Dieting through a training camp – Part 1
Most amateur and professional boxers will have some time off
between fights and once a date is agreed for their next fight they will
increase their training and start their diet to make weight (heavyweights
obviously excluded from this), this is the period they refer to as their
training camp.
What I’m going to discuss here are some key diet and
supplementation points to consider for the fighter who has to make weight, the
what’s and what not’s to stress over, I’ll even brush on the dreaded but now
almost essential dehydration process. Hopefully you’ll pick up some key points,
which you can apply to your own training and nutrition plans. My experience
comes from the boxers and MMA fighters I have worked with and all of my work is
backed by science, something that should not be ignored in exchange for fad
diets or self-proclaimed guru’s new methods. If the scientifically backed
methods don’t work for you then it’s not the science, its’ most definitely you.
Crash diets suck big time, don’t get in the viscous cycle of that being your
only option to make weight. Oh and don’t bitch and moan about having to diet,
if you hate it that much fight at your natural weight.
As a performance athlete making weight you really must do
all you can to protect your metabolism, there’s no doubt as bodyweight and fat
stores drop the so will your metabolic rate, however you need to protect it and
make sure it is not magnified. This is your key tool to making weight the easy
way. Crash dieting and bingeing after a fight are a sure fire way to metabolic
damage, now the science is not vast on this area (check out the seminal
Minnesota Semi-Starvation Study for good info on metabolic rate decreases)
my experience with athletes is that every time you binge and add fat it becomes
harder to shift that fat each fight, compounded by alcohol and age. I’ve worked
with many fighters who through a combination of steady state cv, low calories
and then bingeing after a fight just find it harder each time to make weight
and the calories have to go lower for longer. Soon enough you’re left with
nowhere to go and end up living on barely any food and using stimulants to get
through training sessions, that is not a good place for increasing performance
coming in to a fight. what’s really happening in this situation is your
testosterone levels, nervous system output and thyroid drop through the floor
and yet cortisol levels sky rocket, this is a bad environment for performance,
recovery and fat loss, albeit somewhat inevitable when you do this, limiting it
is key.
I have seen fighters eating sub 500kcals for 2 full weeks
prior to the weigh in, this is a crucial time and using stimulants to carry you
through training brings about the other real issue of adrenal fatigue. So at
all costs protect your metabolism, to do this you need to be sensible and here
are the techniques I use with clients who have suffered with this:
·
If you have a lot of weight to drop then drop it
at the start of training camp, don’t leave it until 4 weeks out where you have
to starve yourself
·
Don’t binge after a fight if you’ve starved
yourself, your body is not a position to handle a huge influx of calories from
sugar and processed foods you will have been craving
·
Increase your carb intake after fights slowly 25g
increments per week
·
Don’t stop training after a fight, you may want
a break but you cant eat all you want and not train, you’ll just get fat
quickly, so just keep in your s&c sessions and your hiit conditioning work
if you wish to cut back
·
Start your dieting early, get the bulk of the
weight off quickly and then slowly eat and train your way in to your weight
·
Keep protein high. Protein has been shown to
help increase metabolic rate.
·
Don’t steady state cardio as your calorie burner
– not only will those long runs damage your knees and joints but too much of
such activity has been shown to slow metabolic rate, I hear of current world
champions going for a steady run to burn off the calories every night. We’ve
all seen the overweight guys walking for an hour on the treadmill in the gym,
saying he’s burnt 1000kcals off at a steady pace barely breaking a sweat, the
fact is he’s not and he’s still overweight
·
Finally don’t worry, permanently screwing your
metabolism up is pretty much impossible, what’s important is making the changes
to make things easier so you can concentrate on your performance rather than
constantly worrying about making weight, stress is not good for your metabolism
either.
You’ll notice that I advise to strip weight quickly at the
beginning of a training camp, the reason for this is two-fold: firstly it will
leave you to concentrate on what should be the most important factor which is
your performance as the fight gets closer, secondly, dragging a heavy body
around the treadmill is hard work, you need to increase your power: weight,
this is basically the speed at which you can move with keeping your heart rate
in the 90%+ zone, the higher the speed the better, after all speed is a key
performance component for fighter. If you’re trundling round the treadmill at
14kph at over 90% hr you need to increase this and you will see a marked
improvement in your performance in the ring, which is ultimately what you want.
The single best way to do this at the beginning of a camp is
a ketogenic diet. This is a far from ideal style of dieting for performance
athletes, although recent research out of Italy showed performance not to be
affected on a 1 month ketogenic diet it is in my experience not optimal long
term for an athlete. Although carbohydrates are not actually an essential
macronutrient they are essential for fuelling and recovering from gruelling
twice a day workouts, however a ketogenic diet alongside a steady increase in
training intensity will drop the weight off you quickly, most of which will be
water/glycogen to start with but there will be some fat loss too, this method
allows you to bring carbohydrates back in around training to fuel and recover
from workouts quickly as well as being closer to your fighting or pre
dehydration weight. 3-4 weeks should be the longest timeframe to use a
ketogenic diet, if you’re doing longer than this then you’ll notice your
performance either dropping or plateauing. You may also start to feel like you
are overtraining as by this time your training intensity should be peaking.
This is the exact tactic I have used many time with fighters, the fact they’re
eased back in to training allows for this type of harsh diet.
To be continued, hopefully/obviously...
