How Much Weight Can You Cut Before a Fight?

Q: What does the ISSN position stand say about weight cutting?

The stand — Ricci et al., Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 2025, volume 22, issue 1, article 2467909 — covers combat-sport weight management in phases. Off camp, it puts habitual weight at 12–15% above the division. During the descent, it sets macronutrient floors of 3.0–4.0 g/kg carbohydrate, 1.2–2.0 g/kg protein and 0.5–1.0 g/kg/day fat. For the days before weigh-in it gives graded figures of 6.7%, 5.7% and 4.4% of body mass at 72, 48 and 24 hours. And for the final 24 hours it describes acute water-loss methods at roughly 2–4% of body mass with appropriate supervision. It is open access via PubMed Central, and reading the original is worth more than any summary of it, including this one.

Q: How much weight do fighters put back on after the weigh-in?

A 2025 prospective study in Frontiers in Nutrition followed professional MMA athletes on a structured weight-management protocol and measured a mean recovery of 7.5 kg between weigh-in and competition — an 11.25% increase on weigh-in weight — across a 24–36 hour window. That figure is the most useful single number in the recent literature, because it defines the real constraint. A cut larger than what can be recovered in the time available does not produce a size advantage; it produces a smaller, more dehydrated athlete wearing a heavier division's name. Note the window: this figure does not transfer to same-day weigh-ins, where there are hours rather than days to rehydrate.

Ask ten coaches how much a fighter can take off before a weigh-in and you will get ten numbers, all of them confident and none of them sourced. Ten percent. Fifteen pounds. "As much as you can put back."

There is a better answer than any of those, and it has existed in the peer-reviewed literature since early 2025. The International Society of Sports Nutrition published a position stand specifically on nutrition and weight-cut strategies for mixed martial arts and other combat sports, and unlike the folklore it is graded by time: the amount it considers suitable depends on how many hours stand between you and the scale.

This article is what that paper says, stated precisely, with the places it stops applying to you named just as precisely. It is not a protocol. The distance between "here is what the literature reports" and "here is what you should do to your body on Thursday" is a physician, and this page is not one.

12–15%

How far above your division the position stand says to sit during the off-camp phase — the single decision that governs every number below it

Ricci et al., ISSN position stand, J Int Soc Sports Nutr 2025;22(1):2467909

6.7 / 5.7 / 4.4%

Body mass the stand describes as suitable to lose at 72 h, 48 h and 24 h before weigh-in — the figure shrinks as the clock runs out

Ricci et al., ISSN position stand, 2025

2–4%

Acute water loss within 24 h of weigh-in that the stand describes as effective, and only "with appropriate supervision"

Ricci et al., ISSN position stand, 2025

7.5 kg

Mean body mass professional MMA athletes regained between weigh-in and competition on a structured protocol — an 11.25% increase on weigh-in weight

Maurício et al., Front Nutr 2025;12:1581698

What this comes down to

The published figures are graded by time, not fixed: 6.7% of body mass at 72 hours out, 5.7% at 48 hours, 4.4% at 24 hours. A single "safe percentage" quoted without a time attached has already lost the information that matters.
The acute water phase inside the final 24 hours is described in the range of 2–4% of body mass, and the same sentence that gives the number attaches a supervision requirement to it. The two travel together or neither travels.
Everything above depends on a decision you make months earlier. The stand puts off-camp weight at 12–15% above the division — sit further out than that and the graded figures stop describing your situation.
Macronutrients have floors during the descent: carbohydrate 3.0–4.0 g/kg, protein 1.2–2.0 g/kg, fat 0.5–1.0 g/kg/day. A descent that drops below them is not the descent the paper studied.
The regain is the fight. In the Frontiers cohort, athletes came back 7.5 kg heavier between the scale and the cage. What you can put back on is a harder constraint than what you can take off.
The weigh-in format changes the arithmetic completely. Day-before and same-day weigh-ins are different sports from a fluid-balance point of view, and a figure borrowed across them is being misused.
There is no published figure for what is safe to do unsupervised, because that is not a question the literature has answered. Its absence is information, not an invitation to fill the gap.

The number everyone quotes, and where it comes from

The single most repeated claim in fight nutrition is some version of "you can cut ten percent". It travels without a citation because it does not have one — it is a rounded average of what fighters are observed to do, laundered into a recommendation about what they should do. Those are different statements, and the distance between them is the entire problem.

What actually exists is a 2025 position stand from the International Society of Sports Nutrition, written specifically for MMA and other combat sports. A position stand is not a single study; it is a committee of authors reading the field and stating what the evidence collectively supports. That makes it the most useful thing in the literature for this question and also the thing most worth quoting exactly, because a position stand's caveats are load-bearing.

The stand's structure is worth understanding before its numbers are. It splits the problem into phases: an off-camp or general-preparation phase where the athlete's habitual weight is set; a longitudinal descent during camp; and an acute phase in the final days where fluid, not tissue, is what moves. Each phase has its own arithmetic. Numbers lifted from one and applied to another are the most common way this paper gets misquoted.

What the position stand actually says

Start where the paper starts, which is not fight week.

Athletes should maintain a weight ranging 12% to 15% above the weight division requirement.

That sentence is about the off-season and the general-preparation phase, and it is the most consequential line in the document. It sets the size of the problem every later number is trying to solve. A fighter living at 25% above their division has not made the fight-week protocols harder; they have moved outside the conditions the fight-week protocols were described under.

During the descent, the stand puts floors under the macronutrients:

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.

These are floors, not targets, and they are per kilogram of body mass — which means they move as you do. The practical consequence is that a descent gets harder to fuel as it progresses, not easier, because the absolute grams shrink with the athlete while training load does not.

The three windows: 72, 48 and 24 hours

Here is the sentence that should replace "ten percent" in every gym in the country:

Suitable losses in body mass range from 6.7% at 72 h, 5.7% at 48 h, and 4.4% at 24 h, prior to weigh-in.

Read the direction of that carefully, because it is counter-intuitive to anyone who has spent time around a sauna. The figure falls as the weigh-in approaches. It is not a budget that accumulates; it is a statement about how much total body mass reduction is described as suitable given the recovery time remaining. Seventy-two hours out, there is room for more, because there is more time on the other side to undo it. At twenty-four hours, there is not.

The mistake this framing prevents is the additive one — reading 6.7 and 5.7 and 4.4 as stages of a plan that sum to something near seventeen percent. They are not stages. They are three answers to the same question asked at three moments.

For a 70 kg athlete those percentages are roughly 4.7 kg at 72 hours, 4.0 kg at 48, and 3.1 kg at 24. For a 93 kg light heavyweight they are 6.2, 5.3 and 4.1 kg. The percentage is the constant; the kilograms are not, which is the next thing that gets lost.

Why the same percentage means different things at different weights

A percentage of body mass sounds like it scales cleanly. Physiologically it does not, and the reason is that the fluid available to lose is not distributed in proportion to bodyweight in the way the arithmetic implies.

Two athletes at 4% of body mass are not in the same position if one of them is carrying meaningfully less body fat, because the fat-free mass is where most of the water lives. Muscle is roughly three-quarters water; adipose tissue is far less. The leaner athlete taking 4% is taking a larger fraction of it out of the compartment that does the contracting.

This is why a figure that reads as conservative for one fighter can be aggressive for their opponent at the identical percentage, and why the position stand's off-camp figure matters so much. The 12–15% band is not arbitrary — it is the condition under which the later percentages describe an athlete with something to give.

For the flyweights and strawweights this compounds. The lower the division, the smaller the absolute mass that a fixed percentage represents, and the less margin exists between a plan and a mistake. A 2% error on a 120 kg heavyweight is 2.4 kg of drinking water. On a 52 kg strawweight it is just over a kilogram, and there is far less of them from which it can come.

If your division and its exact limit are the first thing you need pinned down, that is what the rules and weight classes material is for — the number you are cutting to is not a detail you want to be approximating.

Where nutrition stops and medicine starts

The stand does describe the acute phase, and it is worth quoting in full because the qualifier is not decoration:

During fight week, acute water loss strategies, including sauna, hot water immersion, and mummy wraps, can be used effectively with appropriate supervision (optimally ~2–4% of body mass within 24 h of weigh-in).

Three things in one sentence. The methods are named. A range is given. And the range is conditioned on appropriate supervision — inside the parenthesis, in the same breath as the number.

There is no published figure for what is suitable to attempt without that supervision, and this is the single most important absence in the whole literature. It is not an oversight and it is not a gap for a coach to fill with judgement. Acute dehydration protocols move plasma volume, thermoregulation and electrolyte balance at the same time, and the failure mode is not "feeling rough on Friday" — the authors of the Frontiers protocol paper open by noting that reports in the media and scientific literature have documented severe health events, including hospitalisations and even athlete fatalities, associated with poorly managed rapid weight loss.

Note what that sentence is and is not. It is a statement by the authors of a 2025 prospective study, framing why they built an alternative protocol. It is not a count, it is not a rate, and this article will not present it as one, because the underlying figures are not in that paper. Anyone quoting you a specific number of deaths from weight cutting should be asked where it came from before it is repeated.

The regain is the fight

The most useful thing in the recent literature is not about the cut at all.

The Frontiers study followed professional MMA athletes through a structured weight-management protocol and measured what happened between the weigh-in and the bout. The mean body mass recovered was 7.5 kg, which the authors put at an 11.25% increase on weigh-in weight. Twenty-one of the thirty-one athletes — 67.7% — won.

That number reframes the whole question. If you can take off more than you can put back, you have not made weight cleverly; you have arranged to compete lighter, weaker and less hydrated than the person across from you who cut less. The binding constraint on a cut is not the descent. It is the recovery window, and the recovery window is set by something you usually do not control: when the commission schedules the scale.

That, incidentally, is why a plan built backwards from the weigh-in beats a plan built forwards from today. It is the logic the app is built on, and it is worth internalising even if you never open it.

The half of the plan nobody writes down

Most fighters can describe their cut in detail and their rehydration in a sentence. That asymmetry is strange, because the second half is where the measured outcomes live.

What the literature is reasonably clear about is that putting fluid back is not the same operation as drinking. Rehydration after an acute loss involves fluid, sodium and carbohydrate together, because water without electrolytes distributes poorly and is substantially excreted rather than retained — which is why a fighter can drink continuously through the evening and still be down on the morning's numbers. Glycogen is the other half: it binds water as it is restored, so refeeding carbohydrate is not only about energy, it is part of how the mass comes back at all.

What the literature is not clear about is the specific protocol — the volumes, the sodium concentrations, the timing intervals that circulate in gyms with far more confidence than their evidence supports. The Frontiers cohort recovered 7.5 kg on a structured programme with practitioner oversight; that is an outcome under supervision, not a recipe you can reconstruct from the abstract.

The practical consequence is worth stating plainly. If you have planned the descent in detail and the recovery not at all, you have planned the half that gets you onto the scale and left the half that decides the fight to improvisation, at the exact moment you are least equipped to improvise. Write both halves down, and have someone qualified look at the second one.

What the weigh-in format changes

Combat sports do not share a weigh-in convention, and this is the most under-appreciated variable in the entire discussion.

Worth being precise about where the timing rule actually lives, because it is routinely misattributed — this article got it wrong in its first published version. The ABC's Unified Rules of MMA, as amended 5 August 2026, set out the weight classes and the catch-weight allowances and contain no weigh-in timing provision at all. The familiar "no more than 24 hours before the event" comes from individual state commission regulations and from the ABC's separate boxing guidelines, not from the Unified Rules. So the answer to "when do I weigh in" is always the commission sanctioning your bout, never a single national rule.

What matters for the arithmetic is the gap it leaves you. A day-before weigh-in gives roughly 24 to 36 hours of rehydration. A same-day weigh-in gives hours. The Frontiers cohort's 7.5 kg regain was measured across a 24–36 hour window; nothing about that figure transfers to a fighter who weighs in at noon and competes at seven.

Grappling makes the point most sharply. In IBJJF competition the athlete weighs in and steps onto the mat essentially immediately, which removes the recovery window altogether. There is nothing to rehydrate into. The correct acute cut in that format is not a smaller version of the MMA one — for most competitors it is none, and the plan becomes a longitudinal descent that lands on the number naturally.

Boxing sits somewhere in between and varies by sanctioning body, which is why the WBC's weight-management programme exists at all: it adds check weights in the weeks before a bout precisely because the day-before scale had stopped being informative about what a fighter actually walks around at.

What the commissions have done about it

Regulators have not been idle, and the direction of travel is consistent even where the specific rules are not.

The California State Athletic Commission adopted a ten-point plan on extreme weight cutting in 2017, including fines for missing contracted weight, a mechanism for a fighter who misses to move up, and 30-day and 10-day weight checks for high-level title fights. Western Australia's combat sports regulator published a contestant safety strategy addressing rapid weight loss by dehydration specifically. ONE Championship moved to urine specific gravity testing with hydration checks repeated through fight week, some as close as three hours before competition, alongside daily weight checks.

What all of these have in common is that they attack the information problem rather than the physiology. None of them can stop a fighter dehydrating. What they can do is make the walking-around weight visible early enough that the cut is either survivable or the fight does not happen — which is, in the end, the same thing a well-run camp does for itself.

The practical read for an athlete: the rules that govern your bout are a real input to your plan, not paperwork. A commission with 10-day check weights has removed an option you might otherwise have counted on.

What breaks first

In roughly the order it happens:

The macronutrient floors go before the weight does. The first thing a struggling descent sacrifices is carbohydrate, because it is the easiest lever and the scale responds fastest — every gram of glycogen carries water with it. It is also the lever that most directly costs training quality, and it costs it a week before anyone notices.

Sleep goes next. It is rarely counted as part of a cut and it is one of the first things a caloric deficit plus dehydration degrades. The effect on the last week of sparring is larger than most fighters attribute to it.

Then the plan stops being a plan. The failure signature is recognisable: the descent falls behind, the deficit deepens to compensate, performance drops, the athlete arrives at fight week further out than intended, and the acute phase is asked to cover a gap it was never sized for. Almost every emergency cut is this sequence, not a single bad decision.

Then the recovery window is the thing that fails. Not the weigh-in — the fighter makes weight. It is the next eighteen hours that do not go the way they were supposed to, and by then there is nothing left to adjust.

The detection signal for all of it is boring and it is a scale, used consistently, early enough for the trend to mean something. Weighing daily in the same conditions is worth more than any protocol, because it converts a fight-week emergency into a problem you saw in week three of camp. That is most of what fight camp planning is actually for.

Amateurs, juniors and the athletes the numbers were not measured on

The position stand's cohort context matters, and this is where the honest limits of this article sit.

The literature on combat-sport weight cutting is dominated by adult male professionals. The graded figures above were not derived from adolescents, and applying them to a fifteen-year-old wrestler is not a conservative extrapolation — it is an extrapolation with no support underneath it, into a population still growing. Youth wrestling in particular has its own regulatory history on this question for good reason, and minimum-weight certification programmes exist because voluntary restraint did not work.

Female athletes are under-represented in the same literature, and the physiological differences that matter here — body composition, total body water as a fraction of mass, menstrual-cycle effects on fluid balance — are not the kind you can adjust for with a coefficient.

If you are an amateur competing for the first time, the useful advice is not a smaller percentage. It is that the acute phase is a professional's tool with a professional's support structure around it, and that competing at your actual weight is a legitimate strategy rather than an admission of something.

What we could not verify

Stated plainly, because an article that quotes numbers this precisely owes you its gaps:

No count of deaths or hospitalisations from weight cutting. The Frontiers authors state such events are documented; they cite no tally, and we did not locate an authoritative one. Any specific figure you are offered should be traced before it is repeated.
The 6.7 / 5.7 / 4.4% figures as read from the published summary. They are quoted here as the stand states them. We have not independently re-derived them from the underlying studies, and a position stand is a synthesis, not a measurement.
Commission rules change. The CSAC ten-point plan dates to 2017 and the WBC programme to 2019–20; both have had years to be amended. Check the current text with the commission sanctioning your bout rather than trusting this paragraph.
Nothing here is specific to you. Not your division, not your body composition, not your medical history, and not the format of your weigh-in.

Questions fighters ask

How much weight can a fighter cut in 24 hours?

The 2025 ISSN position stand describes suitable body-mass loss at 24 hours before weigh-in as 4.4%, and separately describes acute water-loss strategies in the range of approximately 2–4% of body mass within that final 24 hours — explicitly qualified as appropriate with supervision. For a 70 kg athlete, 4% is about 2.8 kg. Two cautions matter more than the number. First, the figure falls rather than rises as the weigh-in approaches, because the recovery time available on the other side is what constrains it. Second, there is no published figure for what is suitable to attempt without medical supervision, and the absence is not an invitation to estimate one. The methods involved — sauna, hot-water immersion, wraps — move plasma volume and thermoregulation simultaneously, which is why the paper attaches the supervision condition inside the same sentence as the range.

Is a 10% weight cut safe?

"Ten percent" is the most repeated figure in fight nutrition and it does not come from the literature. It is an observed average of what fighters do, restated as a recommendation about what they should do, and the two are not the same claim. The published guidance is graded by time — 6.7% at 72 hours, 5.7% at 48, 4.4% at 24 — and there is no safe figure established for an unsupervised cut at any percentage. The honest answer to whether 10% is acceptable is that it depends on how many hours remain, how far above the division the athlete normally lives, their body composition, and who is monitoring them. If nobody is monitoring them, the literature has no figure to offer at all.

What does the ISSN position stand say about weight cutting?

The stand — Ricci et al., Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 2025, volume 22, issue 1, article 2467909 — covers combat-sport weight management in phases. Off camp, it puts habitual weight at 12–15% above the division. During the descent, it sets macronutrient floors of 3.0–4.0 g/kg carbohydrate, 1.2–2.0 g/kg protein and 0.5–1.0 g/kg/day fat. For the days before weigh-in it gives graded figures of 6.7%, 5.7% and 4.4% of body mass at 72, 48 and 24 hours. And for the final 24 hours it describes acute water-loss methods at roughly 2–4% of body mass with appropriate supervision. It is open access via PubMed Central, and reading the original is worth more than any summary of it, including this one.

How much weight do fighters put back on after the weigh-in?

A 2025 prospective study in Frontiers in Nutrition followed professional MMA athletes on a structured weight-management protocol and measured a mean recovery of 7.5 kg between weigh-in and competition — an 11.25% increase on weigh-in weight — across a 24–36 hour window. That figure is the most useful single number in the recent literature, because it defines the real constraint. A cut larger than what can be recovered in the time available does not produce a size advantage; it produces a smaller, more dehydrated athlete wearing a heavier division's name. Note the window: this figure does not transfer to same-day weigh-ins, where there are hours rather than days to rehydrate.

Should I cut weight for a BJJ tournament?

IBJJF competition weighs athletes essentially immediately before they compete, which removes the rehydration window that makes an acute cut coherent in MMA or boxing. There is nothing to recover into. For most competitors the appropriate acute cut in that format is none, and the sensible plan is a longitudinal descent during preparation that arrives at the division naturally. Gi weight counts in IBJJF, which is a separate practical detail worth checking against the current rule set rather than assuming. The general principle generalises: the correct fight-week protocol is a function of the weigh-in format, and a format with no recovery window does not have a fight-week protocol.

What are the macronutrient floors during a weight cut?

The ISSN position stand states that macronutrients should not drop below 3.0–4.0 g/kg carbohydrate, 1.2–2.0 g/kg protein, and 0.5–1.0 g/kg/day fat. These are floors rather than targets, and being per kilogram of body mass they move downward as the athlete does — so the absolute grams shrink through a camp while training load usually does not. In practice carbohydrate is the first thing a struggling descent cuts, because glycogen carries water and the scale responds quickly, and it is also the lever that most directly degrades training quality. A descent that has gone below these floors is no longer the descent the position stand describes.

How far above my weight class should I walk around?

The position stand puts the off-camp and general-preparation figure at 12–15% above the division requirement. For a 70 kg division that is roughly 78–80 kg. This is the most consequential number in the whole document, because every fight-week figure assumes it. An athlete sitting 25% above their division has not merely made the later percentages harder to hit — they have moved outside the conditions those percentages were described under, and the graded 72/48/24-hour figures no longer describe their situation. The corollary is that fixing a weight-cutting problem almost never happens during fight week. It happens in the months when nothing is scheduled.

Does cutting weight make you weaker on fight night?

The mechanism is not controversial: acute dehydration reduces plasma volume and impairs thermoregulation, and those effects do not fully reverse the moment fluid is consumed. The genuinely contested question is how much performance is recovered in the window between weigh-in and competition, and the answer depends heavily on the size of the cut, the length of the window, and how the rehydration is executed. What can be said cleanly is that the trade is real and it is a trade — mass gained relative to an opponent against condition lost relative to yourself. Anyone presenting a cut as free is selling something. Anyone presenting a specific percentage performance loss as established fact should be asked for the study.

What is water loading and does it work?

Water loading is the practice of consuming a large fluid volume for several days and then restricting sharply before weigh-in, on the theory that the body's fluid-retention response lags the restriction and continues excreting. It appears throughout the sport and in parts of the literature as a described technique. It is also the area where the gap between how confidently it is discussed and how well it is evidenced is widest, particularly for the specific volumes and timings circulated in gyms. Because it manipulates fluid and electrolyte balance directly, it belongs in the same category as the other acute methods: not something to run from a forum post, and covered by the same supervision condition the position stand attaches to the acute phase.

Do the same figures apply to amateur and youth fighters?

No, and this is the clearest limitation in the literature. The evidence base is dominated by adult male professionals, and applying figures derived from that population to adolescents is an extrapolation with nothing underneath it — into athletes who are still growing. Youth wrestling developed minimum-weight certification programmes precisely because voluntary restraint proved insufficient. Female athletes are also under-represented, and the relevant differences — body composition, total body water as a fraction of mass, cycle effects on fluid balance — are not adjustable with a coefficient. For a first-time amateur, the useful guidance is not a smaller percentage but a different plan: compete at the weight you actually are.

What do athletic commissions do about extreme weight cutting?

The direction is consistent even where the specific rules differ. The California State Athletic Commission adopted a ten-point plan in 2017 that included fines for missing contracted weight, a route for a fighter who misses to move up a division, and 30-day and 10-day check weights for high-level title bouts. Western Australia's regulator published a contestant-safety strategy on rapid weight loss by dehydration. ONE Championship uses urine specific gravity testing with hydration checks through fight week. None of these can prevent dehydration physiologically; what they do is make walking-around weight visible early enough that an unsurvivable cut is caught before the fight is made. Check the current rules with the commission sanctioning your bout — these programmes get amended.

How does the weigh-in format change the plan?

Completely, and it is the most under-weighted variable in the discussion. First, a correction worth carrying: the ABC's Unified Rules of MMA (amended 5 August 2026) contain no weigh-in timing provision — they set weight classes and catch-weight allowances only. The familiar 24-hour rule comes from state commission regulations and the ABC's separate boxing guidelines, so the authority to ask is always the commission sanctioning your bout. What the format then decides is the gap: a day-before scale gives roughly 24–36 hours to rehydrate, a same-day scale gives hours. Every regain figure in the literature, including the 7.5 kg from the Frontiers cohort, was measured under a specific window and does not transfer across formats. Grappling under IBJJF rules removes the window entirely. Before any percentage is chosen, the format has to be known — it is the variable that determines whether an acute phase makes sense at all.

Why does the suitable percentage get smaller closer to the weigh-in?

Because the constraint is not how much can be removed, it is how much can be put back before competing. At 72 hours there is more recovery time available on the far side of the weigh-in, so a larger total reduction is described as suitable; at 24 hours there is less, so the figure falls to 4.4%. The most common misreading is additive — treating 6.7%, 5.7% and 4.4% as sequential stages that sum to something near 17%. They are not stages. They are three answers to the same question asked at three different moments, and only one of them applies to where you actually are.

Can I use this article to plan my cut?

No, and it is written to make that refusal explicit. It reports what the published literature states, with citations you can open and check yourself. It does not know your division, your body composition, your medical history, your weigh-in format or your training load, and every one of those changes the answer. The acute phase in particular carries a supervision requirement in the source material itself, which no article can satisfy. Use this to ask better questions of a physician or a registered dietitian who knows your history — and to notice when someone confidently quotes you a number that the literature does not contain.

Sources

Sourced to

International society of sports nutrition position stand: nutrition and weight cut strategies for mixed martial arts and other combat sports — Ricci AA et al., Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 2025;22(1):2467909. DOI 10.1080/15502783.2025.2467909, PMID 40059405
An alternative structured weight management protocol to rapid weight loss in mixed martial arts: a prospective interventional study — Maurício CA et al., Frontiers in Nutrition, 8 October 2025;12:1581698. DOI 10.3389/fnut.2025.1581698, PMID 41132567
The Association between Rapid Weight Loss and Body Composition in Elite Combat Sports Athletes — PubMed Central, peer-reviewed
Rapid Weight Changes and Competitive Outcomes in Muay Thai and Mixed Martial Arts: A 14-Month Study of 24 Combat Sports Events — PubMed Central, peer-reviewed
Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts — Association of Boxing Commissions and Combative Sports, revision 8.2026 (amended 5 August 2026)
WBC Weight Management Program 2019–20 — World Boxing Council, hosted by the Association of Boxing Commissions
Contestant Safety Strategy to Address Rapid Weight Loss (Weight Cutting) by Dehydration — by-dehydration) — Combat Sports Commission, Government of Western Australia
California approves 10-point weight-cutting plan — MMA Junkie, May 2017, reporting the California State Athletic Commission programme
ABC Regulatory Guidelines — Association of Boxing Commissions and Combative Sports

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