Fight camp nutrition, week by week

The three phases the position stand actually names

The 2025 ISSN position stand splits combat-sport preparation into three phases, and it says so plainly: "Phases of combat sports are generally separated into three distinct phases: 'Off camp' or general preparation, 'fight camp' and 'fight week'/post weigh-in."

That is the structure to plan against, and the boundaries are not decorative. Each phase has its own arithmetic, its own constraint, and its own failure mode. Figures lifted from one and applied to another are the most common way this document gets misused — a fight-week number quoted as a camp number, or a camp rate quoted as an off-camp target.

On duration, the stand is specific: "The average fight camp phase ranges from 8 to 10 weeks, depending on the competition schedule." Twelve-week camps exist and shorter notice happens constantly, but eight to ten weeks is the window the guidance was written around, and it matters because the stand's own weekly loss rate is calibrated to an eight-week camp.

The off-camp phase is where the size of the problem gets set. The camp phase is where a longitudinal weight descent is executed against a training load that, measured rather than assumed, stays flat. Fight week is a different sport again — the weight cut and fight week material covers what happens there, including the acute figures and the supervision conditions attached to them, which this article deliberately does not reproduce.

The decision that governs the whole camp

Everything downstream depends on a number set months before anyone books a flight.

During the off camp/general preparation phase, athletes should maintain a weight ranging 12% to 15% above the weight division requirement.

That is the position stand's sentence, and the reasoning behind it is stated in the same document. Working from typical rapid-weight-loss practice and a weekly body-mass loss of 0.5–1% over an eight-week camp, the authors arrive at 12–15% as the ideal maximum walk-around weight. The worked example they give is a male middleweight required to make 185 lb, sitting at roughly 207–212 lb between fights.

Read the direction of that derivation carefully, because it is the whole argument. The 12–15% figure is not a preference about physique. It is the number that falls out of assuming a safe-to-execute weekly rate over a camp of a known length. Change the length of the camp and the figure changes. Change the weekly rate and the figure changes. An athlete taking a bout on three weeks' notice from 20% above the division is not attempting a harder version of the same plan; they have left the conditions the figure was derived under.

The stand is also honest about its own footing, and this deserves quoting because almost nobody who repeats the 12–15% number repeats this part: "However, these numbers have not yet been fully substantiated through research and while there is scant research on this notion, practical application suggests this range should be effective." It is a reasoned practitioner consensus with arithmetic behind it, not a measured threshold. Treat it accordingly.

The floors, and the arithmetic that makes them move

Here is the sentence this whole article turns on:

Macronutrients should not drop below the following: carbohydrates 3.0–4.0 g/kg, protein 1.2–2.0 g/kg, and fat 0.5 to 1.0 g/kg/day.

Three things about that sentence get lost in transmission. First, these are floors, not targets — the stand's separate camp-phase guidance puts protein during weight descent at 1.6–2.2 g/kg/day and fat at 0.7–1.3 g/kg/day, both above the floor. Second, they are per kilogram, which means they are not fixed quantities but a function of a variable that is deliberately falling. Third, the carbohydrate floor is restated independently in the body of the document with its reason attached: "due to the intense training demands during fight camp, carbohydrate intake should not drop below 3–4 g/kg/d."

Run the arithmetic for an 80 kg athlete entering camp. The low edge of each floor gives 240 g of carbohydrate, 96 g of protein and 40 g of fat — about 1,704 kcal if you price carbohydrate and protein at 4 kcal/g and fat at 9. The high edge gives 320 g, 160 g and 80 g, about 2,640 kcal.

Now move that athlete to 75 kg, which is five kilograms over eight weeks — roughly 0.63 kg/week, sitting inside the 0.5–1% weekly band the stand describes. The low edge of the floors is now 225 g of carbohydrate, 90 g of protein and 38 g of fat: about 1,598 kcal. The floor has fallen by roughly 106 kcal and 15 g of carbohydrate without anyone deciding anything.

Fifteen grams of carbohydrate is not the problem. What the arithmetic is showing you is that the floor is not a fixed shelf you can plan against once. It is a moving object, and it moves in the same direction as the athlete.

Why the floors get harder rather than easier

The floors falling would be harmless if the athlete's requirement fell at the same rate. It does not, and there are three separate reasons, all of them documented.

Training load stays flat. This is the one people assume away, and it has actually been measured. Kirk, Langan-Evans, Clark and Morton observed 14 MMA competitors for eight consecutive weeks without intervention, recording daily duration, RPE, session load, fatigue and soreness. Weekly training duration ranged from 3.9 to 5.3 hours; session-RPE load from 1,287 to 1,791 arbitrary units. None of it changed within or between weeks. Seven of the fourteen were preparing for a bout and seven were not, and the authors found no differences in any variable between the two groups except in the final week before the fight, where an abrupt step taper occurred. Their conclusion: "periodisation of training load was largely absent in this cohort of MMA athletes." Fourteen athletes at one point in time is not the sport, but it is measurement where the alternative is assumption.

Resting metabolic rate falls. In the two published combat-sport case studies most often cited on this point, resting metabolic rate dropped by 331 kcal/day in one athlete and 257 kcal/day in the other across eight-week camps in which body mass fell by 18.1% and 13.5% respectively. Both are n=1, both male, both closely instrumented, and both describe descents well past the 12–15% band. They are not what a normal camp looks like. They do establish that the metabolic side of the ledger is not a constant.

The deficit has to be maintained against both. If load is flat and resting expenditure is falling, the intake that produced 0.6 kg a week in week two produces less in week seven. Holding the rate means widening the deficit. Widening the deficit means taking grams from somewhere. And the only macronutrient with meaningful room in it, by the time this becomes urgent, is the one the athlete can least afford to lose.

Carbohydrate: the first lever pulled, the most expensive one to lose

Carbohydrate goes first, every time, and there is a mechanical reason the scale rewards it.

The position stand states the ratio directly: "Glycogen is a branched polymer of glucose that binds to water at a ratio of 1 g glycogen to 2.7 g water." Skeletal muscle holds roughly 350–700 g of glycogen and the liver 80–100 g. Reduce carbohydrate and you are not only removing the stored fuel, you are removing several times its mass in the water bound to it. The stand puts the achievable loss from glycogen depletion at 1–2% of body mass. Nothing else in a nutrition plan moves a scale that quickly.

Which is exactly why it gets taken. The stand names the bind in one sentence: "The need for carbohydrates to drive high-intensity work, and its connection to body mass via glycogen status create an ongoing conflict for the combat athlete."

The cost side is measurable too. Achten and colleagues gave seven trained runners either 8.5 g/kg/day or 5.4 g/kg/day of carbohydrate across two eleven-day trials whose final week was intensified training. Time to complete an 8 km treadmill run deteriorated in both conditions, but by 61 seconds on the higher carbohydrate intake against 155 seconds on the lower. Sixteen-kilometre times worsened significantly only in the low-carbohydrate condition. Mood deteriorated significantly in both trials, but the fall in global mood scores was more pronounced on the lower intake, and fatigue scores were significantly higher there.

Those are endurance runners, not fighters, and 8.5 versus 5.4 g/kg is a comparison well above the range a fighter in descent is operating in. What transfers is not the number. It is the shape: when training is intensified and carbohydrate is the variable, performance and mood both degrade further on the lower intake — and they degrade during the intensified block, not after it.

The practical consequence is unglamorous. Carbohydrate is the lever that shows up on the scale first and in the sparring room last, which is precisely the combination that makes it easy to keep pulling.

Protein and fat: one floor rises, the other is where the deficit goes

Protein is the one macronutrient whose real requirement rises as the deficit deepens, which puts it in direct opposition to per-kilogram arithmetic.

The combat stand's floor is 1.2–2.0 g/kg. Its camp-phase guidance is higher — "Protein intake during weight descent should be 1.6–2.2 g/kg/d" — with the reasoning stated: "Higher protein intake during the longitudinal weight descent promotes the preservation of lean body mass during caloric deficits." Its general requirement figure is higher again: "Combat athlete's protein requirements range from 1.2–2.4 g/kg, with amounts closer to 2 g/kg being considered a target intake."

The ISSN's dedicated protein position stand goes further. Its headline recommendation for exercising individuals is 1.4–2.0 g/kg/day, and it adds a specific qualifier for anyone in a deficit: "Higher protein intakes (2.3–3.1 g/kg/d) may be needed to maximize the retention of lean body mass in resistance-trained subjects during hypocaloric periods." That population is resistance-trained individuals, not combat athletes in a descent, and the transfer is an inference rather than a measurement. But it points the same way the combat guidance does, and it points opposite to what the falling per-kilogram floor does.

For the 80 kg athlete above, 2.3 g/kg is 184 g of protein. At 75 kg it is 173 g. The absolute grams still fall — that is unavoidable when the multiplier is body mass — but the requirement is anchored to lean mass, and lean mass is exactly what the descent is supposed to be preserving. An athlete who is losing fat-free mass has a protein requirement that is not falling in proportion to their scale weight, which is one of several reasons the stand keeps recommending body-composition measurement rather than body mass alone.

A note on internal consistency, because it matters if you are going to quote this document: the position stand prints four different protein ranges in four different places — 1.2–2.0, 1.2–2.2, 1.6–2.2 and 1.2–2.4 g/kg. They are not contradictory once you attach each to its phase and purpose, but a number lifted out of that document without its clause is close to meaningless.

Fat sits at the opposite end of the same problem. It is where the stand actually directs the deficit, and it is explicit about it.

To facilitate an energy deficit needed for a 0.5–1 kg loss of body mass per week, fat intake is often manipulated to elicit a greater energy deficit, resulting in fat intake levels that can range from 0.7 to 1.3 g/kg/d.

The camp-phase practical guidance repeats it: "Fat intake can range from 0.7–1.3 g/kg/d and may need to be lowered to create an energy deficit and drive body mass loss." Fat is the most energy-dense macronutrient at 9 kcal/g, so it is the cheapest place to find calories without touching the fuel for training or the substrate for lean-mass retention.

There is a bottom to it, and the stand names two. The macronutrient floor is 0.5 to 1.0 g/kg/day. And separately, as a proportion: "consuming daily fat intake below 15–20% of total calorie intake is not advised." For the 75 kg athlete eating 2,200 kcal, 15% is about 37 g of fat — which is where the absolute floor lands too. The two constraints converge, which is a hint that the floor is real rather than arbitrary.

The stand also draws a hard line on total energy, and this is the single most useful practical sentence in its longitudinal-descent section: "For more aggressive weight loss, create a larger caloric deficit, but do not drop below the athlete's RMR." Resting metabolic rate as a floor for intake, not a target. Measured with indirect calorimetry where that exists, estimated with the Mifflin–St Jeor or Cunningham equations where it does not.

Energy availability, and what an over-aggressive deficit actually does

Energy availability is the concept that makes all of the above cohere, and it is not the same thing as calories.

Energy availability is dietary energy intake minus exercise energy expenditure, expressed relative to fat-free mass — what is left over to run the body once training has taken its share. The commonly cited clinical threshold is below 30 kcal/kg fat-free mass per day, though the review that states it also notes that free-living studies "have failed to find clear thresholds or associations" between energy availability and objective markers of health impairment. The 2023 IOC consensus statement on Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport introduced a clinical assessment tool built on accumulated severity and risk stratification rather than a single cut-off, and flagged the growing role of low carbohydrate availability specifically.

The combat-sport case that puts numbers on this is Langan-Evans and colleagues, who instrumented one male combat-sport athlete across an eight-week body-mass loss plan. Body mass fell 13.5%, from 72.5 kg to 62.7 kg. During phase one — seven weeks at an energy intake equal to resting metabolic rate, about 1,700 kcal/day — mean daily energy availability was 20 kcal/kg FFM/day, ranging day to day from 7 to 31. Body mass fell 6.5 kg and fat mass 4.4 kg. The authors report no consequences of the Male Athlete Triad or RED-S during that phase. In phase two, five consecutive days below 10 kcal/kg FFM/day, consequences did present.

That is n=1, male, closely supervised, and a descent that ends well outside the 12–15% band. Do not read 20 kcal/kg FFM/day as a target — the athlete was below the conventional threshold for seven weeks and the authors are describing what they observed, not endorsing it. What the case does show cleanly is that the relationship between deficit depth and clinical consequence is not linear. Weeks of a moderate shortfall behaved differently from five days of a severe one.

The stand's own version of this warning is more general and worth carrying: athletes exceeding the 12–15% band "will require more significant energy restriction, and if completed over a shorter duration than 8 weeks, the caloric deficit needed to achieve the desired changes in body mass may put athletes at a greater risk for low energy availability."

Training days and rest days: what the guidance does and does not say

The honest answer is that the combat-sport position stand does not split its macronutrient guidance by training day and rest day. It gives daily floors, a daily descent range, and post-session targets. Any day-by-day distribution scheme is being imported from general sports nutrition, and should be labelled as such.

What the broader guidance does supply is a grid graded by training load rather than by day of week. Summarising the IOC and ACSM/ISSN daily carbohydrate frameworks, Bytomski lists 3–5 g/kg for low-intensity or skill-based activity, 5–7 g/kg for a moderate programme of about an hour a day, 6–10 g/kg for one to three hours of moderate-to-high intensity, 4–7 g/kg for strength-trained athletes, and 8–12 g/kg for extreme commitment above four to five hours a day. The combat stand cites the same source when it says athletes "should anticipate consuming between 3 to 5 g of carbohydrates per kg of body mass daily for light activity and between 8 to 12 g of carbohydrates per kg of body mass daily for intense training", while adding that the upper end "is likely to be excessive for combat athletes competing in a weight-specific sport."

Notice what happens when you lay that grid over a descent. A camp with four to five hours of weekly training distributed across most days sits in the strength-trained or moderate bands, roughly 4–7 g/kg — comfortably above the 3.0–4.0 g/kg floor. As the deficit deepens and total intake compresses, the achievable carbohydrate intake slides down through that grid toward the floor, while the training that justified the higher band carries on unchanged.

The formal name for adjusting carbohydrate to the session in front of you is carbohydrate periodisation, and Impey and colleagues set out its rationale as the "fuel for the work required" paradigm, where availability is matched to the demands of the upcoming session. That framework was developed for endurance adaptation, not for weight-category sport in deficit, and the stand does not endorse train-low methods for fight camp. The transferable idea is narrower and safer: if carbohydrate has to be constrained somewhere, constraining it around the lowest-intensity work costs least, and the position stand's post-session guidance — carbohydrate at 1.2 g/kg/h or more, with 0.2–0.5 g/kg/h of protein — is where the highest-value grams sit.

Weeks one to four: the phase where nothing appears to be wrong

The first half of a camp is when the plan looks like it is working, and it is also when the errors that surface in week eight are being made.

At this stage the arithmetic is forgiving. The 80 kg athlete's floors sum to roughly 1,700 kcal at the low edge, and their intake is well above that, so hitting every floor and running a deficit are compatible without any trade-off at all. The scale moves. Sparring feels normal. Nothing signals.

Two things are worth setting up in this window because they are almost impossible to retrofit. The first is a measurement baseline. The stand recommends establishing resting metabolic rate and body composition early, precisely so that the descent rate can be calculated rather than guessed: "Accordingly, the sports nutrition professional can calculate a rate of weekly weight loss based on the duration of the fight camp and the total loss in body mass that is required; then plan a systematic longitudinal weight descent." That calculation is the whole of what fight camp planning does that guesswork does not: it turns a target into a rate, and a rate into something a scale can falsify by week three.

The second is the rate itself. The stand names 0.5–1 kg of body mass per week and, separately, 0.5–1% per week. Those are not the same constraint for every athlete — 1 kg is 1.25% for an 80 kg fighter and 1.9% for a 52 kg one — which is one more reason the percentage version travels better across divisions.

The rate figure has direct experimental support. Garthe and colleagues randomised 24 elite athletes to a weekly body-weight loss of 0.7% or 1.4%, all of them doing four resistance sessions a week alongside their usual training. Both groups lost about 5.5% of body weight. Lean body mass increased by 2.1% in the slow group and was unchanged in the fast group, a statistically significant difference, and the authors concluded that athletes wanting to gain lean mass and increase one-repetition-maximum strength during a weight-loss period should aim for 0.7% per week. Twenty-four athletes across mixed sports, over mean intervention periods of 8.5 and 5.3 weeks — not combat-specific, but directly on the question of what a faster descent costs.

Weeks five to eight: where the floors and the budget converge

This is the part of a camp the guidance describes least well and athletes experience most sharply.

The mechanism is convergence. Intake is coming down because the deficit has to be held against a falling resting metabolic rate and a flat training load. The floors are coming down because they are indexed to a falling body mass. But they are not coming down at the same rate, and the gap between them — the headroom in which a plan has choices — narrows from both directions. Past the point where required intake and the sum of the floors meet, hitting the floors and hitting the weight become the same budget, and one of them gives.

There is a published illustration of which one gives. The Frontiers in Nutrition protocol study by Maurício and colleagues followed 31 professional MMA athletes, 28 of them male, mean age 28 ± 4, through a supervised structured weight-management programme. Its initial phase, averaging 29 ± 17 days, was prescribed at a mean of 1,812 ± 502 kcal/day — described by the authors as being set without an energy deficit — with mean intakes of 194.1 g carbohydrate, 141.9 g protein and 46.9 g fat, against a mean pre-descent body mass of 72.38 kg.

Divide those through. Protein comes to 1.96 g/kg, at the top of the ISSN floor band. Fat comes to 0.65 g/kg, inside its band. Carbohydrate comes to 2.68 g/kg — below the 3.0–4.0 g/kg floor, before the rapid phase had begun.

Those are group means across a cohort, not one athlete's food diary, and the study was not designed to test the ISSN floors, which were published after its protocol was written. It is arithmetic on published numbers rather than a finding the authors report. But the pattern it shows is the pattern the whole sport shows: when the budget tightens, protein and fat hold their bands and carbohydrate is what goes under. The same cohort regained a mean of 7.5 kg — 11.25% of weigh-in weight — in the 24 to 36 hours after the scale, and 21 of the 31 won.

Fight week is a fuelling decision before it is a fluid one

The last week is a different problem and this article will not attempt it in detail, but one thing about it belongs here because it is continuous with everything above.

Fight week spends carbohydrate. The position stand describes water-bound glycogen stores being depleted through exercise and carbohydrate restriction to facilitate a 1–2% loss in body mass, with comparable losses available from a low-fibre intake. Whatever else fight week involves — and the acute methods, the graded 72/48/24-hour figures and the supervision conditions attached to all of them are covered in how much weight you can cut before a fight — the carbohydrate portion of it is a withdrawal from an account the previous eight weeks have been drawing on.

Which reframes the camp question. An athlete who has been under the carbohydrate floor since week four arrives at fight week with less glycogen to spend and therefore less body mass available from depletion. The stand makes exactly this point in its own terms: "The rate/amount of glycogen depletion is in part predicated on the athlete's typical carbohydrate intake." Fight week's arithmetic is downstream of camp's.

The corresponding note on the far side is that the stand's post-weigh-in carbohydrate figures — 8–12 g/kg where significant depletion occurred, 4–7 g/kg for more modest restriction — are conditioned on how much was actually depleted and on the length of the recovery window. They are not a fixed refeed.

What breaks first, and the boring signal that catches it

The failure sequence is recognisable and it is almost never a single decision.

The carbohydrate floor goes first. It is the easiest lever, the scale responds fastest because of the water bound to glycogen, and the cost lands in training quality about a week before anyone attributes it correctly. This is the point at which a descent stops being what the position stand describes.

Training quality degrades before the athlete notices. Kirk's data show load does not fall during camp, so a fuelled athlete and an under-fuelled one are doing the same sessions. The difference shows up in what those sessions produce, which is much harder to see from inside than a number on a scale.

The deficit deepens to compensate for a stalled rate. The scale stops responding, the intake comes down again, and now the descent is being run below the floors and below resting metabolic rate — the one line the stand explicitly says not to cross.

The athlete arrives at fight week further out than planned, with less to spend. Both halves of that sentence matter. There is more to remove and less glycogen and hydration margin to remove it from.

Then the recovery window is what fails. The fighter makes weight. The 24 to 36 hours afterwards do not go the way they were supposed to, and by then nothing is adjustable.

The stand's own warning sits at the top of that sequence: "It is advisable that the sports nutrition professional carefully monitor changes in body mass and body composition as it is common for combat athletes to lose weight too swiftly if they are not meeting their energy requirements during fight camp."

Every failure in that sequence is visible weeks early in one measurement, provided the measurement is taken the same way every time. The detection signal is a scale.

Daily body mass in identical conditions — same time, same state, same scale — converts a fight-week emergency into a week-three observation. The value is not any single reading; it is the trend line, and a trend line is only readable if the noise is controlled. Nana and colleagues demonstrated the principle in a related setting: across 31 physically active adults given five body-composition scans over two days, ordinary daily activity and a simple breakfast both substantially increased measurement error, and the authors concluded that a standardised protocol with fasted subjects is the most practical way to minimise it. That study is about DXA rather than bathroom scales, but the lesson transfers directly. An unstandardised measurement is not a smaller signal, it is a noisier one.

The stand adds a second, cheaper signal: weighing before and after training sessions as a way of gauging fluid turnover and sweat rates during camp — information that is useful in itself and more useful still because it tells you how much of a day-to-day scale movement was never body mass at all.

There is a reason to insist on this beyond physiology. A 2026 survey of 23 combat-sport teams by Meng and colleagues compared what coaches prescribed with what athletes reported doing. Athletes reported larger habitual weight losses than coaches recommended — a difference of about 3.1 percentage points of body mass in the unadjusted model, which lost statistical significance once sex was included as a moderator — and reported shorter descent durations than their coaches indicated. Ninety-one percent of coaches advised starting 22 or more days out; 64% of athletes reported starting 15 or more days out. That cohort had a mean age of 16, so it describes junior competitors rather than professionals. What it establishes is narrower and still worth having: the descent a coach believes is happening and the descent an athlete is running can be different descents, and a logged number is how that gets caught.

That is what Fighter Cut is for — building the plan backwards from the weigh-in date, classifying the rate of loss against the published bands, and showing the trend early enough to act on. It cannot know your physiology and it is not a substitute for the practitioner the position stand assumes. Your training log stays on your phone.

Zhong and colleagues' systematic review of 26 studies puts the surrounding problem plainly. Weight loss is practised by 66–100% of combat-sport athletes in the samples reviewed; the mean influence score for coaches was the highest at 368, followed by training partners at 321, with nutritionists and dietitians at 236 and doctors and physicians last at 192. The people best placed to catch a failing descent are the ones with the least influence over it.

The athletes these numbers were not measured on

The combat-sport weight literature is dominated by adult male professionals, and the honest limits of everything above follow from that.

The two case studies that anchor the energy-availability section are both single male athletes. The Frontiers cohort was 31 professionals of whom 28 were male. Kirk's training-load sample was 14 MMA athletes. These are the best available measurements and they are small, male-weighted samples.

For female athletes, Langan-Evans and colleagues make the gap explicit in a dedicated review: despite parallel participation in weight-category events, women are "drastically underrepresented in studies examining body mass loss interventions across both chronic and acute timeframes", and the relevant differences — body composition, and physiological systems modulated by ovarian hormones across the menstrual cycle or by hormonal contraception — need to be considered specifically rather than adjusted for with a coefficient. Low energy availability, female athlete triad and RED-S are the documented consequences the review identifies for these body-mass-loss strategies.

For adolescents there is even less. Zhong's review found combat-sport athletes commonly begin losing weight for competition as teenagers, with mean starting ages across studies ranging from 12.5 to 21 years, and Meng's 2026 team survey had a mean athlete age of 16 with a minimum of 13. Applying figures derived from adult professionals to a growing athlete is not a conservative extrapolation; it is an extrapolation with nothing underneath it. If you are working with juniors, the relevant authority is the federation's own minimum-weight rules and a physician, not a position stand written for professionals.

What we could not verify

Stated plainly, because an article this dense with figures owes you its gaps.

• A unit error we could trace but not resolve. The ISSN position stand reports "large decreases in testosterone below clinical reference ranges (<5 mmol·L−1)" when losing 13–15% of body mass over an eight-week camp. Testosterone is conventionally reported in nmol/L, not mmol/L. We traced the sentence to the narrative review it cites, Lebron et al. 2024, which prints the same unit, which in turn cites the two case studies. We have not seen a correction to either paper, and we have not printed the number as fact anywhere in this article.
• The 12–15% off-camp band is consensus, not measurement. Its own authors write that the numbers "have not yet been fully substantiated through research". We report it as what the stand says.
• The Maurício carbohydrate arithmetic is ours, not theirs. The 2.68 g/kg figure is our division of the study's published group-mean carbohydrate intake by its published group-mean body mass. The authors do not present it, the study was not designed to test the ISSN floors, and group means do not describe any individual athlete in that cohort.
• The position stand does not give training-day versus rest-day macronutrient distributions. Anything in that shape is imported from general sports-nutrition frameworks, and the transfer to a weight-category sport in deficit is an inference.
• Achten's carbohydrate data are from seven endurance runners. We use them for the direction of the effect, not for any number a fighter should apply.
• The internal protein ranges in the position stand differ across sections — 1.2–2.0, 1.2–2.2, 1.6–2.2 and 1.2–2.4 g/kg appear in different places. We have reported each with its context rather than picking one.
• Nothing here is specific to you. Not your division, your body composition, your medical history, your training load or your weigh-in format, and every one of those changes the answer.

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