The sport wrestling is the oldest competitive sport created. Two people who weigh the same amount of weight go hand to hand to try and pin the other. However, losing weight can have extreme advantages. From gaining strength advantages the strategy the team needs and tradition culture.
“I have cut around ten pounds since the beginning of the wrestling season. I cut by eating healthy, sweating hard at practice and burning calories. I think it’s smart to cut the right amount of weight because then you can be stronger than the people naturally at that weight. It sucks to cut but I honestly can’t afford not to.” Senior Hayes Smith said.
Cutting ten pounds is a big deal. It can have challenges like fatigue, dehydration, hunger, mood changes and inability to focus. Hayes Smith, a wrestler at Farmington High, eats healthy and burns calories to lose weight quickly.
“Personally I haven’t cut any weight. I’m actually trying to gain weight because I’m too light for the heavyweight weight class (285lbs). I weigh 208lbs and coach wants me to wrestle at heavyweight because we don’t have one. I wrestle some absolutely huge kids. I have a misplaced rib now because one of them jumped on me in a tournament. I’ve heard it sucks to cut weight but lucky me I don’t have to.” Junior Rowan Henry said.
For some wrestlers at Farmington High they don’t even need to cut weight because the coach doesn’t need them too. Rowan Henry gets the perk of not needing to watch what he eats, however he wrestles people that are exponentially bigger than him.
“I don’t really cut a lot of weight, I weighed around 115lbs at the beginning of the season but I cut to 106lbs. One down side of doing that is there is another teammate in my weight class, so sometimes we need to wrestle. No, I don’t like cutting weight because I love eating food and it restricts most of my food.” Sophomore Bruce Thompson said.
At the end of the day, cutting weight is not a positive thought to wrestlers. Although, they do it anyway because it has benefits that are too great to pass up.
