How to rehydrate after a weigh-in

The question the sport asks backwards

The binding constraint on a weight cut is not how much you can take off. It is how much you can put back before you compete, and whether what comes back is the tissue that does the work.

That reframing is not rhetorical. It is what the numbers force. A cut that removes more than the recovery window can restore does not deliver a size advantage — it delivers a smaller, drier athlete standing opposite someone who cut less and arrived intact. The descent has one hard limit, the scale. The recovery has three: how fast the gut will accept fluid, how much of that fluid the kidney lets you keep, and how many hours the commission has given you. None of the three respond to effort.

The rest of this page works through what has actually been measured against each of those limits, and where measurement stops and gym folklore takes over. For the descent side of the same problem — the graded 72, 48 and 24-hour figures and the conditions attached to them — see how much weight can be taken off before a weigh-in.

What the Frontiers cohort actually measured

The most-quoted recent number comes from a 2025 prospective interventional study in Frontiers in Nutrition, and it is worth stating with all of its conditions rather than as a headline.

Maurício and colleagues followed 31 Brazilian professional MMA athletes — 28 male, 3 female, mean age 28 ± 4 years, all with prior experience of rapid weight loss — through a structured weight-management protocol. In the seven days before the weigh-in the group lost a mean of 7.25 kg, which the authors put at 10.56% of initial body weight. Then, in the authors' words: "Following the weigh-in, within the subsequent 30-h recovery period leading up to competition, athletes regained an average of 7.5 kg, equating to an 11.25% increase from their weigh-in weight."

The group's table numbers make the shape clearer. Mean body mass before the cut was 72.38 kg; at weigh-in, 64.8 kg; at 24 to 36 hours after the weigh-in, 72 kg. In the authors' summary, "the post-weigh-in weight regain was equivalent to the athletes' initial body weight, demonstrating complete restoration."

Four conditions travel with that figure and none of them are optional. It was measured in professional adults, under a nutritionist's supervision with individualised plans and daily food-photo review; the recovery plan the paper describes "spanned 24 to 36 h"; the study was a single-arm design with no control group; and the authors state plainly that rapid weight loss "should be discouraged whenever possible and implemented only under professional supervision." Strip any one of those away and the number stops describing the situation it was measured in.

Because this is the paper everyone cites, it is worth reproducing what it says its athletes actually did rather than paraphrasing it into a set of instructions.

"Immediately after weigh-in, athletes consumed 1.5 L of electrolyte drinks over 90 min. After this initial rehydration, the solid food phase commenced, emphasizing carbohydrate- and protein-rich foods. Carbohydrates were the predominant macronutrient, followed by protein and fat. Total liquid consumption reached 7 L (±0.5), including electrolyte drinks and fruit juices consumed alongside meals and distributed throughout the day. This recovery plan spanned 24 to 36 h." The recovery-phase macronutrient split reported in the paper is roughly 70% carbohydrate, 16% protein, 14% fat.

Two things about that description. First, it is a report of what a supervised cohort was given, not a validated dose — the study had no comparison arm, so nothing in it establishes that 7 L outperformed 5 L or 9 L. Second, the paper states that its electrolyte composition rationale followed the American College of Sports Medicine's 2007 position stand on exercise and fluid replacement, which is a general-athlete document rather than a combat-sport one.

That is the honest status of the most specific rehydration description in the current combat-sport literature: a single-arm observation of a supervised group, borrowing its electrolyte logic from a nineteen-year-old general position stand.

Why water alone leaves almost as fast as it arrives

Plain water is the worst-performing rehydration fluid available, and the reason is renal, not gastrointestinal.

The definitive demonstration is old and still unbeaten. Shirreffs, Taylor, Leiper and Maughan dehydrated twelve men by about 2% of body mass and had them drink volumes equal to 50%, 100%, 150% and 200% of the mass lost, using drinks containing either 23 or 61 mmol per litre of sodium. Their conclusion: "A drink volume greater than sweat loss during exercise must be ingested to restore fluid balance, but unless the sodium content of the beverage is sufficiently high this will merely result in an increased urinary output."

The 2017 review by Evans, James, Shirreffs and Maughan in the Journal of Applied Physiology states the mechanism directly: "ingestion of large volumes of plain water results in a prompt diuresis, effectively preventing longer-term maintenance of water balance," and "addition of sodium to a rehydration solution is beneficial for maintenance of fluid balance due to its effect on extracellular fluid osmolality and volume." The same review notes that carbohydrate and protein co-ingestion can promote retention by influencing the absorption and distribution of the ingested water.

This is why the fighter who drinks continuously through the evening and is still down on the morning's numbers has not failed at drinking. Drinking was never the mechanism. Diluting plasma with unsalted water triggers exactly the response the body is built for: it suppresses the hormonal signal to conserve, and it sends the volume back out. The fluid passed through.

The corollary is the uncomfortable one. If the mechanism is osmotic, then more water is not the fix for water not being retained, and past a point it becomes its own hazard. That failure mode — exercise-associated hyponatraemia, caused by fluid intake exceeding losses — has an international consensus statement devoted to it, and it is the reason "just drink more" is not a neutral instruction.

Glycogen is the other half of the returning mass

Roughly half of a serious post-weigh-in regain is not free water at all. It is carbohydrate, stored as glycogen, and the water that glycogen carries with it.

Fernández-Elías and colleagues tested the long-held 1:3 ratio directly, taking muscle biopsies from nine trained subjects during recovery from prolonged exercise in the heat. Their finding: "Our findings agree with the long held notion that each gram of glycogen is stored in human muscle with at least 3 g of water." In the condition where fluid losses were fully replaced, the observed ratio was far higher — 1:17 — which the authors attribute to water storage not bound to glycogen.

That is why refeeding carbohydrate after a weigh-in is not only about fuel. It is part of how the mass returns at all, and it is why a fighter who rehydrates diligently but refuses to eat carbohydrate tends to look and weigh worse than the arithmetic of their fluid intake suggests.

The ISSN position stand puts figures on the carbohydrate side, and they are large: "Post-weigh-in carbohydrate intake at 8–12 g/kg may be appropriate for combat athletes that undertook significant glycogen depletion strategies during fight week. About 4–7 g/kg may be suitable for modest carbohydrate restriction." Note the conditionality. The high band is explicitly for athletes who ran a glycogen depletion strategy during fight week; it is not a general recommendation, and applying the depleted-band figure to an athlete who did not deplete is a misuse of the number.

Mass on the scale is not water in the tissue

This is the single most important thing on this page, and it is the thing the 7.5 kg figure most easily obscures: the Frontiers study measured mass, not hydration. Its own limitations section confirms there was no direct hydration measurement.

When someone does measure hydration, the picture changes. Jetton and colleagues took urinary hydration measures and body mass from 40 MMA fighters roughly 24 hours before and again roughly 2 hours before competition. The fighters gained 3.40 ± 2.2 kg, or 4.4% of body weight, across the ~22-hour window. Urine specific gravity fell from 1.028 ± 0.001 to 1.020 ± 0.001 — an improvement, but not a resolution. The authors report that "39% of the MMA fighters presented with a Usg of >1.021 immediately before competition indicating significant or serious dehydration," and conclude that "a significant proportion of MMA fighters are not successfully rehydrating before competition and subsequently are competing in a dehydrated state."

Set the two studies side by side and the lesson is unmistakable. A supervised cohort restored 11.25% of weigh-in mass in 30 hours. An unsupervised field sample restored 4.4% in 22 hours and roughly two in five were still measurably dehydrated at cage-side. The gap between those outcomes is not a gap in willpower. It is the difference between a monitored plan and an improvised one.

And mass returning does not mean capacity returning. Barley and colleagues dehydrated 14 MMA athletes by 4.8% of body mass and then allowed unrestricted food and fluid. Repeat sled-push times were slower than control both 3 hours and 24 hours afterwards; medicine-ball throw distance was shorter at 24 hours; urine specific gravity was still higher than control at 24 hours. Their conclusion is quoted here in full because it is the sentence the sport skips: "There is need for caution when athletes use dehydration for weight loss 24 hours before competition."

What the position stand recommends, and where it disagrees with itself

The 2025 ISSN position stand is the most specific published guidance on post-weigh-in recovery, and it contains an internal inconsistency that anyone quoting it should know about.

Its numbered summary statement 12 reads: "Oral rehydration solutions (1 to 1.5 liters/h) combined with a sodium range of 50–90 mmol/dL should take precedence immediately post-weigh-in." Statement 13 adds: "Fast-acting carbohydrates at a tolerable rate of ≤ 60 g/h should follow oral rehydration solutions. Post weigh-in intake of fiber should be limited to avoid gastrointestinal distress." Statement 15 sets the target: "Post weigh-in, rehydration/refueling protocols should aim to regain ≥10% of body mass to mitigate declines in performance and the negative effects of rapid weight loss."

The body of the same paper describes something slower. It recommends, for athletes hypohydrated by more than 3% of body mass, "a conservative initial bolus of approximately 300–500 mL of fluid immediately after the official weigh-ins, followed by additional volumes (~240–350 mL) at regular intervals (every 30 min) to maintain gastric volume." Work that through and it comes to roughly 480–700 mL per hour — somewhere between a third and a half of the 1–1.5 L/h in the summary statement. Both figures are in the same document. We do not know which the authors intend, and this article is not going to pick one for you.

The sodium units are the second problem. The stand prints its oral rehydration solution range as "50–90 mmol/dL" and, elsewhere in the body text, gives typical sweat sodium losses as "~20–80 mmol/dL" and commercial sports drinks as "<30 mmol/dL sodium". Taken literally, per decilitre, an oral rehydration solution at the low end of that range would be 500 mmol of sodium per litre. For comparison, the WHO and UNICEF reduced-osmolarity oral rehydration salts formulation — a clinical product, not a sports one — contains 75 mmol of sodium per litre at a total osmolarity of 245 mOsm/L. The rehydration trials above used drinks at 23 and 61 mmol per litre.

The most plausible reading is that the intended unit throughout is mmol per litre, in which case the stand's range sits sensibly alongside clinical and sports rehydration solutions. But we are not the authors, and converting somebody else's published units on their behalf and then handing you the result as a number to mix a drink from is exactly the failure this site exists to avoid. Take it to a practitioner who can read the original with you.

The gut is the rate limiter

Everything above assumes the fluid gets absorbed. The stomach is where most post-weigh-in plans actually fail, and the constraints are physical.

The ISSN stand summarises the relevant physiology: gastric emptying rates "generally level off around 600 ml, with larger volumes (>1,000 ml) resulting in slower emptying," and emptying is further slowed by intense exercise, by hypohydration exceeding 3% of body mass, and by the reduced food and fluid intake that precedes a weigh-in. In other words, the exact state a fighter is in when they step off the scale is the state in which the gut is least able to move what they pour into it.

Concentration matters as much as volume. Clayton, Evans and James had subjects rehydrate with either a hypotonic 2% or a hypertonic 10% glucose-electrolyte drink after exercise-induced dehydration. At the end of the gastric sampling period, 0.3% of the 2% drink remained in the stomach — against 42.1% of the 10% drink. A drink that sits in the stomach is not rehydrating anyone; it is producing the bloated, nauseated, cannot-eat state that wrecks the second half of a recovery window.

This is why the stand pairs its rehydration guidance with a 2–3% carbohydrate solution for hypohydration greater than 3% of body mass, reserves ~5% sports drinks for lesser deficits, and states — in a sentence reproduced here as printed, missing verb and all — that "Fiber intake post weigh-in contraindicated for optimal post weigh-in recovery and should be limited." It also notes that "no literature on specific foods that cause GI distress in combat athletes exists" — the food-avoidance list it offers is the authors' suggestion, drawn from general and athlete populations, and it is labelled as such.

The practical read is not a menu. It is that the gut sets a ceiling on the rate of recovery that no amount of determination moves, and that ceiling is lower in a dehydrated, glycogen-depleted, low-residue state than it is in any laboratory that measured it.

A worked scenario: the arithmetic at 70 kg

This is arithmetic on published figures, framed as a scenario. It is not a plan, and the point of it is to show that the ceiling is set by format and physiology rather than by resolve.

Take a hypothetical lightweight contracted at 155 lb — 70.3 kg — competing under a day-before weigh-in with roughly 30 hours to the cage. They make weight exactly.

Statement 15 of the ISSN stand puts the target at regaining at least 10% of body mass, so somewhere around 7 kg, arriving at roughly 77 kg. The Frontiers cohort's 11.25% would be about 7.9 kg, arriving near 78 kg. Both figures are in the same territory, and both assume a full day or more.

Now price it. On the carbohydrate side, the stand's depleted-athlete band of 8–12 g/kg would be roughly 560 to 840 g of carbohydrate for this athlete. At the stand's own tolerance ceiling of ≤60 g/h, 560 g takes over nine hours of continuous ingestion and 840 g takes fourteen. Across a 24–36 hour window that is uncomfortable but arithmetically fine. On the fluid side, the Frontiers group's plan reported 7 L (±0.5) of total liquid across 24 to 36 hours, which is comfortably inside even the slower of the stand's two conflicting rates.

Now move the same athlete to a same-day weigh-in with two hours to the mat. At ≤60 g/h, two hours buys at most about 120 g of carbohydrate — around a fifth of the lower bound of the depleted band. At even the faster fluid rate, two hours buys 2–3 L against a plan built on 7 L. Nothing about the target survives the change of format. The stand says as much in plain language: athletes with a 1–2 hour window "will not be able to deploy the same type of acute water loss strategies and rehydration practices as those with longer recovery windows."

The scenario's only conclusion is a negative one, and it is the useful kind. The recovery window is not a variable you optimise. It is a constraint you plan the entire cut inside, months before fight week.

The weigh-in format decides everything

Combat sports do not share a weigh-in convention, and the differences are not variations on a theme. They are different problems with different answers.

The ISSN stand tabulates four bands, each with a net body-mass loss described as workable given the recovery time available, and each conditioned on starting "in a euhydrated state" and on the supervision requirement the stand attaches to acute methods generally. Weigh-ins less than 4 hours before competition — NCAA and Olympic freestyle wrestling, IBJJF, ADCC — carry a net 0–3%. Weigh-ins 4–12 hours out, such as amateur boxing and amateur Muay Thai, carry 2–4%. Weigh-ins 12–24 hours out, such as IJF judo and Olympic boxing, carry 3–5%. Weigh-ins 24–36 hours out, which is where professional MMA, boxing, kickboxing and Muay Thai sit, carry 4–6%.

Read the direction. The allowance shrinks as the recovery window shrinks, because the constraint is recovery, not removal. That is the same logic that makes the pre-weigh-in figures fall as the scale approaches, and it is the single most misread structure in this literature.

Grappling makes the point at its sharpest. The IBJJF's own weigh-in page states: "Before his/her first fight, the athlete will check his/her weight with the Gi," 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." There is no recovery window at all — the athlete weighs in wearing what they will compete in, minutes before competing. There is nothing to rehydrate into, and an acute water cut in that format has no second half. For most competitors under those rules the appropriate acute phase is none, and the plan becomes a longitudinal descent that arrives at the division naturally. The rules and weight classes material is where to pin down which format your event actually uses before anything else is decided.

What the rule books cap

Regulators do not only govern the descent. In boxing, at least, they govern the regain — and the caps are lower than the figures the MMA literature describes.

The Association of Boxing Commissions and Combative Sports publishes regulatory guidelines whose weigh-in section states that "boxers shall be weighed within twenty-four hours prior to the scheduled event," and then adds a provision that is rarely quoted: "Boxers who weigh-in twelve to twenty-four hours prior to the scheduled event shall be required to re-weigh two hours prior to the scheduled event start time and will not be allowed to exceed the weight specified in the boxer/promoter contract by more than ten pounds." Ten pounds is 4.54 kg. For our hypothetical 70.3 kg athlete, that is a hard ceiling of about 6.5% regain — well short of the ≥10% the ISSN stand describes as the target and well short of the Frontiers cohort's 11.25%.

The World Boxing Council's Weight Management Program, which the WBC states began effective 1 January 2019, sets a comparable on-site limit. Its published programme summary lists "Safety weigh-in 30-14-7: 30 day (10%); 14 day (5%); 7 day (3%)" and "Weigh-in on site the day of the fight: On site (10%)", alongside penalties for non-compliance including fines, withdrawal of sanctioning and purse deductions.

Two status notes matter here, and this is exactly where articles usually go wrong. The ABC document is titled as guidelines and its page carries a "Modified July 27, 2005" line; guidelines are adopted at the discretion of individual commissions, and the commission sanctioning your bout is the authority on what is in force. The WBC document we read is the 2019–20 programme presentation; we could not confirm the text currently in force in 2026.

One more absence is worth naming. The current Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts published by the ABC — the version headed as amended with nonsubstantial changes on 6 August 2025 — sets weight classes, allowances and catch-weight limits, but the document itself contains no weigh-in timing provision. That timing comes from the sanctioning commission's own regulations, not from the Unified Rules. If you have read elsewhere that the Unified Rules require a weigh-in within 24 hours, that claim is not in the document we read.

Does coming back heavier actually win fights?

The honest answer is that the association exists in the data and the causation does not.

The clearest evidence is from judo. Reale, Cox, Slater and Burke weighed 86 senior judoka — 36 female, 50 male — at the official weigh-in and again one hour before their first fight, 15 to 20 hours later. Mean regain was 2.3 ± 2.0% of body mass in males and 3.1 ± 2.2% in females. Medal winners regained significantly more than non-medallists for males and for the sexes combined, though not for females alone, and winners regained more than losers across all fights. The authors' own interpretation is cautious: this "may reflect the greater magnitude of the BM loss needed to achieve weigh-in targets which also relates to the experience level of successful athletes." In other words, bigger regain may be a marker of a bigger cut by a more experienced athlete rather than a cause of winning.

The Frontiers cohort reported that 67.7% — 21 of 31 athletes — won their bouts. With no control group, no comparison arm and a self-selected professional sample, that percentage cannot be read as an effect of the protocol. It is a descriptive statistic about what happened to a group.

And the narrative review by Barley, Chapman and Abbiss states the field-level position bluntly: "The influence of weight-cutting on performance is unclear, with studies suggesting a negative or no effect. However, larger weight-cuts (~5% of body mass in <24 h) do impair repeat-effort performance," adding that "it is unclear if the benefit from competing against a smaller opponent outweighs the observed reduction in physical capacity."

Anyone who tells you the trade is settled is telling you something the literature does not say.

What breaks first

In roughly the order it happens.

The stomach goes before the plan does. The first hour after a weigh-in is when a dehydrated, glycogen-depleted, low-fibre gut is asked to accept the largest bolus it will see all week, and the literature above says that is when it is least able to. The signature is early: nausea, distension, the sense that nothing is moving. Everything downstream of that hour depends on it going well.

Then the fluid stops being retained. Volume without sodium produces urine, not plasma. The tell is frequent, pale, high-volume urination through the evening alongside a scale that has stalled — the classic picture of drinking a great deal and keeping very little.

Then the refeed collides with sleep. A recovery window that runs overnight has to fit several hundred grams of carbohydrate and several litres of fluid around the hours a fighter is supposed to be asleep before competing. Something gives, and it is usually sleep.

Then the window closes with the job half done. The fighter made weight. That was never the risk. The risk was the next thirty hours, and by the time it is visible there is nothing left to adjust.

The detection signal for all of it is unglamorous: a scale used consistently and a plan written down in advance for both halves, not just the descent. Fighter Cut is built to plan backwards from a weigh-in date and log weight against the trend, which is the part software can honestly help with — it cannot tell you what your body will retain, and neither can anything else you can install.

The athletes these numbers were not measured on

Every figure on this page comes from a population, and the populations are narrower than the confidence with which the numbers get repeated.

Women are barely in the data. The Frontiers cohort was 28 men and 3 women. The judo study, which did include 36 women, found the medal-winner regain difference significant for males and for the sexes combined but not for females alone. The Jetton and Barley MMA samples are male. Differences in body composition, total body water as a fraction of mass, and cycle effects on fluid balance are not adjustable with a coefficient, and nobody has published the coefficient anyway.

Adolescents are excluded by the authors themselves. The Frontiers authors write that they "do not recommend applying these methods to children or adolescents under 18 years of age, or to athletes with existing medical conditions, such as kidney issues." That is not this article being cautious on their behalf; it is their own exclusion, printed in their own paper.

Amateurs are not professionals with less experience. Every protocol described here assumed supervision — a nutritionist reviewing daily food photos, individualised plans, medical oversight. An amateur reproducing the intake figures without the oversight has copied the visible half of the intervention and left behind the half that made it an intervention. The useful advice for a first-time amateur is not a smaller percentage. It is fight camp planning that lands on the division without an acute phase at all.

And the long term is simply unknown. The ISSN stand's own final numbered statement says so: "The long-term effects of frequent weight cuts on health and performance are unknown, necessitating further research."

What we could not verify

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

• The sodium units in the ISSN position stand. As printed, the stand gives oral rehydration solutions at "50–90 mmol/dL", sweat sodium at "~20–80 mmol/dL" and sports drinks at "<30 mmol/dL". Read literally those are roughly ten times the concentrations reported everywhere else in the fluid-balance literature. We did not contact the authors and we have not seen a correction. We report the text as printed and refuse to convert it into a recipe.
• Which rehydration rate the stand intends. Its summary statement says 1–1.5 L/h; its body text describes roughly 480–700 mL/h. Both are in the same paper. We could not resolve the discrepancy.
• Which body mass the ≥10% regain target refers to. The stand does not specify whether the percentage is taken from weigh-in weight or pre-cut weight. For a 70 kg athlete the two readings differ by close to a kilogram.
• Small internal inconsistencies in the Frontiers paper. Its abstract reports 0.5 L of fluid on the day before weigh-in while its table reports 750 mL; its mean kilogram and mean percentage figures do not reconcile to a single mean body mass, which is what you would expect if percentages were computed per athlete and then averaged. We did not have access to individual data to re-derive them.
• No hydration measurement in the headline study. The 7.5 kg regain is a mass measurement. The paper reports no urine specific gravity or other hydration marker, so it cannot tell you what fraction of that mass was restored body water.
• The exercise-associated hyponatraemia consensus statement. We verified its citation — Hew-Butler et al., British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2015 — but the full text was not accessible to us, so nothing in this article quotes its contents. It is listed as a starting point, not as a source we read.
• Rules change and guidelines are not regulations. The ABC regulatory guidelines page carries a 2005 modification date, and the WBC programme document we read is the 2019–20 version. Neither is a substitute for the current rules of the commission sanctioning your bout.
• Nothing here is specific to you. Not your division, your body composition, your medical history, your sweat sodium, or your weigh-in format — and every one of those changes the answer.

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 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. 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, 2025;12:1581698. DOI 10.3389/fnut.2025.1581698, PMID 41132567
3. Optimizing the restoration and maintenance of fluid balance after exercise-induced dehydration — Evans GH, James LJ, Shirreffs SM, Maughan RJ, Journal of Applied Physiology, 1 April 2017;122(4):945–951. PMID 28126906
4. Post-exercise rehydration in man: effects of volume consumed and drink sodium content — Shirreffs SM, Taylor AJ, Leiper JB, Maughan RJ, Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, October 1996;28(10):1260–71. PMID 8897383
5. 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, September 2015;115(9):1919–26. PMID 25911631
6. Dehydration and acute weight gain in mixed martial arts fighters before competition — Jetton AM et al., Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, May 2013;27(5):1322–6. PMID 23439336
7. Repeat effort performance is reduced 24 hours after acute dehydration in mixed martial arts athletes — Barley OR, Iredale F, Chapman DW, Hopper A, Abbiss CR, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, September 2018;32(9):2555–2561. PMID 28930879
8. The current state of weight-cutting in combat sports — Barley OR, Chapman DW, Abbiss CR, Sports (Basel), 21 May 2019;7(5):123. DOI 10.3390/sports7050123, PMID 31117325
9. Regain in body mass after weigh-in is linked to success in real life judo competition — Reale R, Cox GR, Slater G, Burke LM, International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, December 2016;26(6):525–530. PMID 27206272
10. Effect of drink carbohydrate content on postexercise gastric emptying, rehydration, and the calculation of net fluid balance — Clayton DJ, Evans GH, James LJ, International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, February 2014;24(1):79–89. PMID 23980237
11. American College of Sports Medicine position stand: exercise and fluid replacement — Sawka MN, Burke LM, Eichner ER, Maughan RJ, Montain SJ, Stachenfeld NS, Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, February 2007;39(2):377–90. PMID 17277604
12. Statement of the 3rd International Exercise-Associated Hyponatremia Consensus Development Conference, Carlsbad, California, 2015 — Hew-Butler T et al., British Journal of Sports Medicine, November 2015;49(22):1432–46. PMID 26227507. Citation verified; full text not accessible to us and therefore not quoted
13. ABC Regulatory Guidelines and Rules — Association of Boxing Commissions and Combative Sports, page carries a modification date of 27 July 2005, retrieved 24 August 2026
14. Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts — Association of Boxing Commissions and Combative Sports, amended with nonsubstantial changes 6 August 2025
15. WBC Weight Management Program 2019-20 — World Boxing Council, programme effective 1 January 2019, document hosted by the Association of Boxing Commissions
16. Weigh-Ins — International Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation, retrieved 24 August 2026
17. The Prohibited List 2026 — World Anti-Doping Agency, World Anti-Doping Code International Standard, in effect 1 January 2026
18. The treatment of diarrhoea: a manual for physicians and other senior health workers — World Health Organization, 2005, ISBN 92 4 159318 0, source of the WHO and UNICEF reduced-osmolarity oral rehydration salts composition

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