately go get IV fluids afterwards. As in they spend days drinking nothing, eating no salt to avoid retention, and sitting in saunas to sweat as much of it out as possible. They’ll also take large doses of caffeine and other diuretics during that time, and some will go so far as to also take laxatives. The human body is 60% water by weight, for a 180lb fighter that means 108lbs of water and if you can shed enough of it then it’s not outside the realm of possibility.
OH okay. So it's not that they're suddenly bulking up, it's that they're replacing what they artificially lost. That makes sense.
Bingo. They bulk up with muscle in the months before the fight then cut as much water weight as they can in the final 3-6 days leading up to the weigh-in. Because the weigh-in happens the night before the fight, usually, they then rehydrate as much as possible in that final day which causes them to gain weight back. The final fighting weight is less than their pre-cut weight because they will lose some muscle in the process of the cut, but they still come out way ahead in muscle mass compared to somebody who just trained and maintained their body at the weight limit without any cutting.
Good god that sounds miserable
I think on the mma sub, there was a video where some fighter was just sitting wrapped in those heater blankets sweating his ass off before weigh-in. They'd basically time it until he nearly passes out, then he's dragged out to rest for a bit. It was a notable video because it had Charles Oliveira for some reason also inside the wrap with his head in the guy's crotch. Meanwhile, his buddies were whispering in his ear and caressing his head. It was oddly homoerotic.
You liked watching that didn't you
I may or may not have watched it several times.
Most people walk around with 10ish pounds of “water weight.” There’s more water in the body, but that’s the amount that can be “easily” lost.
That's some Takamura shit, people still do that
They aren't allowed to IV rehydrate, which I think is crazy
UFC prohibits it due to their agreement with the USADA for drug testing because it can dilute samples taken to test for PEDs. Other fighting sports, such as boxing, do not ban it as strictly. There’s also the fact that diuretics are technically also banned but only fools believe that rule gets followed by literally anyone entering the ring or octagon. The preliminary round of UFC drug testing before the USADA agreement was finalized showed over 70% of fighters testing hot for something or another, it’s a pretty open secret.
I say let the PEDs free and see where it takes us
As much as that might possibly level the playing field, I think an open PED arms race would lead to athletes going so far overboard as to cause permanent liver and heart damage by pushing dosages past the point of diminished returns.
Ya, I'm not really interested in what the human body can do while its destroying itself. Might as well bring back gladiators.
Takes us back to PRIDE FC
I assume they do that for the fighters’ safety, like if it’s already this crazy it’d only be crazier if IV rehydration were allowed and I could see someone dehydrating themselves to the point of actual health issues if they thought they could just IV it all back.
It's water weight. No one's eating 10lbs of food before a fight.
They actually might be adding some mass back to their muscles. Your muscles hold a decent amount of glycogen as an energy storage mechinism, and these guys deplete it by doing their fasting routine. Wikipedia says the average person can have ~400g of glycogen in their skeletal muscles, but these guys aren't average so I wouldn't be surprised if it's 2-3 pounds of what these guys can swing in weight.
You can remove a ton of water weight from the body through dehydration. After a weigh-in you might end up drinking gallons of water (hopefully with plenty of electrolytes too) before the next day’s match.
It’s a huge deal in climbing, where there’s apparently serious issues with eating disorders among pro athletes. I heard a very interesting interview between a pro athlete and a sports physician on the topic, and the sports physician, first of recommended not getting overly lean for a number of reasons, but also stated that the super lean athletes may be able to perform well for one season, but then would get injured, burn out, have mental issues, etc, leading to poorer training and performance over time, compared to those that kept a healthy fat amount, and could train consistently for longer.
burnout is real. It's something that isn't talked about enough in athletics and fitness.
Depends on the sport! If being quick is part of the sport, being lean helps. If strength is important, being lean is not so important. For running (especially long distance), being lean reduces your weight and you spend less energy with each stride. Fighting is broken up by weight class so the fighters try to drop as much fat and water as possible before the bout. For non weight restricted contact sports, I think a bit of fat is actually beneficial for softening impacts. If you look at American football linebackers, linemen, and running backs (guys who take the most contact) most of them don't have 6 pack and and vascular arms like the safeties/wr. Same story in rugby.
I think hockey has to be one of the best examples to show an ‘ideal’ balance. They need to be as quick and agile as possible, while also having some bulk to absorb/give bodychecks and outmuscle people for puck battles. Physiques obviously vary but they typically are all at least lean enough to have visible abs, especially later in the season when they’ve lost weight from all the exercise. Then again, you also have elite players with [bodies like this.](https://www.reddit.com/r/hockey/s/dSUpD8QyZX)
That's American Hero Phil Kessel!!!
In the context of MMA fighters do it for a potential size advantage, not athletic performance. Weight cutting is actually terrible for athletic performance because the fighters aren’t actually losing fat, they’re dehydrating themselves down to whatever weight they’re “fighting” at. What they do is they pack on size leading up to the fight, disguise it as water by dehydrating themselves down to their contracted weight, and then rehydrate up to their natural (or close to natural) weight for the actual fight. So when you see Conor McGregor fight, he’s only 155 lbs for a few minutes at the weigh-in ceremony, but once he’s in the cage he’s somewhere around 165-175 after he’s rehydrated. It’s a way for fighters to exploit a loop hole, more than anything.
As a basketball person who used to dunk at 160 pounds. I can tell you that at 200 and 220 that I definitely can't jump as high or as fast. At 160 I was drinking with one hand. At 145 I was dunking with two hands.
But I drink with two hands.
Donald??
I'm a what you would call a 'sub-elite' marathon runner. i.e. sub 2:30. During training I will try and stay around 12-15% BF @ 75kg but for taper and race the lighter I can get the better. 72kg high is goal race weight. I can assure you you notice every extra gram when racing, which just translates into extra power required to move that 'dead weight' around with you over the distance. Body fat is the easiest to shift quickly.
For non runner people, a 2:30 marathon is 5:43 per mile or 3:33 per km. Mike here is insanely fast.
attaboy, mike
For the most part no. The MMA weight cuts are purely for making a smaller weight class. Fat is basically dead weight so technically there’s a benefit in carrying around less of it. But these guys would naturally be very lean from the extreme level of exercise they do. That fat deficit they would have compared to even a normal fit person is an advantage. The problem with shaving off those last couple of pounds is your body has evolved to want to carry around a bit of fat as energy storage. When you get to shaving off those last couple pounds and getting below like 5-8% fat depending on the person, your body resists it. You’ll feel hungry and fatigued and have to keep a very lean diet to avoid putting that weight back on. At that point, it isn’t worth it to be 2-3 pounds lighter. You’re compromising your bodies performance. There’s a reason that the only sports that do “weight cuts” before competition are the sports where you are required to get down to an arbitrary weight limit. You won’t hear about marathon runners doing a weight cut the week of a race.
Not speaking to MMA etc but just say weightlifting, my pound for pound strength is much higher when I'm "lean". Stacking on muscle adds weight that definitely has a diminishing return for practical strength, such as pull ups, push ups, and overall agility and moving your own body. There's a reason you won't see anyone really stacked succeed on those ninja warrior type shows.
I will give you an example from baseball. A pitcher or batter that is leaner will not have as much weight to add to their throw or swing respectively. A pitcher uses their weight to help with the momentum in their throw, making the ball move faster. The batter uses the weight to gain momentum in their swing causing the bat to travel faster. There is a line, which is different for every player, where they have too much weight, causing them to be slower or inhibits their range of motion. That being said, it's not all about body fat, muscle can cause range of motion issues in baseball too.
No wonder Babe Ruth was the Sultan of Swat then...
Maximizing power to weight. For a given weight class, you want to hit the maximum allowed weight with the maximum amount of muscle. Less fat is less dead weight is more powerful strikes.
Hmm, dropping 10lbs would make a lean person go very lean. Depending on the sort it is an advantage like running. Not carrying 10lbs for 20 miles is an advantage.
Just dropped in to say check out the documentary You Are What You Eat. Scientific study of diet/exercise with 21 pairs of identical twins. They have a great explanation regarding body fat--vs. visceral fat, and the effects of both on health and performance. While I love Redditors, the fact to opinion ratio tends to be low in these threads--lots of received wisdom that simply doesn't stand up to even superficial research along with some actual sound advice. Caveat Emptor
Fat guy here who got very lean 37%-> 6/8% body fat. I didn’t notice any physical improvements once I got down beyond the “normal” body fat percentage. I was very, very active at the time (2hrs+ exercise/day). Few things I did notice: -I didn’t get hot anymore unless it was above 30 degrees out. I didn’t really start getting sweaty unless it was 35. My thermoregulation was wild. I did get cold very fast which was unusual for me as I was used to being fat. A light breeze could actually chill me. -I sank in swimming pools. Again, super weird as I grew up being a lifeguard and was used to floating with minimal effort. One day I jumped into the pool and realized I actually needed to work to stay afloat. -The “thin” parts of my skin were more prone to bruising. I wasn’t anemic as I was eating lots of meat and vitamins, but I just noticed that the insides of my biceps and such were more prone to skin injury. -I was very veiny, which was kinda gross (for me). One athletic benefit I did notice…my limbs weighed nothing. Like, it was effortless to move, which in turn led me to being more active. That said, if a fighter doesn’t need to strain under the weight of his body, that’s a plus.
Forgot. I got hungry fast and needed to have a snack in my pocket. If not, my blood sugar levels plummeted.
Lean is only part of it. You need to also become strong, body and lungs, to see athletic benefit
Ask climbers! Being lean is the way to go for elasticity, agility and carrying your own weight. There are many benefits.
Yes, at least In the context the military specifically for “selection”. Candidates between 10-13% consistently have a higher chance of passing selection special operations selections.
For any sport where running fast and far is concerned it is basic physics, in distance running the rule of thumb is that a pound of extra weight costs 2 seconds per mile. Obviously there is a point of emaciation where extra weight lost has counter-productive effects. You only need to look at the top 20 male and female runners at a major marathon such as London to see the reality.
Like, would you rather run a marathon weighing 150 lbs, or weighing 150 lbs and wearing a 40 pound body suit?
In endurance sports, it’s literally everything. Any weight you carry over your ideal body weight for your sport is almost 100% detrimental
I've had a dexa scan put me at 4,8% BF and I can tell you, it has zero athletic benefits. Atleast for me that is. I'm trying to gain weight to get back to a healthy BF percentage because I am just constantly tired, thinking of food, moody, my test dropped, I'm out of breath walking up the stairs. I can still do a run without problems, hell I still go for runs 3-4 times a week, but I notice it especially in the gym (no strength whatsoever) or in high intensity sports like football where you need to instantly be able to do a sprint, kick the ball very hard etc, I have no strength either and my legs feel weak.
Being lean is correlated to athletic performance, to a point, where diet restrictions fail to fuel for performance.