In Harm’s Weigh : When Every Ounce Counts, Wrestlers Often Take Excessive Measures : to Drop Excess Pounds--Leaving Their Health Hanging in the Balance

This was desperation week for a lot of California high school wrestlers, the week for the official state weigh-in that determined the lowest weight class in which a wrestler could compete for the rest of the season, including tournaments. If you’re a wrestler, hardly anything in your sport is more important, more misunderstood or potentially more dangerous than the often reckless process of making weight.

For as long as wrestlers have been competing in classes, they have been taking extreme measures to lose a few quick pounds; it is not uncommon for a wrestler to drop four pounds in a few hours, nor is it unheard-of for a wrestler to lose 20 pounds overnight. But figures show that the chances of dying after a contest are much greater for wrestlers than for athletes in other sports, and experts feel that the wrestlers’ ritual of rapid weight loss may be a contributing factor. Because wrestlers almost universally fail to acknowledge rapid weight loss as a potential health hazard, however, it is a practice that has been largely ignored by parents, coaches and administrators. The medical profession is worried.

“You’re flirting with real danger when you try to lose weight in a hurry,” said Dr. Gershon Lesser, a Los Angeles internist and cardiologist. “Wrestlers run great long-term risks not unlike the risks run by bulimics and anorexics. Losing two or three pounds a day is dangerous. You can lose two pounds a week safely, but if you want to lose more than two, you better be under a doctor’s supervision.”

But there are wrestlers who lose weight on their own--often without the knowledge or permission of their coach and parents. And their weight-loss methods are neither safe nor very sane, say doctors. Wrestlers have been known to take diuretics and amphetamines, sit in saunas for hours wearing rubber suits, vomit like bulimics, exercise relentlessly, starve themselves for days, take prolonged hot showers while spitting profusely, use enemas and laxatives, and even donate a pint of blood at the Red Cross to lose those final 1.8 pounds.

David Robinson, a freshman at Pierce College, is an assistant wrestling coach at Chatsworth High. Last year as a senior at Chatsworth, he won the City 3-A championship at 112 pounds. Robinson has been wrestling seriously for five years and even attended a 30-day wrestling camp in Iowa. He has lost weight quickly himself and has seen or heard about a lot of alleged abuses.

“I knew of a doctor who injected a kid with diuretics, and I’ve seen guys make themselves puke to lose weight,” he said. “There was a guy on our team doing it until I made him stop. You can always tell who’s lost a lot of weight. It’s the guy with sunken cheeks. He’s listless. He falls asleep in class. He doesn’t get through practice. A guy like that doesn’t feel like lifting weights and usually doesn’t do well in matches.”

Robinson recounted a story about an Olympic wrestler who was competing at the ’85 World Games--it is the kind of story that perpetuates radical weight-loss practices by glorifying win-at-all-cost wrestling. “The guy dropped from 125 pounds to 105 overnight,” Robinson said. “He was crazy. They had to drag him to the scale and he passed out. But the next day he won the world championship.”

Football players who also wrestle usually face a dilemma: They have to gain weight for football and lose it for wrestling. When Matt Hickman played football at Camarillo High in 1984, he weighed about 275 pounds, 30 pounds above the limit for wrestling’s super-heavyweight division. But wrestling starts before the football season ends. Hickman was forced to lose nearly 10% of his total body weight in only three days. He says he lost the 30 pounds by “not eating, not drinking, sitting in the sauna all the time and running around all the time.”

Didn’t anybody warn him about the possible dangers of rapid weight loss? “I knew it was fairly harmful,” said Hickman, now at Moorpark College, “and I don’t do it anymore. But it was worth it at the time. I liked wrestling.”

When Hickman was losing his 30 pounds, he certainly didn’t feel like partying. “I felt horrible,” he said. “I got stomach cramps. I wanted to eat all the time. I lost coloring in my skin. Every time I rinsed my mouth out I wanted to take a big swallow. But I felt a lot better after the weigh-in when I ran across the mat and opened a bag of munchies and scarfed out.”

The reason wrestlers feel so miserable during rapid weight loss is that the short-term effects are similar to the symptoms of mononucleosis and heat exhaustion: nausea, light-headedness, weakness, fatigue. The possible long-term effects are heart disease and kidney and liver problems.

Aside from starvation, the wrestlers’ most common method for losing weight is sudden dehydration--which usually happens in the sauna. But locking yourself in a sauna for eight hours at 110 degrees tends to dry you out like an overcooked meat loaf and poses an immediate health threat. Sudden dehydration causes an imbalance of the body’s electrolytes, which are essential chemically charged particles that regulate various physical functions at the cellular level.

Because of his intense physical activity, a wrestler puts great demand on the heart, which is a muscle that requires protein and electrolytes. When he deprives his body of these essentials either by dieting or dehydration, “he’s setting up an opportunity for the destruction of the heart,” Lesser said, adding, “and you don’t get signs.” One day you seem fine, and the next “you just might drop dead.”

A wrestler who dehydrates himself to make weight also exposes himself to greater risks as soon as he gets on the mat for a match.

“A significant depletion of electrolytes coupled with fluid loss during competition is a very dangerous combination,” said Dr. George Holland, co-director of the exercise physiology research lab at Cal State Northridge.

Chatsworth’s David Robinson tells another story related to cutting weight. “About every year,” he said, “you hear about a wrestler who died in a sauna of a heart attack.”

But Robinson’s story is difficult to document. Jack Spain, head trainer for USA Wrestling, the sport’s governing body, said he has heard of no one dying in a sauna. “I’ve witnessed wrestlers becoming so dehydrated after using a sauna or a steam bath they’ve lost consciousness,” he said.

Until the last few years, very little data had been kept and research done on wrestling, according to Dr. Fred Mueller of the University of North Carolina. Since the mid-1960s, Mueller has been collecting statistics for the National Federation of High School Sports, but only since 1982 has his work included wrestling.

Mueller has statistics that may be relevant to rapid weight loss, he says. During the school years of 1983-84 and ‘84-85, there were five wrestling deaths that “occurred right after a match and were not directly associated with an injury due to wrestling,” he said. “They were probably heart-related, but I can’t say for sure they were related to rapid weight loss.”

In each of those seasons, there were about 245,000 boys wrestling in high school. Football, with nearly 1.7 million competitors, reported nine deaths indirectly related to the sport during the same two-year period. In 1984-85, according to figures supplied by Mueller and the national federation, the odds of an athlete dying after a match were greater in wrestling than any other sport, and 4.6 times greater than in football.

Fritz McGinnis, the director of wrestling for the national federation, says he has never heard of a wrestling death attributed “specifically” to weight loss. In Nevada recently, a high school wrestler died after exercising heavily to lose weight, but his death was blamed on congenital heart problems, the Nevada coroner’s office said.

“The trouble with setting standards in wrestling is that there hasn’t been a well-publicized case of an athlete dying directly from rapid weight loss,” said Dr. Steve Scott, director of sports medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. “It’s amazing there haven’t been more fatalities,” he added.

Why do wrestlers cut weight even when they know the risks and feel so bad doing it? “The sport dictates it,” Scott said. With the high school season beginning in November, a wrestler and his coach have a couple of months before January’s official weigh-in to decide the weight at which he’ll compete. Often, the decision isn’t based on the wrestler’s natural weight. Sometimes, his competitive weight depends on whether or not a wrestler thinks he can beat the competition in his class. Sometimes, it depends on whether the coach has more than one good wrestler in the same class. If so, someone will have to wrestle at another weight.

But many times, what compels a wrestler to cut weight is that he thinks he’s stronger at a lower weight. And if he thinks it helps him win, then he’s going to do it. “If you’re tough at 103 pounds, there’s no doubt in your mind you’ll be tougher at 98,” said Bill Clark, who runs interscholastic wrestling for the Southern Section. This means that a wrestler will almost always go down a class instead of increasing his weight, even if it means losing seven or more pounds.

There is also strategy involved: After his weight becomes official in January, a wrestler is allowed to go up two classes at any time during the season--a possible 26 pounds in the higher divisions, excluding super heavyweight--so coming in under his natural weight at the official weigh-in will allow him to wrestle in a heavier class later without having to add unwanted bulk.

If a wrestler goes up two classes during the season, he can come down only one--a rule that is supposed to prevent wrestlers from having to lose a lot of weight in a short time. Still, if the decision to drop a class is made the night before a match, he’d have to lose six or seven pounds for the weigh-in the next morning.

The lowest-weight-possible strategy has a ripple effect on every weight class. For example, if a natural 145-pounder stays in his natural class, he’ll probably have to wrestle stronger, bigger-boned, natural 154-pounders who have dropped down. So he sweats off a few pounds and melts to 138. What happens is that most wrestlers in the 13 weight classes, from 98 to 245 pounds at the beginning of the season, are competing below their natural weights.

Holland calls it a Catch-22 situation: Everyone is losing weight to wrestle the people they should be wrestling anyway in the next higher weight level. “It’s like a football player who takes anabolic steroids or amphetamines because he has to play against people who are taking them,” Holland said. “You do it to protect yourself.”

The one single factor that makes losing weight a tradition in wrestling is the contention that it makes you a better, more competitive wrestler. But the medical profession disagrees. It says that radical dieting is actually counterproductive. Aside from possibly feeling weak, you may also be weak.

“You begin to shed muscle mass,” Holland said, “which is exactly what you don’t want. It’ll affect your performance.”

Dr. Mark Grabiner is the director of the biomechanics lab at USC. A former wrestler, he teaches a wrestling class in the physical education department for “enjoyment.” Asked whether a wrestler can improve his performance competing below his natural weight, Grabiner laughed and said, “that’s a false pretense. It just doesn’t work that way. What does happen is that you lose stamina and strength.”

Guidelines for high school wrestling are established by the national federation, which is based in Kansas City. The Southern Section, like all high school associations in this country, follows the wishes of the federation. The first federation rule book first came out in 1973 and stated that sweat boxes, hot showers, whirlpools, diuretics and rubber sweat suits were illegal. It also recommended then that coaches set realistic weights for wrestlers, which were designed to help check the practice of cutting weight. But it’s only been in the last few years, Clark said, that he and the Southern Section’s wrestling advisory committee have actively stressed sensible weight control.

“It’s a genuine concern of ours, and we’ve taken a very strong position on it,” Clark said. “That’s why we suggest that the coach meet with the parents at the beginning of the year to discuss diet and weight.”

Clark thinks the situation has improved. “Setting unrealistic weights for kids used to be more prevalent than it is today,” he said. “We provide a lot of information for coaches now and they understand the body more than they ever have.” An irresponsible coach who condones or encourages severe weight loss won’t be around very long. “You just can’t do it for any length of time,” Clark said.

“There’ll be pressure from his peer group, this office and parents.”

Holland acknowledged that today’s coaches seem to be more sensitive to and knowledgeable about the weight-loss issue, but he feels that they still have a long way to go before the abuses are eliminated. And the coach can’t duck behind the alibi, Holland says, that wrestlers are losing weight behind his back.

“If a coach really educates his wrestlers about the risks of rapid weight loss, the athletes’ attitude would be completely different,” Holland said. “Not educating them is negligence by default. It’s a coach’s professional responsibility and there’s no excuse for not doing it. Coaches have to get their acts together on this issue. The American College of Sports Medicine is very clear about it: Coaches should not encourage their athletes to lose weight or look the other way if they do.

“Because anabolic steroids are a substance, some people tend to regard them as a much more drastic process than acute dehydration, but I see relatively little difference between someone who encourages the use of steroids and someone who encourages acute dehydration. Both are deplorable.”

Grabiner also put the onus on the coach. “Despite the fact that sports science has become well-established,” he said, “a lot of coaches resist changing their fundamental philosophies. Some coaches’ minds are like cement: thoroughly mixed and permanently set. But the old coaches are getting older and are being replaced by younger ones who see things differently. And, more and more, at the college levels you see more reasonable approaches to the weight situation.”

USA Wrestling recognizes the problems of cutting weight and is doing something about it. Dr. Dan Gould of the University of Illinois chairs the organization’s Sports Science and Medicine Committee, which does studies and research--a long-project involving young wrestlers is being undertaken at Michigan State--and attempts to educate coaches.

“It’s a battle, but we’re making inroads with coaches,” Gould said. “We’re getting them to ask the question, ‘What’s the most effective weight for my kid and the best way for him to lose it.’ But the problem of cutting weight is still the biggest we have. We have a long way to go. Unfortunately, our elite wrestlers are good at losing weight the wrong way.” That sets a bad example for others.

Even if a wrestler has been warned by his coach about the dangers of cutting weight, it is the wrestler who must ultimately make his own decisions. And if he’s got a winning-is-everything mentality, nothing will be too extreme for him.

Rick Becker, a 10th-grade wrestler at El Camino Real, said he often loses five pounds overnight and slowly dropped 12 pounds over the summer to get down to 105.

“The coach doesn’t recommend it,” he said, “but if you want to lose weight bad enough to make a weight class, you will.”

When the wrestler doesn’t put pressure on himself, the system often does it for him, Chatsworth wrestling Coach Bob Hammond says. Because the official weigh-in comes after the holidays, a lot of wrestlers return to school overweight from those turkey dinners and party buffets. And it is when a wrestler is faced with the need to lose 10 pounds instead of two that he often takes drastic measures.

“Their own methods for losing weight are not always healthy,” Hammond said, “but the problem a coach has is control. You don’t know what a kid does when he’s not at school. He could go to a health club and sit in the sauna. The best thing for a coach to do is monitor the kids daily and make sure they don’t lose gross amounts of weight. But I think the situation is improving. Coaches are more aware of the dangers, although there’s no doubt in my mind that the kids are still taking severe measures to lose weight.

“I once saw a boy wrestle at a local high school at 121 pounds. He looked gaunt, pallid. He had dark circles under his eyes. Later, I saw him at a tournament and he was 112. I thought, ‘What’s he going to do to himself?’

“The problem is, at their age, kids think they’re immortal, so they don’t worry about permanently damaging their health.”

Milt Goffman, coach at El Camino Real since the school’s wrestling program began in 1973, feels that a coach should make a wrestler compete at the right weight.

“If a 155-pound kid wants to compete at 145,” Goffman said, “the coach has to say, ‘I’m not going to allow it.’ I know what a kid weighs the first day of practice. I’m not going to let his weight drop drastically. If he wants to lose two or three pounds, that’s fine with me. But losing an extreme amount isn’t OK, except if a boy has 20 to 25% body fat. Then he can afford to lose a lot of weight, but I’m there to see that he doesn’t lose it all at once.”

Clark pointed out, however, that a wrestler “can lose as many pounds as he wants during the summer and the coach will never know how he did it.”

A situation that compounds the weight-loss problem is natural growth. The wrestler whose pituitary is working overtime can change from a little kid to an adult almost overnight and may try to fight nature by forcing his weight to remain the same. But doing this, Holland says, “could possibly interfere with the growth process” by depriving the body of important nutrients. As they used to say about cigarettes, cutting weight can stunt your growth.

State sports associations such as the California Interscholastic Federation help compensate for natural growth by increasing the allowances for each weight class by one pound a month. A kid who competes as a 98-pounder in November can weigh as much as 103 pounds in March without going up in class.

Wrestlers with a chronic weight-loss habit also will not be happy to hear that their chances for infection are increased and they could also bring out an illness they never knew they had, like diabetes, Lesser said. The Journal of the American Medical Assn. recently ran a study pointing out that wrestlers who continually force their weight below normal levels may suffer decreased sex drive.

A lot of wrestlers, Goffman says, create weight problems for themselves. Before the weigh-in for a match, they’ll starve themselves to make weight, then they’ll go out and eat a pizza. “So it starts all over,” said Goffman. It’s a vicious cycle: starve to lose weight, make weight, eat a pizza because you’re starving, gain a few pounds, starve to lose weight.”

Although the medical profession is alarmed about rapid weight loss, novelist John Irving said he thinks it’s a “red herring.” Irving is a former wrestler who wrote lovingly of the sport in “The World According to Garp.” Maybe there are wrestlers who lose weight incautiously, maybe there are irresponsible coaches somewhere, but wrestling, Irving said, “is altogether a very healthy sport and wrestlers are the healthiest, best-conditioned people I know.”

Furthermore, he said, “Where weight cutting is religiously maintained, it is not done to be destructive. I don’t know any serious wrestler in a good program cutting weight stupidly. I don’t see the bad breath and sunken cheeks I remember from my high school and college days. The science of wrestling is getting smarter and smarter. It’s much better managed and understood.”

Irving knows wrestlers who have taken radical step to lose weight, “like sleeping in saunas and wrapping themselves in Army blankets, but it caught up with them. They got sick and stopped doing it. They didn’t become anorexics the rest of their lives.”

But to Holland, nothing makes sense about cutting weight. Not the dangers. Not the process. Not the rationale.

“The whole thing,” he said, “is crazy.”

‘The trouble with setting standards in wrestling is that there hasn’t been a well-publicized case of an athlete dying directly from rapid weight loss. It’s amazing there haven’t been more fatalities.’

Dr. Steve Scott

Director, Mayo Clinic sports medicine

‘I don’t see the bad breath and sunken cheeks I remember from my high school and college days. The science of wrestling is getting smarter and smarter. It’s much better managed and understood.’

John Irving

Author, former wrestler