Fellow QS Show&Tell member, lifestyle experimentalist, and tango king Tim Ferriss recently wrote an astounding blog post on rapid weight loss through manipulating kidney function – dehydrating and rehydrating. He did not actually lose the weight for a tango competition. Tango – in case you were wondering – does not generally classify competitors by weight. However, in 1999, Tim won a major Sanshou (Chinese kickboxing) championship:
I arrived the on-site at 187 lbs., weighed in at 165 lbs., and stepped
on the platform to compete the next morning weighing 193 lbs.
I remember my friends in high school and college who were wrestlers used to engage in what seemed like insane weight-loss programs in order to qualify for competition, but nothing they did resembles what Tim describes. Competition drives innovation, and rewards risk – sometimes fatally, as Tim points out. But because extreme training has such high stakes, it is also a proving ground for techniques of self-monitoring and self-exerimentation. (Our interview with pseudonymous trainer “Phineas” about anabolic steroids covered adjacent territory.) Tim’s account of rapid weight loss is an eye-opener.
This is pretty common in professional combat sports such as boxing and mixed martial arts because athletes try to move down the lowest weight class possible to maximize their size advantage. All of the top level fighters have very detailed plans regarding their training weight, when and how they start cutting weight, and how to safely put that weight back on in the day between the weigh in and the fight.