Kid Wrestlers "Cutting" Weight

Being a parent of a 7^th grade junior high wrestler who has wrestled of over 6 years and on the wrestling board for our local wrestling booster club, I find myself reading lots of forums regarding youth wrestling. One recent forum covered younger wrestlers "Cutting" weight to get down to lower weight brackets for tournaments, more specifically the WWF (Wisconsin) Youth State Wrestling Tournament. The forums to say the least are very interesting reading.

Let me start out by displacing a common misconception on wrestlers and weight loss. Being that I never wrestled, I had some concerns with my son getting into wrestling due to what I had witnessed first hand with friends "Cutting" weight in unhealthy manners. That was 20 years ago and let me tell you things have changed majorly.

Wrestling no longer practices the same weight loss techniques of its predecessors (Like when I was in high school.) You no longer find a 15 year old high school wrestler sitting in a high school shower wearing a rubber suit trying to sweat off 10 pound before the evening meet. They are not starving themselves for days trying to drop down 3 weight classes. Checks and balances are now in place to make sure that our wrestlers maintain healthy weights. Fat tests and hydration tests are conducted at the beginning of a season that insures that someone at 145 pounds doesn't come down to 112 if it would be dangerous for them to do so. Everything is posted on a public website and every wrestler at the high school level is accounted for.

This doesn't mean that wrestlers aren't dropping weight, its part of what makes wrestling one of the toughest sports out there. It means that guidelines are in place to make sure that someone doesn't cheat the system and endanger themselves by utilizing unhealthy weight loss methods. You can't prevent everyone from doing something harmful to lose weight, but the emphasis of the modern wrestling world is on how to keep our kids healthy.