Weight loss controlled in wrestling

For a wrestler, working out with a plastic trash bag over your body or turning up the thermostat in the weight room to resemble a sauna doesn’t seem strange. Dehydrating yourself to lose some weight works.

Rock Bridge trainer Greg Nagel called this the “old school method” to move down to a lower weight class. But dehydration is dangerous for the body.

“When you are dehydrated, your muscles don’t function properly,” Nagel said. “They don’t have the right balance of electrolytes, and that leads to an increase in core body temperature. That increase in core body temperature is such that your body cannot reverse it. And in some cases it is fatal.”

To make sure high school wrestlers don’t create health problem for themselves, the Missouri State High School Activities Association is implementing the Wrestling Weight Management Program this year. The program answers a National Federation of State High School Associations mandate requiring states to adopt a weight management program for wrestling.

Missouri’s program, put in place in April of 2006, requires wrestlers to go through a certification process before the season begins in order to determine the lowest weight that a wrestler is allowed to participate at. Wrestlers will still weigh in before each match, but they will not be allowed to wrestle at a weight that is lower than their certification.

“I think it will provide much more science in the way of determining which weight class is best for a wrestler,” said Dale Pleimann, an MSHSAA assistant executive director who oversees wrestling.

Unless a doctor allows it, wrestlers cannot have less than seven percent body fat. Nagel said the absolute minimum body fat percentage for a high school aged male is three percent.

“Your body needs a certain amount of fat to run on and operate properly,” Nagel said. “That basement is three percent. Seven percent allows you a little bit of a cushion upwards from your essential body fat. That allows you to fluctuate a little bit from day to day and not put yourself in danger of using your essential body fat.”

But wrestlers will also be tested to be sure they are adequately hydrated.

“You can lose quite a bit of weight just by dehydrating yourself and that’s not healthy at all,” Rock Bridge coach Brook Harlan said. “So by watching these guys, making sure they’re hydrated, I think helps quite a bit. It makes them eat properly and actually do the weight by working out rather than just wringing their bodies out and losing all the water.”

Hickman coach J.D. Coffman said the program will be good for the wrestlers, but that, like anything else that is new, the first year could be confusing to coaches.

“It’s going to be good in the long run,” Coffman said. “In the years to come, after we figure out the paper work and all the tasks, the hoops you got to jump through as far as getting the kids certified.”

Part of the program requires wrestlers’ weights to be posted online. The system allows wrestlers to lose only one and a half percent of their total body weight per week, and an online database will track wrestlers’ weights throughout the season.

The wrestlers say they won’t miss going to extremes to make weight and think the program will help eliminate the pressure to do so.

“I think it’s good,” Rock Bridge’s Taylor Crane said. “It keeps kids from cutting way too much weight. A lot of kids during the season, you’ll see them in the beginning and they are just huge, like strong. And once they get their weight down, they lose so much fat and they just look tired and sick.”