DISCLAIMER: Messing with the fluid levels in your body can be dangerous! The author is not responsible for any morons who attempt this and hurt themselves because they don't know what they are doing!
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Until recently I haven't had to worry about this, however, as I have let my bodyweight drift into the 250lb range, it became ever evident that I was going to need to do this to compete in the 242's.
I will say up front that I compete in the IPF. We weigh in 2hrs before lifting, there are no 24 hour weigh-ins so although the amount of weight that I cut is not that impressive, cutting much more is likely to affect you negatively come meet time since you've only got 2 hrs to rehydrate (less if you count warm-ups)
Most of the ideas here are not my own, just modified to suit my needs based on what I felt I needed to do. I took a lot of pointers from Matt Kroc's article on elitefts where he cut 22lbs in one day.......this is, for the most part, a "less hardcore" version of what he did.
Approximately 12 days out from meet day my bodyweight was 249.5 in the am after taking care of business. I dropped almost all carbs except for my PWO shake and PWO meal. The remainder of the day was trace carbs from veggies and low GI fruit (apples, grapefruit, berries). I have no idea how many carbs I took in but it was a lot less than usual. I also bumped up my fat a bit to compensate.
The weekend before the meet I had a ski trip planned that I had no intention of missing. It had been scheduled a long time ago, and I didn't want to lose the deposit I had in for it. By that friday (5 days after dropping my carbs) I weighed 248.
I brought a bunch of low carb snacks with me on my trip, but I did have to eat a bit of "crap" food for some of my meals over the weekend. When I got back on Monday, my bodyweight was 248.5. When I woke up the next morning it was 247.0.
So, at this point, I've managed to lose 2.5 lbs in 7 days by changing nothing except my carb intake......not bad, but I still needed to drop at least 5 (preferably 7lbs) before Saturday morning.
I kept up the
low carb diet until Friday. Friday morning I weighed in at 246.0lbs. I ate breakfast, a mid-
morning snack, and lunch then ceased all food and fluid intake. Hopped on the scale right after finishing lunch and was 249.0.
I knew that 3lbs of that would likely take care of itself just through my normal daily activity, but it still left me with 6 lbs to get rid of. I was targeting a weight of 240 as I didn't have access to the meet scales and needed to be sure I was under.
After lunch, I did a bit of cleaning and random **** around the house, then hopped in the bath tub with the water at borderline scalding temperature for about an hour. Got out of the tub around 3, dried off and weighed in at 245.5........a loss of 3.5 lbs in 3 hours......not bad, but those are the easy pounds to lose.
I'd been waiting around all day for these guys to install my garage heater and they were taking their sweet ass time. I needed to get on the road as it was a 4.5 hour drive to Edmonton for the meet and I wanted to get to sleep asap so I wouldn't be craving fluid all night.
From 3 until about 5:30 when they finished, I just hung out in the house with about 4 layers of sweats on, just before we left I weighed in again.......still 245.5, no change. In all honesty I hadn't really been sweating that much so it didn't surprise me.
Hopped in the car and headed off at 5:45. I cranked the heated seat all the way up, jacked up the heat and sat there sweating as we drove. About half way there I started to get massive cramps, tried shifting positions, stretching, nothing worked. My mouth was pasty and I felt like ****. I tried to tough it out but my vision was starting to get a bit blurry so I decided to stop and take in a bit of fluid to keep me going (blurry vision is not a good thing when you are driving at night). At around 8:30 pm I drank half a bottle of gatorade and had a couple of crackers with peanut butter......felt MUCH better.
We got to the hotel around 11 and I hopped on the scale. Despite taking in that fluid I weighed 243.5, a loss of 2 lbs.
I had a couple more crackers with peanut butter and a mouthful of water to wash them down then went to bed.
Got up at 6am on meet day and weighed in - 243.0......****, still 1lb heavy on my scale. I still had some time as our hotel was close to the venue so I filled up the tub and sat in there for about 30-40 minutes. Got out and dried off - 242.5.......a loss of half a pound.
It was time to go so I loaded up my gear, cooler and donned my 4 layers of sweats hoping to sweat out a bit more before weigh in. When we arrived at about 7:30, I did a brisk walk around the track in the stadium for about 20 minutes (it was getting tough to break a sweat). I then went to the washroom and managed to sqeeze out a bit more fluid and a little mini-deuce. Weigh ins were late starting (probably a good thing) so about 10 minutes before I got weighed I hopped on my own scale - 241.0........gonna have to be close enough.
Weighed in at 109.1 kg (240.0 lbs). I guess the meet scales were light (lucky for me) then proceeded to chug 2 bottles of Powerade and 1L of water. Then ate 2 Vector bars and 2 McD's egg mcmuffins. Felt pretty bloated at that point but by the time I had to warm up I was feeling pretty damn good. Hopped on my scale again and it read 246.5. I managed to drink another bottle of powerade before lifting.
So there it is. I cut a total of 8 lbs in about 20 hours and managed to not affect my strength at all. I will say this though, after doing what I did, I have an immense respect for the guys that drop 20-25 lbs for a meet or a fight..........it is NOT fun, all you can thinkg about is how thirsty you are.
My recommendation, for those with an IPF type weigh in is to try to set yourself up so that you don't have to worry about doing this. It will make it MUCH easier on yourself. If you do end up a bit over, the above tactics should help you drop those couple of lbs you need to make weight.
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