Cutting Weight For MMA, Importance Of Carbs & Fight Nutrition w/ "Fight Dietitian" Jordan Sullivan (SSOF Ep. #15)

Jordan Sullivan0:26

So I think it was just good timing really. Just kind of caught that wave and rode that with the guys. And a couple years on, I think, yeah, we've been very fortunate to have a lot of touches around Australia, New Zealand, and the world to be honest to kind of spread that message that we really do promote better weight cutting practices. And, you know, you don't have to cut so much weight and if you are going to do it there's a better way to do it. So I guess that's the short 2-minute spiel.

James de Lacey2:42

Nice. No, actually that's perfect. I actually wanted to start this podcast on the weight cutting topic. Obviously if you search some of the horrific headlines for weight cutting, there's obviously been hospitalizations, deaths, all sorts of bad things going on within weight cutting. So maybe let's start with the common mistakes, maybe the mistakes you were making before learning all the things back in your day when you were fighting and just, I guess, general common mistakes that you see as well among the fighters that come to you.

Jordan Sullivan3:10

Yeah, I think it's pretty common. I made all the same mistakes that everyone made. I remember I did a terrible cut when I was in Toronto. MMA was illegal in Ontario for a while when I was there, so we had this underground comp and there was three weight divisions and I think I had to lose something like 12 kilos and I went full keto. And keep in mind I had two degrees at this stage. I had a master's degree, I could have known better.

But yeah, I think it was 12 kilos over 10 weeks or something like that and it was horrendous and got smashed. I think I got submitted within 2 minutes or something, just terrible. I did all sorts of terrible things like getting in hot baths that were way too hot. I remember being in my apartment by myself the day before a weigh-in or a competition and being in a bath and passing out because it was so hot. I was so fatigued and kind of going under. And you know, running in sauna suits and sweatsuits just uselessly and yeah, lots of terrible things.

But I think when you're in that environment, at least back then, it wasn't really, I wouldn't blame my coach or blame anyone else. We just didn't know any better. There just wasn't really that information. It's a really new field. I think MMA as a sport itself is, what, 25 years old, just over 25 years old.

And so you think of more traditional sports like wrestling and whatnot, they've been around since the ancient Greeks, you know, for hundreds and hundreds of years. And so there's been a lot more time. And you think of those mainstream American sports, there's been a lot more time and money invested and the sports science has obviously grown with those sports.

I think what we're starting to see with MMA and combat sports in general, we're starting to see the growing of that sports science, but that definitely wasn't there back when I was. And that was only, you know, like five, six, seven years ago. So it wasn't even that long ago.

And so now it's really cool to see how that has come. And a lot of the common mistakes, you see guys, they still make them today. Cut carbohydrates. I think that's worldwide around most sports. People think that you want to lose weight, you want to cut carbohydrates.

I think you see guys that really want to restrict water. It's a real thing in boxing I notice. It's tough to do training sessions dehydrated and not have a sip of water for the mental toughness, and that's just not good. You see guys running in sauna suits thinking that just being hot is going to burn more calories and, you know, getting in saunas and sweating out sweat and losing fluid thinking it's going to help them lose weight.

All of these things, they still happen today, they were happening back then. It's just, I think that's been a big eye-opening experience for me, going through that and doing that. But then, you know, it's good to experience that because then you can chat to these guys and be like, "Hey man, I did it, I stuffed up." And it definitely makes it a bit easier to enforce a bit of change on them.

James de Lacey5:53

Yeah, for sure. Because obviously some of those methods obviously have their place within a weight cut, for example using the sauna suit, being in the sauna, etc. Do you want to maybe, I guess this is specific to the individual, but maybe run through generally how a weight cut should run from say beginning of fight camp, whatever it is, through to fight day? Doesn't have to be too detailed, but just a general idea so listeners can get an idea that they're not running a sauna suit eight weeks out or anything like that.

Jordan Sullivan6:24

Yeah, I'll give you a quick rundown. Basically at the start what you want to do is you pretty much want to work backwards from whatever your weight is. And I think it's important when you're figuring out what your fight weight is that you actually put a bit of thought into it.

I know a lot of times when I was training, competing, you kind of just look around the gym and just look at guys the same size of you or talk to your teammates and be like, "What do you think I should go to?" And they're like, "You go to this weight division or you go to that." And it's just like there's not thought other than that into it.

And so I encourage a lot of people: go get a body scan, go to someone who knows how to do caliper testing and get an idea of how much body fat you actually have. Because when you're dieting, what we call the fight week or fight camp phase, sorry, you're just losing body fat. That's what you want to do. You want to manipulate your body fat to a point that you're still healthy and you can still train and you can still fuel those sessions properly, but you can slowly bring that body fat down.

And what you want to end up at right before that fight week starts, so say four, six, eight, ten weeks, however long you want to give yourself, you want to be at your ideal performance body fat. And we know for guys and girls that can vary. So for guys that can vary from anywhere from 4% body fat up to 12, 13% body fat. Girls, it can vary from anywhere from 6, 7% right up to, you know, 16, 17, 18% body fat. So having a good understanding of how your own body responds—

To different body composition positions is really important. And little side note, I think this is important too, not just in combat sports but sports in general. I think we get these really messed up ideas: I've got to have a six-pack, got to be shredded. A lot of people, that's not attainable. And you're absolutely not going to be at your optimal performance weight if you look like that. A very, very small percentage of genetic outliers will look like that. The rest of us mere mortals, we're probably not going to look like that when we're at our ideal performance weight.

So figuring that out is really important. What is an actual weight class that's appropriate for me that I'm going to feel good in, perform? At the end of the day, you don't get a medal for jumping on the scale and making weight. You get a medal for competing. That's the first thing.

Next thing we always say is you need to figure out how many calories you need to eat, because you don't want to eat in too big of a ditch. When I say that, I mean you don't want to go on a big calorie deficit. It's a big mistake people make because if you're in a deficit, doesn't matter if you're in a little deficit or a big deficit, you're going to lose weight.

But being in a little deficit and a big deficit has very, very different effects on your body. And a lot of people make the mistake of just, to play safe, and just go into a huge deficit for 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 weeks, whatever this fight week.

And as that time goes on, their body goes deeper and deeper in this ditch. We experience what we call low energy availability, which is a somewhat new of a concept that's becoming more and more well-known throughout the sporting world of just how detrimental it is for both performance and health. And this is things where girls will lose their menstrual cycle, guys' testosterone will go, your metabolic rate will go down because your thyroid gets affected, you get gastrointestinal issues, your likelihood of injury increases, your risk of concussion. All these things goes up because you're in this low energy state. You don't have enough calories to support your body's basic needs.

So understanding how many calories you need is really, really important. So they're the two biggest things at the start: what weight class appropriate, how much body composition you have, how many calories can you eat so you're not just putting yourself into a prisoner of war fight camp and just getting through it.

And then what you need to figure out is, okay, if I get to that fight week, how much weight can I cut? And when we say cut, we're talking about the 3 to 5 to 7 days leading up where you manipulate fluid in your body. And this is probably the most dangerous part of this whole process, is the manipulation of fluid. Because a lot of people make the mistake of thinking when you're in a fight camp or you're cutting weight or whatever, they think of, okay, I'm in the sauna, sweating out, I'm running a sauna suit, or I'm in a bath.

But cutting weight and cutting water weight starts in that four to five days when you cut out carbohydrates, you cut out salt, you cut out fiber. You do all of those things. What that does: it reduces fluid from different components in your body and you slowly get lighter. And then the guys on the last day go, "Hey, I've got two, three, four kilos to go, I've got to go jump in a sauna and sweat that out." So you're already dehydrated by the point you get there, by the time you get to that point, and then you become more dehydrated.

So understanding what limits are safe to do in that scenario is really important. Because the body, we're humans, we're super survival machines. There's a reason there's 7 billion of us on the earth. There's a reason we've lasted so long is because we're pretty good survival machines. We're good thermoregulatory animals as well, which means that we're made to sweat. We're the best sweaters in the animal kingdom. So our body has really good systems for handling heat and handling fluid.

But there's a point—like you said, people have died doing this, people have got really injured—so there's an obvious point where you become too dehydrated where it's very detrimental. You go out and go for a run for an hour or two, you can easily not drink some water and come back and just rehydrate after, body's fine. But we need to figure out: where's that point? Where's that point, James, for you and your body? And where can we push these? Where do we want to stay safe? What methods work best for your body? Figuring that out is really important.

Then what you essentially do is you just put all of that together: okay, what's my body composition, how many calories do I need, how much weight do I have to lose each week to get to that weight, and then I know by using these different methods to manipulate fluid, how much weight extra can I get off. And then that's going to be my ideal fight weight. So it's really just putting those three components together.

And I think a lot of people kind of think, "Yeah, you know what? I'll just eat a couple cans of tuna and some crackers and maybe I'll get there." Yeah, you probably will. You'll go on that huge ditch. But if you want, there's a lot more science out there today and there's a lot more better approaches that you can do where you can lose a decent amount of weight and you can cut that water weight to a decent extent, but do it very safely and do it within the confines of the science that we know to be safe.

So like I said to all my athletes, it's not hard making weight. Anyone can make weight. But making weight in a very scientific and safe manner is a bit more challenging.

James de Lacey12:35

For sure. Let's go straight to the beginning of that to make it really practical for listeners, in terms of figuring out how many calories essentially they can eat a day to maintain their weight, and then to figure out how much they need to eat in a deficit to lose that weight. Is there an easy way that you recommend for people to essentially figure that out for themselves?

Jordan Sullivan13:00

Yeah, go to Google and put in "calorie calculator" and use—there's about 10,000 of them. Put whatever one you're in. I use a super simple one where I do 125. So 125 kilojoules, which if you divide that by four is calories. So say 125 kilojoules times your body weight. That's how many kilojoules you need. But if you want that number in calories, divide it by four.

So I'll say that again: 125 kilojoules times your body weight in kilograms. That's how many kilojoules you need a day. But if you work in calories, divide that by four. That's how many calories. That's your baseline. That's your baseline. And then if you're active, and if you go out and you play sport or live an active life or work a physical job, whatever, go look up physical activity multiplier. Just put that into Google and it'll tell you how much to times that number by. And that's probably going to be pretty close to how many calories you need per day.

Thing is, nutrition science in that sense is not that accurate. James, if I wanted to figure that out for you, I could do those numbers, but I really don't know if those numbers are accurate until you go and do it. And I think I encourage everyone to try that: just go and do it. Do you maintain your weight eating that many calories?

Are you putting on weight or are you losing it? That's going to be your best bet. Because otherwise you have to go sit in the gas chamber and I have to look at everything that goes in and out of your body for hours on end, and no one wants to do that.

James de Lacey14:13

For sure. So say someone started that, they're losing weight to their fight weight before their weight cut. What is your ideal body weight come that fight week? So essentially, how much, in terms of percentage of body weight, is your optimal entry to lose on that fight week before the weigh-in? Do you have something, a range that you like fighters to be at, or is there something that's too much or too little?

Jordan Sullivan14:41

Yeah, it really depends on what level they're at. If they're an amateur, I'd tell them just don't lose any. Just stay as close as you can. I don't think if you're an amateur it's really worth it. Like I said, you don't get paid or you don't get any awards for making weight. You get out there and getting—you get awards for performing and getting that experience as an amateur. So much more valuable when you're professional, especially a high-level professional. There's a few more ins and outs of it.

By the textbook, we know we can safely move up to 10% of your body weight. So if you fight at 70 kilos, coming in at 77 kilos, if you know what you're doing, you can very—not easily, but you can very safely and scientifically move 7 kilos of your body weight. So if you're 100 kilos, you're fighting 100 kilos, 110 kilos, that's 10 kilos there. 10% is quite a lot though if you don't know what you're doing. I think 8% is probably more realistic for even guys working with a professional.

And if it's the first couple times you're doing it, you really shouldn't be aiming to do any more than 3 to 5%. Because the thing is, you've got to play around with these different strategies. And even though we know what these strategies do—the strategies, you cut carbohydrates and you...

Lose water weight. Anyone that's tried a keto diet, like I did stupidly years and years ago, you lose a lot of weight fast because you lose water weight. You're not losing natural weight, you lose water weight. Cut fiber out, you lose a lot of the good stuff that's in your guts for a couple days, you flush all that out. Salt holds water in your body, so if you cut that out you can lose.

But everyone's body is different, and that depends on the type of diet that you've been eating habitually most of your life or in the weeks leading up. It depends on your genetics, depends on your activity style, depends on where you live, the environment you're in, so many factors. So I can give you a range, but you don't really know until you do it.

And I think it's so much better to err on the side of caution, especially if you're just starting out and doing this. I think if you're an amateur, just don't bother. Focus on the fight, focus on the competition, that's what's important.

If it comes to a point where you're a professional and you're looking around and you're like, guys are literally way bigger, then that's a risk. That's a real risk. And unless you're in fighting and you've been punched by someone who's 5 to 7 kilos, or head kicked by someone who's a lot heavier than you, that's a thing. I don't like people who say now we shouldn't do it because that's a thing.

And it hurts when you get head kicked by someone a couple weight classes ahead of you. That's when you go, okay, how do I look at these strategies? And then figure out what's safe for my body, and then how do I practice them? So when it comes time to do it live in this fight week, I'm comfortable with it and I know what my body can do, and I can do it safely.

James de Lacey17:00

Yeah, that's good advice for everyone listening, too. You mentioned as well, obviously, going on that keto diet, on one of your mistakes for your career. You want to maybe dive into... Yeah, I mean, yeah, I've been asked multiple times as well by athletes to follow up. Should they eat carbs? Should they drop carbohydrates? It's like man, you're training twice a day and you want to get rid of carbohydrates? That's just dumb. But do you want to maybe dive into maybe why doing a keto diet might not be the best option for people to do while they're training?

Jordan Sullivan17:47

Yeah, it's good advice, I guess, for MMA and combat sports, probably not the best. So to understand it, you just need to know this very basic idea of what we call bioenergetics or energy metabolism. How your body metabolizes and uses different fuels for energy. What I mean when I say that is we can break down carbohydrates, protein, and fats for energy. They're our macronutrients. We barely use protein, so we'll ignore that for now.

But at very low intensities of exercise, our body is very good at using fats. Because fats are this big thick energy storage hormone, there's lots of calories in there. I describe it to people like if you're making a campfire, there's the big logs. The big logs that you put on the bottom that just burn all night. They never make a big flame, but they burn all night long. That's like your fats.

So your body is very good at using them for long periods of time, but at very low intensity. So like if you go for a walk or a really light jog, your body's super comfortable at using those fats. But as the intensity goes up, you need to switch over to a more faster and explosive energy source, and that's what carbohydrates are.

And if you think of a campfire, the smaller sticks you put on a campfire, and you throw kindling on there, you do that on a campfire, what happens? It just blows up, right? That's essentially what carbohydrates do. So as the intensity goes up, your body goes, crap, I need some more faster, more explosive energy. I'm going to use carbohydrates.

So from about 60, 65% of your max, you start predominantly using carbohydrates as your energy source. So I always say to combat athletes, think of your training. How much of your training do you spend under 65%? Probably not that much. Your warm-up maybe. If you're drilling at jiu-jitsu, kind of doing Shadow Boxing, even when you start hitting pads, hitting the bag, you're probably going higher than 60, 65%.

So the majority of your training that you're doing is going to be fueled by carbohydrates. And so the mistake is, it's quite logical, right? If your body wants to use carbohydrates for the training that you're doing, but you don't have that fuel in there, it's like driving a car without the fuel.

And you see this with guys in the gym that do keto or low carb high fat diet. They'll have that slow burning log in there, so they'll be able to have energy, but they won't ever be able to hit those top ends. They won't be able to get that top intensity. If they do, they just crash, because you just build up so much lactic acid fast and you just crash out. They're the guys that never really hit that top gear, and you see that in the gym all the time. They'll be good for a minute wrestling or whatever, and then they just...

It's not for sports, like any sport that requires you to exert yourself for extended periods of time over 60% of your max. You need a lot of carbohydrates in that fuel.

James de Lacey20:25

Yeah. And I also don't understand how someone could eat almost a low and no carb and a high fat but also eat before training. If you're having a high fat meal before training, that must just sit in your stomach for hours.

Jordan Sullivan20:25

Yeah, you know what? That thing a lot of keto guys say to me, they're like, if I'm ever stuck, I just go to McDonald's and buy a double cheeseburger and then just throw the buns away. It's like man, imagine having that before training. Put you straight to sleep.

James de Lacey20:53

Yeah, yeah. Wouldn't be good. Oh, I want to come a little bit back to the weight cut part of this, in terms of water loading. I don't know if this is something you ever implement, agree with, disagree with. I guess you don't hear about it as much now in terms of a weight cutting strategy. Do you maybe want to dive into what water loading is and whether it's something that you ever prescribe, and why you would or not?

Jordan Sullivan21:22

Yeah. So water loading is probably the most misunderstood concept in combat sports, and unfortunately there's a lot of practitioners even that I believe really do not understand it. And I'll say that because the concepts behind it, we don't understand. And one of my mentors, Reid Reale, is the only guy that's really studied this, and he did a study at the AIS.

What water loading is, is essentially you drink an increased amount of water than what you would normally, and the idea behind it is that it changes your body's ability to process that water. So if you put more water in, your body gets used to processing more water. And when we put... everyone knows if you have two cups of water, what do you do? You run to the toilet and you pee it out, right?

So the idea is, if you put more in and keep peeing, you'll keep peeing out more. And then the idea is you put more, more, more, and then all of a sudden you drop it back down. And then your body goes, okay, I've had more, more, more water. And when you drop it down, you're not actually putting any more water in, but then you're going to keep peeing fluid out. So you actually end up peeing out excess fluid, and that's the theory behind how water loading works.

And what Reid did back in 2017 at the Aussie Institute of Sport is they did the first really controlled study of it. And the idea about how it works is there was this whole theory about, I won't get into the physiology of it, but pretty much tricking your body. And you can't trick your body. You don't get seven billion humans on Earth and last for over 300,000 years by tricking your biology.

But essentially, the theory was that you were playing around with these renal, like your kidney hormones, the hormones that tell you to hold water and the hormones that tell you to lose water. And the theory was that by increasing that water intake, and you drank, drank, drank, drank, drank, you're going to increase the hormone that says, hey James, keep peeing, keep peeing.

And then if you stopped that intake for, say, 24 hours, that wasn't enough time for your body to figure out that you've actually stopped drinking water, and that hormone was still high. So your body goes, James, just keep peeing, even though water wasn't coming in, which caused you to pee out excess amounts.

What Reid's study found, and this is what loads of people... I'd say if you ask 99% of people about why water loading works, they'll tell you exactly that. And they found that's not true. That just doesn't happen. The complete opposite happened. That hormone did come back down. But they did find that in the water loading group in this study, they did lose more fluid than the other group that was just drinking a normal amount.

So they controlled for all those other factors I spoke about, carbohydrates, salt, blah blah blah. They didn't actually control too much of salt, but they controlled for all these other things. And they found water loading did increase the urinary output of fluid, and that group lost more weight. What they found...

Though, was that there was a different mechanism behind it. And essentially what they found is that if you think of a garage, a car garage, if you've got want to get three cars in there and you've only got one door, right, you've got to drive all of them through one door, it's going to take longer than if you had two or three doors, right? You could drive all three at the same time. What they found is that by doing an increasing this fluid intake, you're essentially opening more doors in certain parts of your kidney to allow that water out.

And it takes a little while for your body to figure out, okay, we haven't actually lost that, we haven't actually increased the water anymore, so we'll keep these doors open and you still lose water. And that's an important distinction to make, and this is very in the science, but I think it's very important because when you think about this in practice, a lot of people will go, oh, water loading is quite dangerous, water loading is super dangerous, you'll get risk of hyponatremia.

I don't particularly think that's true. I don't think in the context of cutting weight I don't think the risk of hyponatremia is as large as what people make it out to be. And the reason I think that is because people don't understand that concept. And then people will always just give out a blanket statement of, hey James, you want a water load? Just drink 8 liters, no matter if James, if you weigh 50 kilos or what you weigh 100 kilos.

People just seem to say how to drink 2 gallons or 8 liters when in reality that concept that I just described of opening more garage doors in your kidneys, in that certain part of your kidney, can theoretically, and we see this in practice, does happen whether you increase your daily habitual intake by even up to 25, 35, 45%. So instead of James, you drinking 8 liters, if you normally drink two liters every day and I say James, just drink 3 liters, 3 and a half, four liters, you should theoretically get that same response.

And we see that. And with our guys, we do do water loading but I never do these extreme things when they're going to be drink, if you drink two liters, go hey James, drink four times that.

James de Lacey26:10

Where you're getting, I've seen people like 12.

Jordan Sullivan26:10

Yeah, and it's insane, right? But you know what? I have guys that work outside and they work in the heat and they drink 10 liters every day, so 12, you know, which then we have another conversation where you say, well, a water load probably isn't necessary, just do a fluid restriction because your habitual intake is already so high. By bringing that down, that difference is probably going to have a physiological effect in your body.

And this is the mistake a lot of people make when it comes to designing fight week plans: is they don't consider the habitual intake or the change from the habitual intake. That's why having a good fight camp plan where you plan for how much fluid this person has, how much carbohydrate they have, how much fluid they drink every day, and then they're the things that you're manipulating in that fight week. You can control the dials, you can turn down and turn up certain systems, pull different levers to get a more pronounced effect.

So if I want you to cut carbohydrates, like I did stupidly, like I was saying, like don't lose all weight, but if you were eating keto in camp and you had no carbohydrates in your system, and then we cut them out fight week, you're obviously not going to lose any weight because you just don't have any in there to start with. So planning these things very strategically so you can change during that fight week from the habitual intake of the fight camp is really important, and it's a detail that a lot of people miss.

I'm harping on about this because I've seen a lot of people make this argument of, oh, hyponatremia. And I'm into ultra endurance sports these days, that's kind of what I've been into the last 18 months, and I can tell you that hyponatremia is a much greater risk in those sports, yet it's so much rarer. And what you would have to do for an athlete in the setting of combat sports and cutting weight to put them at risk with hyponatremia is pretty extreme.

And if you're giving someone a plan that is that extreme where you're putting them at risk of hyponatremia, I don't think you should be practicing, for sure.

James de Lacey28:25

Is with a water loading plan, say for example you're going from 2 L a day to 4 L a day, does that still increase each day? You see a lot of water loading plans that go from say 4 L day one, 6 L day two, 8 L day three, whatever it is, and then they drop it off. Is that something that needs to be done, or can you stick with that 25 to 40% over your usual intake and kind of stay there for a few days?

Jordan Sullivan28:51

So again, this is why coming back to understanding that physiology is important. There's something you learn when you learn systems physiology, is that structure equals function. And what that means is if you understand the structure of the thing that you're trying to change, you can predict the function of it.

So if I was talking about that nephron or the part of the kidney that we're trying to manipulate here, and we're opening up these garage doors to let more fluid out, right, we can achieve that with just the habitual intake. And then what do you do if you increase it more? You probably do increase more, but is it necessary? Probably not. So there's probably no need to increase, keep increasing, because you've already increased on that habitual and the goal is to just get that increase. And so there's absolutely no need to just keep pumping more and more and more fluid in.

James de Lacey29:41

Yeah, no, that's fair enough for everyone listening as well so they don't have to go drink 10 or 12 liters of water the week of their fight, so they kind of save some people, I hope.

Jordan Sullivan29:41

There's one thing I'll say James, just on that. There's two options when you think about water loading. If in your everyday diet you don't drink heaps of water, you just drink one or two liters a day, then you're increasing by that little bit. Even if you just double it and it's at that smaller amount, so you're going from 2 to four liters, okay, that's fine.

If you drink say 10 liters a day and you work outside in the heat, it's probably not a good idea for you to go, okay, I'll just double my intake and then drink 15 L, because you're going to probably already have all of those garage doors set up. And you're going to be fine to just decrease, do a 24-hour, 18-hour, we usually do a 12-hour fluid restriction. We won't do any more than that, and just do a fluid restriction.

Because from you, because your habitual is so high, physiologically you've already set everything up to get the same effect for what you want to achieve in a water load. So by just bringing it down to say 12, 18 hours, you're still going to get that effect. So that's an important thing for people to understand as well.

James de Lacey30:58

Yeah. So how do you then structure after the weigh-in? So let's use an example, as for the 24-hour weigh-in, how do you structure the rehydration and the refueling there? Do you have this broken down based on, I don't know, body weight lost or anything like that?

Jordan Sullivan30:58

Yeah, yeah, it can be pretty complex if you want to get into it. I think hydration, if you talk to anyone in sport science that tell you they understand hydration in the human body, I'll tell you someone who's lying and doesn't know what they're talking about. Because it's probably one of the only things, I'd say the last 100 years, that has just been consistently unknown.

And the reason that hydration is so complex in the human body is there's not many good ways to measure it. We have good ways to approximate it. Say if I said, hey James, how would you measure your hydration? Say, hey, I just look at the color of my pee, which really is just telling me how hydrated your bladder is. Or we can get a bit more technical and you can take blood samples and you can look at different blood markers. But even then, that's just telling you about the hydration status of a particular part of your body, which is the fluid in your blood.

But we know there's different compartments in the body that have different fluid in there. So we have fluid inside our cells, and our body is made up of billions and billions of cells. We have fluid outside those cells, and then we have fluid in the blood. Now the reason I'm talking about this is because when we talk about weight cutting, it's very unique in that we tend to manipulate fluid from all of those compartments.

Where if I went, me and you James, we go, hey, let's just go for a 5, 10k run outside, and I don't know, we sweat 2% of our body weight, we're probably only going to manipulate fluid from one of those compartments, which is in our blood, which is very close to our skin. And all we have to do is, I don't know, we just, we could go to the pub after and have a beer and we probably put that back in. It's not hard to put it back in because it's so close to your skin.

So close to your gut, sorry, and you can just put it back in. When you manipulate fluid from those deeper parts of your body, say outside of your cells and inside of your cells, things get a bit more complicated with how you rehydrate people. And so when we're cutting weight and we're sweating, we know if you sweat more than 4% of your body weight, the amount of fluid that you lose from deep inside your cells increases, and the percentage that you lose increases to a certain amount and you keep losing fluid from there. And it moves through your body from inside your cell, outside your cell, to the blood, onto the skin.

So then it becomes this challenge of okay, how do we get that fluid back inside the cell? Because at the end of the day that's what's most important. And if you think of the context of fighting, if James, you're going into a ring and someone's going to be punching you in the head, you probably don't want your brain cells depleted. Like it's probably okay if you've got a little bit of fluid volume, blood plasma volume depletion, a little bit, it's probably okay. But being depleted in those cells in there is not good. So that's the problem we're trying to solve.

As it is right now, what we know is that after this dehydration you're going to be depleted in your blood. That blood's going to be depleted, outside's going to be depleted, inside yourself's going to be depleted. So the goal would be, okay, how do we get fluid back into that blood? And you can do that by getting water in. If you've got enough time, if you got two, three days, you can just drink water slowly and it'll eventually come in.

The problem is is like you just weighed in, you've probably got a fight in 24 to 36 hours. It's like we probably got to get this back in as fast as possible. Because I also just told you not to eat carbs for five days. So we got to restore all of that, we got to get ready for this, and you got to mentally sleep and get ready for all these things.

So we put in what's called hypertonic oral rehydration solutions. Essentially what that means is just like, it's like a Pedialyte or a Hydralyte. It's just a concentration of solutes, like salt and electrolytes, that is less concentrated than your blood. And what that does is when you put that in – we won't get into the science of it – it causes that fluid to move from your gut into your blood really fast.

And so if you put that back in, you can get it back in really fast. You get it to your blood, then it's going to move to outside your cells and back inside your cells.

So if anyone's listening and they go, okay, what do I eat then? The recommendations is is just to have one liter per hour and have 1,000 mg of sodium. I don't know necessarily how much I agree with that knowing what I know about hydration, but what I would tell people is just go down to Chemist Warehouse, get Pedialyte or Hydralyte and use that and slowly drink it.

A recommendation we use with athletes is have 500 to 600 mls in the first 15 minutes after your weigh-in of that oral rehydration solution, so your Hydralyte or whatever. And then have about 165 mls every 10 minutes after until you replace about 150% of what you lost. So if you lost, I don't know, if you lost a liter of fluid, you need to put back in 1.5 liters. So have 500 mls within 15 minutes and then 165 mls every 10 minutes after until you replace 150%.

But you don't have to get, you see all these post-weigh-in drinks. I've seen ones that put Monster Energy drink and creatine and amino acids and all these weird things there. And it's like, no, unless I'm reading the wrong textbooks and I'm talking to the wrong fluid balance hydration expert, I don't quite understand what they're trying to do there. But your best bet is just get oral rehydration solution, like Hydralyte, Pedialyte, and use that until you've replaced those fluids.

And then the priority goes, okay, we've replaced the fluid, James, you're technically hydrated. What's next? Priority is getting those carbohydrates back in. If we cut carbs, you can get ready to fight, you've got that fuel in the car to do that high intensity activity. How many carbs do you need? You need this many carbs. Go eat some pizzas and a burger.

James de Lacey37:15

So do you have a recommended carb source then for that, as you mention just pizza and burger there, or do you have something depending on the athlete, I guess, what they like?

Jordan Sullivan37:15

Yeah, again it depends. What I always have the rule is don't try anything new fight day that you haven't done during camp. So the way you set up a fight camp diet is that on the big training days you eat quite a lot, and you want to eat pretty similar on, say, your sparring day than what you're going to do on your fight day.

So if on your sparring day you've been eating, say, oats in the morning and then you've been having a grilled chicken burger for lunch or whatever, and then you go off to sparring, I'm probably going to give you something pretty similar to that post-weigh-in and on fight day. So keeping things habitual. And then again, we often do it where we'll have our guys, they will eat pizza and pasta and things like that afterwards.

But it's not like they haven't been eating that in fight camp, because you can make anything fit in a plan. If you know how to work the numbers, you can make anything fit.

It's just really what have they been eating? I would very much err on the side of caution of, okay, I haven't had, I don't know, KFC in 12 weeks, I'm going to go smash a bucket of KFC. It's like, yeah, well, yeah, exactly.

James de Lacey38:23

So what about then for weigh-ins that are shorter in duration between the weigh-in and the fights? Obviously jiu-jitsu, often you're weighing in mat side or maybe half an hour or an hour beforehand. I competed nationally in weightlifting, so weigh in two hours before. And actually I had a really good weight cutting routine. Had Dr. Eric Helms do mine at that time, and that was really good, gave me all that stuff in terms of being able to rehydrate and whatever afterwards.

So then what would you recommend in terms of, maybe that's a mat side weigh-in? Obviously someone's not going to do any acute weight loss strategies for mat side weigh-in before they go on because you don't have time to do anything afterwards. But maybe for someone who weighs in an hour or two hours before, anything they can do or any recommendations they can do? They need to drop weight for that weight class and then any recommendations, depending on whatever happens before, what they should do afterwards.

Jordan Sullivan39:25

Yeah, it all comes down to how much time you have. And I think jiu-jitsu, I've done terrible ones where I've been two divisions running at the same time and I've cut heaps of weight and jumped in there and then had to go from mat to mat. It's horrible. And it's horrible because again, if you cut weight aggressively, like you were doing MMA, and you cut carbohydrates, you dehydrate yourself, you cut all your salt out, well, they're all very important things for your performance.

And then you just have none of that on board, so you're just running on fumes. So you get out there and run on fumes.

I think for something like jiu-jitsu, it's a very high explosive, especially at a competition. And I think until you get to your higher belts where you chill out a little bit, if you're a white and blue belt, you're going to be operating at 120%, 130% of every single one of your matches. So that's important to consider.

I always say to guys, if you've got, say, mat side weigh-in or even if you do have one to two hours, you can't put much back in in one to two hours. Walk pretty close to your weight there. There's a couple strategies you can do, what we call our low-risk strategies, like low fiber, low volume diet that you can use three days up to it. You can eat heaps of carbs and you can eat a pretty good amount of calories by reducing your fiber and reducing the volume, which is the physical weight of the food.

You get some good stuff in and really fuel yourself up and still drop, not much, but anywhere from half a percent to 3% of your body weight, depending on what your habitual diet looks like when you cut that out.

You can manipulate salt a little bit. Our body's very good at balancing salt, so even if you reduce your salt intake for one to two, maybe three days max – I wouldn't do it any more than that – you can lose some water weight. Again, you need to be mindful of your hydration levels. You can sweat a little bit going in there. We know you can compete 2% dehydrated, be pretty good.

But you just need to be mindful that if you're cutting fiber, if you're cutting salt, whatever, you're already going to be dehydrated. So if you even if you just use your warm-up to sweat out, you're probably already 1% dehydrated. If you do, if you go, okay, 2% of my weight is 1.4, I'm going to say you're probably going to be 3%, 4% dehydrated rather than two. So just being mindful of that.

I say to all guys who have short weigh-ins, take your diet seriously the weeks beforehand, because at the end of the day, most of those sports you're going to put yourself in

A way better chance to demonstrate your skills, which skills pay the bills in those sports. That's what's going to make you win. You're going to be able to display your skills a lot better if you're adequately fueled, you're not depleted, and you are well hydrated going into that.

If you do need to cut some weight, marginal 1 to 3% in the days leading up and use those low strategies, I would never recommend anyone to cut carbohydrates out, to jump in a sauna, to be running laps before. Maybe you could have that combo at a very high level if it was a last minute thing and you had to do it. Maybe entertain the idea, but other than that, no. It's just not worth it. It's just not worth it.

James de Lacey42:17

Do you have any examples of maybe common high fiber foods that people would normally eat on their diet and then the substitutes that are low in fiber?

Jordan Sullivan42:17

I mean, anything that's brown, right? Brown bread, brown pasta, brown rice—all of those things are going to be higher in fiber. Swap it for the white, so swap your brown rice to white rice, things like that. Peel the skin off your fruit.

There's lots of natural low fiber foods, right? I give a lot of my guys milk chocolate leading up if they're Jiu-Jitsu guys because it's got quite a lot of carbohydrates in there and then no fiber. So you can find lots of low fiber foods that have good amounts of carbohydrates, which is what you need to fuel up on to get ready for that comp.

But again, it's important to say this because a lot of people make this mistake: you fiber, but you don't have a good high fiber diet. And I'm talking anywhere from 30 to 60 grams per day of fiber in your daily diet, and then you cut it out. If you don't have it there to cut out, you're not going to lose any weight. A lot of people will be like, "Man, I tried a low fiber diet and it just didn't work." Well yeah, you don't have any fiber in your normal diet; you just eat lollies every day.

So prepping your body to respond to it is very important. But this is kind of going sideways, but this is why it's so important we say to all our guys: eat like an athlete all year round. If you—it doesn't even have to be a professional job—but if you identify as an athlete or an athletic person, then eat like one.

That doesn't mean you have to eat chicken, rice, and veg every single day of your life like a narcissistic bodybuilder or whatever. Just eat properly and eat like a performance diet all year round. You can still eat your pizza, burgers, go out and have some beers with your mates or whatever. Just eat a performance diet all year round and you'll avoid 95% of these weight cutting issues.

James de Lacey44:21

Oh, definitely. Do you have any female athletes that you've worked with?

Jordan Sullivan44:21

Yeah, plenty. Yeah.

James de Lacey44:21

How do you navigate the menstrual cycle then with weight cutting? Because that's obviously something that's not talked about as often, but it's obviously something that—my wife competes, she's a little weightlifter, and obviously she's got to contend with that too. She knows certain parts of her cycle she's going to hold water and things like that.

Jordan Sullivan44:54

Yeah. I won't get into the debate because I know it gets very heated when you talk about training and the menstrual cycle. And I won't get into that because I know there's some very polarizing and passionate camps there. But in terms of that weight cutting, what you just said—fluid retention is going to be a big one.

We know that at certain stages of the cycle you're going to be holding fluid, and we know at other stages of the cycle your thermoregulation can be manipulated. So your core body temperature can be higher. So you might not need to jump in a hot bath if you do need to sweat; it doesn't have to be as hot. Or if you are training or running on a treadmill to lose some weight, you'll probably feel a bit more hot and flustered. They're probably the two biggest ones when it comes to weight cutting.

The thing is with the menstrual cycle, and something you'll realize when you start working with a lot of female athletes, is that it's so varied between individuals. And I think we make a mistake of looking at research and being like, "Oh, maybe I should eat these anti-inflammatory foods here, and then I'll eat this food, and then this week I'll go off and do this type of training, this week I'll do this type." Great in theory, great blanket recommendations, very much on the right path of what we need to do for our female athletes to get them to the next level.

In reality, we're not quite there yet. And when you work with a lot of female athletes, you will realize just how different the cycle is for all of them. I've got female athletes that when they start bleeding—or where most athletes just don't want to move, they want to stay in bed—some of them will say, "I feel so energized. I feel great. This is when I want to get my big sessions in." You're like, "Wow, that's a bit different," but that's just them.

And then you've got some athletes that will put on 2, 3 kilos of fluid in their cycle, and others just won't notice, won't be a blip. So you really have to spend a lot of time with them tracking it. You have to really track it. And where we're at right now with it is, yeah, there's some really promising theory, but when we try to put that in practice, it's very hazy.

So what you have to do is sit down with your female athlete and have that open, honest conversation. Guys, don't be weird about it. If you're in performance, you need to have these conversations. Say, "We need to figure out what happens to your body at every single stage, because your cycle is going to be different to her cycle, it's going to be different to hers. And if we want to make this weight, we want you to perform, we need to be aware of this."

And we don't even need to be—we need to be aware of it, and it's not just what happens in one cycle. We know there can be inter-cycle variability. So, okay, well, are there patterns over this long macro cycle that we're seeing? Other factors: how does stress affect this? How does when you're 2, 3 weeks out, if you're at a certain stage, how does that affect it? If you've got a lot of pressure coming on from over here, or if you're in a big training block, how does that affect it?

So you just need to sit down with them, have an open conversation, be very honest, and then build that rapport with them so that they'll be honest with you. Because that's really over the years that I've done it with all of the female athletes and trying to put these recommendations in place and kind of use cookie cutter programs, it just doesn't work. You've just got to sit down with them and figure out how does your cycle line up and how do we best work with you individually.

James de Lacey48:03

Nice. That's good advice as well. Just before we finish this off, I actually wanted to touch on maybe—what would you—I guess recommendations for a fighter listening who wants to maybe eat like an athlete and they want to start tracking their food?

Do you have, for say, a performance-based diet, recommended macronutrient breakdown that they could follow? Something generic or general, because obviously we ruled out keto, so we're saying eat your carbohydrates. So what would you recommend then? Basically per pound of body weight or per kilo of body weight in terms of macronutrient breakdown?

Jordan Sullivan48:35

Yeah, I think the classic, like 2010, How to Make Weight in Combat Sports by good friend of mine Dr. Carl Langan-Evans kind of outlines that. It's called a 3-2-1 principle, and that's pretty much 3 grams per kilo of carbohydrates, 2 grams per kilo of protein, and 1 gram per kilo of fat.

But even that—that's what they say when you're in fight camp and you're in a calorie deficit, right? If you're outside of that fight camp phase and you're in your general prep phase or whatever it is, and just general training phase, you probably eat a lot more than that.

Combat athletes are notoriously bad for—I think that as a community we are probably low carbohydrate athletes, even though most of them will eat the majority of their diet as carbohydrates. They're probably categorized as low carbohydrates.

Some numbers I would encourage you—I don't know if you want to get out MyFitnessPal, and I don't want to have a whole discussion about diet culture and all of that thing, but if you get out MyFitnessPal and you do track these, try to aim for somewhere between 5 to 7 grams per kilogram of your body weight every single day of carbs. And you might think it doesn't sound too bad. Do the math and work it out—it could be a decent amount.

I'm in ultra endurance nowadays, and we have guys that are at 10 to 12 grams per kilo, and there's a marked difference in performance. Marked, marked, marked difference. And I think a lot of combat athletes—I said as a community, we're these low carb athletes purely because by the calorie restrictions to make weight we can't be high carb athletes. When you're outside of camp, you should be high carb athletes.

Be training your body to get higher carbohydrates. I think getting 2 to 2.5 grams per kilo of protein every single day is great to aim for. At least 1 gram per kilo of fat is great for keeping your hormonal health. But really, really, really, really make an effort to keep increasing that carbohydrate, because eating carbs is hard. I think a lot of people think that you can just smash them back. You have to train your gut is the words we use, literally.

You have to increase the receptors in your stomach and in your intestine to increase the uptake of carbohydrates in your body. So start – you're probably only taken now if I probably looked at most athletes it'd be 3, 4 grams. Try to bump that up, get it to 5 to 7, try to get it up to 8 grams if you can. Don't worry about putting too many calories in because you can manipulate the other two. What I would say to all combat athletes: work on training your gut and work on getting more carbohydrates in.

James de Lacey51:07

No, fully agree with you there, man. I love – I mean, I only pretty much high carb diets now. It just for me as well, eating higher carb, it digests so much quicker and easier as well. Obviously, you're eating, say, just say for example chicken, rice, and veggies – obviously it's generally lower fat meal – of eating that, you can eat that 30 minutes or an hour before training and you're good. Whereas if you're having, I don't know, whatever high fat meal, something sort like a fatty steak and whatever else, man, that stuff's all sitting there for ages. That might be a night time meal.

Jordan Sullivan51:34

Exactly. And just like I say to all our guys, you got to practice that, right? And if you break down the numbers – and this is going a bit of a tangent – but say for the guys who train a long time, and it's not uncommon for MMA to have crazy 3-hour high intense training. I've been in wrestling classes where we're training for 3 hours doing 10-minute wrestling rounds and it's just madness. You can't expect someone to just come off the street, jump in that class, and be able to get a good amount of carbohydrates in.

But if you think, if we want to be performance athletes and you want to get anywhere from the range of 30 grams of carbohydrates, which is just a banana, up to say 120 grams, which is like a foot long and a half Subway in per hour while you're training, you have to train your gut. You can absolutely do it. We see it in endurance sport, so guys can get 120 grams of carbohydrates, the equivalent of a foot long and a half of a Subway in per hour.

But you can't just do that just off the back – you're going to spew on the mat, you're going to spew on your training. But you can absolutely train your body to get better at that and get better at taking more and more carbs in.

And it's just something that a lot of athletes push to the wayside because there's that real low carb culture. But I think it's such a powerful tool, such a powerful performance tool if combat athletes start putting that to practice and start training their body to take on more carbs.

James de Lacey52:50

What would be your recommendation then in terms of carbohydrates per hour for, say, for example you have the high intensity wrestling class that's 3 hours, in terms of maybe a carbohydrate drink? Do you have recommendation, how many carbs they should have based on the session?

Jordan Sullivan53:15

It's going to change for each person, right? But generally aiming for – I think starting at 30 grams. The funny thing about – I'm talking about all make sure everything's relative to your habitual diet and everything's relative to your body weight – the funny thing about carbohydrates in your body, it seems to be the one thing in nutrition that is an absolute factor that it doesn't seem to be that if you're this size or this size, you can absorb more or less. Obviously a little bit more, but not substantially where it's significant.

It seems that we can start at 30 grams, but the max that we can say tap out one certain type of carbohydrate, like glucose or that type of sugars that we put in, is about 60 grams per hour. And if you want to go more than that, you've got to use, say, glucose and fruit sugars or fructose as well, and you can push that right up to 120 grams per hour.

So I encourage all of my guys: start at 30 grams. Like I said, that's just a banana, that's a banana or a Gatorade, like a 600 mil Gatorade's 36 grams of carbs. Start with that and see if you can get that in over the hour, and then work your way up. And I say to all my guys, work your way up to at least 60 grams per hour while you're training.

If you're doing really intense sessions like some of our top, top level guys – holy smokes, those sessions are insane – and the calories burnt, the amount of carbohydrate burnt in those sessions is just phenomenal. And it's like we need to work up to at least 100, at least 100 grams per hour. And it's taken some of them years to get up there, but they can finally get there.

It's a combination of mostly taking in fluids and sports drinks, because then you're addressing the fluid loss and the carbohydrates. Some of them do take in food as well, and we'll use things like sports gels or gummy chews that are just easy to get in, low volume, that are just quick, easy to get in, in a rest, in between rounds and whatnot. But we do, with all of our top level guys, we really work on getting a good amount of carbs in during training.

James de Lacey54:59

That's awesome. So that's for anyone listening as well – simple sports drink, take to training with you. You can start getting your carbs in, that's it.

Perfect. Well, no, this has been hugely insightful podcast regarding the weight cutting nutrition, Jordan. If anyone wants to keep up with what you're up to and I guess any information and knowledge that you want to share, is anywhere they can follow you?

Jordan Sullivan55:23

Yeah, we got a pretty big presence on Instagram, that's probably where we're most active: the_fight_dietitian. We have a Facebook, The Fight Dietitian, as well. YouTube, just under Jordan Sullivan. We put a lot more educational content out there.

This year we started a podcast as well, TFD Performance Podcast, where we talk a lot more about the theory but how it translates into practice. So if you're into sports nutrition, I'd highly recommend people go over there.

We do have another podcast as well, The Fight Science Podcast. It's essentially – I created a couple of years ago where I pretty much got all the experts that I know around the world and we just spoke about how do you do this in practice. And so if you're into the actual science of fighting, go over to The Fight Science Podcast and all that info is free and it's pretty valuable.

James de Lacey56:14

Perfect. Next, well thanks for coming on, Jordan, I really appreciate it.

Jordan Sullivan56:14

Thanks, man. Thanks for having me.