How to lose water weight before a weigh-in

1. The claim under test, and who is actually asking

"How to lose water weight fast" is typed by two entirely different people, and the honest answer differs for each.

One is a general-health searcher who feels puffy and wants the number on the bathroom scale to move. The other has a weigh-in on a calendar, a contracted limit, and a promoter's scale to stand on. This article is written for the second reader and their coach, because that is the only one for whom the published literature has any figures at all.

For the first reader, the useful answer is short and unglamorous: day-to-day fluctuations on a scale are dominated by fluid and gut content, no source we could fetch supports an overnight target figure, and the interesting question is almost always what is driving the retention rather than how to remove it. That is a question for a clinician, not an article.

The claim under test for the second reader is the one the sport repeats constantly: that there is a known, safe amount of water an athlete can remove before a weigh-in, and a method for removing it. The first half of that does not survive checking. We fetched the current International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand for combat sports, a prospective study of 31 professional MMA athletes, a 256-athlete cross-sectional survey of rapid weight loss across eight combat sports, the NCAA's 2025-26 wrestling weight management packet, the IBJJF rules book, the Unified Rules of MMA and Nevada's administrative code. None of them names a percentage of body mass and calls it safe.

What they contain instead is a set of descriptions — of what athletes do, under what supervision, over what timescale, and what it costs them. That is a different kind of information and it is worth more, because it comes with its conditions attached.

The second half of the claim — that there is a method — is true but almost useless without the first. The methods are well documented and we describe them below. What this article does not do is sequence them, give volumes, give temperatures, or give durations. The moment a description of what supervised athletes did becomes an ordered list with numbers, it is a protocol, and nobody publishing a protocol on the open internet knows who is reading it, what division they are in, how far above it they sit, or whether anyone qualified is watching.

2. What water weight physically is

Water is the largest single component of a human body, and the fraction is not fixed. Popkin, D'Anci and Rosenberg's review in Nutrition Reviews puts it plainly: "Water comprises from 75% body weight in infants to 55% in elderly." That is a lifespan range across the general population. It is not an athlete-specific figure, and that review does not supply one.

The commonly repeated "about 60% of an adult male and 50–55% of an adult female" appears everywhere in fitness writing. We could not fetch a primary source stating it in this session, so we are not printing it as a sourced fact.

Body water sits in two broad compartments — inside the cells and outside them — and the movement between them is the mechanism that matters here. A water deficit raises the ionic concentration of the extracellular compartment. That concentration gradient draws water out of the intracellular space, and the cell shrinks. Osmoreceptors in the brain detect the change and drive both thirst and renal water conservation. Plasma osmolality is defended within a narrow band, roughly 275–290 mOsm/kg.

The textbook split — two-thirds intracellular, one-third extracellular — is physiologically standard and we still did not fetch a primary source for it here, so we describe the compartments qualitatively rather than printing fractions we did not verify. This is a health-adjacent article and the standard has to be the same for the boring facts as for the interesting ones.

The same applies to plasma volume. Sweat loss reduces circulating volume; that direction is well supported. Every specific "you lose X% of plasma volume at Y% dehydration" figure we chased traced back to secondary fitness writing rather than a measurement, so no percentage appears here.

What the athlete is actually able to move, in practical terms, is the extracellular fluid, the water stored alongside muscle glycogen, and — not water at all, but on the scale regardless — the residue of food in the digestive tract. The position stand treats that last one explicitly, describing fight-week losses that come partly from "a low-fiber intake of <10 g/day for 4 days", with losses it calls equivalent to the 1–2% attributed to glycogen depletion.

That is worth stating plainly because it reframes the whole question. A meaningful share of what a fighter removes in the last days before a weigh-in is not body water and was never part of their physiology in any interesting sense. It is what they ate.

3. Glycogen and its bound water

Glycogen holds water, and the ratio everyone quotes is wrong, or at least far less settled than its confidence suggests.

The 2025 ISSN position stand states it as "a branched polymer of glucose that binds to water at a ratio of 1 g glycogen to 2.7 g water." That is the number the document governing combat-sports nutrition uses: 2.7, not 3.

The folklore 3:1 — sometimes 3 to 4:1 — traces to Olsson and Saltin's 1970 paper in Acta Physiol Scand. Nineteen subjects performed glycogen-depleting arm and leg exercise, then ate a fat-and-protein diet for three days and a carbohydrate-enriched diet for four. Thigh and arm glycogen rose from 4.5 and 2.6 g per kg wet muscle to 19.9 and 16.9. Body weight rose 2.4 kg and total body water rose 2.2 L over those four days, and with glycogen stored calculated at 500 g or more, the authors concluded "3—4 g of water is bound with each gram of glycogen."

Read the design again: that is a division sum. Total body water change divided by an estimated glycogen mass, in 19 subjects on a supercompensation diet. It is a calculation, not a measurement of bound water, and it is not a fight-week cohort.

Fernández-Elías and colleagues in 2015 dehydrated nine aerobically trained subjects by 4.6 ± 0.2% through 150 minutes of cycling in the heat and then rehydrated them at two different levels. They reported at least 3 g of water stored with each gram of glycogen — and noted that the higher ratios seen under full rehydration were likely due to water not bound to glycogen at all. The authors themselves flagged that the ratio moved with how much the subjects drank.

The most honest assessment is Shiose and colleagues' 2022 narrative review in Nutrients, which traces the estimate back past Olsson and Saltin to Zants, working from Pavy's liver data, and reports that "results obtained from animal studies are confusing. First, some studies have confirmed a significant relationship… whereas other studies did not confirm this relationship." Their conclusion is the sentence to carry: "it can be assumed that body water increases approximately 3–4-fold when muscle glycogen is stored in humans. However, it should be noted that… the increase in body water accompanied by muscle glycogen storage cannot be concluded to be actually due to glycogen-binding water."

So: estimates cluster somewhere between 2.7 and 4 grams of water per gram of glycogen, the position stand that governs this sport uses 2.7, the original figure is a calculation roughly a century old at its root, and researchers actively caution that the association may not be causal binding. Anyone writing "every gram of glycogen holds three grams of water" as a settled fact is repeating a number nobody has directly measured.

What the position stand does say about the practical effect is bounded and conditional: during fight week, "water-bound glycogen stores can be depleted through exercise and carbohydrate restriction, facilitating a 1% to 2% loss in body mass." Fight week. Combat athletes. Inside the same supervised context the rest of the document describes.

4. Sodium and the extracellular compartment

Sodium governs the extracellular water gradient, which is why sodium manipulation appears in every description of fight-week practice.

The position stand's sentence is one line: "Sodium restriction and water loading are effective for inducing polyuria and acute water loss." That is the mechanism, reported as what the literature describes practitioners doing. It is not an instruction and there is no schedule attached to it here.

The physiology underneath is the same osmoreceptor loop described above. Extracellular ionic concentration sets the direction water moves across the cell membrane and drives the renal and thirst responses. Manipulating intake changes what the kidney does with the water it sees.

The combination of sodium restriction with a period of elevated fluid intake, followed by a taper, is the most prevalent single manoeuvre in professional MMA. In the 31-athlete Brazilian cohort study, 83.9% of athletes reported using water loading. We have an entire article on water loading before a weigh-in and what the evidence for it actually looks like, which is where that question belongs rather than here.

What this article will not print is the day-by-day fluid schedule used in that study. It was a supervised research protocol with investigators watching, and reprinting it as a list converts reportage into instruction. That distinction is the whole reason a sheet of research exists before an article does.

5. What the position stand actually says, with its conditions

The most-quoted numbers in this field are the graded losses: 6.7% of body mass at 72 hours out, 5.7% at 48, 4.4% at 24. They are quoted as a ceiling framework, as a safety guideline, and occasionally — catastrophically — as stages that add up to something near 17%.

They are none of those things. They began life as a measurement.

Peacock and colleagues, publishing in the Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology in 2022, collected data from 616 professional MMA athletes competing for the UFC between 2020 and 2022, aged 31.1 ± 4.0 years. The athletes' weight was obtained 72 hours, 48 hours and 24 hours before the official weigh-in, at the weigh-in, and before competition. The paper's own summary is that these athletes "average a weight loss of nearly 7% within 72 h prior to the official weigh-in" and "gain nearly 10% of total weight between the official weigh-in and competition."

The 2025 ISSN position stand restates those figures, as "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." Two of the position stand's authors are also authors of the Peacock paper. The stand did not measure them.

So the chain runs: a descriptive average of what 616 UFC fighters did, restated one citation later as "suitable", and then restated across the internet as a ceiling, a limit, or a safety framework. Nobody established any of these numbers as safe, and no study in the literature we fetched tested a threshold against harm.

They are also cumulative, not sequential. Each figure is the loss remaining from that timepoint to the weigh-in, which is exactly why they descend — the 72-hour figure already contains the 24-hour one. Adding them is arithmetically meaningless and the result is a fabricated number.

The same caution applies to the regain target. The stand says "rehydration/refueling protocols should aim to regain ≥10% of body mass to mitigate declines in performance and the negative effects of rapid weight loss" — and that 10% is the observed "nearly 10%" gain in the same UFC cohort.

The one sentence in the stand that actually endorses acute water removal must be read whole, because each clause is load-bearing:

"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 conditions, not one. During fight week — a bounded, managed phase, not a general practice. With appropriate supervision — the subject of the sentence, sitting between the method and the number. Optimally — the authors' own hedge on the range itself. An article that prints "2 to 4% in 24 hours" without the rest has changed what the source said.

The stand is also candid about how thin the ground is: "The long-term effects of frequent weight cuts on health and performance are unknown, necessitating further research," and "There remains a limited body of scientific research investigating rapid weight-loss strategies, which includes evaluations of the different methods, the influence on competitive performance, acute physiological changes, and refueling and recovery methods."

6. The methods the literature describes, and who supervises them

Seven method classes appear across the documents we fetched. Each is described here. None is sequenced, none carries a volume, a temperature or a duration, and that is deliberate.

Fluid restriction. The most prevalent method class across combat sports in Barley and Harms' 2025 survey of 256 athletes, and associated with larger losses within both two weeks and 24 hours of the weigh-in.

Water loading followed by a taper. Reported by 83.9% of the 31 professional MMA athletes in the Brazilian cohort. The position stand describes the sodium-restriction-plus-water-loading combination as inducing polyuria.

Sodium manipulation. Quoted above, from the position stand.

Carbohydrate restriction and glycogen depletion. The stand's 1–2% of body mass, during fight week, in combat athletes.

Low-fibre, low-residue intake. Under 10 g per day for four days, per the stand. This removes gut content, not body water, and the stand describes the losses as equivalent in magnitude to the glycogen figure.

Sweating: sauna, hot-water immersion, "mummy wraps" and plastic-suit training. These are the three named inside the supervision sentence. In the professional cohort, 74.2% reported sauna use and 64.5% reported training in plastic clothing. We treat these methods and what is known about them separately in sauna suits and hot water immersion.

Active dehydration through exercise in the heat. The NCAA's position on this is a single sentence: "Wrestlers should be educated about the negative effects of active dehydration techniques."

That NCAA line is worth sitting with, because the 2015 meta-analysis discussed below found the performance decrement roughly 2.7 times larger when dehydration was achieved actively through exercise than passively through heat. The governing body's caution and the pooled physiology point the same way.

Two things are absent from this list on purpose. Diuretics do not appear because they are a doping question and a cardiac-risk question at once, and neither fits responsibly inside an article about water physiology; that subject has its own piece. And there is no ordering. The literature reports which methods athletes use and how prevalent each is. It does not publish a sequence, and neither will we.

Barley and Harms also recorded something that belongs in this section rather than a footnote: use of certain high-risk methods was associated with an increased likelihood of disordered eating behaviours. Their own conclusion was that practitioners and regulators "should emphasise the use of smaller weight cuts and to begin losing weight further out from competition." That is the authors' recommendation, not ours, and it is the only recommendation in this article that came from a source rather than from us.

7. A worked scenario: the arithmetic for a 70 kg athlete

Take a hypothetical athlete weighing 70 kg, with a weigh-in 24 hours before competition. This is an arithmetic illustration on published figures, not a plan — Fighter Cut has no coached roster and no athlete described here exists.

The position stand's acute range, quoted whole above, is approximately 2 to 4% of body mass within 24 hours of the weigh-in, during fight week, with appropriate supervision. On 70 kg, 2% is 1.4 kg and 4% is 2.8 kg. The stand's own qualifier "optimally" sits on both ends.

The fight-week glycogen manoeuvre is described as facilitating a 1–2% loss: 0.7 to 1.4 kg on the same athlete. The low-fibre intake is described as producing an equivalent magnitude, which would be another 0.7 to 1.4 kg — and none of that is body water.

Put alongside each other, those figures show why the question "how much water can I lose" is the wrong question. A meaningful share of what the scale gives back is glycogen-associated water and gut residue rather than the extracellular fluid most people mean by "water weight", and the position stand's format table describes the sweat component separately: a net 4–6% from sweat where the weigh-in sits 24–36 hours out, 0–3% where it sits under four hours out.

Now change one variable. Suppose that same 70 kg athlete is competing at an IBJJF tournament instead, where the weigh-in happens in uniform immediately before the first match. The 4–6% band does not apply, the 0–3% band does, and the 24-hour acute range is describing a window this athlete does not have. Nothing about the athlete changed. The format changed, and the available mass changed with it.

The arithmetic that matters most is the one nobody runs: how far above the division the athlete is sitting when fight week begins. The stand reports the common recommendation of losing 0.5–1 kg of body mass per week, and an athlete who is 12 kg over with three weeks left has already put themselves outside the conditions every figure in this article was described under. Planning the descent week by week from the weigh-in date backwards, and seeing early whether the required rate is one the literature describes at all, is the part of this that is arithmetic rather than physiology — it is what the Fighter Cut app is built to do, and it does not make any cut safe.

8. What it costs: performance, cognition and the things we could not price

Hypohydration costs performance, but not uniformly, and the unevenness is the useful part.

Savoie and colleagues' 2015 meta-analysis in Sports Medicine, pooling 28 manuscripts, reported that hypohydration impaired overall muscle endurance by 8.3 ± 2.3% and muscle strength by 5.5 ± 1.0%. Anaerobic power fell 5.8 ± 2.3% and was significantly altered. Anaerobic capacity at −3.5 ± 2.3% and vertical jumping ability at 0.9 ± 0.7% were not.

Two conditions in the same analysis travel with those numbers. Using an active procedure to dehydrate participants decreased muscle performance by an additional 5.4 ± 1.9% — a 2.76-fold difference, P = 0.02 — compared with a passive procedure. And trained individuals showed a 3.3 ± 1.7% smaller decrease than untrained subjects, though that second comparison sat at P = 0.06 and so did not clear the paper's own significance threshold. The cohorts were mostly healthy adults, not combat athletes, and the number of effect estimates differs by outcome.

The vertical-jump null is the finding that earns trust, because it contradicts the framing everyone uses. Dehydration does not wreck everything equally. The authors went further and raised the possibility that a body water loss of around 3% may actually improve performance in body-mass-dependent tasks such as vertical jumping, for the obvious reason that the athlete is lighter.

That is also precisely why the folklore claim "3% dehydration costs you 10% of your strength" should not be repeated. It has no source. The actual meta-analysis reports 5.5 ± 1.0% for strength pooled across hypohydration levels and a null for jump. The 10% figure appears to be a compression of several unrelated findings and we could not trace it to any study.

On cognition, a 2018 meta-analysis by Wittbrodt and Millard-Stafford pooled 33 studies, 280 effect estimates and 413 subjects across 1–6% body-mass loss and reported a small but statistically significant overall impairment, effect size −0.21 (95% CI −0.31 to −0.11), described as most pronounced for attention, executive function and motor coordination beyond 2% body-mass loss. We reached that paper only through a search summary rather than the full text, so treat those figures as reported rather than read.

The ISSN stand sets the threshold lower than most athletes expect: "Even a small change of 2.5% in body weight due to dehydration can impair performance."

The symptom side comes from the 31-athlete Brazilian cohort, and the condition on it is the thing to notice. Those athletes lost a mean 7.25 kg — 10.56% of baseline — across the seven days leading up to the weigh-in, under a structured, prospectively supervised interventional protocol. During that cut, 58% reported fatigue, 32% cramps and 22% dizziness. No fainting or chest pain was reported. That is the supervised best case: more than half the athletes fatigued and nearly a quarter dizzy, with investigators watching.

That cohort regained a mean 7.5 kg, 11.25% of weigh-in body mass, within 30 hours of the official weigh-in — more than they had taken off. Sixty-eight percent of them won their bout, and that fact proves nothing about the cut; there was no control group and a win rate is not a performance measure.

On thermoregulation we have nothing to give. We did not fetch a primary source quantifying the effect of hypohydration on core temperature or sweat rate in this session, so this article prints no figure for it.

9. Weigh-in format changes the whole problem

The single variable that determines how much water loss is even on the table is when the weigh-in happens relative to the first contest. Not the athlete's discipline, not their willpower, not their experience.

The position stand states it directly. Where weigh-ins fall within 24–36 hours of competition — professional MMA and boxing — it describes a net 4–6% body-mass loss from sweat losses starting in a euhydrated state. Where weigh-ins fall less than four hours before competition — IBJJF and wrestling — it describes a net 0–3% from sweat losses starting euhydrated.

The IBJJF case is the cleanest illustration because there is no recovery window at all. The federation's own weigh-in page states that before their first fight the athlete checks their weight in the competition uniform, that "There is only one opportunity to check the weight", and that "If the competitor does not make his/her weight, they will be immediately disqualified." The Rules Book v6.1 of June 2024 corroborates: the inspector verifies the uniform meets specification before weighing (8.1.11), athletes may not change gis after weighing in for their first match under penalty of disqualification (8.1.13), and each athlete mounts the official scale once (8.3.1).

An athlete weighing in dehydrated in that format competes dehydrated, minutes later, with no fluid replaced. Every figure describing what supervised professional MMA athletes do in a 24–36 hour window is describing a problem that does not exist at an IBJJF tournament.

This is the reason a percentage borrowed across formats is misused rather than merely imprecise. Day-before, same-day and immediate-weigh-in are three different problems.

10. What the regulators actually check

Regulation in this area is fragmented, and the most commonly stated "rule" in the sport is not in the rulebook everyone attributes it to.

The Unified Rules of MMA. The Association of Boxing Commissions' Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts, last amended 6 August 2025, set the weight classes — Atomweight up to and including 105 lb through Super Heavyweight over 265 lb — and the catch-weight allowances, and stop there. Within a division, "there are no allowance restrictions if both combatants weigh-in within the same contracted division." Across divisions, "If a person misses the contracted weight and the two competitors are in different weight classes, the heavier opponent shall not exceed five (5) lbs. of the lower weighing fighter."

The document contains no rule about when a weigh-in happens and no hydration test. A case-insensitive search of the full extracted text for hydration, specific gravity or dehydration returns zero hits, and the only occurrence of "hour" is the bout-frequency rule. The near-universal claim that "the Unified Rules require a 24-hour weigh-in" is false. Weigh-in timing is set by the individual athletic commission and the bout agreement, not by the sport's unified rulebook.

Nevada. NAC 467.514(1) requires that each unarmed combatant be weighed in public, in front of the opponent, a Commission representative and a promoter representative, "at a time and place designated by the Executive Director" — so no fixed 24-hour rule sits in the regulation either. NAC 467.522(1) forfeits 25% of the purse to the opponent for missing contracted weight unless the difference is one pound or less, and 467.522(3) provides that "if, during the 1 hour following the time of weighing in, an unarmed combatant is able to make the weight or weighs 1 pound or less outside the agreed limits, no forfeit may be imposed." A Commission physician examines each combatant at the time of weighing in, under 467.528. NAC 467 as fetched contains no urine specific gravity requirement.

The NCAA. Collegiate men's wrestling is the one place in this article where a hydration threshold is written into a document that is in force. The 2025-26 packet states that "Urine specific gravity has been selected as the most practical, cost-efficient measure of hydration", tested by "refractometer (gold standard) or urinometer" with the explicit note that "Test strips are not permissible as a measuring device for specific gravity." If specific gravity exceeds 1.020, the wrestler must return not earlier than 24 hours. At or below 1.020, the initial hydrated body weight is recorded. From certification, loss is capped at 1.5% of body weight per week, and the lowest allowable weight is set at five percent body fat. The policy stance is stated as an aim: "Eliminate the tools used to accomplish rapid dehydration."

The NCAA is also honest that the threshold is a compromise, chosen because it "is simple to administer, non-invasive, and relatively inexpensive". We cover the sensitivity and classification problems of urine specific gravity as a hydration test in hydration testing at weigh-ins.

What we will not state. ONE Championship publicises a urine specific gravity test with a 1.025 pass threshold alongside its weigh-in; we could not locate a published rulebook or regulation stating it, only the promotion's own news pages and third-party explainers. California's ten-point weight-management programme is well reported but we reached only news coverage and meeting agendas, not regulation text, and did not verify its current status — so no CSAC number appears in this article at all.

11. Who this evidence does not cover

Nearly every magnitude figure above rests on adult male professionals or male collegiate wrestlers, in small cohorts.

In the Brazilian prospective cohort, 28 of 31 athletes were male. Three women is not a basis for any female-specific inference, and the authors do not attempt one. The NCAA packet quoted throughout is the men's wrestling programme; a separate women's packet exists and we did not extract it. The Barley and Harms survey does not report a sex breakdown in the abstract we fetched. The Savoie and Wittbrodt meta-analyses pool general healthy-adult cohorts, not combat athletes.

There is no sourced basis in this article for telling a female athlete what she can remove. The differences that matter — total body water as a fraction of mass, and cycle-related fluid shifts, which is the single most relevant mechanism for the general-health reader who typed "how to lose water weight" — are not adjustable with a coefficient applied to a male figure. We have no verified source for menstrual-cycle fluid dynamics in this article and will not improvise one.

Adolescents are similarly absent. The collegiate packet covers a young adult population under a season-long certification system with a body-fat floor; nothing here describes a growing athlete, and the weight-management architecture the NCAA built exists precisely because that population needed protecting rather than informing.

The cohort sizes are the other limitation worth stating. Thirty-one athletes in the prospective cut study. Nine in the glycogen rehydration study. Nineteen in the 1970 supercompensation paper. The UFC dataset is the outlier at 616, and it is descriptive — it records what happened, with no intervention and no control.

12. What we could not verify

The following are gaps in this article, named rather than papered over.

Any percentage described as safe. No document we fetched applies the word to a figure. The 10.56% loss in the Brazilian cohort is a measured description of what 31 supervised professionals did in a prospective study, not a safety statement, and the graded UFC figures are a measurement of 616 athletes rather than a threshold tested against harm.

The exact decimals 6.7 / 5.7 / 4.4. The Peacock paper's abstract rounds to "nearly 7%" and "nearly 10%". The three decimals appear in the ISSN position stand, which cites that work. So the measurement is confirmed and the precision is inherited from the restatement rather than read off the original.

The intracellular/extracellular fractions, the adult male and female total-body-water percentages, and any plasma-volume figure. All standard, none fetched from a primary source in this session.

The Savoie cognition companion figures. Wittbrodt and Millard-Stafford 2018 was paywalled; the effect size and confidence interval above come from a search summary of the abstract, not a read of the full text.

The Olsson and Saltin and Fernández-Elías papers were available to us only at abstract level. Both are paywalled.

Thermoregulatory cost. No primary source fetched, therefore no number printed.

ONE Championship's 1.025 threshold. Reported consistently and never located in a rule document.

Any California State Athletic Commission number, threshold or current force-of-law claim. Not verified; not printed.

The Brazilian cohort's weigh-in-to-bout interval. The published paper states both that the protocol was conducted eight days before competition and that regain occurred within a subsequent 30-hour recovery period leading to competition. Those two timings cannot both describe the same window. That is an inconsistency in the published text rather than an artefact of our extraction, so this article prints only "within 30 hours of the official weigh-in" and no interval between weigh-in and bout.

The 3,500-calorie rule, the 3:1 glycogen ratio and "3% costs you 10% of your strength" are three of the most repeated figures in this sport. The first is outside this article's scope. The second we traced to a calculation rather than a measurement. The third we could not trace to anything at all.

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, 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. Weight Loss and Competition Weight in Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Athletes — Peacock CA, French D, Sanders GJ, Ricci A, Stull C, Antonio J, *Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology*, 2022;7(4):115, doi:10.3390/jfmk7040115, PMID 36547661
3. An alternative structured weight management protocol to rapid weight loss in mixed martial arts — Maurício CA, Artioli GG, Gonçalves AF, et al., *Frontiers in Nutrition*, 2025;12:1581698, doi:10.3389/fnut.2025.1581698, PMID 41132567
4. Effect of Hypohydration on Muscle Endurance, Strength, Anaerobic Power and Capacity and Vertical Jumping Ability: A Meta-Analysis — Savoie FA, Kenefick RW, Ely BR, Cheuvront SN, Goulet ED, *Sports Medicine*, August 2015;45(8):1207–27, doi:10.1007/s40279-015-0349-0, PMID 26178327
5. Dehydration Impairs Cognitive Performance: A Meta-analysis — Wittbrodt MT, Millard-Stafford M, *Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise*, 2018, doi:10.1249/MSS.0000000000001682, PMID 29933347
6. Water, Hydration and Health — Popkin BM, D'Anci KE, Rosenberg IH, *Nutrition Reviews*, August 2010;68(8):439–458, doi:10.1111/j.1753-4887.2010.00304.x, PMID 20646222
7. Muscle Glycogen Assessment and Relationship with Body Hydration Status: A Narrative Review — Shiose K, et al., *Nutrients*, 29 December 2022;15(1):155, doi:10.3390/nu15010155, PMID 36615811
8. Variation in total body water with muscle glycogen changes in man — Olsson KE, Saltin B, *Acta Physiologica Scandinavica*, 1970;80(1):11–18, doi:10.1111/j.1748-1716.1970.tb04764.x, PMID 5475323
9. 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):1919–26, doi:10.1007/s00421-015-3175-z, PMID 25911631
10. Rapid Weight Loss Across Combat Sports and the Relationships Between Methods and Magnitude — Barley OR, Harms CA, *Translational Sports Medicine*, 2025;2025:2946317, doi:10.1155/tsm2/2946317, PMID 40177332
11. Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts, amended 6 August 2025 — Association of Boxing Commissions and Combative Sports, PDF, August 2025
12. 2025-26 Men's Wrestling Weight Management Program Packet — National Collegiate Athletic Association, PDF, in force for the 2025-26 season
13. IBJJF Weigh-Ins — International Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation, official weigh-in procedure page, accessed 23 September 2026
14. IBJJF Rules Book v6.1 — International Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation, June 2024, sections 8.1.11, 8.1.13, 8.3.1
15. Nevada Administrative Code chapter 467 — Unarmed Combat — Nevada State Athletic Commission / Nevada Legislature, NAC 467.514, 467.522, 467.528, accessed 23 September 2026

Read next