Why cutting weight is so dangerous
Dr. Nicholas Rizzo: “The two biggest threats are decreased kidney function and heat illness or strok. Those are the main cause of deaths.”
The culture of extreme weight cutting in mixed martial arts is the most dangerous solvable problem we have. California State Athletic Commission executive director Andy Foster takes a progressive, proactive approach to the deadly issue. He regulated Saturday’s Bellator 192; 34 fighters weighed in successfully. By contrast, UFC Fight Night 124 the previous weekend took a more conventional approach, and middleweight Uriah Hall spent days in the hospital.
Sara Chodosh recently took a look at the dangers for Popular Science.
The two biggest threats are decreased kidney function and heat illness or stroke, explains Nicholas Rizzo, a past president and board member of the Association of Ringside Physicians. Those are the main cause of deaths.
Water enables your kidneys to filter blood and maintain proper balances of potassium and sodium, both of which are critical to cell function. Your kidneys are basically a series of membranes with blood on one side and water (later: urine) on the other. The body gets potassium, sodium, and lots of small molecules of waste to move across those membranes by creating what’s called a concentration gradient. If there are lots of, say, sodium atoms on side A and not many on side B, the sodium will move towards side B to balance the everything out. That’s pretty much how your whole excretory system works. So if you deprive your body of water, you can’t get enough of a gradient to filter your blood.
Long-term kidney impairment eventually leads to damage, and that damage can kill you—if the heat doesn’t get you first.
Sweat is how humans cool themselves off. We are constantly getting rid of heat from our bodies, even when we don’t feel like we’re actively sweating, and we can only do that because we have water to spare to evaporate into the air, taking our body heat with it. In a sufficiently dehydrated state, you stop being able to cool off. Some fighters have gotten heat illness, heat stroke, or even died from overheating.
And even the fighters who successfully make weight face secondary problems, Rizzo says. If you enter a fight and you’re dehydrated, you’re more likely to be injured. You’re putting yourself at significant risk. An estimated 39 percent of MMA fighters enter the ring dehydrated because they simply can’t recover all that lost water in time. This is a really important point, says Rizzo. They can recover to some degree, but the analogy I give fighters is that your body and muscles are like a sponge. It’s easy to squeeze out a wet sponge, but when water goes back in, it goes at the sponge’s rate. You can’t force water into it.
Some athletes once opted for intravenous fluids in an attempt to rehydrate faster, but that method is now banned—it’s considered a form of doping. And just drinking water won’t get you back to peak performance in just a day.
There’s also some evidence that dehydration puts you at higher risk for concussions and other brain damage. That means fighters may be entering the ring—where they’ll get hit in the head repeatedly and possibly knocked out—more prone to serious brain injuries.
It’s a sport where you don’t just lose—you get the crap kicked out of you. And when athletes are already incapacitated by dehydration, they’re just setting themselves up for injury.
Foster has created a 10 Point Plan to fix the deadly problem. It works. The ABC medical committee supports it. The ABC has adopted it. The UFC supports it and will continue to adopt further parts of it. Unfortunately, many athletic commissions are apparently waiting for a high profile death, bafflingly unconvinced by the lesser known deaths, and the endless series of hospitalizations and other major health problems.