Carbohydrate periodisation for fighters

The floor is the answer, and it is written per kilogram

The ISSN's 2025 position stand on nutrition and weight-cut strategies for mixed martial arts and other combat sports states a set of minimum thresholds together, for the longitudinal weight descent: carbohydrate 3.0–4.0 g/kg, protein 1.2–2.0 g/kg, and fat 0.5 to 1.0 g/kg/day. The carbohydrate line is the one this article is about, and its exact wording is that intake "should not drop below 3–4 g/kg/d."

Three things about that sentence matter more than the number.

It is a floor. "Should not drop below" is not "aim for." A floor describes the edge of a room, not a place to stand. Read as a target, it becomes permission to run a whole camp at the bottom of a range whose bottom was written as a warning.

It is per kilogram of body mass, which means it shrinks as the athlete does. The absolute amount of food the floor describes is smaller in week eight than it was in week one, while the training that food is paying for does not shrink on the same schedule. That gap is the subject of fight camp nutrition, week by week, and it is the reason a plan that worked in the first fortnight can quietly stop working without anyone changing anything.

And it is consensus, not a measurement. The derivation of 3–4 g/kg is not visible in the stand's text. It is presented as a recommendation by a panel reading a literature, not as the output of a trial that fed combat athletes four different carbohydrate intakes through a descent and measured what happened. There is no such trial. A number arrived at by expert judgement is still the best number available here, and it is worth knowing which kind of number it is.

This article does not multiply that range by a body mass, and readers should be sceptical of any article that does. A floor expressed in grams per kilogram is a statement about a population. The same range turned into a daily gram figure for a specific athlete is a prescription, and the person qualified to write one is a registered dietitian who can see the athlete, the division, the weigh-in format and the training week.

What the stand actually says about the preparation phase

There is a widely quoted pair of figures for carbohydrate: 3–5 g/kg/day for light activity and 8–12 g/kg/day for intense training. The ISSN combat-sports stand does contain that sentence. It also, in the very next clause, disowns the upper half of it for this population:

"Although research suggests 8–12 g of carbohydrate per kg of body mass may be required for endurance athletes, this amount is likely to be excessive for combat athletes competing in a weight-specific sport."

And in its own summary the stand states that while 8–12 g/kg has been recommended for athletes completing high volumes of endurance exercise, a range of 4–5 g/kg may be an appropriate starting intake for combat sports athletes once matched to total daily energy expenditure in the general preparation phase.

That qualification is not a footnote — it changes the shape of the argument. The gap the fighter is being shouted across is not the enormous one between a descent floor and an endurance load. It is the far narrower distance between a descent floor of 3–4 g/kg and a general-preparation starting point of 4–5 g/kg, both written per kilogram, both for combat athletes specifically.

That is a more useful fact than the dramatic version, and it reframes what "periodise" can honestly mean in this sport. It does not mean oscillating between famine and a Tour de France stage. It means a modest, phase-linked difference between the preparation block and the descent, with the session demands of a given day sitting inside that range rather than swinging outside it.

Anyone quoting 8–12 g/kg at a fighter as though the combat position stand endorsed it has stopped reading one clause too early.

What glycogen depletion actually costs

The best direct evidence on what low muscle glycogen does to hard, short work is a 2025 study in Frontiers in Physiology. It used the one-legged knee-extensor model, which lets the same person act as their own control: one leg is depleted by exercise and diet, the other is loaded, and both are then tested.

In 10 healthy males, age 25 ± 2, described as recreationally active rather than athletes, resting muscle glycogen was 593 ± 100 mmol/kg dry weight in the loaded leg and 177 ± 29 mmol/kg dry weight in the depleted leg. On constant-load, high-intensity exercise lasting approximately five minutes, time to task failure was 258 ± 181 s in the loaded leg and 156 ± 75 s in the depleted one. That is roughly a 40% reduction, in a randomised, counterbalanced, within-subject design.

One detail in that study deserves as much attention as the headline. Resting contractile characteristics were unaffected by glycogen status. The depleted leg was not weaker in the sense of producing less force on demand. It failed sooner at sustaining work. That is the distinction between a single explosive effort and a round, and it is the reason the finding is interesting to a fighter at all.

The analogy to a five-minute round is obvious and the article will draw it — as an analogy. These were ten recreationally active young men extending one knee against a load. Not fighters. Not sparring. Not in an energy deficit. Not women. The conditions are the claim, and the conditions are narrow.

What the study does license is a direction: arriving at a hard session already depleted costs sustained work capacity, and the cost is large enough to be visible in a five-minute test. What it does not license is a prescription for how much carbohydrate a specific fighter eats on a specific Tuesday.

Why the scale moves when carbohydrate drops

This is the mechanism behind the gym advice, and the reader deserves the mechanism rather than the folklore.

Glycogen is stored in muscle with water. The ISSN combat stand describes it as binding water "at a ratio of 1 g glycogen to 2.7 g water" — and it is worth being precise that the stand is citing that figure from prior literature, not reporting something it measured.

The primary measurement people reach for comes from Fernández-Elías and colleagues, who took muscle biopsies from 9 aerobically trained cyclists before, one hour after and four hours after 150 minutes of exercise in the heat that produced 4.6 ± 0.2% dehydration. During recovery with limited fluid, the paper reports that "per each gram of glycogen, 3 g of water was stored in muscle (recovery ratio 1:3)." In the full fluid replacement arm of the same study, that ratio rose to 1:17. In both trials, muscle water had fallen by 13 ± 6% and muscle glycogen by 44 ± 10% from pre-exercise.

Do not average 2.7 and 3. They are not two attempts at the same quantity. One is a conventional binding figure the position stand repeats from elsewhere; the other is a measured recovery storage ratio under a specified fluid condition, and the authors' own conclusion is that their findings agree with the long-held notion that each gram of glycogen is stored with at least 3 g of water, with higher ratios possible because water is also stored in muscle unbound to glycogen.

The 1:17 arm is the part that gets left out of every retelling, and it is the part that matters most here. The same nine people, the same protocol, a different fluid condition, and the ratio moved by a factor of nearly six. A relationship that unstable is not a conversion rate.

So: when the scale drops on a low-carbohydrate week, most of what left was stored fuel and the water bound to it. It is not fat, it returns with the carbohydrate, and the same study measured the ratio anywhere from 1:3 to 1:17 depending on how much fluid was available — which is the reason it cannot be used to predict a weight. How quickly that weight comes back, and what governs it, is the subject of how long water weight takes to come back.

This article will not turn that relationship into arithmetic in either direction. Not carbohydrate in to kilograms off, and not kilograms off to carbohydrate in. The reason is not squeamishness: it is that the measurement does not support the subtraction, and a worked example becomes a rule the moment it is written down, with the input swapped for whatever the reader happens to want.

"Train low" — where it came from, and what happened when it was tested

The idea has a specific origin, and the origin is much smaller than its reputation.

In 2005, Hansen and colleagues trained 7 healthy untrained men for ten weeks on a one-legged knee-extensor protocol. Training volume and workload were matched between the legs; the difference was that one leg performed its second session of the day fasted, after two hours of rest, and therefore trained with low glycogen. Time to exhaustion at 90% of peak improved markedly more in the low-glycogen leg. Resting glycogen and 3-hydroxyacyl-CoA dehydrogenase rose significantly only in that leg; citrate synthase rose in both but more in the low leg. The authors' own framing was explicitly speculative: low muscle glycogen enhances transcription of genes involved in training adaptation, "these results made us speculate that training at a low muscle glycogen content would enhance training adaptation."

Seven untrained men. One leg each. An endurance time-to-exhaustion outcome. That is the foundation of an idea that now gets repeated to professional fighters as though it were settled.

It was tested, repeatedly, and it did not hold. Gejl and Nybo pooled 9 studies in roughly 130 endurance athletes — primarily male, with a single study containing 5 men and 3 women — and found a standardised mean difference of 0.17 (95% CI −0.15 to 0.49, p = 0.29) for carbohydrate periodisation against normal or high availability. Seven of the nine studies showed no advantage. Their conclusion is unambiguous: "the evidence to support a performance enhancing effect of CHO periodization in well-trained endurance athletes is weak and 'train-low' is not per se associated with enhanced endurance."

The same review names the cost side, which is the part a fighter should care about most: compromised training quality, "particularly lower intensities in peak intervals," is identified as the major drawback of chronic carbohydrate restriction. Peak intervals are the closest thing in that literature to what a hard round is.

A five-week trial in 17 trained cyclists reached the same place from another direction: periodising carbohydrate produced no superior result against an energy-matched high-carbohydrate diet on maximal lactate steady state or substrate oxidation. Both groups gained muscle mass and lost fat. The energy match is the important design feature — it removes the possibility that any difference was simply eating less.

None of this makes train-low nonsense. It makes it an endurance hypothesis with a null meta-analysis over it, and no combat-sport test at all.

The ketogenic arm, and the comparison people skip

Burke and colleagues studied 21 elite male race walkers across three weeks of intensified training, comparing high carbohydrate, periodised carbohydrate and a ketogenic low-carbohydrate high-fat diet. Over 29 data sets, 10 km race performance improved 6.6% in the high-carbohydrate group, 5.3% in the periodised group and declined 1.6% in the ketogenic group. Exercise economy improved in the carbohydrate groups and was maintained — that is, did not improve — in the ketogenic group. The authors' conclusion: "Despite a significant improvement in V̇O₂ peak, adaptation to the topical LCHF diet negated performance benefits in elite endurance athletes, in part due to reduced exercise economy."

Two things follow, and the second is the one that gets skipped.

The first is that the ketogenic arm went backwards on the competitive outcome while its aerobic capacity marker went up. A physiological improvement and a performance decline in the same athletes is a useful warning about which endpoints to trust.

The second is that the periodised group did not beat the high-carbohydrate group. In the study most often cited to show that carbohydrate manipulation is sophisticated and modern, the simple approach won by a nose. Elite male race walkers are not fighters and a 10 km race is not a fight, so this is not a finding about combat sport. It is a reason to be unimpressed by confident claims that a ketogenic diet makes anyone a better fighter, which is not a claim any fetched evidence supports.

What periodisation can honestly mean for a fighter's week

Strip out what failed and what was never tested, and something defensible is left.

Carbohydrate demand is not flat across a week. A day with a hard sparring session and a conditioning block does not make the same demand as a technical day or a rest day, and the ISSN stand's own structure — separate figures for light activity and for intense training — recognises that. Matching intake to the session, inside a range the stand names for this population, is not the same practice as the train-low protocol that failed in the endurance literature. It is what "periodise" ought to have meant before it acquired a protocol.

What a fighter is actually deciding is where within a narrow band a given day sits, and whether the hardest session of the week is being arrived at depleted. The evidence for the second part of that is the strongest thing in this article: about 40% shorter time to task failure at 177 versus 593 mmol/kg dry weight, in ten recreationally active men on roughly five minutes of work.

There is one more small trial worth reporting, because it points the other way and the honest thing is to print it. In 22 university athletes randomised to two weeks of evening carbohydrate restriction — no carbohydrate after 4 p.m. — alongside daily hour-long moderate-intensity pre-breakfast running, peak oxygen consumption, maximal work rate, respiratory quotient, body weight and lean body mass all improved, and the authors concluded that the method "markedly improves fat metabolism even when performed for a short period." It is small, it is short, the outcomes are aerobic rather than fight-specific, and it was not run in a deficit. It belongs in the evidence pile, not at the top of it.

Consider a scenario — a scenario, not a person and not a client. Take a hypothetical flyweight, call her Mara Delgado, four weeks out, training six days across a week that contains two genuinely hard sessions and four moderate ones. The question worth her coach's time is not what her daily carbohydrate number should be. It is whether the two hard sessions land on the days she has eaten most, whether the floor is being respected on the days she has eaten least, and whether the pattern is visible enough that anyone could answer those questions from a record rather than from memory.

Carbohydrate availability, cortisol, and the immune question

Bishop and colleagues put 12 trained cyclists through three days of a high-carbohydrate diet (more than 70% of energy) and three days of a low-carbohydrate diet (under 10% of energy), then had them ride for an hour at 60% of maximal power followed by a time trial. The high-carbohydrate condition produced higher plasma glucose, lower plasma cortisol and a lower circulating neutrophil count.

The authors' own conclusion is carefully bounded: "pre-exercise CHO status influences neutrophil trafficking but not function in response to prolonged cycling." Function was not impaired. Nobody counted infections. Nobody measured illness.

So the flat claim that low carbohydrate weakens a fighter's immune system is not what this study found, and it should not be repeated. The defensible sentence is narrower: carbohydrate availability before exercise changes the stress-hormone and white-cell trafficking response to that exercise, measured in twelve trained cyclists.

Two hedged findings sit next to it and are worth naming as hedged. A systematic review of rapid weight loss in combat athletes — held here at abstract level only — reports that acute rapid weight loss "activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, elevating plasma cortisol and suppressing lymphocyte proliferation, T-cell function, and natural killer cell cytotoxicity." A scoping review, also at abstract level, reports that rapid weight loss in combat sports consistently impairs recovery, increases muscle damage and fatigue, and increases injury risk. And the 2023 IOC consensus on Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport recognises low carbohydrate availability as additive to low energy availability in the development of REDs — a point about the combination, not about carbohydrate alone.

The reader of this article is very likely in both conditions at once. That combination has not been studied in combat athletes.

What combat athletes actually eat, when someone measured

Pettersson and Berg measured dietary intake in 68 elite Olympic combat athletes — 21 female and 47 male, mean age 21.3 ± 3.8 — in the recovery window between weigh-in and competition, across six tournaments in wrestling, taekwondo, judo and boxing. This is a post-weigh-in observation, not a camp figure, and it should never be quoted as one.

Carbohydrate intake in that window averaged 5.5 g/kg of body mass against a then-recommended 8–10 g/kg. The athletes consumed roughly 4.2 kg of food and fluid and regained only 1.9 kg of body mass. Water made up 86% of what was consumed, and for each litre of water drunk athletes gained 0.57 kg of body weight — a figure calculated with five heavyweight athletes excluded.

The split by recovery time is the finding a fighter can use. Sports with a long recovery window — wrestling and taekwondo, around eighteen hours — consumed roughly double the water, carbohydrate, protein and fat of the short-recovery sports, judo and boxing at around eight hours. The weigh-in format, not willpower, sets the ceiling on what can be put back.

Separately, a cross-sectional study of dietary strategies in professional MMA fighters characterises the pre-weigh-in period as one of "severe carbohydrate and fiber restriction with reduced fluid intake," with systematic elimination of vegetables, dairy, legumes and whole grains, followed by aggressive carbohydrate, fluid and sodium replenishment afterwards. High-fibre foods, notably, stay restricted through the recovery period too.

What happens in fight week is a different article with a different risk profile, and the post-weigh-in refeed figures belong there rather than here. What this data contributes to a periodisation article is one honest observation: the restriction real fighters practise is concentrated at the extreme end of camp, and even the athletes with the longest recovery windows did not reach the intakes that were being recommended to them.

Fibre, food volume, and the squeeze nobody quantifies

The MMA cross-sectional data make clear that fibre restriction is not an accident of appetite. It is deliberate, it is part of making weight, and it persists into the refeeding period.

That creates a constraint this literature describes qualitatively and has never measured. A fighter trying to respect a carbohydrate floor while simultaneously stripping fibre for gut-content reasons is pushed toward lower-residue carbohydrate sources — and the same fighter is in a deficit, with appetite, gut tolerance and food volume all working against them. Every part of that squeeze is real and none of it has a number attached in combat athletes.

So this article prints no fibre target. No verified primary was found that quantifies fibre grams or food volume as a barrier to hitting a g/kg carbohydrate target inside a deficit in this population, and inventing one would be worse than saying so.

Protein and fat move with it, because the floors are a set

The carbohydrate floor was not published on its own. It appears in the same sentence as the others, and reading one without the other two produces a plan that fails somewhere else.

On protein, the stand is worth quoting carefully because it contains several figures in several places. It sets a protein floor of 1.2–2.0 g/kg/day that intake should not drop below during a descent, while its own descent guidance is 1.6–2.2 g/kg/day and its general-preparation range is 1.2–2.4 g/kg. The floor is the number not to go under, not the number to aim at. An athlete who reads 1.2 as the plan has read the warning label as the instructions.

On fat, the floor is 0.5 to 1.0 g/kg/day, and the argument for why it exists is made properly in the dietary fat floor. The short version relevant here is structural: the carbohydrate floor alone consumes a large share of a deficit's energy budget, which is why fat is the macronutrient camps reach for, and why that reach has a bottom written under it.

The three floors together do not leave much room, which is the point of stating them together. A deficit has to come from somewhere, and when all three minimums are respected the room available is smaller than most camp plans assume. That is an argument for a slower descent and a higher starting weight relative to the division, not for taking one macronutrient below its floor to make the arithmetic work.

Making the floor visible, which is most of the battle

A floor is only a floor if someone can see where the day landed relative to it. In practice the failure mode is not a fighter deciding to breach a threshold — it is a fighter who has no idea whether they breached it, because the week was reconstructed from memory on a Sunday.

That is the modest and honest case for logging: not that a number in an app is a plan, but that a recorded week is the only thing a dietitian can actually work from. Fighter Cut logs the macronutrient split alongside the energy figure so the carbohydrate line is legible day by day rather than inferred at the end of a block.

What that record is for is a conversation, not a verdict. Nobody has established the right carbohydrate intake for a particular fighter in a particular camp, because the study that would establish it does not exist. What a record does is let the people qualified to individualise this — a registered dietitian, a physician — see a real pattern instead of a reconstruction. The same argument runs through what to eat when cutting weight and through the hydration side of camp in staying hydrated through the training weeks.

The athletes none of this was measured on

This section is the one to read twice.

Women are barely present. The depletion study is 10 males. The race-walking trial is 21 elite males. The train-low origin study is 7 men. The meta-analysis is described as primarily male, with a single constituent study containing 3 women out of roughly 130 participants in total. The biopsy study's abstract does not state sex at all. The only well-sexed cohort in this entire article is Pettersson and Berg's 68 Olympic combat athletes — 21 female, 47 male — and that is an observation in the weigh-in-to-competition window rather than an intervention. There is no carbohydrate-periodisation intervention in female combat athletes in this literature at all.

Adolescents are absent entirely. No fetched source studies carbohydrate periodisation, glycogen depletion or camp intake in athletes under 18, despite amateur combat sport being full of them. A growing athlete in a descent is the highest-risk reader of this article and the evidence base for them is empty.

Amateurs are absent. The combat cohorts here are elite or professional; the physiology cohorts are recreationally active or untrained non-athletes. The reader who trains four evenings a week around a job matches neither.

The whole periodisation literature is an endurance literature. Cycling, running, race walking, university runners. Not one of these studies tested a combat athlete, a sparring round, a grappling test, or an athlete simultaneously descending in weight. That is the single largest limitation in this article and no amount of careful reading closes it.

And none of these gaps closes with a multiplier. A figure measured in ten young men is not converted into a figure for a female flyweight by scaling it, and a figure measured in athletes in energy balance does not become a figure for athletes in a deficit by adjusting it downward. Those are different populations answering different questions.

What we could not verify

"Train low, race high" as combat-sport advice. Refused. The origin study is 7 untrained men doing one-legged knee extension with an endurance time-to-exhaustion outcome, the authors framed their own interpretation as speculation, and the pooled meta-analysis over it found nothing (SMD 0.17, p = 0.29, 7 of 9 studies showing no advantage). No fetched study applies train-low to a combat athlete, to a fight-specific test, or to anyone already in an energy deficit. It is an endurance hypothesis, and it is reported here as one.

"Keto makes you a better fighter." Refused. The closest evidence is the race-walking trial, and it is negative on the competitive outcome: −1.6% over three weeks in 21 elite males, with exercise economy failing to improve. No combat-sport equivalent exists in anything we could open.

"Low carbohydrate weakens your immune system" as a flat statement. Refused. The study behind it measured plasma cortisol and neutrophil trafficking in 12 trained cyclists and explicitly found function unchanged. The honest sentence is about a stress-hormone and cell-trafficking response, and it is hedged accordingly in the body of this article.

"Cutting carbohydrate burns fat faster." Refused. Nothing fetched supports a fat-loss advantage from carbohydrate restriction at matched energy intake; the five-week cyclist trial matched energy deliberately and found no superiority. Chased to origin, the folklore traces to the scale effect of glycogen's bound water, not to fat.

Any formula converting carbohydrate intake to scale weight. Refused, and deliberately absent from every section above. The biopsy study measured a recovery storage ratio under two fluid conditions and got 1:3 and 1:17 from the same nine people. A relationship that moves by a factor of six with fluid availability cannot license a prediction, and the mechanism is printed here as an explanation of why the weight is water rather than as a method for shedding it.

A fibre gram target or a food-volume figure for this population. Searched for, not found. The constraint is documented qualitatively in professional MMA fighters; no primary quantifies it inside a deficit, and this article does not estimate one.

One systematic review on body composition and dietary intake in combat athletes returned an HTTP 403 from its publisher during research and was never read. It is named here only so a later pass does not rediscover it and assume it was checked. No figure from it appears anywhere above.

The IOC REDs consensus wording on low carbohydrate availability is reported here at the level its published abstract supports — that low carbohydrate availability is recognised as playing a growing role alongside low energy availability — rather than at the level of a quoted internal passage.

Sources

Sourced to

1. International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand: nutrition and weight cut strategies for mixed martial arts and other combat sports — Ricci AA, Evans C, Stull C, Peacock CA, French DN, Antonio J et al., Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 9 March 2025;22(1):2467909. DOI 10.1080/15502783.2025.2467909, PMID 40059405
2. Relationship between muscle water and glycogen recovery after prolonged exercise in the heat in humans — Fernández-Elías VE, Ortega JF, Nelson RK, Mora-Rodriguez R, European Journal of Applied Physiology, 2015;115(9):1919–1926. DOI 10.1007/s00421-015-3175-z, PMID 25911631
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4. Performance effects of periodized carbohydrate restriction in endurance trained athletes — a systematic review and meta-analysis — Gejl KD, Nybo L, Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 17 May 2021;18:37. DOI 10.1186/s12970-021-00435-3, PMID 34001184
5. Low carbohydrate, high fat diet impairs exercise economy and negates the performance benefit from intensified training in elite race walkers — Burke LM, Ross ML, Garvican-Lewis LA, Welvaert M, Heikura IA, Forbes SG et al., The Journal of Physiology, 1 May 2017;595(9):2785–2807. DOI 10.1113/JP273230, PMID 28012184
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7. A five-week periodized carbohydrate diet does not improve maximal lactate steady-state exercise capacity and substrate oxidation in well-trained cyclists compared to a high-carbohydrate diet — Prieto-Bellver G, Díaz-Lara J, Bishop DJ, Fernández-Sáez J, Abián-Vicén J, San-Millán I et al., Nutrients, 19 January 2024;16(2):318. DOI 10.3390/nu16020318, PMID 38276556
8. Effects of short-term nighttime carbohydrate restriction method on exercise performance and fat metabolism — Sakamoto T, Ueda SY, Nakahara H, Nutrients, 4 July 2024;16(13):2138. DOI 10.3390/nu16132138, PMID 38999884
9. Pre-exercise carbohydrate status and immune responses to prolonged cycling: I. Effect on neutrophil degranulation — Bishop NC, Walsh NP, Haines DL, Richards EE, Gleeson M, International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, December 2001;11(4):490–502. DOI 10.1123/ijsnem.11.4.490, PMID 11915783
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11. Weigh-in to fight night: dietary strategies of professional MMA fighters — Evans C, Chau MK, Tonnel L, Landmesser J, Stull C, French DN, Antonio J, Peacock CA, Nutrients, 2026;18(17):2880. DOI 10.3390/nu18172880, PMID 42739050
12. Effects of rapid weight loss on the immune system in combat sports athletes: a systematic review — Lee HS, International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 2026;27(1):508. DOI 10.3390/ijms27010508, PMID 41516380 — held at abstract level only
13. Effects of weight-cutting practices on sleep, recovery, and injury in combat sports: a scoping review — Kużdżał A et al., Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology, 2025;10(3):319. DOI 10.3390/jfmk10030319, PMID 40843850 — held at abstract level only
14. 2023 International Olympic Committee's (IOC) consensus statement on Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (REDs) — Mountjoy M, Ackerman KE, Bailey DM, Burke LM, Constantini N, Hackney AC et al., British Journal of Sports Medicine, September 2023;57(17):1073–1097. DOI 10.1136/bjsports-2023-106994, PMID 37752011

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