Silver Chips Online

Cutting weight to make the cut

Shorts, long johns, pants, sweats, snowpants, undershirt, tee, sweater, hoodie, jacket, two hats, one scarf and a pair of gloves, and senior wrestling co-captain Alan Coleman is ready.

In the next 45 minutes, Coleman will sweat off five pounds. He will climb 60 flights of stairs on nothing but a tablespoonful of peanut butter and a mouthful of water, gargled during yesterday’s practice to convince his throat he’s getting rehydrated, then spit out to prevent water weight. At 3:30 p.m., the naturally 150-pound athlete will be 135 pounds. Coleman will make weight for his meet; he always has.

Coleman is joined by 58 percent of his high school wrestling peers in a quest to make weight, a quest that can lead to impaired muscle recovery, cardiac complications and death.

In this two-part series, Chips looks at athletic activities that translate to intense awareness of weight and in which shedding pounds is encouraged, if not overtly, then by custom. Wrestling, which accounts for nearly three in four instances of eating disorders among male athletes, represents the most patently male version of anorexia and, despite increasing awareness of consequences, is rampant among MCPS wrestlers.

Days of starvation

Senior Scott Nguyen, a Blair wrestling co-captain, explains that it’s helpful to compete at least a weight division (one division is usually five to eight pounds) below your normal weight for two reasons. First, it’s better to be the heaviest wrestler in a class than the lightest. Second, since so many wrestlers cut pounds to make weight, you’re essentially wrestling people with the muscle mass of a heavier opponent.

According to Nguyen, wrestlers regularly lose around five pounds at the beginning of a season because of strenuous, six-day-a-week practices. However, once their new muscle and lost fat even out, athletes who want to wrestle below their natural body weight need to go the extra mile.

At first, Nguyen tried to wrestle close to his natural weight of 118 pounds, convinced that the energy he saved by refusing to cut would make him stronger. Although he has returned to that weight class this year, when the Blair squad lost their 103-pound wrestler last year, Nguyen says he felt pressure to replace the other athlete to help out the entire squad and boost his personal record.

Over the course of two days in 2002, Nguyen went from 112 pounds to 105 pounds. He worked hard at practice, wearing sweatclothes to keep in the heat; he came home to a cup of plain lettuce (his only meal for the day) and another workout (treadmill, draped in a plastic bag); he spent days at the YMCA sauna sweating off pounds. As soon as he weighs in—roughly two hours before his match—Nguyen joins the rest of his team in the locker room to “eat like pigs" as compensation for days of starvation.

The gospel of cutting

Coaches, says Nguyen, will regularly keep track of the weight of every athlete on the wrestling squad and will warn athletes if they’re dramatically overweight close to upcoming meets.

Senior Muamba Muanankese, another wrestler, says that Blair’s coach, Jake Scott, never encouraged him to make weight but that the trade secrets of cutting come down from other wrestlers. “Pretty much everyone does it," he says, “so you hear things, see what people are doing."

National Institute of Mental Health researcher Jim Grizell attributes the dramatic and harmful weight fluctuations of wrestling to practices like those of the Blair wrestling squad. Such practices, he says, generate a subculture where the wisdom of rapid, voluntary dehydration is passed down from older wrestlers as gospel. However, he points to a 32 percent incidence of eating disorders among wrestlers and several recent deaths as a wake-up call for the community.

Wake-up call

In the late 1990s, three of college wrestling’s rising stars died of dehydration. The result was a sudden spurt of college initiatives, which have trickled down to the high school level in the form of mandatory pre-season certification at a minimum weight.

According to William Beattie, coordinator of athletics for MCPS and director of Maryland’s state wrestling committee, the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) approves two types of weight certification programs. MCPS operates under a plan in which pre-season certifications are obtained by the wrestler from any licensed physician and are subject to revision throughout the season. Beattie explains the problems with this plan: “If you want to wrestle at some weight badly enough, then you’ll get a physician to okay you," he says. “Most doctors just stick you on a scale and go, ‘yeah, sure, I guess you could lose a few.’"

However, Beattie is pushing to have the entire state switch over to the second NFHS plan, which mandates urine testing to check for hydration, body mass index (BMI) measurements with calipers and minimum weight certification based on a formula designed to determine a wrestler’s weight with seven percent body fat. In preparation, every MCPS wrestler this year received free BMI testing to provide their personal physicians with an objective base for making minimum weight decisions; next year, Beattie hopes to have an independent doctor on site at these sessions.

Scott feels that the push toward increasingly strict stipulations on making weight among wrestlers brings MCPS closer in line with his personal ideals. Says Scott, “Other than through a healthy diet and regular exercise, there’s no benefit to cutting weight—wherever you are, that’s where you’re best suited to wrestle."

According to Coleman, MCPS’ trial run has been unsuccessful. “Since you know everyone in the county is cutting weight, you gotta do it, too," he says. This means, he explains, that people find ways around the system. Through starvation and various tricks passed down to him by his predecessors, a 150-pound Cole-man managed to clear himself to wrestle at 125 pounds.

The bottom line

Nguyen knows people who are even more extreme in the quest to make weight. He sums up the making-weight mentality succinctly. “People do what it takes," he says. “That’s the bottom line."

http://silverchips.mbhs.edu/story/2954