Cutting Weight Is a Bad Idea, but if You NEED to Here’s How 

This was my question. RU-vid's chat system has a character limit so I wasn't able to fully describe the problem, but Dave was able to interpret it correctly anyway. Much appreciated! For those at home, the 2-4 pounds of fat (not water weight, but straight fat) is in ADDITION to the ~7-8 pounds I might normally cut ahead of a meet, which puts me in a precarious position. I've lost 10 pounds ahead of a meet once and it made me feel like dogshit during my attempts. Definitely time to move into a different weight class after this year. Thanks for all the help.

Plenty of time, heck that's less than half gallon water.

I'm kinda new to competitive powerlifting and at least for me the reason I'm doing this in the first place is to be the strongest version of myself I can be. Not intending to end up as a super heavyweight, but trying to hold on to a smaller weight class only seems counter-productive to me. You're holding your progress back only to be more competitive at a point in your career that is not yet your prime anyway. I'm personally going to compete in the class that my weight fits in at the time I have to sign up for the meet lol!

I competed last weekend. I cut 17 lbs in 7 weeks. 90% of that weight cut was pizza and beer related. 5% was inflammation from not enough rest (I'm getting older). 5% was from reducing water over the last 3 days prior to the meet. I was in tune with what I was eating because I weighed myself 2 times a day for 4 weeks to see how food, shitting and drinking water affected me on a daily basis.

Cutting always seems like such a nightmare hahah, but yeah great advice from Dave on this one. Steps make all this difference.

I lost 7 lbs for this meet and it's the last time I do it. I felt shakey and lost strength. I trained heavier and i need to compete at the same weight.

You know Dave was talking about JM when talking about losing weight to break records :)

Competitive regulations have ruined: boxing, judo, karate, tae kwon doe... now strength building is on the sacrificial altar all in the name of "legitimacy".

Cutting weight is the most dangerous part of most sports. I’m old enough that we had coaches instructing us how to do it for high school wrestling. Now, my understanding is that it’s taboo and only mentioned to discourage it. Still, I’m sure there’s a fourteen year old kid out there holding his fucking dinner in his hands while he stands on the scale so he knows whether he can eat or not. I’d love it if it wasn’t part of MMA or powerlifting, but that’s a bit of a pipe dream.

💪

The bigger the better right? I mean imagine a skinny Santa.