Making Weight & Weight Cutting + The Perfect Meal After Weigh In For Combat Sports w/ Carl Langan-Evans (SSOF Ep. 24)

Carl Langan-Evans0:29

And I was fortunate at the time to run into a guy called James Morton, Professor James Morton, who in the past has been the head of nutrition for Liverpool Football Club, for Team Sky or Ineos as it is now. So he was with them for the five times they won the Tour de France. So a top top research practitioner in sports nutrition, but he had a very keen interest in boxing.

And he was working with some high-level, Liverpool's a bit of a hub for combat sports athletes in MMA, boxing, Taekwondo. And so he was working with a few boxers. So I kind of latched on to him and I did a major project with him with the Master of Research. And then I ended up getting asked by James to do a PhD and the title of the PhD was Making Weight in Combat Sports.

So we did like five studies trying to examine better ways to make weight in combat sports. And then from that over the past 10 years or so, we've done a couple of nice publications, some nice articles on the guidance of how to make weight more safely and effectively. And then since then I've also started working with a lot of different combat sports athletes as well.

James de Lacey3:32

Awesome. Yeah, that's a great background to cover in this podcast. But I wanted to start, we'll get into that weight kind of thing, but first I had a, there was a Facebook thread with a couple of friends talking about Alex Pereira's body weight. I wanted to ask you this, they had some questions on there.

So he walks around I think it was, I've got it right here, like 102 kilos, which is about 226 pounds, fights at middleweight. So he's going to cut down to 84 kilos or 185 pounds. And the question was obviously that's a big big cut, similar to kind of what you were doing back in your day. But what are the long-term implications of doing something like that over and over?

Carl Langan-Evans4:25

It depends, it really depends. Another classic example that I'm sure people will be aware of is Paddy the Baddy, Paddy Pimblett. So he's similar. I'm actually part of the team that works with Paddy, so I get a lot of stick. Get a lot of stick at them and everyone's like, why are you letting them get so fat?

I think it depends on how they're making the weight. So as an example, looking at those two guys, if you look at someone like Paddy, Paddy is carrying, believe it or not, Paddy doesn't have a hard time making 155. He just goes away, he eats a heck of a lot of food, he gets fat. So it's a case of examining him and streamlining his body composition to get to a point, and I can testify to this, he doesn't do a very bad cut at all.

Where it becomes an issue is some of these guys who are already really lean, they're carrying a lot of lean tissue, they've got very low body fat percentage, and they're trying to lose, you know, like 20 in very short time frames. And that's where it becomes a little bit of an issue because the chronic and the acute both present unique challenges from that perspective.

And if I start with the acute first, so losing mass amounts of body mass acutely in particular through dehydration, and we actually did a study on this back in 2019, we examined a fighter who lost I think it was 32 pounds over eight weeks, of which the last seven kilos they did in like 18 hours prior to the fight. It can cause a serious amount of issues. Most notably you get major damage to the kidneys, so you get acute kidney injury.

Because we're in a very fine balance of fluid and electrolyte within our body. The body in males, depending on size, tends to be about 60% of mass, in females it's around about 55%, again dependent on the size. So we're made of water, but we're made of water for a purpose and we can manipulate that within reason, but there are thresholds, there are limits.

And what a lot of these guys who are lean tend to do is go way beyond those limits. And as a result of that, you get damage. So what what tends to happen is we have a ratio between the amount of fluids we have in our body and the amount of electrolytes. We all hear this idea, don't we, take electrolytes to stay hydrated because it's the balance of those two things that help us maintain the water.

Weight cutting basically plays on those, on that balance depending on what you do. So for instance, a technique called water loading plays on increasing the amount of fluid and dampening the amount of electrolytes to help you make weight, whereas obviously dehydration works on dampening the amount of fluids and you have an increased amount of electrolytes.

When you have an increased amount of electrolytes, it does cause physiological problems. So we know within tolerable limits, and so as an example, I'll use this case study that we did as an example. The fighter we examined, you're in a fine balance of say sodium as an electrolyte, for example James, between 135 to 145 nanomolar. If you go above 145 to say 150, you're going to have issues. If you go over 150, you die, it's death.

The fighter that we examined and did that 7 kilo weight cut in 18 hours was 148 nanomolar from memory. So this individual was scorching, they were at the cliff edge. Additionally we measured some markers related to kidney function, so urea. So again, urea is obviously what you find in urine, urea creatinine, and the levels that they had in their blood were indicative of damage to the kidney because you shouldn't have that much of those two things in the blood in the first place.

So yeah, the plain and short of it, same as always with me, made the long-winded answer, the plain and short of it is you can seriously damage your health from multiple perspectives, most notably your internal organs. But if you go too far over the cliff edge, death. And as you've said, we've seen cases over the past couple of years, you know, Dian Bang in over in one of the events in Asia, and then I forgot the girl over in Australia who did Muay Thai and she died.

And there's been probably more than there should have been combat sports athletes dying from these sorts of practices. So that's the negative when it comes

To the acute, the negative comes with the chronic. So if you get really fat and then obviously you come down, in order to get that fat mass off you need to put yourself into a deficit and you need to put yourself into a state of low energy availability. Now in doing that, you will lose that body fat and you will get lean, but depending on how long you do it for and how severe you do it for, what then happens is you get something called a rebound.

And this is basically what's happening in society now. It's called rebound hyperphagia, where you've got to pay the money back to the bank in terms of the calories that you've missed out on. So again, we did another study back in 2021 where we examined this and we got a guy to lose 10 kilos and he made the weight and he did it really safely and really effectively. He weighed in fine and he performed, and his performance markers and health markers were all great. He won the competition.

But then we tracked him for a week after the competition, and not only did he put back all the weight on that he'd lost, he actually put on more and he put on more fat mass as well. So it's this idea of yo-yo dieting. Always on a lot of fights, and this is what happened to me. The more you lose, the more you put back on and it becomes harder and harder and harder.

And it's this rebound hyperphagic response that leads to collateral fat patterning. And from that, in this case study that we did on this fighter, within a week their blood fat levels—so their cholesterol, LDL and HDL—the capacity to use fat as a fuel, and the general well-being, the psychological state, their insulin—we measured insulin—their insulin levels were basically indicative of somebody who had type two diabetes within one week of going on that binge.

So yeah, there are consequences of doing both ways to be fair, and which we're trying to figure out. But ultimately I think the chronic is something that's a bit more manageable. The gradual is a bit of a better approach, whereas that extreme acute weight cut, yeah, end you can die.

James de Lacey11:17

Yeah, I think we scared everyone listening to this now. So I want to dive into—

Carl Langan-Evans11:17

I don't mind saying as well, because he told planet Earth, the individual we did the case study on where we see acute kidney damage was actually Paddy Pimblett when he was making featherweight for Cage Warriors. And from that he made the decision to move to lightweight.

James de Lacey11:46

Wow.

Carl Langan-Evans11:46

Yeah. Yeah. So that, but it literally James took us to show the guy in numbers you're going to die if you keep doing this for him to then go, okay, I'll move up to lightweight. So it's just about making the right decision. It's about being smart about your approach.

James de Lacey11:46

No, exactly. And I wanted to dive into that. So I wanted to dive in almost like what your perfect safe weight cut looks like. So obviously there's organizations like the ONE FC who are kind of leading the charge and kind of removing that area. But maybe for someone who's fighting amateur MMA, amateur boxing, whatever it is, and they're cutting down kind of what, or where you believe their weight should sit kind of leading into the fight before they start their weight cut, and then kind of how you would approach bringing that weight down gradually before having to use maybe some kind of acute weight loss strategy question to the fight.

Carl Langan-Evans12:42

Yeah, I think so. I'll talk about the approach first. So what we tend to do with the fighters that we work with is the key to all this is assess, don't guess. Whenever you're working with somebody and they just write you a plan and you basically do it and obviously you make weight, it's a little bit like sticking your finger up in the air in the wind.

Every fight is individual. You've got obviously male fighters, female fighters, you've got lighter weight categories, you've got heavier weight categories, you've got guys who are shorter, guys who are taller, more lean, more muscular. So we always tend to do a baseline assessment of body composition because to answer your question, really the answer is the typical scientist answer: it depends.

For instance, you get a fighter who—and we've had fighters in the past—so we'll measure them. I'm lucky being based in university, we have some real nice tech. So we have DEXA scans and bioelectrical impedance to be able to really assess this and be really pinpoint. But in assessing that it lets you know first and foremost, can you even make the weight that you're trying to make?

Because we've had fighters come to us in the past and it's very much like, I want to lose 11 kilos to make this weight. And you assess the body composition James and it's like, you're already at like 8% body fat. How are you going to do that? And that goes back to the earlier example you were talking about, about then they start having to do extreme weight cuts to try and make that.

Flip side, have also had coaches send fighters to us to basically convince the fighter to move up a weight category. And then we've assessed them and gone, we don't need to move up. They've got the body composition to make the weight, they're just not doing it in the right approach.

So in an ideal world, what we'll do, we'll assess body composition and then we'll assess something else called resting metabolic rate. Now body composition can be, like I said, we've got some really nice tools here—DEXA, BIA—or it could be as simple as someone doing skin folds as well. It doesn't have to be super expensive and super scientific like what we have or the UFC Performance Institute. You can seek these things out relatively easily and get composition measured.

From that we then do a resting metabolic rate assessment. And the reason why we do that, or what that is, is that gives us the minimal amount of calories you need to be eating in a day to just live, to just sustain. And the biggest thing that I, or the biggest mistake that I see fighters make, is they go below that threshold.

And the body's a really clever organism. All it's done, all it does and all its mission is hardwired to do, is keep the brain running as long as possible. So what tends to happen is if you eat below your basal metabolic rate in calories, power saving mode on your phone, the body just starts to go into power saving mode.

So you've probably heard it before, haven't you? Oh, I'm eating 1200 calories a day but I'm just not losing any weight. It's just stalled. Nothing's—that's basically because your body's reset itself to a new baseline because it's not getting enough energy.

So bizarrely, like I say, you work with a lot of fighters and you go right, you need to eat this much. And they look at you like you're some kind of crazy person and go, I can't eat that much. I'm not going to make weight. You're like, no you will. It's because you're burning this much and you're only eating this much. It's all about balance.

So going back to the point that the ideal weight cut is, we have a chronic period. And this is where I think we need to classify some terms. Weight cut to me is probably the days and hours leading into the fight where you cut weight to artificially lower your body mass to meet a weight category. Prior to that bit, the chronic phase—so the weeks and maybe months I'd say—is weight making. So you've got weight making phase, you've got weight cut phase. You've got the chronic.

So within the chronic, it's all about knowing that you have the body composition to lose body fat, to lower your body fat percentage and thereby lose mass. And then in the acute phase, know that you can then safely and effectively dehydrate and use methods.

So let's say you've got 10 kilos to lose. In an ideal scenario, we assess your body comp, we do your RMR and we go right, you've got 5 kilos in body fat solution. So we spend eight weeks managing your diet for you to get lean and lose that body fat, which then means you've only got, say only, you've got 5 kilos to lose in the weight cut, the acute phase.

And that's where we start to think about utilizing things like playing around with the fiber content of what you're eating, the carbohydrate content of what you're eating, the sodium content. Because those type of things are what help you hold on to water within the body.

Fiber: each gram of fiber that you have within your gut, that's bound to 20 mils of water. You remove that, you're artificially lowering the water content of your body. Every gram of glycogen in carbohydrate you have within the body is bound by 3 mils of water. So again, you lower that, so you can actually dehydrate—I say dehydrate—you can lower the mass of the body's water content without needing to go into heated environments or sweatsuits and things like that.

So what we would do then, we've lost the first 5 kilos in the chronic phase, we then maybe lose 2 or 3 kilos by modulating your diet 7 days out and slowly lowering your fluid intake. And then at the end you've got like—

A 2 kilo sweat and you just basically put the sauna suits on and do a session or you do half bath or you go into, you do cycles of saunas. So that would be the ideal approach. The negative approach would be you try and lose those 10 kilos 20 hours before a fight by doing crazy, as we said before, weight cuts because that's going to really damage, well yeah, that'd be the worst approach basically.

So that's how that would be the ideal for me. And I guess going back to your point, and this is an important thing to me and I'd love to hear your listeners' thoughts on this: regulation in this space is not the way to go. Because I can tell you now, as a former combat sports athlete, give a fighter a rule, they will get around it. They'll bend it to the nth degree.

So Taekwondo, my old sport, when I first started back in the '90s, showing how old I am now, we used to have day-of weigh-ins, James, which were two hours prior to the competition. We still made weight then. They had the idea of, "Okay, we'll move the weigh-in to the day before to allow more recovery." We all went, "Great, now we'll make more weight."

Now they brought in a rule, similar to Judo, where they go, "Okay, we're going to do a random weigh-in the following day, and if you're above 5% of your weigh-in weight, you're disqualified." Okay, no problem, I'll still make weight. I'll hold that 5%, or I'll go over 5% and make weight again if I get randomly checked, and then I'll compete. So it doesn't matter what you do.

And then the classic one with the ONE FC. The ONE FC is hailed as a real, I suppose, bastion of practice and something that people should aspire to. And you know what, I don't want to rag on ONE FC because they are trying to be effective, but we saw a couple of weeks ago, what was it, like nine fighters fail weight or something like that? And because the problem with the hydration test that they use is they're not a very good metric of assessing whether someone's dehydrated or hydrated, and they're very easy to cheat.

So no, I have debates with guys all the time, and as a former fighter I'm like, regulation is not the way to go because it doesn't matter how you regulate it. Regulating it, for me, actually makes it more dangerous sometimes. So I'm having a huge debate at the moment with the British Boxing Board of Control because they have a rule where for title fights, you've got to be within 3% of your weight, I think it's three days prior to the weigh-in.

And all fighters do, a lot of fighters do, is just cut twice. So cut for that weigh-in and then cut again. And it's like, yeah, in trying to make things safer, you've made it more dangerous because they're doing two cuts now instead of one. So for me, it's about education. It's about things like this, getting the message out to fighters and coming up with protocols and scenarios and education in order to make fighters aware.

Because at the end of the day, I'm not anti-weight cut. In fact, I think weight cutting, weight making, is a key cultural part of the sport. There's been some research showing that when you do it, it makes you feel like a fighter. It's part of the discipline. It's part of it. So it's not that I think we should do away with it at all.

So some of these guys who are like, "Oh, just weigh them before they go straight into the fight," they'll still make weight. They'll still do it and then they're just fighting dehydrated and punching each other in the head. Even worse. You're never ever going to get rid of the culture of the sport. It's too far ingrained. What we need to try and do is change practice. If we can do that, get people to make weight more safely and effectively, then that's a better way to do it.

But regulation, as you mentioned, amateur boxing do it one way, pro boxing do it another way depending on what promotion it is, the UFC do it one way, ONE FC do it one way, amateur MMA do it. It doesn't matter what way you do it, these guys are going to make weight. So there's no point in trying to over, you've got to regulate, but don't over-regulate it. Just educate these guys on how to make weight more safely and effectively.

James de Lacey23:03

And almost have professionals like yourself somehow become more involved with more and more of these fighters. Obviously a lot of them cowboy on their own as well, but that's also a financial thing too.

Carl Langan-Evans23:03

Absolutely. I mean, the big thing that people always say is, "Oh, well, the financial implications." And I think start at the top and work your way down. It will be nothing for a lot. I mean, give the UFC props, they're doing this now with the Performance Institute, for example. But invest in some people who can work with your roster of fighters to make weight.

And then, as with everything in life, if I see my hero make weight in a specific way, that'll permeate down. It'll permeate down into better practice, I think, across the board. Because it's all about standing on the shoulders of giants. That was what it was with me when I was training, trying to aim for the Olympics, and I'm with the Olympic team in GB and I'm going, "Okay, well, that guy's doing that to make weight. That's what I'm going to do."

And we know that there's been a lot of surveys examining this, and the two biggest influences in the making weight process are coaches and teammates. So if we can change the thought processes and start at the top and work our way down, it doesn't need to be massively financially, you know, overburden the likes of promotions, the likes of commissions. Because a lot of these organizations, just invest a small bit of money into some educated people.

But this is the thing that makes me crazy. We spend a lot of money on changing rules and regulations but won't invest in. So as an example, I've offered to do free education and talks for NGBs in the UK, and they haven't taken me up on it. So you're like, well, do you really care about this or do you just want to be seen to be tackling the problem by changing the rules? So for me, mate, it starts at the top, it really does.

James de Lacey24:56

Yeah, don't get me started on professional sporting organizations. I've been to the ring with that, so I'm, that's why I'm on here doing this.

Carl Langan-Evans24:56

Yeah, commissions and promotions and governing bodies, and it's kind of like, take a step back and look at this. But bearing in mind, look, a lot of the time the guys making the rules have never thrown a punch in anger or have done a fight in their life. So it's like, it's a little bit of ivory tower mentality, I think. And this is where it's like, get down to the coalface of what's going on.

Because I'll give you a very quick anecdote on that. We were working with a major governing body once through Liverpool John Moores, and we invited them in to show them some of the research that we've done. And they blatantly turned around and said, "Yeah, we don't have a problem with weight cutting. Our protocols and procedures are all there."

And then we literally had a PhD student who'd done data collection and put it up on the screen, and their jaw just dropped. They were like, "People are losing eight kilos for a day-of weigh-in?" And we were like, "Yeah, well, you don't have a problem with weight cutting in your organization, right?" And they were like, "Okay, we need to look at this. We need to examine it."

So for some of them, I genuinely think it's either they don't care or they don't know. It's got to be one of those two reasons. So hopefully we start to elicit and see some change in the future.

James de Lacey26:11

Yeah, for sure. I want to jump back a little bit into this weight cut. So let's go, for example, you're making weight. First, I guess, what percentage of body weight are you aiming for over your weight class, maybe the week of, if that's even something that's probably individual? And then secondly, after you weigh in, how are you refueling? Assuming, say, you have a 24-hour [window].

Carl Langan-Evans26:38

Yeah, no, this is the million-dollar question that we're trying to answer. I think in males we have a really good overview that the minimum amount of body fat percentage you can go down to before you start causing some real issues is about 6%. There was a really nice paper done back in the '90s, done by a US military unit, examining basically how low can you go before things start to go south. And in men it's 6%.

So again, going back to the earlier point, we get a guy who comes in here, but like, "I need to make 10 kilos to make the..."

Weight category, but need to lose 10 kilos to make the weight category, we assess the body comp and you're like 8% body fat already. You don't physically have the capacity to lose part of that mass in body composition, so it'd be a weight cut of like 8-9 kilos. And when you figure the percentage of that, it's beyond a safe tolerable limit.

So in males it's 6%. Females are a little bit more difficult because the problem that we have in sports sciences, we don't tend to do a lot of research on females. The number is kind of muted there, about 12% in females, because women inherently carry more fat than men due to reproduction. They have more fat tissue inherently, so men can get leaner and women can't.

But 12%, but the problem you have with that is I've seen women be able to go extremely low and have no issues, whereas sometimes you'll be working with a female fighter and she gets to about 18% and then she starts losing a period and becoming amenorrheic and things like that. So women, it's a bit of a balance and act, but that's where you'd basically be.

In terms of the weight cut itself, so the limits of body mass you would lose, saying dehydration, the ideal number that's thrown around is 5% of your body mass. So it's one of those things that you don't really want to be losing any more than that in an ideal scenario if you can. So it was a 100 kilo fighter, as you said before, and they're weighing in, they don't want to be losing any more than 5 kilos in the days and the hours leading into the fight.

The reason why is because we know over 2% of dehydration and body mass loss, that starts to affect cognitive function. Anything over 5%, you start to get reductions in strength and power and sport-specific performance. And then anything over 10, well, anything between 5 and 10%, you're going into that dangerous territory, as I mentioned before, kidney damage. Anything over 10%, you're going into the death territory.

So, you're a 100 kilo fighter, you've got to lose 10 kilos, and you get your body comp assessed and you're already 7%, so you're going to have to lose like that 10% in weight cut. That's not a good idea.

James de Lacey30:03

It's not a good idea. If you take the Alex Pereira example, he's 99.8%, 226 pounds, to get down to 185. I think they fight October.

Carl Langan-Evans30:03

That's extreme. Already at 9%, hell of a weight cut. That is a hell of a weight cut. And look, you can do it. The thing about the human organism is it's an amazing piece of equipment. You can push it to—we know that extreme environments and God knows whatever else—you can push it to extreme tolerable limits. No one's saying you can't do it, you can do it. But it's the consequences, as we talked earlier on, of doing it. And repeatedly do that, you're going to put yourself in a bad place.

Now I'm glad you mentioned the refuel, because this, I am telling you now, is where fights are won and lost. They are won and lost in that—again, it depends on circumstance. So if you're competing in say amateur MMA and amateur boxing, you'll do a general weigh-in, you might compete two, three, four hours later. Your window of recovery there is limited. Even say BJJ, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, I think it's like two hours before. You got a real short window, so your strategy to make weight needs to be considered in the context of how long you've got to recover.

Sounds terrible to say this, pro MMA and pro boxing, like what I work with, it's easy. You get like 24 hours plus. It's so easy because you've got such a long time period to be able to refuel and recover them.

But ultimately it's about goals, and goal number one is rehydration. The biggest mistake that I tend to see combat sport guys make is they're hungry, they haven't eaten what they've wanted to eat for such a long time. I'm the biggest example of this back in my day. It's straight to the McDonald's, straight to Pizza Hut, and get that in. But you've got to remember, you've been on 8, 10, 12 weeks of restricted eating, dieting, depending on how long you've done it.

Your body's readjusted, and then you're just introducing a load of fat, a load of salt, a load of carbohydrates into the system. And the body is like, 'What the hell do you want me to do with this?' And that's where you just feel crap. You're just dead and lethargic.

But bearing in mind, your first goal is rehydration. So a lot of fighters that we work with, what we'll do is getting them rehydrated first. And great rehydration options are—and these are commercially available—your classic electrolyte drinks. Back in my day, I think the only one that was on the market was like Lucozade Sport, something like that. Whereas now you've got all sorts of different brands, or you can obviously get the electrolyte tabs that you can pop into a 500ml bottle of water.

Drinking pure clear water is the worst thing that you can do, because as we mentioned before, you basically reduced the capacity to hold on to water. So what you going to do? The one that drives me mad with a lot of fighters is they drink clear water, couple of liters, and then an hour later they're going, 'Oh great, I'm peeing clear, I'm hydrated.' And you're like, 'Well no, you're not. You're just peeing out what you put in quickly.'

So as an example, I had a fighter on this weekend who competed in a boxing event. He weighed in at 2:00 p.m. and he didn't have his first pee until the following morning. Now that tells me—now people look at that and go, 'Oh, that's bad,' but it's like, well it ain't, because everything that's going into the system is being held onto. The muscle is being hydrated, the organs are being hydrated. So the longer you go for a pee, the better, basically, when you're drinking fluid. And that's where your electrolyte solutions and things like that will really help.

Believe it or not, you'll laugh at this, a real gold nugget for the listeners: the singular best refuel rehydration drink after a weigh-in is a milkshake. Because there's been some nice studies showing that milk is one of the best rehydration beverages that you can get. It's full of electrolytes, it has a small amount of protein, it's fairly decent in carbs, and it's got a good amount of water in it. So I always tend to get the guys like a chocolate or a strawberry milkshake or something like that.

And then, what you basically want to do is your stomach will have shrunk as well, so you're expanding it with a volume of fluid. You're getting the fluid into this, you're not having anything else in there competing with that to get it in for rehydration. And then after an hour, you feel good, you feel okay, you're hungry, then go for something to eat.

But again, the food choices that you have—at the end of the day, once you've fought, have at it, go and do what you want with that stuff. You've earned it, you've deserved it. So think about eating for performance. You want high carbohydrate-based foods, fruits and foods. Pasta, white pasta, white rice, things like that. Any sources, you want them to be low fat.

The one that drives me mad is when we tend to go for—everyone wants to have a carbonara. And I'm like, it's full of cheese, it's full of egg, it's full of fat. It's like, spaghetti bolognese, mate, is the king. It is the absolute king of fuel food. It's just like lean beef, tomato-based sauce that's low fiber, and pasta there. So be strategic in your refuel.

And if you get that right, you'd be amazed. So again, this guy I was telling you about, the one who didn't pee until the following morning, he weighed in and then within less than 24 hours, he put on 18 pounds. And that's a huge advantage, right? But it was a good 18 pounds, and he had no stomach issue.

Your stomach in the refuel period is an absolute diamond of a—it's a brilliant indicator. You put it in and it starts giving you any indications that it's upset, stop doing it. Because you want that to—you want this is basically the engine room of refuel. This is what's sorting everything out and where it's going. So you put it in and it makes you feel a little bit sick or a little bit upset, or you go on the toilet and you're having the squirts, it's like, well, whatever you put in there, it didn't like. So stop doing that.

But yeah, two gold nuggets from me, mate. And this is the thing about sport science, people say to me all the time, 'It can't be that simple,' but it is. Get a milkshake in you. It's one of the best things you can do. By all means, you want to get water as well, get a milkshake because it's got what you need in there. And then later on down the line, like a chicken—

James de Lacey37:04

A spaghetti bolognese or a chicken biryani or something like that is absolutely ideal. That's ultimate.

I've actually had a couple of good – I guess we'll call the whole thing a weight cut, most people refer to it that way. I had Dr. Eric Helms do mine for when I was competing. I was a subject in one of his research studies for his PhD. It was the shittest time. I had to drink pea protein three times a day at 60% of my maintenance calories and I was like, oh my gosh, for two weeks at a time twice.

So for doing that, he helped me with my weight cut. I was competing in weightlifting. And yeah, similar thing in terms of the rehydration stuff. And it's a two-hour weigh-in. I felt great. It was like a slow water drop through the week, slow reduction in voluminous foods and things like that and calories.

And then after weighing, it was a liter of water and a liter of Gatorade. And make sure you drink one liter total before touching food. And then my food was just white rice and tuna and stuff, all that stuff. And I was good.

And then another one I've done myself, I was in jiu-jitsu here, but because it was mat side, it was basically mat side weighing. So I wasn't going to do anything like that. But I ended up dropping just slowly dieting down from about – must have been about 83, 84 kilos down to 77 with the gi. And I felt great, but I did it early and I was training at that weight and I felt great. I was able to train at that weight.

Carl Langan-Evans38:19

That's it. You've just hit the nail on the head. So two examples you've got. Brazilian jiu-jitsu, it's two hours prior weighing. Doing extreme – I say extreme – even doing fairly high dehydration, given you haven't got the time to get the fluid back into you in the acute phase, is not the best approach for that.

Exactly what you just said: you want to try and do it a bit more gradually, a bit more chronically. You might do a little dehydration, a little sweat or something like that, and then you've got that window to try and rehydrate yourself.

But your approach for that versus an approach where I have got a pro boxer who weighs in at 9:00 in the morning on Friday and then fights at 9:00 p.m. on a Saturday night – well, we can be a little bit more thoughtful in what we do with that.

And yeah, I genuinely work with fighters at the minute who lose 10, 12, 15 kilos to make weight. But based on the numbers, based on the data, based on the insight, it's feasible. It's when these individuals, like we mentioned earlier on, are trying to do it and you're going, what the hell? How are you going to do this? There's not that much water in the body for you to lose. Are you going to start chopping off limbs or something? It's insane.

Shaving the hair? Crazy. And again, I've done that stuff in the past. I've had girls I've coached cutting ponytails off and all sorts of crazy stuff.

So yeah, it's bizarre, isn't it, that you have some fighters who basically say the hardest fight they have is the weight cut or making weight, and then the fight's the easy bit. And I always try to find that crazy because I'm like, isn't the fight supposed to be the hard bit that you've got all the training for? The weight-making bit should be fairly easy, or it shouldn't be the hardest part of the process.

But again, we're talking about this now on the podcast, and when you put it out there, it's common sense. People always say to me, now you put it like that, it makes sense. It's common sense. I understand. But it's just through having conversations, and that goes back to what I was saying earlier on about education.

Just if this information gets out there and people – it doesn't need to be a costly thing. But promotions and commissions – imagine if they put this out, some infographics or some free webinars or some free videos and stuff like that. It'd make a huge impact. It really would.

And then obviously your higher end, where you're getting into the likes of some of the guys I work with – and I know you've spoken to Jordan Sullivan and the guys he works with – that probably takes a bit more scientific insight and a bit more monetary investment. But at the baseline level, it's just about understanding the process.

James de Lacey41:01

Yeah, for sure. What advice would you have for someone who maybe competes regularly, so maybe a grappler that competes every two, three, four weeks, then?

Carl Langan-Evans41:26

Great point. Because again, I no longer compete in it, but when I used to compete in taekwondo, we used to do maybe, I'd say, three, four events a year. They'd be quite nicely spread out, so you could afford to get big and then cut down. Whereas now, similar to what you're saying, they now have basically a ranking circuit, and these guys are fighting every four weeks.

So one of those things, I'd still say the approach needs to be – in Combat Sports we don't really have seasons, but for me, because it's an all-year-round thing, if you say like post-Christmas to January, February is like your pre-season, like prep kind of thing, have an idea in your pre-season of where you're going to be almost. And then have an honest conversation with yourself around what type of weight you want to maintain and what you're able to steadily drop to and come back to.

Again, there's no magic numbers on this, really. People always say to me, well, what percentage or how many kilos? And you're like, well, it's really about you. Because again, let's say somebody comes in the beginning of the year and they've had a really good Christmas and they're carrying a bit of fat. Well, event one, you might be fighting at a bit of a heavier weight, but come event four, you might be a bit lighter. And I guess it depends on the importance of the event as well.

So with some of the fighters that I have that fight quite regularly, for me, it's kind of like, well, how important is that? Or can you still get the ranking points from fighting in a higher division that adds to that division or something like that? And then so some guys will basically go, okay, well, this one's not that important, and the ranking points that I can get will still count towards that. So it's like, well, fight at that weight then. And then if this is the real important one, we'll get you to that weight.

But again, contextually, if you can't do that and you've got to be the same weight, it's just about being sensible. It's just about, what can I pragmatically do and get down to and get back to that doesn't affect my performance so much? So again, going back to what you're saying, I get a lot of this off the BJJ guys where they're like, well, I compete regularly, I'm weighing in either mat side or a couple hours before.

So it's like, well, look, let's be sensible and let's just make this maybe a couple kilos over. Maybe, no more than five kilos. And that way in fight week you can take a couple kilos off with those manipulation strategies, and then you can do a little mini-cut and then get yourself back up there and maintain that. So that's what I'd say.

James de Lacey44:07

No, that's awesome advice. And I wanted to jump into as well, let's say after the fight. So obviously mentioned go to town, whatever you do to celebrate, but then obviously there's after the celebration, you've still got, I guess, a period of super-compensation from what you've done before. So what's your advice there for someone who's maybe just done an extreme weight cut, fought, and now they're kind of getting back after the fight?

Carl Langan-Evans44:33

My friend, this is what I'm going to spend the next couple of years trying to figure out. That is the answer to that question. Because the honest answer is I really don't know what the correct approach is yet.

Because, so as I mentioned before, we did a case study on this where we had a guy, a combat sports athlete. We had him make weight over eight weeks. We did the classical approach of examining his body composition, getting his energy in, his macros right, gradually making him weight, doing a very minimal acute, I suppose, weight cut at the end. And he did really well and he performed.

The problem that we have with that approach – we tracked something called within-day energy balance. And it wasn't a lot of fun to do this, to be honest, but we were doing it for the data. We basically tracked his energy balance hour by hour every single day for the whole eight weeks. So pretty data-heavy. But by the end of it, the guy had made weight.

Weight, he had made weight safely, he made weight effectively, his body composition was in a good place, he performed very well. Like I say, he won the competition, he qualified for what he needed to qualify for, there were no negative health perspectives or anything like that. But he was negative 105,000 calories in debt to the bank over that eight weeks, and the body needs that back.

Now, inherently what happens, and this is what we're seeing with some fighters like Paddy and stuff, is that you go through that rebound hyperphagia phase and it's just basically eat, eat, eat, eat, eat, eat, eat. Now the issue, why I say I don't know the answer to the question, is we don't know whether that's completely psychologically regulated, we don't know whether it's physiologically regulated by signals and muscle, does this idea of reverse dieting, so basically going low and coming back up.

We don't know if that's the right approach bearing in mind you can't always reverse diet for too long. You might not have eight weeks in, eight weeks out.

So the honest answer is, for the first time in this podcast mate, I don't really. What I do know is, and there was a study we never ever get the ethics to do the study again, there was a study done back in the '40s during World War II called a Minnesota Starvation Experiment. And basically what it was, it was a group of conscientious objectors who didn't participate in the war but agreed to participate in a study where they were semi-starved for six months with a view to they were trying to figure out how do we refeed people after the war. So famine, concentration camp victims, and so it's like how do we adequately refeed these people back up after a period of semi-starvation?

And what they did is they split them into groups and some got 400 calories a day extra, some got 800, some got 1,200, some got 1,600. And it didn't matter what you did, after they took the lock off and went right, you can eat whatever you want now, they just went hypophagic and just ate and ate and ate, and they all overshot.

So yeah, the honest answer is mate, you need to get that money back in the bank. If you had 105,000 calories in the bank, I think it doesn't matter whether you get it, put it back in slowly or whether you put it back in lumps. The outcome on the interest is the same. I think you're probably going to put a little bit more fat mass on, and what I want to try and figure out over the next few years is, is it a case of like we would say reverse diet and is that a good option?

Could we potentially do like a reverse diet with high refeed periods? So it's like a reverse diet with, with that work? Is it better off just letting them go through a period of maybe two weeks of unrestricted eating and then bring them back down?

Don't know, really don't know the answer. And not just for combat sports, I don't think anybody knows the answer to that in nutrition and metabolism. Because I've spoken to some, well, thankfully enough we've got an energy stress meeting in John Moores, like a conference next week which I'm speaking at, and some of the best minds in in human metabolism are going to be there next week. So I'm going to be asking that question and saying what you think the best approach to this would basically be.

But no, the problem that we have with it mate is, and again I think you see a lot of this is, well classic example, a lived example. I used to compete at 58 kilos, I used to habitually be around about 70 kilos. Now I weigh 96 kilos and I am classified as clinically obese. I'm carrying a lot of fat. So that repeated pattern of loss and gain and loss and gain, we think subsequently, the classic one is think about how many fighters that you see who used to make weight and what they look like now.

In boxing, a classic one is Ricky Hatton. They're all big fat guys, because they probably cause damage over repeated cycles of making weight. But no, there's a lot more we really need to do in that, and like I say, I don't eat crazy amounts of food. I'm eating what's probably normal throughout, you know, what would be regarded as normal intake. I don't really train at all anymore because I'm a lazy guy after, after COVID. But yeah, I find it ridiculously difficult to regulate my body mass after doing a lot of those things.

So that's something that we want to really try and figure out over the next couple of years. But all I would say as practical tidbit for the listeners is try and not go crazy. Try and maybe, for the fighters now I say to them, look, have a week off, go crazy, and then after that maybe try and be a bit more sensible in your approach. Try and maybe control where your weight is, or if it goes up then just bring it a little bit further down and find like a settlement point or something like that.

But in terms of the best approach, we need to do a lot more work on that. So we've got a real nice approach to making weight, I think we need to find a good approach to recovering weight as well.

James de Lacey51:34

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I want to jump on one more practical bit before we finish this off for the listeners, and that is coming back all the way to the making weight phase. Now, I guess with guys like Paddy and people you work with, I'm assuming you provide maybe like a meal plan, like a set meal plan for them so they kind of know.

So let's say someone's listening to this and maybe they know how to track their macros and things like that, do you have maybe a macro breakdown that you like to use? Are you looking at maybe higher carb, etc., etc.? Is there something maybe even, no numbers you could give the listener that they could follow?

Carl Langan-Evans51:58

Definitely. So what I would say is, practical example for everybody, so an approach that doesn't cost you any money, it's just going to cost you time. We mentioned earlier about measuring people's basal metabolic or resting metabolic rate. There are calculators online, if you literally Google resting metabolic rate, there are calculators that you can use online to establish that.

So for instance, a quite common equation or calculator is called the Harrison-Benedict equation, and all you've basically got to plug into that is your age, height, and weight, and it will give you a number in terms of your basal metabolic rate. So first protocol is go on a calculator, go on an online calculator, Google basal metabolic rate and see what that number is. That number is what you want to be eating as a minimum in a day.

So typically, say for a 60 to 70 kilo guy, that's going to be between 1,700 to 1,800 calories a day. So that's what you want to be doing. From that, then figure out how many meals you want to eat that across within a day. So we have fighters and some of them are like, you know, I like eating little and often, I want five meals. Some guys are traditionalists and they're like, no, I want breakfast, I want lunch, I want dinner. So you can kind of figure it out, what the best approach for you is.

A little practical point, there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that eating little and often leads to an increased metabolism or any of that crap. So yeah, don't believe that. So whether you do it small or whether you do it big, the result is exactly the same.

From that then, what we want to be following is something called the 3-2-1 combination, and that's 3 grams per kilo of your body mass carbohydrates, 2 grams per kilo of your body mass proteins, and 1 gram per kilo of your body mass fats. So what that equates to, let's keep it simple math, if we think of the 100 kilo fighter, within the day they would want to be eating 300 grams of carbohydrates, they'd want to be eating 200 grams of protein, and they'd want to be eating 100 grams of fats.

And when you equate that to, it might be a bit over for the bigger guys, it might be a bit under for the smaller guys, when you equate that to that resting metabolic rate, that tends to be in and around that number ideally. Now, the reason why that combination is important is the thing that a lot of fighters tend to do is they tend to deliberately eliminate fat from the diet. But fat is actually really important within the diet.

Your body, part of your body structure like your brain is predominantly actually made of fat. The myelin around your nervous system is made of fat. So you need fat in your diet, it has real important functions within the body. So don't eliminate fat. But that 1 gram per kilo body mass, so that 100 grams in 100 kilo guy, will give you enough fats to help you with those functions.

2 grams per kilo of protein, so like I say, 200 grams of protein, gives you enough protein intake to maintain your muscle mass when you're in a deficit. And that's a key thing because when you tend to go into a deficit, you'll start to lose muscle mass because there's not enough energy to provide.

To keep it, so you're giving it enough energy and/or enough protein to keep holding muscle mass, which for combat sports is really important, unless, like I say, you're going into the murky ground of sometimes with fighters we have to make them lose muscle mass, but we won't get into that. And then the carbohydrates allowance then is just to give you enough energy throughout the day to be able to perform and train and compete.

The biggest question I always get, James, is about the keto diet. The keto diet, right, let's be clear: the keto diet or the low-carb diet, high-fat diet, whatever it may be—it's not a bad diet, it will work. It's effective in context, for athletes, in particular combat sports athletes making weight, it's terrible, because carbs give you the fuel. I might get a lot of stick for this because I get a lot of fighters going, "Oh, well I went on a keto diet and I felt absolutely magnificent and I felt brilliant." It's like, well, great, okay, if it works for you, do it.

But the big one that drives me crazy is when fighters go on a keto diet because what happens when you go on a keto diet is you actually down-regulate and dampen your capacity to use carbs as a fuel. But when fighters come on a keto diet and then once they weigh in, ramp the carbs in, it's like you've just literally spent eight weeks making yourself really bad at using carbs for fuel.

So it's a bit of an anti thing to do. Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily advocate the keto diet. Like I say, the diet itself is not a bad diet, it's just not good for the context of fighters.

So that amount of carbohydrate gives you enough energy then. So in summary, go online, calculate your basal metabolic rate and make sure you're eating at least three grams of your body mass—so three times how much you weigh of carbs, two times how much you weigh of protein, and one times how much you weigh of fat. And that will pretty much tick the box for what you need.

You'll be on a number then—so let's say, as I said, that's 1,800 calories. And then throughout the day, including your resting metabolic rate and whatever else you burn, you're burning 2,500 calories, you're in a deficit. You'll start to gradually lose weight, but you're intaking enough of good macronutrient combinations to maintain form and function.

James de Lacey57:41

Yeah, perfect, perfect. I don't know if you've got a couple minutes, I have one more question, please.

Carl Langan-Evans58:08

All right, perfect.

James de Lacey58:08

One more question, and it's about water loading. So obviously it's often used—some coaches hate it, some coaches love it—so I would love to have your opinion on it, whether you use it or not, where you think people should use it, is there a correct way or incorrect way of doing it?

Carl Langan-Evans58:42

So I need to be careful on this because a very good friend of mine, Dr. Reid Reale, who's at the Performance Institute, UFC Performance Institute in Shanghai, did the seminal study on this, basically showing that it's effective. I know Jordan Sullivan uses it. My partner Paul Reed, I work with a lot of our fighters with, he uses it. I'm not a major fan of water loading, and not because I don't think it's effective—well, there's a few reasons why.

Number one, so Reid basically showed in his study that if you do a water load of 100 mLs of fluid per kilo of body mass—so for example, a 60-kilo guy does 6 liters water load—you'll get anywhere between a 1 and 2% reduction in body mass. And the way water loading works is, as we said before, you're in that balance of electrolyte and fluids. Rather than reducing the fluids and increasing the electrolytes, we're increasing the fluid and dampening the electrolytes. And then when you stop doing that, the body goes, "Oh, I need to get this back into equilibrium," and you start basically losing water.

The reason why I'm not particularly a huge fan of it is because if you tell a fighter to water load six liters, they'll do 10. If you tell them to do 10, they'll do probably 20. And there's a problem: water, believe it or not, having too little water can kill you, but having too much water, something called hypernatremia, can kill you as well.

So I tend to find that if you utilize it and you implement it and it's controlled and you understand it, great—but just don't go extreme with it. So some of these idiots who are doing 10, 12 liters a day of alkaline water, it's not—like everything in life, it's all about balance. Not good for the kidneys.

One of the main reasons why I don't like it is because all these guys are doing, pardon my language, is pissing all the time, and more often than not at night. So a lot of them just say to me constantly all the time, "Christ, I'm water loading, I'm having [bad] sleep because I'm up two, three times a night to go for a piss because I'm water loading." And I'm like, so they're having really [bad] sleep in fight week, and ultimately we're only getting a 1% loss in body mass.

So the cost-benefit of doing it for me, James, is a bit like, eh, you probably lose that extra 1% by just doing a little bit more sweat or reducing your fluid intake.

So, no, I don't particularly—I'm not anti-water load, and to be honest, I have some fighters we work with who just insist that they want to do it. Culturally, predominantly MMA fighters, grappling fighters—it's just embedded. And it's like, there's no point in having the battle with these people, just let them do it anyway. But from a cost-benefit ratio thing, and again, it's very individual—you'll speak to some guys and they'll do it and they'll have big drops with it, and then you speak to other guys and they go, "Well, I hardly dropped anything at all." You're like, well, stop doing it then.

So, yeah, it's one of those things for me. But the key thing with it is, if you're going to do it, be careful with it because you can, as much as you can damage yourself by reducing water, by dehydrating, you can also damage yourself by taking on too much as well. It's all about balance, isn't it?

James de Lacey1:01:58

That's figured out on this podcast: yin and yang. It's all about balance.

Carl Langan-Evans1:01:58

It's the—I call it the Goldilocks effect: too much, too little, just right. If you find that sweet spot in anything—weight making, weight cutting—it's just about balance. If you get it right, the results are incredible.

James de Lacey1:02:25

No, that's a perfect way to end this podcast, Carl. I really appreciate you coming on. Is there any way people can follow what you're doing—research, random advice, things like that?

Carl Langan-Evans1:02:25

Yeah, no, absolutely. So I've conjoined some of my—on the advice of Jordan Sullivan, because he's an absolute god on social media and I'm not, mate, I keep getting told off all the time—but I am at CLesPOSci. So C-L-E-S-P-O-S-C-I, and I'm on Twitter with that and I'm on Instagram with that. And I am under strict orders from a few people, fighters included, to start doing a bit more content and a bit more information over the coming weeks, months. So yeah, watch this space. People can follow me on that, and then from there if they want to reach out, they can.

James de Lacey1:03:25

Perfect. No, thank you very much, I really appreciate this, Carl.

Carl Langan-Evans1:03:25

No, you're welcome. Thanks for having me on, mate. It's really good to be on.