Rocky Fielding's Weight Cut & How Not To Get Fat After Multiple Weigh-Ins w/ Dr. James Morehen (Ep. 47)

Dr. James Morehen0:39

And really fortunate that, you know, through Graeme's network and the respect that he has got in the industry, there was a PhD that was kind of sculpted to work in professional rugby league. So at that point, I started the PhD.

I did 1 year at Widnes Vikings. I then moved over to Warrington Wolves and did 2 years there. So, I had 3 years of a PhD working in professional rugby union. All of my studies were with professional athletes. My whole cohort was pro athletes.

So, really unique applied real-world case study. And then following the PhD, it was like, "Oh, crap. I need to get a job now. I'm no longer a student." And at this point, I'm now 28 years old. Can't be a full-time student.

Yeah. So, I'd gone from 18 to 21 in Canada. And now I'm 28. I've finished the PhD. I now need to get a job. You know, a full-time job. So, I then applied at England Football, the FA over here in the UK and was successful with that.

And then I had 4 years at England Football as performance nutritionist with 15 national teams, over 300 players. Really enjoyed that process, learned a lot. But my passion was rugby. That was my sport. And so, I then went back into rugby union at Bristol Bears, which is where I'm at now.

And then also England rugby supporting the Roses, the women's squad within the RFU. And then I guess my link into combat sport throughout that journey was through Professor James Morton who put me in touch with him and kind of helped and guided me through a project with Rocky Fielding who was super middleweight fighter based in Liverpool and someone that I worked with for 5 years which was an amazing experience with Rocky and I owe all of that to Professor James Morton for passing Rocky over.

And then currently to this day I'm the nutritionist to Chris Billam-Smith. And Chris is a cruiserweight who's fingers crossed should fight for a world title this year with Richard Riakporhe. So they're kind of both going on their own journeys in their different federations and then they're hopefully going to meet in a May time or maybe sooner for a world title, a real British dust up, so should be good.

James de Lacey5:01

Nice. It's a nice comprehensive history then. Before I actually dive into some of your case study with Rocky Fielding and a lot of your research in there, are there any nutritional differences that you implement between males and females? Cuz obviously you're working with the women's rugby and the Bristol Bears. Is there any difference there or is it kind of all the same principles?

Dr. James Morehen5:17

Yeah, it's a good question and look I think to start with the fundamental principles of sport nutrition are what they are. So you know we look at as an example fueling for match play that we know that we need to increase skeletal muscle glycogen to allow that player to perform better in the game in terms of more total distance covered, more high intensity meters being covered, the ability to do acceleration and deceleration. Like we know that that skeletal muscle reservoir needs to be bigger, whether that's a male or a female.

What we are beginning to learn now, however, is that you know, the metabolism of female athletes might be different depending on where they might be in their cycle in terms of menstruation. And so we're beginning to learn that at certain weeks of a cycle, that resting metabolic rate might go up and therefore the requirement and the need for extra fuel availability during these particular weeks might also go up.

If we look at protein, protein intake, the core pillars that we talk about are time, and type, and total. It doesn't matter whether you're an alien, a male, or a female, the time and type and total of protein is quite similar. You know, we always talk about that threshold of 1.6 to 2.2 g per kilo as the total amount per day.

And the beauty of that is that when you unit that conversion out to gram per kilo of body weight, then it's straight away relative to the individual that you're working with because if they're 80 or they're 100 kilos, you're working with that individual weight.

So there are differences and what we're beginning to see now is that there's an amazing amount of research that's starting to happen in the women's or the female athlete space. A great example is Kirsty Elliott-Sale up at Manchester Met University who's spearheading a real big research department in that female athlete space and I think it's a matter of months, maybe a couple of years before we then really start to see these consensus statements like the UEFA consensus statement that was published and very widely accepted in football, but really is based on all male data. But it's a matter of time before we might have a UEFA consensus statement which is specifically for female athletes.

James de Lacey7:33

Does that mean cuz I remember I'm pretty sure it was a while ago reading about the menstrual cycle but teams weren't able to ask and track their players' menstrual—I don't know if you're if you're able to track that and then tailor nutrition based on that or is that something that's still a barrier?

Dr. James Morehen8:05

Yeah, I mean is it a barrier anymore? Maybe in some sports in some clubs. So look for us at Bristol Bears we track where they are in their cycle and we gather that data. Speaking with someone like Kirsty and this was me learning when I was with the Lionesses at England football is that you can't just collect one month's worth of data and then be really accurate and confident with your strategies based off of one month's data collection.

What we need with female athletes is minimum of three maybe six months worth of data collection to then have a better idea as to okay is it interesting that this individual athlete has an 18-day long menstruation where this individual athlete might have a 31-day or a 32, you know, this is where every individual athlete's different but without the data collection and without the longitudinal data collection it's quite hard for us to accurately and strategically prescribe individual nutrition strategies.

But so yeah, longer term data collection with the female athlete is going to be crucial and look some, depending on I guess the head coach, depending on the nutritionist in the club, depending on who's driving that want and desire for that research will then dictate as to whether that's happening at club level.

James de Lacey9:27

Yeah I know that's fair enough but you mentioned about the skeletal muscle glycogen stuff. I remember this might be applicable somewhat to combat sports but when I was in rugby so Calvin Morris, who worked with England rugby back in the day, they used to do something before games.

So, if they had a late morning or early afternoon game, instead of—so, for example, you'd have your main feeding window before the game, say 4 hours before the match. Let's say if they play at midday, 8:00 a.m. would be the main meal, and there'd be top-ups leading in.

But, what they would do is they would get up extra early, say 5:00 6:00 a.m., have a carb-heavy meal, go back to bed, whatever, then come back for another feeding at 8:00. And the idea was that they have instead of having the one feeding window of carbohydrates, like the other team would, they would have literally two feedings of carbohydrates before the match and essentially be more fueled for that match.

I don't know if there's any application in that of I don't know. I mean, I could see that could be applicable for maybe combat athletes who are fighting in the morning or midday after like they've weighed in the day before. But I don't know if that's anything, if there's anything to that or something you've thought about or anything like that.

Dr. James Morehen10:35

The first thing I wrote down there as you're telling me that is the impact of sleep. So, if I asked some of those Bristol Bears players to wake up at 6:00 so that they, they'd be like, "[expletive]." Your words, your words, not mine, but if I said to them, "I want you to get up at 6:00 so I can give you two bits of white toast with some jam and honey to increase your glycogen availability," they'd be like, "Mate, there's not a chance you're waking me up at 6:00 on the morning of a game. Like, I want to lay in. I want to be rested. I want to be nice and chilled."

So the second bit that I wrote down then is the success or the ability of that athlete to actually nail the day before carb load. Because in my mind, if I know that if our players have got a 12:00 kickoff midday on a Sunday, then on Saturday, we're making sure we nail the Saturday fueling plan so that if they are going to lay in and then we have a rolling breakfast into a brunch that might act as that pre-match meal, then okay, if they only get one hit in that opportunity, at least I know that they've absolutely nailed the day before and that comes down to knowing your players individually about who will get up for breakfast and who is going to lay in.

And then also knowing the athlete that really struggles to eat on game day and they don't want to eat, they want to feel light. And so can you then begin to play around with actually consuming liquid carbohydrates instead of instead of me asking him to have a big bowl of porridge and a banana and get 60 g of carbs, then what I might say to him is, "Hey, why don't you have this really high carb maltodextrin solution that you can put in 500 mils of water and we can consume that as part of a hydration strategy as well."

So there's different ways to play around with that, but I think I would probably get a slap on the back of the head if I knocked on doors at 6:00 a.m.

James de Lacey12:43

For sure. Now, let's jump into the Rocky Fielding case study. We'll come back to some of that fueling stuff after weigh-in, but I know you tracked a lot of weight cuts over I think it was like 5 years of weight cut weight regain. Do you want to maybe dive into I guess some of your findings there and how they can apply to the combat athletes listening to this.

Dr. James Morehen12:55

Yeah, so as we're speaking, I'm just going to load up the paper again so I've got it to hand, but look, effectively what we did here was as I was working with Rocky, and through all of James Morton's knowledge as well, we were beginning to see an athlete that was rebounding in his weight quite dramatically between camps. So Rocky's 6'2" and he would have to weigh in at 76.2 kilos. I'm 5'6" and I weigh about 75 kilo. So for me and him to weigh in around the same weight was always a bit of an eye-opener for me.

And as I went through this process, it was the first combat sport athlete that I'd ever worked with. And I was just being quite due diligent about collecting data and just making sure that things were noted down. And then I started to think about Christ, the amount of DEXA scans that we've got with Rocky at the university under the ethics. And the amount of times that he'd been in the lab to do resting metabolic rate measurements, into the gym to do his training.

Like, we had all of this data and I thought is it worth me presenting this to Carl and presenting it to James and saying, "Look, do you think that we could write this up as a bit of a longitudinal case study?" And the answer was a resounding yes.

So what we managed to track with Rocky over time, fundamentally over 11 different contests over a 5-year period, we managed to track this individual athlete's change in body composition and body weight. Now, it's important to note that we didn't get body composition change in all 11 fights because there were times where, for whatever reason, it might have been Rocky's partner was ill or he had to pick the kids up from school or whatever, there might have been periods where we weren't able to get that DEXA scan. So there are camps in that 11 camp window where we didn't get DEXA scans, but on the majority of them we did.

And what we were obviously assessing there was the total mass change in the athlete. We were then looking at the skeletal muscle change, which on a DEXA scan is represented as lean mass, which technically isn't muscle mass, it's fat-free mass, as hopefully Carl probably alluded to. And then we were collecting fat mass and body fat percentage, and then we also were looking at the markers of bone mineral density.

So over those 11 contests, what we were seeing is that yeah, there was a dramatic change in these masses within the human body. There were times where for whatever reason, social life, things going on outside of combat, being a boxer, Rocky was presenting into camps probably a little bit heavier than where we wanted him to be.

And the one that sticks out to me all the time is the 17 kilo drop in 11 weeks that we had to implement with the bloke. And it was at that point in my career where I went into James' office and I said to him, "Rocky's coming today, this is the weight he's at, this is how long we've got until the fight. Like, I actually don't know, is this physiologically possible? Like, are we meant to do this? Should we be doing this? Should we be supporting him to do this? Like, is this right?"

And I'll never forget James saying to me, he was like, what you've got to remember is the fight's been signed. So Rocky's either going to do it with your help and we're going to try and do it to the best of our ability, accepting that this is going to be a tough road, or he's going to do it without your help anyway, because he's signed the fight and he needs to earn the money, and then you run the risk of him doing stupid stuff, and maybe not doing it in as better way as you would have with your support.

So that was the main thing that we were looking at over the time was that body weight change, and then like I said, we had some serious fluctuations in skeletal muscle mass represented by the lean mass, fat mass, and body fat percentage.

What was really nice with Rocky is throughout that 5-year period, although he was fluctuating quite substantially with the weight, it never really had a knock on effect on his bone mineral density and content. So that bone health we were quite confident was in a good place. Now, we never collected bloods. We would have loved to have done some of the bloods that Carl had done with his case studies, but one, it was just budget at the time and at the time we weren't thinking about it in that manner.

James de Lacey17:36

Before getting back to the podcast, I want to let you know there's a link down the description for the Sweet Science of Fighting Underground Community. You can get all the help you need for your combat sports training. You get every single Sweet Science of Fighting training program, online course, and you get access to a range of coaches within the private Discord community. So go check that out and back to the podcast.

Because I know as well that you covered the weight regain about, was it regaining more fat mass each time after each weight cut? Was that something that was part of that case study?

Dr. James Morehen17:53

Yeah, exactly that. And it was, I'll be completely honest with you and the people that are listening here. So at the time when we were collecting the data, we were working camp to camp in a way. And what I mean by that was like the DEXA scan from camp two was in the past. If I was now like at camp seven, I wasn't really bothered about what he was 3 years ago because he's a completely different bloke now, right? And he's 3 years on in his career. Of course, we had the data there, but I didn't interrogate it into that much detail.

What I did focus on quite tightly and certainly towards the end of his career when he fought Tyrone Spong in Germany for the world title belt, and then when he had to then defend that against Canelo at Madison Square Garden, those two camps were probably the tightest that I was on my data collection in terms of body weight change at different time points of the camp because when he won the world title, he said it was the best that he'd ever made the weight.

He felt amazing in the ring. All of these positive things and I was, alright, sweet. If this is the best you've ever felt and you won a world title from it, then we need to mirror that when we get ready for Canelo.

But then when we were looking at writing this up as a case study and we started to interrogate every aspect of the data from the 5-year period, what we were then beginning to see is, oh crap, isn't it interesting how his baseline fat mass when he entered the start of a camp from camp one to camp 11 or when we had the DEXA scans, it was creeping up ever so slightly.

So much so that from the first DEXA scan we had on Rocky in year zero or year one compared to 5 years later, his baseline fat mass was about a kilo and a half higher. So now, of course that could be the fact that he just ate a lot of donuts before this camp and put on a lot of fat mass, but we were beginning to see a trend that over the years it was starting to increase up.

And then we dived into the literature a little bit. Carl and James and I, those guys mainly were driving me to reading around rebound hyperphagia, what happens when people go into starvation mode, what tissue are they going to lose quicker, what tissue are they going to gain back quicker once they increase their energy availability. And what's really interesting here with this literature is that the guys who published this area, they term it colossal fattening.

And basically what it means is, I'm going to try and use this analogy on the screen, but I'll explain it as people look at it. If I've got two bar charts in my, I've got a bar chart in my left and a bar chart in my right hand, if the bar chart in my left represents fat mass and the bar chart in my right represents lean mass, as I go through a period of weight loss and my energy availability is substantially lower than what I need, then of course over time you will drop a little bit of fat mass and you normally go into a bit of catabolic state and you start to lose a bit of muscle mass because you're essentially not consuming enough to maintain it.

And that's what you see with quite a few of these combat sport athletes is that they'll drop that weight but actually some of it they're losing is muscle mass as well as fat mass. So with Rocky, this was happening camp to camp. We were losing fat mass, we were losing muscle mass and those bar charts were dropping, dropping, dropping so much so that when he presented on the scales, there might have been camps where he dropped four or five kilos of fat mass but we'd also dropped three kilos of skeletal muscle mass.

Now of course anyone who's well versed in this area would say, "Yeah, but that might just be the inability of the DEXA scan to detect that you're now presenting an athlete who's dehydrated with low muscle glycogen on the assessment." Which is true.

But what we were then seeing is that once Rocky ate like a normal Liverpudlian again and he went out with his mates and he had a beer and he had a burger, what we were seeing is that he was accumulating fat mass far quicker than he was accumulating muscle mass back.

So you then get that colossal fattening where the weight gain comes on but unfortunately it's the gain in fat mass that is happening quicker than that gain in muscle mass. And anyone who's gone through a, this is outside of boxing now. Anyone who's strength trained and is a trainer, we know how hard it is to build muscle. It doesn't just happen overnight, but if you have two weeks of eating pretty crap and your energy availability is really in the surplus or you have two weeks of really dedicated training, normally the likelihood is that that fat mass is going to increase a lot quicker up to two kilos than your ability to put 2 kilos of muscle on.

Sometimes it could take 6 months to put 2 kilos of muscle on, depending on how far along your training age you are. But it might only take a month to put 2 kilos of

James de Lacey23:06

For sure, for sure. I want to dive into a little bit of the weight regain cycle almost starting after the fight. Is there a way to minimize this I guess creeping of fat gain over time?

I know Carl was talking about on the podcast that you got to almost refill that deficit that you have had during the weight cut at some point and potentially that means a fat regain regardless. But is there a way to minimize over time? Is that something that's been researched or something that you've looked into?

Dr. James Morehen23:46

Well look, I think just on Carl's point there is 100% correct. For any combat sport athlete to stay at the body composition that they managed to get theirself to when they're weighing in for a fight is almost impossible. Because it's the extreme end, isn't it? It's that final 300 g, 400 g that you're trying to get out.

Normally, most fighters I've ever worked with, and hopefully you'll support this, normally there's an element of dehydration in there as well. So you're never really going to sustain that body composition 365 days a year. So as Carl said, of course there is going to be an element of fat mass gain as you present yourself back to being living like a normal athlete, not the extreme end of trying to make weight.

So I think that that's just an acceptance piece that okay, there might be that one, one and a half, two kilo gain in fat mass that brings you back to you being James and Rocky being Rocky. But it's when you go over and above that for, I would say too quickly and for too long, that's where you're going to get that chronic gain in fat mass.

And my wife, my partner, she used to be a physique athlete in the female space. And what I was learning off of her and her PhD is that sometimes these physique athletes do it better than anyone else from a nutrition point of view because one thing they do very well, which is what a lot of boxers and combat sport athletes can learn from is that if they know they've got a contest in 16 weeks time they give themselves 16 weeks to get ready for it.

So what they do is they gradually drop that weight over time. They begin to tighten up their nutrition strategies. They begin to count out the macros and they're pretty bloody tight with what they do if I'm honest.

I remember my wife wouldn't let me stir her black coffee with my spoon that had stirred my white coffee because of the extra two calories that might have been on the spoon. But that's how diligent they are. And when you're that diligent and you're that tight on your training and that tight on your nutrition, okay, if it's a clean federation and nobody's taking the drugs, that's why they look as lean as they do on stage because they've just basically mastered the art of energy availability, energy in, energy out and sculpting the bodies to look as amazing as they do.

And then what they do very well afterwards is that those that are trying to negate this rebound hyperphagia, what they do is they bring the energy availability back in but again by step-by-step progression. They don't just go from having 1,500 calories a day with less than 50 g of carbs for 4 days leading into the physique competition. They don't just go from that to 3 and 1/2 thousand calories, 200 g of carbs. They actually bring that in over sometimes 7 or 14 days so that it brings them back out very, very slowly.

And Chris Billam-Smith, who I work with now, he's probably the, look, there's I've got no doubt there's other boxers that do this very well, but certainly who I've worked with, he's very, very smart about how he does that. I've met Chris at 101 kilos, and I've seen him with his top off, and he looks in great shape. I've seen him 4 weeks post-fight, when he's maybe 97, 98. He looks in great shape. I've seen him the week of the weigh-in or 2 weeks before, and he's ripped, and he's in great shape.

And what I've noticed with Chris is that his walking around weight related to his weigh-in weight is never, ever more than 10 kilos. Ever. And if you then think about stuff that we discuss on the course in terms of how much actual body mass you can lose in those final couple of days before the weigh-in, with Chris, he loses about 4 kilos in that final week of the fight.

So in reality, all Chris is ever doing is having a gradual body composition change of about 6 kilos. And there's times where he'll do that in 6 weeks, there's times where he'll do that in 8 weeks, 10 weeks. So that's actually really doable. Really doable. If someone wants to commit to something, they can change 6 kilos, no problem, especially when you're 100 kilos.

So what I've noticed with Chris is that if you imagine an ECG graph, his actual fluctuations, his amplitude in his rebounding and making the weight, it's far, it's a lot smaller than what you see on Rocky's graph in that publication.

James de Lacey28:34

I like that. I like the physique example there, too. I mean, I watch a ton of food I've eaten videos, and all that kind of grocery shopping videos and stuff and I've been watching some of the Olympia physique athletes as well and you see the stuff they're eating afterwards and yeah, as you mentioned, it's super tight.

Like, I mean, some of, that's the full-time professional mindset, right? Even some of them didn't even bloody... Obviously everyone probably remembers back in the day from pumping iron and stuff, Arnold and things smashing cake and whatever else after Olympia, but you see them now, these dudes are just straight back on their diets literally the day after the Olympia and that's, I mean, that's crazy.

Dr. James Morehen29:18

And also just to touch on that, because I talk about this a lot in the team sport world that I work in now, is I don't think anybody is robotic. Everyone's got a vice. Everyone has something that is their bit of escape.

So for these dedicated physique athletes, their escape is training. Like they love it. That's their vice, but don't get me wrong, I guarantee you that they've got a sweet tooth and some of them will be having the low-calorie, low-sugar chocolate sauce on waffles on a Saturday morning.

But what I noticed certainly in Nora's world and the athlete she was working with is that they would normally have six days where they're really, really on it, and when I say on it, they're just eating like a professional physique athlete should. Like, this is what I've chosen to do in my life and this is what I'm going to do.

But then they're normally, they'll have a meal a week where they don't care what they eat. There's no counting, they just eat it and they just enjoy it and they might have a dessert. And then I look at that and I go, right, if there's breakfast, lunch, dinner, so that's three meals a day times seven, that's 21. Plus all your snacks in there, let's round it up to 30, maybe 35.

So you've got 35 eating opportunities a week. And if a physique athlete smashes 30 of it and they have five vices a week where they might have the low-calorie ice cream, they might have the protein pudding that's got a bit of chocolate in there. But if 30 of them each week are nailed and five are not, it's the law of averages, right?

That individual, whatever they're doing, is going to do really, really well. And I think there's a lot to be learned from the physique world for other athletes to look at that consistency and that building of habits and that behavior change to say, "Look, yeah, let's do it. 80/20 rule. Let's smash 80% of our life and or our eating behaviors and then 20% you can kind of, you have the bag of Haribo and you don't feel guilty about it."

James de Lacey31:12

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No, that's good advice for anyone who's too neurotic about their eating and getting too into it. But I wanted to jump into a bit of post-weigh-in fueling. I think a lot of people potentially get this wrong and maybe we can use the example of the 24-hour weigh-in. I think most striking and MMA organizations do a 24-hour weigh-in even at the amateur level. So maybe we'll stick with that for now, but do you want to dive into your strategies for post-weigh-in, I guess, refueling?

Dr. James Morehen32:03

Yeah. So, I mean, look, the first thing that I would always try and get back into, certainly Rocky and now Chris, is that level of hydration and bringing that fluid back in because it's the last thing that certainly I would always advise that they take out. So I think it's important that that then goes back in.

So, look, when I was with Rocky, I was still learning and I'm still learning massively now and what I found with Rocky was that if I gave him, like if I gave him a Lucozade, for example, he would like it and he'd drink it, don't get me wrong, but if I gave him a chocolate milk, then he'd smash it and he would have no problem drinking the whole thing, right?

So I was then looking at, okay, the literature put into practice with this individual athlete that I was working with. So if I know that he's going to smash the chocolate milk, I could probably give him two of them and he's going to get both of them in within the next 30 minutes while he's doing his interviews with Sky Sports or whatever.

And so that's the strategy I went down with Rocky. It was, let's give him some milk, let's give him some carbohydrates, let's give him some sugars, but fundamentally, let's give him something that he really enjoys drinking because that's really nice for somebody who's just made weight. A cold chocolate milk on the palate, on the tongue, is really attractive.

So yes, it's important that you get the rehydration and the electrolytes back in, of course it is, but remember you've got 12 hours until they get in the ring, if not longer, 24 hours. So it's not as if he's fighting in 2 hours time.

So I would always go with something like a chocolate flavored milk and when you look at the literature from Ron Maughan and him doing his assessments of, well, what actually is able to rehydrate an individual quicker, then actually milk and a flavored milk is a lot better at doing that than just water alone and sometimes some of the oral rehydration solutions that are on the market.

So I'd hit Rocky with that and then with him, again, this is individual, what did he like to do as a fighter? He liked to go for a family meal. So I was never ever going to get in the way of that as a nutritionist because that's such a social thing for a fighter to be able to do after they've made weight. Now, you have to eat chicken, rice, and broccoli. Can you imagine me saying that to him? I was never going to do that.

So I used to always go along to the meals if I could, and then at that point he would say to me, "Right, what do you recommend?" So he was never going to pick the tuna salad. He was always going to pick the carbohydrate-based meal, but a good example, sometimes you might advise him to say, "Look, instead of having the pizza here, which might be frozen dough, there's probably going to be a little bit of oil on that, my recommendation would be why don't we go for this rice dish or this sweet potato dish or something that might be a little bit better for him than just a frozen dough out of the oven."

So with that, I would then allow him to eat what he wanted within certain parameters at the meal, but I was always making a note of it, and at the time, it's not as if I could weigh the sweet potato out when it was brought out. But what I could do was take a picture of it and then go into the nutritional software and have a good idea as to, right, okay, this is roughly how much he's eaten.

And you've got to remember when I was with him in Germany and New York, I didn't have food prep companies over there that I could tap into. It's not as if I could bespoke-ly give him 55 g of carbohydrates.

Then I remember what I did that night. So sorry, we left the restaurant and then he was like, "Mate, there's an ice cream parlor there. Can I go and get an ice cream?" And I was like, "I'm not going to say no to you because you've just made the weight and you've got a world title fight tomorrow. If that's going to make you happy, let's go and do it."

But then I took the menu, took a picture of it, got the macros. So then I remember that night what I did was I calculated it all up, and I was like, "Okay, he's hit about 4.4, 4.5 g per kilo. It's probably not enough really. If you look at the literature where we want someone to be once they've made that weight and then go into the fight. Was I confident that that was enough? Probably not. So that's where I would then go to—"

James de Lacey36:29

Was that 4.4, 4.5 g per kilo of carbohydrates, or—

Dr. James Morehen36:43

Yeah, which, if you look at football team sport athlete, 90-minute game, you're trying to get the minimum 6 g. But that's 6 g per kilo when they're not depleted of glycogen. Like I had Rocky when he was making weight.

I had Rocky, he was pretty low. And there's not going to be much glycogen sitting in the muscle. So I'm starting with an iPhone battery level that is definitely in the red. And I need to get that to 100% as quick as I can.

So I remember going to his room and offering him a Yazoo or a Lucozade, something just to get another 50-60 g of carbs in him. So that really is my approach as to how that refueling would happen.

And then with protein content, I'd kind of let them go ad lib there. I'm not too fussed about how much protein they're having because for me the main driver here is let's get that glycogen back into the body.

And then where it's kind of different a little bit with Chris is that Chris is actually, he's much more, I guess, performance nutrition aligned where he's like, "Mate, I don't really want the chocolate milk. I've worked for the last 6-7 weeks, I—"

Haven't had any chocolate. So I don't really want that now. Can I just have something like a Science in Sport Beta Fuel which has got 82 g of carbohydrates in it? He's like, "I'll just have the sports supplement. I want to keep it clean. I want to stay on task. And then after the fight, I'll go and have whatever I want." But he's someone that's a little bit more I want to keep it—keep it clean and not let any sweets or ice creams or anything come into the frame now before the fight.

So does that give you insight into that?

James de Lacey38:20

Yeah, it was awesome. I think Sweet Sweat are finding us to release it weight regain chocolate milk now to—but the biggest thing the biggest thing I'm learning James is that every fight is different.

Dr. James Morehen38:36

So we can read the literature—there's so much good literature out there. So much good literature. You've got so many people doing good podcasts that share all of that knowledge and the scientific evidence. But ultimately the fighter has to be happy and they have to enjoy what they're consuming considering they've just spent 8 weeks trying to make the weight.

So I get it—here's the scientific knowledge. Here is the absolute evidence-based gold standard that I want you to do. But not every fighter is going to want to do that because they might look at it and go yeah, I get that but mate I'm going out for—I'm going out for dinner with my family. I haven't seen them for 8 weeks. They've just flown over to Vegas to come and see me. So there is a little bit of you have to think okay, they are normal and they might want to go and be a little bit social.

James de Lacey39:28

Yeah, for sure. One thing I actually haven't touched on any of the nutrition podcast I've done so far is I guess eating leading into the fight because I'm sure—I mean you got the weight regain aspect cool but then you're still got another how many hours until the actual fight. What's your strategy? I mean it's probably individual as well but what's your strategy there leading in? Is there do you have some kind of maybe formula or something in place there where they need to eat this then this then or is it like hey eat as you see fit?

Dr. James Morehen39:58

Yeah, again I would always—most of the weigh-ins that I've ever been a part of have been 1:00 maybe 3:00 p.m. the day before. So after that you have that acute window when they're doing all the interviews and stuff. You then have that even a meal option and then you have pre-bed. So you've got three windows there to try and get what best part of 350-400 g of carbs in, if not more, which is doable.

So then I what I always measure the day of the fight is okay, what weight is that fighter now waking up at once they've emptied their bladder. What is now their resting—their resting weight? And certainly with Chris and with Rocky actually they want to get back to that weight that they were when they did their final spar of the camp because that's the weight that they fight at.

That's what they're used to fighting at. And it might be 4 kilos heavier, it might be 5, it might be 6, it might be 7. But that for me has always been a marker for I always would then message them and say, you know, what's your weight in the morning? And they might be it's X. I'm I'm 2 kilos lighter than where I want to be. And then that for me is a bit of an indication to say, right, okay. Let's have a really carby breakfast now. Let's make sure we're fueling up here.

Let's get that weight up a little bit more because we've still got time. If you're the headline act, you're not on till 10:00 at night. So we've still got a nice chunk of time to get some more glycogen within the muscle in the body and try and hit that baseline weight.

So I would always encourage a breakfast, a lunch potentially some carby snacks throughout. And then for me similar to my practice in team sport really, I would always encourage at least 3 hours before they're going to get into the ring, maybe 3 and 1/2. That's where they have their last big intake of whatever it might be. You might be snacking on carbohydrate-based sports foods or supplements in the changing room, but certainly that last big intake about 3 hours before.

James de Lacey41:53

Nice. How does that change? I've seen here some amateur MMA organizations that had the athletes weigh in between 10 and 12 in the morning, and then I thought I think they fought that the same evening. So say 7:00 p.m. onwards. So let's just say an 8-to-10-hour window. How does that strategy change in terms of if your refueling window from the time of your weigh in to the fight changes?

Dr. James Morehen42:23

Yeah, from to 8 to 10 hours instead of the full over 24 hours that—yeah, yeah. Well, I guess look, you have to be probably a little bit more dictatorial in terms of this is what you need to eat and this is how much you need to eat to make sure that they're going to make—hit the resynthesis of that glycogen that they require. But I've never worked with a judo athlete in terms of where it's been that short a time space. So I mean, educate me on this. Are they—do they have to fight within a catch weight or can can they be—

James de Lacey43:05

So this is this is an—this is an MMA organization here and they had—yeah, just your normal MMA weight classes. So they would have weighed in 10 to 12 in the morning, made weight, and then and then fought that evening. So they would have had yeah, probably 8 hours to refuel essentially before actually fighting.

Dr. James Morehen43:20

Yeah, but there's there's no you have to be within this bandwidth. They're not getting weighed in before the fight.

James de Lacey43:20

No, no, no.

Dr. James Morehen43:20

Yes. So I'm, you know, I I would be looking at multiple sources of carbohydrate intake there and—and there's solutions on the market now, James, that you put 80 an 82-gram carbohydrate sachet in a bottle like this. You know, if if you're someone that didn't really want to eat with in that 8-hour gap, but you just wanted to drink it all, you've only got to have three of them and you've got 240 g of carbohydrates. And and then you could maybe—

James de Lacey43:50

Yeah, plus the liquid.

Dr. James Morehen43:50

Yeah, plus the liquid, right? So there's your rehydration. And then, you know, do you then look at what, you know, I I do want a bit of food, but I don't want it to be too heavy, so I might just have some bread with some jam. I might have some white rice with some sweet chili sauce, whatever it might be.

I know the Team Sky riders when they're on their Tour de France over 21 days, it's white rice for breakfast, lunch, and dinner with orange juice. Right? That's what they're eating because it's very lightweight and it's pretty carb dense. And normally you can whack a sauce on it of some sort, and you can just scale it down.

So yeah, if I was working with a judo athlete, that's probably the approach I would take. But again, it's you know, how heavy do you want to be when you're going back into that ring? Because the more food that's going in and the more fluid that's going in, that's going to dictate what weight you're going to be fighting at.

James de Lacey44:55

Yeah, I'm assuming as well there's obviously an individual component with how you digest food cuz if you're having that sit in your stomach or having something like a really fatty meal that sits in there and you need to be ready to fight and you have that—

Dr. James Morehen45:08

And also and I learned this in rugby recently is that if it's a really key performance, nerves, adrenaline, being pumped up from the fight, all of a sudden your [expletive] is falling out. And you might have had the cleanest nutrition, but you're just really nervous and your stomach is playing games on you.

And sometimes I have it. If I'm presenting in front of a large group of people, I don't need a number two. I don't. I'm a regular person, you know what I mean? But for whatever reason, I'm nervous now and my gut my gut doesn't like it, and then I'll feel I need to go to the toilet.

And I've seen that if it in elite sport. I've seen it where nutrition—or they or they vomit. I've had players that will vomit before every single match. And I was like, "Holy man." And there you go, right? There you go. So they're [expletive] is falling out or they're vomiting. And now they've got to go and have a fight, or now they've got to go and play 80 minutes of rugby.

So when we talk about nutrition impacting performance, there it is, right? So it's important that that gets practiced. You're trialing it within sparring sessions. How many fighters do you know that through their whole camp they didn't take one carbohydrate gel in a sparring session or they didn't practice any sign of their refuel strategy in a sparring session, and the first time they then do it is on the night of the fight where they then just go, "Right, hey stomach, we're going to have a absolute carbohydrate party. Here's a load of different sugars that I want you to now handle and control."

And the stomach's like, "What you doing? I'm I'm not used to this." Which is the exact problem that's runner's gut. That's why you hear of runner's gut when people do marathons and they haven't practiced their nutrition strategy.

James de Lacey47:01

Is that something that instead of maybe being, okay, this sparring session we're going to practice the refueling strategy and load them with carbs, is that like almost like a carb tolerance you would build them up on? So, for example, as they train, you would start introducing more carbohydrates during their lighter training sessions every week and stuff like that?

Dr. James Morehen47:01

Yeah, you can do and it, look, you don't have to do this every single week, but look, certainly in rugby, there's some players who I'll sit down with and I'll ask them about their match day strategy. And if they're not someone that's ever had a carbohydrate gel on at the match, I'll say to them, "Right, tomorrow's training session, I'm going to give you a gel 20 minutes before the session. Let's see how you feel."

And nine times out of 10, they're like, "That was class. I felt really good. I enjoyed that." And it's like, "Right, okay, I want you to implement that on the game, on the day of the game."

There are sometimes, however, you might give them a certain flavor or brand, and they come back to you and they're like, I had a really bad stitch or that went straight through me, wasn't used to that, didn't really like that. And then you're like, right, okay, we need to practice this because I can't be doing that at a World Cup final. And this is your first time that you've had a carb caffeine gel because if you run off at 62 minutes, I know exactly why you've done it and it's my fault.

So, there's definitely, definitely you can train the gut just like any other organ within the body, okay? So, it's important that that gets practiced.

And the biggest example is these marathon and Iron Man events where people just don't practice it. They don't get the gut used to tolerating that amount of sugar, that amount of fuel going through it at any time point. And remember that when you're competing at this level, the blood is now in the skeletal muscles. When you're running a triathlon or you're on the bike, the blood, the majority of your blood has been shunted to your legs.

So, the actual amount of blood in and around the organ of the stomach firing on all cylinders is going to be nowhere where it should be really, which is why people struggle if you eat and then go for a run. You're asking the body to digest the food and also now exercise within 10 minutes of each other. The body doesn't like it.

James de Lacey49:07

Hell of a way to put it. That was all good. We got that all too, but that's interesting you talk about the almost the pre-match nerve stuff. And my wife, when she was competing in professional weightlifting, so she would, we knew that when she was cutting the weight for, so there's 2-hour weigh-in in weightlifting, we knew that when she was cutting the weight, she would get, her nerves would literally have a drop one or two kilos leading into the weigh-in without having to do anything.

Even when she was eating gummy bears and things like that beforehand, it wouldn't stay on. And so, it's something important I guess for fighters to potentially know, does your weight suddenly drop leading into your weigh-in because of things like that.

Dr. James Morehen49:55

Well, it's, you know, it's interesting. We're diverging a bit here, but if I've seen this firsthand with my own mom, right? When we lost our dad, my mom was stressed, she was grieving, and she lost 10 kilos in 2 weeks. 10 kilos of body weight in 2 weeks, and it was an insane drop in that body mass, and that was stress, that was grief. So, when the body's playing tricks on you, it can certainly result in a change in body mass and body composition.

Seeing people experience stress and grief in particular, that alone, that physiological damage on the body is insane because when people are grieving, a lot of the time they'll drop a lot of weight, and they don't even realize they're doing it. So, when you're talking there about your partner becoming nervous and anxious, and that increase in that resting metabolic rate, grief is a big one for that.

James de Lacey50:43

No, for sure. That's something that people can also monitor for themselves as well in terms of individual basis on how your body responds leading up to the weight cut and the fight, but I think we pretty much covered everything on this podcast that I wanted to ask you, James, but if people want to follow you and see what you're up to, where can they do that?

Dr. James Morehen51:09

Yeah, so, I'm on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Moham Performance, and yeah, I've got my own website. There's a few links on there to the mentorship program I run, the book that I published on Amazon, and just a few kind of little courses and things like that that I put out. So, yeah. The main socials, I'm yet to enter the black hole of TikTok, so I'm not on there yet.

James de Lacey51:31

I ain't going. It's going to be banned in the US anyway.

Dr. James Morehen51:31

Oh, I hope so. They banned TikTok?

James de Lacey51:31

No, there's lots of talk about it being banned.

Dr. James Morehen51:31

Wow.

James de Lacey51:31

Chinese company, man. Stealing the information. So, yeah. But, all good. Go down to the description, too. James has his weight cutting course on as part of the Sweet Science of Fighting membership there. So, check that out. It'll be his link down there. But, thanks for coming on. I appreciate it.

Dr. James Morehen52:01

All good, bro. All good. Nice one.