Rehydrating after weigh-ins is a critical step for an athlete to ensure their body is ready for competition. Wrestlers, whether they're beginners or seasoned competitors, need to pay special attention to how they manage their hydration after weight-ins as well as throughout the entire competition day.

Wrestling has a stigma about weight cutting, and often the wrestling community is perpetuating it ourselves. In my opinion, it is emphasized much too heavily and much too young. Through competing, coaching, and educating young wrestlers about the sport, I have observed that our young athletes are taught they might only be successful if they compete at a lower weight. The number of males and females I've spoken to who have decided not to continue their career onto a collegiate or international level, have mostly been due to burn out from weight cutting. When does it become impractical to maintain a weight class? Should our minds, bodies, technique, and love for the sport suffer? This post is meant to be a guide for young athletes to navigate the pressures they may be receiving to cut weight.

Food is typically a contentious topic in wrestling. There's the team that believes you should wrestle at your natural weight, and the other team which believes that cutting weight is more advantageous. However, cutting extreme amounts of weight will not provide a healthy athlete in the long run. Eventually, the body breaks down and what could have been a long healthy career is cut short.

Basic nutrition is no longer common place in our world, especially in the US. When it comes to making good decisions, we've unfortunately never been given the right tools. As we live our lives on the go, we reach more for alternatives than for whole foods. Even as athletes, we are still faced with the misconceptions that society instills. How do we educate ourselves to rise above the ideas that most of our peers and the people around us believe to be true about nutrition? We've brought back world medalist Othella Feroleto to help us address common misconceptions and to give us helpful tips.

Othella Feroleto is a former athlete for the US Army World Class Athlete Program, has an extensive wrestling resume, and is now pursuing her masters degree in human-nutrition and dietetics. We are thrilled to have nutrition advice from someone who has wrestled and traveled the world. That kind of experience helps you advise younger wrestlers who are looking to reach a new level of training.

Wrestlers and athletes spend years learning how to eat better for performance, and then transfer that knowledge to life. Once you've weeded through all the nutritional knowledge, you'll find that a few tips are tried and true. Below are techniques that help with learning your body, and how to appropriately portion your meals throughout the day.

If you are up to date on athlete trends, you'll have heard about meal prepping. Not only are there countless articles you can read on how to actually meal prep, but also instagram accounts showing others' gorgeously stacked tupperware for their week's meals. But who is actually using this and using it well? And is it actually benefitical for athletes?

Whenever I speak with my adult female friends on nutrition, I often hear them speak about wanting to "get back to eating clean." When I ask them what does that mean or look like for them, it is often "oh, super super healthy and I do everything perfect." 

We are inherently influenced by what something looks like that we are about to eat. It's in our DNA, as a visual cue was what protected us from eating something poisonous while we were hunters and gatherers. Second cue? Taste and texture. I know this well as I was an extremely picky eater as a child, and my fight or flight radars went off often with new foods. Texture was big for me and I was extremely resistant to trying anything new. I was encouraged to not give up and am proud to say that today, I will try anything once (well almost anything). Your body needs fuel to go, and recognizing that your choices make a difference can help you make changes for the better as an athlete, and for the rest of your life as a healthy human!