Blood, Sweat & Tears : Making Weight Often Poses Grave Risks for Wrestlers

If the high school wrestler in your family is suffering from listlessness, nausea, sunken cheeks, sallow complexion and stomach cramps, don’t necessarily blame flu. The problem might be self-induced.

This is the time of year--holiday food feast ends, official state weigh-in takes place--when wrestlers traditionally take drastic measures to lose unwanted pounds.

The wrestling term is “sucking weight,” and it can be taken literally. Wrestlers use such dehydrating procedures as enemas, laxatives, vomiting, diuretics, amphetamines and spitting in the sauna for a few hours while ensconced in a rubber suit.

If all else fails, a wrestler always can donate a pint to the Red Cross.

“It’s barbaric, things wrestlers do,” said Terry Fischer, wrestling coach at El Camino Real High.

Sucking weight is not limited to post-holiday purges. It goes on all season, a ritual that is “bred into wrestling,” said Martin Juarez, coach at Buena High.

The medical profession would like to see it bred out of the sport. While the short-term symptoms of sudden weight loss--it is not uncommon for a wrestler to lose four pounds in a few hours nor unheard of to drop 20 pounds overnight--usually disappear after the season and the wrestler returns to his normal eating habits, there are long-term risks to the heart, liver and kidney, problems also seen in people who suffer from bulimia and anorexia, medical experts say.

Although there have been no recorded high school wrestling deaths directly attributable to rapid weight loss--eight of the 10 fatalities between 1982 and 1990 were blamed on congenital heart defects--wrestling has almost as many catastrophic injuries as football per 100,000 participants, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research. And many medical authorities believe that wrestling’s high injury rate is linked to the debilitating effects of sucking weight.

“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, an authority on wrestling and former director of sports medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. “It’s amazing there haven’t been more fatalities.”

Over the past two decades, state and national high school officials have become more aware of the weight-loss problem and have taken such steps as banning rubber suits, modifying rules and trying to educate coaches, wrestlers and parents. Officials say progress has been made.

“I don’t see things I saw 10 or 15 years ago,” said Bill Clark, Southern Section administrator in charge of wrestling. “It seems to be a little more reasonable.”

Officials, however, cannot support their assessment with any statistical evidence or comprehensive studies, and skeptics wonder whether much really has changed. According to coaches and athletes, wrestlers still suck weight, some of their own volition, some with the encouragement of their coaches.

“It’s criminal that certain coaches still let kids go beyond their limits,” Fischer said. “No wonder people don’t have great respect for wrestling. They think kids are starving.”

Although San Fernando High Coach Mike Castillo does not think the problem is as widespread as it once was, “those wrestlers with high expectations (for winning) do their best to maximize weight loss,” he said. “Sometimes, they go beyond what they should.”

To give wrestlers the opportunity to diet at a less frantic pace after the holidays this season, the state changed the date of the official weigh-in from the traditional second week in January to the third week. The official weigh-in is important to a wrestler--it determines the lowest weight class in which he can compete for the rest of the season, including tournaments--but moving back the date is not expected to make much of an impact on the problem of sucking weight, experts say.

The state follows the wrestling guidelines of the National Federation of State High School Assns. and has not taken an aggressive approach in tackling the weight-loss issue. The state has not done comprehensive surveys to determine the extent of the problem nor has it even organized a statewide wrestling coaches’ association that could police the sport directly.

Wisconsin, meanwhile, this season adopted the nation’s strictest rule governing weight loss: During the season, a wrestler will not be allowed to compete below a weight that has been determined by body-fat analysis. The rule effectively prevents a wrestler from taking more than a few pounds off his natural weight.

In California, a wrestler can go up two weight classes but down only one. This allows greater flexibility in choosing the weight at which one wants to wrestle. For example, a wrestler can weigh 160 at the official weigh-in, gain 29 pounds to wrestle at 189 during the season, then lose 18 pounds to wrestle at 171 in tournaments.

The Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Assn. devised the body-fat rule after studying the state’s wrestlers for several years and finding that almost 25% had sucked weight during the season.

The studies showed that many wrestlers “gained an inordinate amount of weight right after the season--as much as 31 pounds in two weeks,” said Don Herrmann, WIAA director. “That was a pretty clear indication they were at an unhealthy weight during the season.”

After two years of testing, the body-fat rule was made mandatory for Wisconsin’s 350 high schools, which once had faced abolition of wrestling at the urging of one Wisconsin county medical society. A simple skin-fold test, costing $3-$4, measures body fat. During the season, a wrestler is not allowed to dip below 7% body fat.

Bob Davis, a former high school wrestling coach who is the wrestling rules interpreter for the California Interscholastic Federation, likes the Wisconsin rule and hopes that the CIF will be able to adopt something similar. “It’s a matter of organization and time,” he said, pointing out that the CIF oversees about three times the number of high schools as its Wisconsin counterpart.

As expected, many Wisconsin coaches and wrestlers originally resisted the WIAA’s attempt to control weight loss. Sucking weight always has been considered wrestling’s badge of courage, becoming part of the sport’s mythology. Tales, apocryphal or not, abound of wrestlers who shed 30 pounds the night before winning the state meet. In their hearts, wrestlers always have believed that leaner means meaner.

But it’s not true. “It’s all a myth,” Fischer said. “There’s no advantage to be thin.”

Word might be getting around. “Wrestlers have a better understanding of nutrition and changes that can happen,” Clark said. At recent state tournaments, Davis noted, “Kids who are at their natural weight and don’t have to suffer as much (to suck weight) seem to do better.”

Fischer, who is in his first year at El Camino Real after coaching stints at North Hollywood and West Torrance, puts the burden on the coach to monitor his wrestlers. “If a kid sucks weight, the coach isn’t doing his job,” Fischer said. “Coaches are responsible for their kids and their health.”

Fischer has taken a radical approach at El Camino Real. “The kids wanted to lose weight (the traditional way) but I wouldn’t let them,” he said. Instead, he put them on a diet of foods high in protein and complex carbohydrates and worked them hard in the wrestling room so the weight came off naturally.

“They ate their way to a lower weight class,” Fischer said, “but they were still full of good food value and energy and felt stronger and better. And they’re winning without having to suck weight.”

Fischer feels that his program will pay off at tournament time and beyond. “My kids will be healthier in April and March,” he said.

Although wrestlers might be more aware these days and take saner approaches to weight management, myths are difficult to kill. “A lot of people automatically lose 10 pounds to start the season,” said Jim Jackson, a senior wrestler at Buena High, using himself as an example. He started at 130 and gradually lost 11 pounds to compete in the 119 class.

And even though a body-fat rule--if California ever gets one--will prevent wrestlers from losing 20 or 30 pounds during a season, it will not eliminate the need for a wrestler to suck off a few ounces or pounds in the hours before a tournament. “That,” said Buena’s Juarez, “will never change.”