Weight Cutting for Powerlifting: An Exploratory Overview
Within the context of the sport of powerlifting, which, at it’s roots, is a weight class sport, weight manipulation tactics have long been deployed for various reasons that range from: holding extra leverage in a given weight class, desperation, cushion to coefficient scores, and simply, because it is standard practice in some circles.
As an athlete, I have cut weight successively for 12 powerlifting meets, in my opinion at least, and have coached by rough estimation, 20+ athletes, through some sort of dietary or weight manipulation in order to make weight for their given goals. So I feel qualified to give my takes on the matter.
I think these days, there is enough info on how to cut, although, not enough info on rehydrating. I mean think about it, how many times while waiting to weigh in, do you overhear someone complaining/bragging/stating something along the lines of, “Oh man I had to cut 15lbs for this”. At least for me, fairly frequently.
This article will touch upon my personal preferred methods for certain, however, I want to look at weight cutting from a different perspective.
Frankly, there are specific scenarios in which you can and should cut (and the opposite) and I don’t think it is as black and white as maybe once thought. When I got into the sport in late 2017, untested powerlifting lore was you should never cut unless it was to take a world record. Intuitively, I just knew this was asinine, but you would be surprised how many people still follow this same ethos, or variations of it, till this day. In general, for virtually every sport, the only reason you cut is out of desperation or for the benefit of being at a heavier bodyweight than your competitors and in theory, being stronger, while still meeting the weight requirement.
Beyond this, I think there is a systematic approach and flow chart as to whether you are a candidate for a weight cut protocol, based on a series of qualifiers, that can make the process much easier, both in terms of decision to do so, but also implementation.
I also think sometimes people misnomer a weight cut with pure dieting and to even further double down, view dieting as a whole, as cutting, to me, there is a distinction there.
So, now that that’s out of the way, let’s get into the details!
Weight Cutting vs. Dieting
The notorious photo of Conor McGregor is usually used to highlight how drastic a weight cut protocol can be. Although McGregor certainly pulled out all the stops last minute, chances are he did not drop from his natural weight of 170lbs down to 145lbs, without additional dietary restriction many weeks out.
For the sake of distinction, cutting and dieting are too different things that produce the same end goal. One is transient, the other is “permanent”, I say that in jest because the same method in which we lose weight, when reversed, will just bring weight back on.
Dieting, is what we know colloquially as “losing weight”. This is typically seen as calorie restriction of some manner, whether we want to admit it or not, for a duration of time, until we get to our goal bodyweight or body composition. The method in which we lose this weight is more than likely expelling of excess body water at first, than pure tissue loss later which hopefully is not muscle mass and instead adipose tissue (bodyfat).
Dieting, in the scope of powerlifting, is a tough concept for us coaches to navigate as there are several cons, physiologically speaking, to being in a calorie deficit for an extended period of time. However, for the right athlete with the right goals, it might be necessary to undergo some type of diet, and those reasons we will get into after making our distinctions.
Cutting, is a transient weight loss, usually very last minute, that seeks to drop weight, for the sake of dropping weight. Again, powerlifting at it’s roots is a weight class sport and for some avenues of the sport, you cannot compete for placing, unless you make a given weight class that you have declared. The method in which we lose weight here however, differs, we are solely relying upon the loss of: gut mass, body water, and manipulation of food weight, in order to make the number on the scale. In essence, you don’t do a weight cut protocol for vanity sake, as the weight you lose, can (and needs to be) put back on very rapidly.
So, we have that distinction in place, but how do we decide on whether or not to diet, cut weight, and what is considered a valid reason to do either?
Decisions, Decisions
Before you decide to do this with your boy, consider a few things!
To me, the decision process of all this starts many months out and involves careful consideration towards your goals both short-term, and longer term.
As we all know in this sport, there are levels to this, and to be blunt, you have to be aware of your current objective level to be rational with this process.
I have this conversation with my athletes, rather frequently, and I never sugarcoat them at any step of the process, the conversation in terms of successive questions will usually look like this, if an athlete comes to me and is wanting to drop bodyweight.
Why do you want to drop weight?
There is a lot of merit to simply getting this out in the open. In particular, my answer on what I would personally recommend, usually can be decided within this first question alone.
Body dysmorphia knows no gender, so this goes towards all lifters, but if an athlete tells me bluntly that they are not comfortable with their current body composition, regardless of possible physiological detriment, I will support them. Now, with that, I also like to be clear about expectations. Things like adding weight to the bar outright, recovery being consistent, all start to become harder to manage, the deeper into a deficit we go and the longer the duration of said deficit. However, for some people, the benefits of being comfortable in their own skin, far exceed any amount of weight they could add on the bar, and for me, I would prefer peace of mind, over performance, assuming we can compartmentalize that aspect, which, again, is not that easy.
If an athlete is simply wanting to enter the weight class below for competition purposes, well, that is now a more complex issue. One that requires objective data such as:
Current bodyweight and how far we are away from the next weight class down. If an athlete has been competing at 86kg and finds it hard to keep on enough weight to build into the 90s, then to me, you are trending towards it making more sense to look to be an 82.5kg lifter.
What exactly does “competitive reasons” mean? Are we gunning for a nationals total and are objectively close? Is there a particular record we are close to in that next weight class down? If it is to medal at a local meet or something similar, I like to gauge how important this actually is to the athlete as I see a lot of people do a lot, for a little, and their post-meet reflection is almost always regret in this avenue.
Is it the dreaded, “I want a higher DOTS”? Well, this one is the one I am almost always going to turn down unless, again, it is for a very tangible reason. You will see why this is almost always not as good an idea as we think.
What is their age and experience in the sport?
Simply put, if the athlete is under 18, they will not be eliciting any drastic weight cut protocol for any reason. Maybe other coaches take a different stance, but this is not something I allow my teen lifters to do.
If they are of age, but it’s their first meet, again, this is not something I will allow, or at the very lease, will strongly, strongly not recommend.
Finally, if they are of age, have experience competing, then I will be a bit more receptive to the process as a whole.
So, if we passed this stage in terms of reasoning, the next stage is what makes the most sense on how?
Have they had experience in dieting/cutting phases before?
I’ve worked with quite a few wrestlers, who have had (in some cases rather hellacious) a history with dieting and weight cutting and even if it was not the best protocol, they at least know what to expect.
If someone has never dieted in general, for any period of time, I begin to be a bit weary on how I would personally approach this.
What federation do they compete in?
If USAPL/IPF affiliate, we know they feature a 2hr weigh-in, which, means there is far less wiggle room for mistakes and/or does not lend itself well to aggressive weight loss as that repletion has to be just as aggressive.
If virtually any other federation, we can bank on a 24hr weigh in, which usually means you can be a bit more aggressive with our approach, although again, that is not indicative of a reason you should.
Generally speaking, with the amount of time between weigh ins and lifting time, there are general recommendations for each duration on how much we can cut and reasonably put back on and expect very little to no performance loss. Usually for a 2hr weigh in this will be about 5% on the highest end of total bodyweight, and for 24hr weigh ins this can be stretched to as high as 10% with more layers being deployed. Both of these are the highest ends of what I have seen recommended and personally, I prefer 3% and 7.5% respectively, for my own athletes as a cut off.
Proximity to weight class and how far out are we?
In general the further you are out and the heavier you are relative towards the goal weight class, the more likely dieting down to a zone that is manageable to manipulate a week out, makes sense.
The closer you are to a meet and the closer you are to a given weight class, a weight cut protocol starts to make more and more sense for this approach.
Are we prepared to rehydrate in a careful and concise manner?
Everyone who has cut properly, knows rehydration is rather miserable. Dieting, well of course there are hunger cravings and stuff of the like, but trying to rehydrate in a manner that does not effect performance, is a balancing act that can go south quickly.
If we as coaches have never done this before, or understand how an athlete will react, then in my opinion, you should not be recommending any sort of protocol as there is no way you can explain what an athlete will be feeling and how to manage that in real-time.
What sounds good, and is proven even, on paper, sometimes fails in practice due to the chaos that is the immediate hours after a weigh in.
We now have clearance in several avenues, the only step now, is how do we implement our decided weight loss protocol, how do we rehydrate, and as a powerlifting coach, what is beyond our scope of practice? In order to answer this, we will look at three hypothetical athletes who, in my opinion based off the aforementioned qualifiers, are deemed feasible for a protocol. I could use personal athletes of mine, but touching upon scope of practice, weight loss and bodyweight is not something I disclose without permission beforehand.
Specific Scenarios
Charlie Dickson, shown here at 2017 USAPL Raw Nationals, was known for pretty drastic cuts to make 83kg/183lbs, Charlie used the advantage of cutting to place high at nationals meets and even won a Junior World Championship.
We will start with hypothetical athlete, X, who we will mark as the following.
He is a male lifter, 29 years of age, competing in the 100kg class, with a meet in 12 weeks, with the following goals/qualifiers.
Been competing for 3 years, has done 6 meets.
He is well-read on what a weight cut should look and feel like and used to cut weight for jiu-jitsu in the past.
He competes in USAPL.
His goals are tangible and he is set to qualify for his first national meet, however, at the 12 week out mark, he sits at 105kg on the dot, consistently.
How do we approach this?
Well, to me, this is as much of a reason to look to sneak into the weight class below, just shy of needing to in order to place at a national level meet, as there could be.
If I were presented this, I would look at the second bullet point quite heavily.
Although this person has never cut for powerlifting, they do have experience with it in general, which means you can be more aggressive with it than someone who has never experience anything of the like.
Then my mind goes to percentages.
The athlete wants to compete at 100kg, if we stretch this out to the maximum % cap of 5%, that being 5kg in this case, in theory, they can sit where they are now and look to manipulate the week of. However, 5% for a first cut, regardless of experience, will be a steep ask for rehydration purposes. So, I would recommend we trim that back to 3.5-4%, so, 3-4.5kg a week out.
The athlete would need to drop weight, preferably slowly, in order to get to this cut off. My recommendation in this case, would be to be in a small deficit until we reach that cut off, and look to maintain weight after that point.
I have seen scenarios where athletes over-diet and now the last 3 weeks of preparation leading into the meet are met with performance loss and poor recovery, by proxy of caloric restriction. If performance is the goal, and in this case it is, we want to take as many steps as we can to make sure performance stays as stable as possible. Your body needs acclimation periods to adjust to leverages and if we are always in a state of fluctuation, performance loss probability goes up.
The athlete listens and a week out, we are 104kg, rather consistently, so the following would be how I would go about them cutting the weight, borrowed heavily from this article I will link below and the three videos I will link shortly after.
https://sisyphusstrength.com/blog/2018/6/25/how-to-water-cut-like-a-pro (This is the most useful article I have ever found and turned my perception upside down on how to cut properly)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8nzxLOvcSM&t=184s (The OG of OG weight cut videos)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2q7KT5sAic (Probably the most comprehensive free video out there)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9uZ0sn9chM&t=50s (A multiple day look at a water load and water cut with additional layers)
Starting 6 days out we would begin a water load and water cut protocol that would look something along the lines of the following:
6 days out, 60% of peak water intake (the article recommends 120ml per kg of bodyweight, which I agree and have success with, however if you are American and prefer gallons, I simply do the calculation to gallons after the fact), with high sodium. Now, depending upon the lifter and how religiously they track their food intake, is where the distinction lies in “high” sodium intake. I have had success with anymore between a 1.5x up to a 2.5x increase, as long as that is just up from their normal intake, you will have a loading effect. Food will stay completely normal in this scenario.
5 days out, nothing changes, same deal.
4 days out, food stays the same, sodium the same, however water is now at 80% of peak intake.
3 days out, same as 4 days out.
2 days out, this is where things start to change. Water is now up to 100% of peak water intake, sodium is now dropped below normal intake, and depending upon how heavy the individual is, we look to start introducing low food weight, highly energy dense foods. We are no longer eating for enjoyment, we are trying to make a number on a scale. Where things are variable for me, is how low sodium we go, some athletes can function on almost rock bottom levels of sodium, where as others need to stay around a gram-1.5grams in order to not be nauseated from all the water intake.
1 day out, we look to keep things the same, however, again, depending upon how heavy the athlete is, we look to cut off food and water intake (fasting) for a set duration of time before the athlete is scheduled to weigh in the following day. If an athlete is still very overweight, and we noticed the average amount they lose from night weight to morning weight is not within the parameters of them making the class, we will look to be “better safe than sorry” and look to eliminate solid food quite early in the day, and extend the fasting window a bit further.
A common misconception is we are fasting all day, this is incorrect. We want to consume, really as much calories as we can stomach, under the guidelines of very low sodium and low food weight, that becomes very difficult however.
I can speak upon me specifically, the final days of my weight cuts, my stomach is not the best however I do get in close to 1700 calories, which is not far off my normal intake on a non-training day.
The tricky part as well, is timing the athletes cut off point, with their weigh in, if they have a morning weigh in, this works a little easier in my opinion. If weigh ins are at 7am and we are on the border of whether we will make it through this protocol alone, the article recommends 16hrs of fasting, however, that is simply too long for my own observation, so on the high end, I will day 14hrs, the low end, 12hrs. So for this particular athlete, they will cut off all food and water intake at 5pm the previous day.
For athletes with an afternoon weigh in, we actually look to keep food and water intake in, virtually till they go to sleep. They can wake up normally and then assess what they need to do further, if anything, or eat something small as long as they are under.
The morning of, there is nothing more we can do besides extremely transient weight loss methods that range from easy to hard to do, but almost inversely with how long they take to complete.
For athletes who are going to be close, I recommend they get up 2 hours before their weigh in to check their weight. If they are under, on a calibrated scale, you are good. If they are over, or they are using a scale that they are not sure is accurate, then we deploy one or two of the following.
Spitting. This is the easiest method and least performance detriment probability of all the last minute things you can do. Eliciting salivation and spitting into a bottle or cup, is rather mindless, however it takes quite a bit of time the more you have to lose. I have successfully spat 1lb and that took every ounce of my being. That said, you need to be prepared to do this ASAP as you can see in real time what you are losing, assuming you are using a 16oz bottle.
Active/Passive Sweating. Now depending upon who you ask, what resource you find, there is a better option depending upon what you have access to. Active sweating, aka, moving to elicit a sweat, is easier to do, however, if you are in poor cardiovascular shape and it is not something you are used to doing before lifting, again, performance detriment goes up. Sitting in a sauna/makeshift steam room is normally what I would recommend, however, we are not getting further away from what I would be comfortable with in terms of repletion.
Hot Bath. Epsom salt baths are ROUGH and the diffusion process of water loss is almost surely going to effect your performance, regardless of repletion.
From there, look to enter the repletion period, which is the most crucial process. I won’t get into exactly what I use, as this is something I have tweaked personally over the years that is atypical from what I usually see, but has proven to be very effective.
Post weigh in, nutrition/repletion will be broken down into: immediately off the scale, the hour after weigh in, the rest of the day after that.
Immediately after the scale, simple sugars w/ high sodium intake.
1hr after weighing in, carb-rich meal with, for this athlete, as close to, if not slightly more than, 1 gallon of water. To put it simple, this part sucks and if you are not careful, you can really set yourself back with how you go about this. The reason why we don’t simply house fluids is because there needs to be somewhat of a base level of food in your stomach for saturation purposes and to be crude, if you consume solely liquids, it will most likely exit just as fast as it enters. This period is where most athletes fall off the pace and do not get back to their training weight.
Getting back to your training weight at the start of the week, is the most important variable we are after, any athlete that cuts, we are looking to match, but preferably exceed that. You may be asking why that is so important, well, it is at the very least a reasonable metric that you are 100% hydrated, but also, for leverage sake, if your belt is fitting looser, you feel pretty vulnerable under a heavy bar.
I coach athletes to be diligent but to not over-do this portion. If you are drinking willy nilly and having conversations and joking around, you will not rehydrate to 100%. Conversely speaking, if you are death chugging to the point of nausea, you will most likely throw up, negating any possible benefit that we intended on.
The rest of the day, we look to simply keep the pace up at a much slower rate. Sports drinks, simple sugars, a bit of sodium and water. This is more important than you think.
Now, let’s look at athlete Y.
Athlete Y is a female lifter who is seeking to drop down a weight class, for no reason other than she wants to feel a bit more comfortable with her everyday walk-around weight and figures she is in between 2 classes and would prefer to commit to the lower of the two. Here are her parameters:
USAPL competitor, has done 2 meets.
She has historically been in the 67.5kg class, but has weighed in around 64.5kg each of the previous meets she has done. The next class below is 60kg.
This athlete wants to perform well, but is not in striking distance of any qualifying totals/is not interested at this time in that side of the sport.
She has never dieted before and is unsure as to how the process should feel/what to expect.
She is 24 weeks out from her next meet.
Now, to me, this is where scope of practice matters. Unless you advertise for nutritional service, this athlete clearly has stated they are after net weight loss for body composition purposes, not for a competitive advantage. I would tread lightly with where you go next. If you feel comfortable providing recommendations, do so, but not under the guise of prescription. It is entirely reasonable however, to tell the athlete that based on their goals, longer term dieting would be better for them and that it would be best to reach out to specialist or to do their own research. When you try to play too many roles, you often are not satisfying any one of those roles.
That also being said, if you do feel comfortable and versed with a recommendation, I also think the following conversation would be important to have.
It is to be expected, or at the very least, it should not be a surprise, if absolute weight on the bar goes down.
This sport has weight classes for a reason, although the goal is to retain as much strength as possible, the reality of the situation is you will most likely loose some absolute strength. You are almost certainly trading that for relative strength, however.
In my experience, this initial convo is met with acceptance, however, after a certain period, where weight on the bar actually does go down, there is some disappointment associated. This is why it is necessary to be 100% clear with your goals, as I think just about everyone would love to be lighter and improve body comp while getting exponentially stronger, physiology however, does not care about our feelings of the matter, unfortunately.
The more weight you lose relative towards your starting weight, the more likely weight on the bar will go down. This athlete is 64.5kg and will be needing to lose 4.5kg, or around 8% of her total bodyweight. It is to be expected that the closer she gets to 60kg in the morning, the less likely she will hold on to top end weights, now, style of lifting matters too, but that is a topic for a different article entirely.
Lay out a timeline of expected weight loss, benchmarks, and what to do if rate of weight class is becoming too fast.
If the athlete is 24 weeks out, she is afforded plenty of time and can take her time on the way down.
Much like the athlete in the other example, we preferably do not want want to be in a deficit for the final duration of training, so for the sake of ease, we will say 20 weeks is our timeline.
From there, having a timeline of roughly where an athlete should be based upon proximity to meet, can really help ease their mind as to if they are on the right track or not.
However, sometimes weight loss becomes too sudden too soon, so being well-versed in things such as:
Diet breaks
Refeed days
Reverse dieting, is strongly recommended
My thought process with this individual, would be to simply undergo a longer term diet phase, not rely on a weight cut, and hopefully get to the zone of bodyweight around 4 weeks out and look to sustain that indefinitely. This method, to be frank, requires a bit more willpower on the athlete’s end, but is far less complicated.
Finally, on to athlete Z.
Athlete Z is a male lifter, who has a unique goal of needing to make weight for a national meet in order to compete for a medal, however, he has found himself very heavy, just 4 weeks out, and we will assume you were unaware he was this heavy leading into the day.
Other important info:
He is competing in WRPF which features a 24hr weigh in.
He is a seasoned competitor, has cut before, however never this much.
He has a real opportunity to win the meet and it would be a tangible breakthrough for his career.
His age is 35 years old.
The weight class he qualified in is 110kg, he is currently 118kg.
Now, again, how I would approach this would be within the second and third bullet point.
This is a case where you pull out all the stops and you are afforded to with the longer time of repletion.
This athlete first off, needs to be explained, in the future, we need to be more communicative as the easy fix was to diet down well ahead of time and get to water loading range. Admonishing the lifter won’t help them make weight however, so we need to be proactive.
We have 8kg to lose, or ~17.5lbs, and we have 4 weeks to lose it.
Doing some math, this lifter is 8% over the class, roughly, so we know we are not going to lose with water and sodium manipulation alone. So preemptively, we need to be ready to peel back some layers.
First off, we would start the loading protocol we did for the first athlete, just a day earlier as this is a 24hr weigh in occurring the day before.
Now, this loading protocol scales to bodyweight, however, it becomes astronomical the amount of water one needs to drink, for reference, an athlete at 118kg, would need to consume just under 4 gallons of water, at 100% peak water intake, and if the athlete is not drinking anything near a gallon to start, that is going to be a steep ask.
So to me, this is where we need to be preemptive the front end of the week.
We switch to calorically dense foods early, we taper off to mostly liquid calories early, or we simply start dieting aggressively many weeks out.
Personally, if this was a 2hr weigh in, I would recommend a diet phase ASAP, however, since this is a 24hr weigh in, I would prefer to be as last minute as we can, so we can focus on training, because after all, you still need to lift well and we are afforded a lot longer to rehydrate.
These are the only things that would change, in my opinion.
The athlete goes the full 16hrs of fasting on the final day between 1 day out and weigh in day.
The athlete should more than likely be prepared to be uncomfortable with his dietary choices leading into the week. We will most likely want to eliminate highest fiber food and keep energy density extremely high, much earlier in the week.
We will also want to be prepared to not rely on solely spitting to make the distance the final day. I have only had one lifter this amount over, and the way we made it the final day was with spitting concurrently with dry sauna for intervals of 15 minutes at a time.
I also think it is important to be ready to step in and say enough is enough, if it is truly a force and the athlete will lift poorly. Even if a medal is on the line, you cannot be reckless with this kind of thing.
Lastly, the rehydration process would be the same right off the scale, but you can take much more time getting your weight back over the course of a full day + continue to eat and drink the morning of the meet.
A common misconception here is to just eat nonsense, going out to eat to Golden Corral and having a high fat meal. Of course, it will satisfy your hunger, but when you wake up the next morning, under training weight, feeling like your legs are not underneath you, you will regret not taking that post-weigh time as seriously as you should have. Nothing changes, you just have a longer time to do so.
Dave Cailler, had 6 steaks between weigh ins and lifting at IPL North American in 2022, not recommending this, just stating this as a matter of fact.
Final Remarks
Coaching someone through a weight cut and/or diet phase for the goal of performance, is a tough situation for a multitude of reasons. In my opinion, if you are agreeing to do this, you must know the ins and outs, pretty much to a tee as being reckless with recommendations can be detrimental towards athlete’s performance and more drastically, their health.
If a coach simply recommends to go sit in the sauna for hours on end, and to drink a pedialyte post weight in, I am sorry, but that is irresponsible at best, and borderline reprehensible at worst. If you do not know, you do not know, but do not, I repeat, do not, purport you have knowledge in this avenue with people who trust you, if you know deep down you don’t.
I think it is important to note, repeated cycles of this, can develop disordered eating patterns and paired with starting at a young age, can lead to real harm down the line. I am not saying my ways are the best ways, however, I do pride myself in educating each lifter that does inquire about something of the like.
Teen, and some junior lifters, should not be cutting weight in most scenarios, however in the few scenarios in which it is reasonable, I really believe anything more than simple manipulation of food weight/spitting, is a risk that I am not usually willing to take.
Lastly, if you are an adult, please do not feel bound by anything as lame and mundane as, “you should never cut unless it is to take a world record”, because man, life is short, and if you are prepared, cutting 2lbs the week of the meet to maybe have an opportunity of winning your weight class, could be all the reason to do it. But again, you need to be willing to acknowledge the possible downside of such a thing.
Hope you all took something away from this!
To Utopia,
Erik