Protein During a Weight Cut: How Much and Why

Ask what protein intake a fighter should hit during a descent and the literature gives you three answers: 1.2–2.0, 1.4–2.0, and 2.3–3.1 grams per kilogram. All three are from credible sources. All three are current. And they look like a field that cannot agree with itself.

They are not disagreeing. Two of them are floors and one is an optimum. Two are expressed per kilogram of body weight and one, in its original form, per kilogram of fat-free mass. And they were written to answer different questions — one about not undermining a combat-sport descent, one about maximising lean mass retention in resistance-trained athletes in a deficit.

Once the denominators and the questions are separated, the picture is coherent and genuinely useful. This article separates them, adds what a 2025 Bayesian meta-regression of 29 studies established, and sets out the arithmetic problem that catches almost every fighter in the last three weeks of a camp.

1.2–2.0 g/kg

The protein **floor** the combat-sport position stand says intake should not drop below during a descent, per kg body mass

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

2.3–3.1 g/kg/d

Intake the general protein position stand says **may be needed to maximise lean mass retention** during hypocaloric periods in resistance-trained subjects

Jäger et al., ISSN position stand, J Int Soc Sports Nutr 2017;14:20

Per kg FFM

The unit the underlying systematic review used — fat-free mass, not body weight — scaled upward with severity of restriction and leanness

Helms et al., Int J Sport Nutr Exerc Metab 2014;24(2):127

>97%

Probability of a linear dose-response between daily protein and fat-free-mass change in a Bayesian meta-regression of 29 studies

Refalo, Trexler & Helms, Strength Cond J, January 2025

What this comes down to

The three published figures are not in conflict. 1.2–2.0 g/kg is a floor for combat-sport descents; 1.4–2.0 g/kg is a general sufficiency range; 2.3–3.1 is what maximises lean-mass retention under energy restriction in trained lifters.
The denominator matters more than the number. The original systematic review expressed its 2.3–3.1 figure per kilogram of fat-free mass. For a lean fighter the two units are close; for anyone carrying meaningful body fat they are not.
A 2025 Bayesian meta-regression of 29 studies found a >97% probability of a linear dose-response between daily protein and change in fat-free mass under energy restriction — and that the relationship was stronger when protein was expressed relative to fat-free mass.
The same analysis found the relationship stronger in longer interventions, in men, and at lower body-fat percentages. Leanness raises the requirement rather than lowering it.
A floor is not a target. The combat-sport stand's 1.2–2.0 g/kg describes a descent that has not broken; it does not describe a descent that has protected as much lean mass as it could.
The arithmetic trap: per-kilogram targets shrink as the athlete does, so the absolute grams fall through a camp while training load usually does not.
Protein is the lever with the best evidence for preserving lean mass in a deficit. It is not a lever for everything, and the size of the deficit and the training stimulus do more of the work than the final 20 grams.

Three numbers, three questions

The confusion resolves once you notice that the sources are answering different things.

The 2025 ISSN position stand on combat-sport weight management is concerned with what a descent should not break. Its language is explicitly about floors:

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.

Not "aim for". Should not drop below. It is describing the boundary of the descent the paper studied, not the optimum within it.

The 2017 ISSN position stand on protein and exercise is concerned with muscle protein balance across exercising populations generally:

For building muscle mass and for maintaining muscle mass through a positive muscle protein balance, an overall daily protein intake in the range of 1.4–2.0 g protein/kg body weight/day (g/kg/d) is sufficient for most exercising individuals.

Sufficient. For most. Under ordinary conditions.

And then the same document's separate position for the specific case a fighter is actually in:

Higher protein intakes (2.3–3.1 g/kg/d) may be needed to maximize the retention of lean body mass in resistance-trained subjects during hypocaloric periods.

Three sentences, three jobs. A floor for a combat-sport descent. A sufficiency range for exercising humans. And an optimum for retaining lean mass while in a deficit — which is precisely and exactly the situation of a fighter in week six of a camp.

The denominator that changes the answer

Here is the detail that gets lost in nearly every summary, and it changes the number materially.

The 2.3–3.1 figure originates in a 2014 systematic review by Helms and colleagues in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, which examined energy-restricted, resistance-trained athletes with relatively low body fat. Its conclusion, in its own units, was that protein needs for this population are likely 2.3–3.1 g/kg of fat-free mass, scaled upward with the severity of caloric restriction and with leanness.

Fat-free mass. Not body weight.

The 2017 position stand carries the range forward expressed per kilogram of body weight, which is a reasonable simplification for the lean, resistance-trained population the original review studied — at 10% body fat, fat-free mass is 90% of body weight and the two units differ by about a tenth.

But that simplification stops being harmless as body fat rises. Consider two 80 kg fighters:

	Athlete A (10% body fat)	Athlete B (20% body fat)
Fat-free mass	72 kg	64 kg
2.3–3.1 g/kg body weight	184–248 g	184–248 g
2.3–3.1 g/kg fat-free mass	166–223 g	147–198 g

The gap between the two readings for Athlete B is roughly 50 grams a day at the top of the range. That is not a rounding difference. It is the difference between a plan that fits in a restricted energy budget and one that crowds out the carbohydrate the same position stand puts a floor under.

The practical rule: if you know your body composition, use fat-free mass, because that is the unit the underlying research used. If you do not, using body weight is a conservative approximation for a lean athlete and an over-estimate for anyone else.

What the 2025 meta-regression added

In January 2025, Refalo, Trexler and Helms published an updated systematic review with meta-regression in the Strength and Conditioning Journal, extracting data from 29 studies out of 916 retrieved and fitting Bayesian linear and non-linear models.

Three findings matter for a fighter.

The dose-response is linear, with high probability. The analysis reported a greater than 97% probability of a linear dose-response relationship between daily protein intake and change in fat-free mass under energy restriction. There is no threshold above which additional protein stops contributing, within the ranges studied — the returns diminish in practical terms because everything competes for a finite energy budget, not because the curve flattens.

The relationship is stronger when protein is expressed relative to fat-free mass. This is the same point the 2014 review made about units, now supported by a model comparison across a much larger dataset. It is a good reason to prefer the FFM denominator rather than a stylistic preference.

And it is stronger in longer interventions, in men, and when body-fat percentage is lower. Each of those qualifies the picture in a useful direction. A four-week camp is not an eight-week camp. The evidence base is stronger in men, as it is nearly everywhere in this field. And the leaner the athlete, the more the protein intake is doing.

The authors' summary of what higher intakes buy is appropriately modest: increasing protein intake may lead to fat-free-mass gain even in energy restriction, but at minimum it can mitigate fat-free-mass loss, thereby maximising retention.

That is the honest claim. Protein does not make a deficit free. It changes what the deficit takes.

Why being leaner raises the requirement

The finding that leaner athletes need proportionally more protein is counter-intuitive until you look at what a deficit actually draws on.

In a caloric deficit, the body meets the shortfall from stored energy. Adipose tissue is the intended source; lean tissue is available too, and the proportion drawn from each is not fixed. It depends on how much adipose tissue there is to draw from, how large the deficit is, whether a resistance-training stimulus is present, and how much dietary protein is arriving.

An athlete at 25% body fat has a large reservoir the body will preferentially use. An athlete at 8% has very little, and the deficit finds lean tissue sooner. The same absolute energy shortfall therefore costs the leaner athlete more muscle, which is why the recommendation scales with leanness rather than against it.

That has an uncomfortable implication for combat sports specifically, because the population is selected for leanness and then asked to descend further. A fighter in the last weeks of a camp is usually at the point on this curve where the protein requirement is highest and the energy budget to accommodate it is smallest. Those two facts arrive together, every time, and they are the reason the last three weeks of a descent are where lean mass is actually lost.

The floor is not the target

Worth stating directly, because the two figures get used interchangeably and they are not interchangeable.

The combat-sport stand's 1.2–2.0 g/kg protein floor describes a descent that has not gone wrong. An athlete who stays above it is inside the conditions the paper's other figures — the graded 6.7 / 5.7 / 4.4% losses at 72, 48 and 24 hours, quoted in how much weight you can cut before a fight — were described under. Fall below it and those figures stop describing your situation.

But staying above a floor is not the same as protecting lean mass optimally, and nothing in the combat-sport stand claims it is. The floor and the optimum answer different questions, and a fighter in a real deficit has reason to be interested in both.

Where the two documents sit relative to each other is worth noticing too. The combat-sport floor tops out at 2.0 g/kg body mass. The lean-mass-retention range starts at 2.3 g/kg fat-free mass. For a lean athlete those figures are adjacent rather than contradictory — 2.0 g/kg of an 80 kg body weight is 160 g; 2.3 g/kg of 72 kg of fat-free mass is 166 g. The combat-sport floor at its top is roughly the lean-mass range at its bottom.

That is a coherent picture, not a contested one. The floor's ceiling is the optimum's floor.

The arithmetic trap in every camp

Both sets of figures are per kilogram, and both denominators are falling.

An 84 kg fighter descending to 77 kg over a camp, targeting 2.5 g/kg of fat-free mass, is chasing a number that declines as they do. At 84 kg and 12% body fat, fat-free mass is 73.9 kg and the target is about 185 g. At 77 kg with the loss split between fat and lean tissue, fat-free mass might be around 69 kg and the target about 173 g.

Twelve grams a day, which sounds trivial and is not the point. The point is the direction. The absolute protein requirement falls through a camp while training load usually does not, which means an athlete who set a gram target in week one is over-eating protein relative to their own recommendation by week eight — and every gram of protein occupying the energy budget is a gram of carbohydrate not occupying it.

The combat-sport stand puts a carbohydrate floor of 3.0–4.0 g/kg under the same descent, and carbohydrate is the first thing a struggling descent sacrifices, because glycogen carries water and the scale responds fast. That makes the interaction real rather than theoretical: protein crowding out carbohydrate in a shrinking budget is one of the mechanisms by which a descent quietly stops being the descent the paper described.

The practical version is to recompute the targets against current body mass every couple of weeks rather than setting them once, which is exactly the kind of thing a plan built backwards from the weigh-in handles and a plan built forwards from today does not. That is what fight camp nutrition, week by week works through in detail.

Per-meal dosing and distribution

The 2017 stand is specific about how the daily total should be arranged, and the figures are practical.

General recommendations are 0.25 g of a high-quality protein per kg of body weight, or an absolute dose of 20–40 g.

Acute protein doses should strive to contain 700–3000 mg of leucine and/or a higher relative leucine content, in addition to a balanced array of the essential amino acids (EAAs).

These protein doses should ideally be evenly distributed, every 3–4 h, across the day.

And on timing:

The optimal time period during which to ingest protein is likely a matter of individual tolerance, since benefits are derived from pre- or post-workout ingestion.

For a fighter, the distribution guidance runs into a practical obstacle worth naming. Training two or three times a day, with weight to make, tends to produce a pattern of eating almost nothing until evening and then eating everything. Even distribution every three to four hours is a reasonable target and a harder one to hit than the sentence makes it sound, particularly in the last week of a descent when appetite and stomach comfort are both compromised. How much of the timing evidence survives once it is taken out of the laboratory — and how little of it was gathered in anyone who was eating at a deficit — is worked through in eating around two-a-day training.

Where the daily total is the binding consideration and the distribution is imperfect, the total is the thing with the stronger evidence behind it. The meta-regression modelled daily intake, not meal timing.

Protein sources, and the two things that actually differ

Once the daily total and the denominator are settled, the remaining question is what the protein is made of, and the honest answer is that it matters less than the volume of argument about it suggests.

The position stand's per-dose guidance identifies two properties that do differ meaningfully between sources: a balanced array of essential amino acids, and enough leucine — 700 to 3000 mg per dose, or a higher relative leucine content. Those two properties are what make a protein source effective at stimulating muscle protein synthesis, and they are where animal and plant sources genuinely diverge, because plant proteins are typically lower in leucine per gram and more often limited in one or more essential amino acids.

The practical consequence is a dose adjustment rather than a prohibition. A plant-based fighter reaching the same leucine content per feeding needs a somewhat larger dose, or a combination of sources whose limiting amino acids differ. That is an arithmetic adjustment, not a barrier.

Two things that matter less than they are made to. Timing relative to training is described by the stand itself as likely a matter of individual tolerance, since benefits derive from pre- or post-workout ingestion — the anabolic window as commonly described is not what the current position supports. And powder versus food is a question of convenience, cost and digestive comfort rather than of efficacy; in a camp where appetite is suppressed and the athlete is trying to reach 180 grams without feeling full, that convenience is a real advantage, which is a different claim from a physiological one.

For fighters there is one additional consideration that has nothing to do with amino acids. Any supplement carries contamination risk in an anti-doping context, and a fighter subject to testing has reason to prefer whole-food protein where practical and third-party-tested products where not — the reasoning is set out in banned supplements and anti-doping risk.

Where protein stops being the lever

Being clear about the limits of a single nutrient matters, because protein is the easiest thing in a diet to increase and therefore the thing that gets over-asked.

It does not offset an excessive deficit. The magnitude of the energy shortfall is doing more work than the final 20 grams of protein. An athlete descending far too fast will lose lean mass at any protein intake.

It does not replace the training stimulus. Every study in this literature involves resistance-trained subjects who continued to train. Protein retains lean mass in the presence of a stimulus that signals the tissue is needed. Without that signal, the nutrient has less to work with.

It does not fix under-fuelling in general. Chronic low energy availability produces a syndrome of physiological consequences that adequate protein does not prevent, which is the subject of low energy availability in combat sports. A high-protein diet inside a large chronic deficit is still a large chronic deficit.

And it does not do anything for the acute phase. Nothing in this article applies to fight week's fluid manipulation. Protein intake is a longitudinal-descent question, and the acute phase is a different problem with a supervision requirement attached to it in the source literature.

A worked scenario

Take a hypothetical 84 kg athlete at approximately 12% body fat, descending to a 77 kg division across an eight-week camp. Fat-free mass is about 73.9 kg.

Protein floor, from the combat-sport stand: 1.2–2.0 g/kg body mass, so 101–168 g per day. Anything below 101 g puts the descent outside the conditions the stand's other figures were described under.

Lean-mass-retention range, from the systematic review in its original units: 2.3–3.1 g/kg fat-free mass, so 170–229 g per day. The 2025 meta-regression suggests being higher in that range does more, with the caveat that everything competes for the same energy.

Carbohydrate floor, same stand: 3.0–4.0 g/kg body mass, so 252–336 g. Fat floor: 0.5–1.0 g/kg, so 42–84 g.

Add the lower bounds: 170 g protein (680 kcal) plus 252 g carbohydrate (1,008 kcal) plus 42 g fat (378 kcal) is about 2,066 kcal before anything else. That is the arithmetic reality of respecting the floors while pursuing the lean-mass optimum, and for most athletes in a camp it is not a large deficit at all.

Which is the useful finding from the exercise. Once the published floors are respected, there is far less room for an aggressive deficit than most descent plans assume. If the numbers do not fit, the variable that has to move is usually the rate of descent — not the protein, and not the carbohydrate.

None of this is a prescription. It is arithmetic on published figures for a hypothetical athlete, and your body composition, training load, medical history and division are not in it.

The populations the evidence does not cover

Women are under-represented. The 2025 meta-regression explicitly found the dose-response relationship stronger in men, which reflects both a possible biological difference and the composition of the underlying literature. The combat-sport weight literature has the same imbalance.

Adolescents are not in this evidence base at all. Every study concerns adults. Growth changes both protein requirements and the consequences of restriction, and extrapolating downward has nothing underneath it.

And the studies are not fighters. The underlying research is largely in resistance-trained individuals — bodybuilders, lifters, physique athletes — undergoing energy restriction. A fighter carries a very different concurrent training load, and the interaction between high-volume conditioning work, a deficit and protein intake is not what these trials measured.

What we could not verify

The full text of the 2025 meta-regression. We worked from the published abstract and indexed summary of the Strength and Conditioning Journal paper. The headline findings — >97% probability of a linear dose-response, stronger when expressed relative to fat-free mass, in longer interventions, in men and at lower body fat — are the paper's own, but we have not read its complete methods.
The full text of the 2014 systematic review. Likewise indexed and summarised rather than read in full. The 2.3–3.1 g/kg fat-free-mass figure and the scaling with restriction severity and leanness are the review's conclusions as published.
Whether these figures transfer to combat athletes. They come from resistance-trained populations under energy restriction. No study we located tested them in fighters carrying combat-sport training loads.
Any interaction between protein intake and acute fight-week fluid manipulation. Not studied, not addressed here.
Nothing here is specific to you. Not your body composition, your energy expenditure, your medical history, your kidney function, or your division. Individual protein prescription is a job for a registered dietitian who knows your history.

Questions fighters ask

How much protein should a fighter eat during a weight cut?

Two published figures apply and they answer different questions. The 2025 ISSN combat-sport position stand sets a floor — protein should not drop below 1.2–2.0 g/kg of body mass during a descent. The 2017 ISSN protein position stand states that higher intakes of 2.3–3.1 g/kg/day may be needed to maximise retention of lean body mass in resistance-trained subjects during hypocaloric periods. The second range originates in a systematic review that expressed it per kilogram of fat-free mass, which for anyone above about 12% body fat is a meaningfully lower absolute number than the same figure applied to body weight.

Should protein be calculated per kilogram of body weight or fat-free mass?

Fat-free mass, if you know it. The 2014 systematic review that produced the 2.3–3.1 range used fat-free mass as its denominator, and the 2025 Bayesian meta-regression of 29 studies found the dose-response relationship was stronger when protein intake was expressed relative to fat-free mass rather than body weight. For a lean athlete the two units are close — at 10% body fat they differ by a tenth — but for an athlete carrying more fat the difference can reach 50 grams a day at the top of the range, which is enough to displace carbohydrate from a restricted budget.

Does more protein always preserve more muscle in a deficit?

Within the ranges studied, the relationship appears linear rather than plateauing. The 2025 meta-regression reported a greater than 97% probability of a linear dose-response between daily protein intake and change in fat-free mass under energy restriction, with the authors noting that increasing intake may produce fat-free-mass gain even in a deficit and at minimum mitigates loss. The practical limit is not physiological but budgetary: every gram of protein occupies energy that the same position stands allocate to a carbohydrate floor of 3.0–4.0 g/kg, and carbohydrate is what training quality depends on.

Why do leaner athletes need more protein when cutting?

Because a deficit draws on whatever stored energy is available, and the leaner the athlete the less adipose tissue there is to draw from. An athlete at 25% body fat has a large reservoir the body will preferentially use; an athlete at 8% has very little, so the same energy shortfall reaches lean tissue sooner. Both the 2014 systematic review and the 2025 meta-regression found the requirement scaling with leanness — the review scaling its recommendation upward with leanness and restriction severity, the meta-regression finding the dose-response stronger at lower body-fat percentages.

What is the protein floor in the combat sports position stand?

The 2025 ISSN position stand on nutrition and weight-cut strategies for combat sports states that macronutrients should not drop below carbohydrate 3.0–4.0 g/kg, protein 1.2–2.0 g/kg, and fat 0.5–1.0 g/kg/day. These are floors rather than targets, and they define the conditions under which the stand's other figures — including the graded 6.7%, 5.7% and 4.4% body-mass losses at 72, 48 and 24 hours before weigh-in — were described. A descent that has gone below them is no longer the descent the paper is describing, and its other numbers stop applying.

How much protein per meal should I eat?

The 2017 ISSN protein position stand recommends 0.25 g of a high-quality protein per kg of body weight per dose, or an absolute dose of 20–40 g, distributed evenly every 3–4 hours across the day. Each dose should aim to contain 700–3000 mg of leucine or a higher relative leucine content alongside a balanced array of essential amino acids. For fighters training two or three times daily while making weight, that even distribution is harder to achieve than it sounds, and where a choice has to be made the daily total is the figure with the stronger evidence behind it — the meta-regression modelled daily intake, not meal timing.

Does high protein intake help you make weight?

Not directly, and treating it as a weight-cutting tool confuses two different mechanisms. Protein's role in a descent is protective: it changes what the energy deficit takes from you, favouring fat loss over lean-mass loss. It does not accelerate the loss of body mass, and at very high intakes it competes for the energy budget with the carbohydrate the same position stand puts a floor under. The variable that determines how fast you descend is the size of the deficit; the variable that determines what the descent costs you is largely protein plus a resistance training stimulus.

Can I eat too much protein while cutting?

In a restricted energy budget, yes — not because of toxicity at these intakes in healthy people, but because displacement is real. The combat-sport position stand puts a carbohydrate floor of 3.0–4.0 g/kg under a descent, and carbohydrate is what fuels training quality and what carries glycogen-bound water. An athlete pushing protein to the top of the lean-mass-retention range inside an aggressive deficit will often find the carbohydrate floor breached, which puts the descent outside the conditions the literature describes. If the numbers do not fit, the rate of descent is usually what should move.

Does the protein target change as I lose weight?

Yes, and this catches almost everyone. Both figures are per kilogram, so the absolute gram target falls as the athlete does — while training load usually does not. An 84 kg athlete at 12% body fat targeting 2.5 g/kg of fat-free mass needs about 185 g; the same athlete at 77 kg needs roughly 173 g. The direction matters more than the magnitude: a gram target set in week one is an over-estimate by week eight, and the excess is occupying budget that carbohydrate needs. Recompute against current body mass every couple of weeks.

Does protein still work if I'm not lifting?

Less well, and this is a real limitation of the evidence rather than a caveat. Every study in this literature involves resistance-trained subjects who continued to train through the energy restriction. Protein retains lean mass in the presence of a stimulus telling the body that the tissue is needed; without that signal there is less for the nutrient to do. For a fighter, that argues for maintaining some resistance training through a descent rather than dropping it in favour of conditioning, which is often the first thing to go when time and energy get short.

Do these numbers apply to female fighters?

With less confidence, and the reason is the evidence base rather than a biological finding. The 2025 meta-regression explicitly reported the dose-response relationship as stronger in men, which reflects both possible physiological differences and the composition of the underlying studies. The broader combat-sport weight literature has the same imbalance — it is dominated by adult male professionals. The figures are the best available starting point for a female athlete and should be treated as more provisional, with individual prescription belonging to a dietitian who knows the athlete.

Do these figures apply to teenage fighters?

No. Every study in this evidence base concerns adults. Growth alters both protein requirements and the consequences of energy restriction, and applying adult figures derived from resistance-trained lifters in a deficit to a growing athlete is an extrapolation with nothing supporting it. For adolescents the relevant question is usually not what protein intake protects lean mass during a cut, but whether the cut should be happening — and that is a question for a physician and a registered dietitian, not an article.

What is the single most useful thing to change about protein in a camp?

Compute it against fat-free mass rather than body weight, and recompute it every fortnight as the number falls. Those two changes align your intake with the unit the underlying research actually used, stop you over-allocating budget to protein late in a descent, and free the energy the carbohydrate floor needs. They cost nothing, they require no supplements, and they address the two errors — wrong denominator, stale target — that account for most of the distance between what fighters eat and what the literature describes.

Sources

Sourced to

International Society of Sports Nutrition Position Stand: protein and exercise — Jäger R, Kerksick CM, Campbell BI et al., Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 2017;14:20. DOI 10.1186/s12970-017-0177-8, PMID 28642676
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
A Systematic Review of Dietary Protein During Caloric Restriction in Resistance Trained Lean Athletes: A Case for Higher Intakes — Helms ER, Zinn C, Rowlands DS, Brown SR, International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, 2014;24(2):127–138
Effect of Dietary Protein on Fat-Free Mass in Energy Restricted, Resistance-Trained Individuals: An Updated Systematic Review With Meta-Regression — Refalo MC, Trexler ET, Helms ER, Strength and Conditioning Journal, January 2025. DOI 10.1519/SSC.0000000000000888
Effect of Dietary Protein on Fat-Free Mass in Energy Restricted, Resistance-Trained Individuals (indexed record) — Semantic Scholar record for the 2025 meta-regression, including abstract and study count
International Society of Sports Nutrition Position Stand: protein and exercise (publisher record) — Taylor & Francis, Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 2017
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
2023 International Olympic Committee's (IOC) consensus statement on Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (REDs) — Mountjoy M, Ackerman KE, Bailey DM et al., British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2023;57(17):1073–1097. DOI 10.1136/bjsports-2023-106994
Acute-Weight-Loss Strategies for Combat Sports and Applications to Olympic Success — Reale R, Slater G, Burke LM, International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, 2017;12(2):142–151. DOI 10.1123/ijspp.2016-0211
International society of sports nutrition position stand: caffeine and exercise performance — Guest NS et al., Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 2021;18:1. DOI 10.1186/s12970-020-00383-4, PMID 33388079

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Protein during a weight cut