For all of the discussion around tactics, conditioning and skill in MMA, one of the most brutal parts of the sport happens before the fighters step anywhere near the Octagon: weight cutting.

For UFC welterweight contender Ian Machado Garry, it means taking a body that naturally sits somewhere around 86–87kg and forcing it down to the 77kg welterweight limit before fight night. And while he’s become extremely good at the process, that doesn’t mean he thinks it’s a particularly good idea.

‘I think it’s ridiculous,’ Garry told Men’s Health on a recent episode of the Built for Life podcast. ‘I feel like weight cuts take away from the sport, as opposed to bringing good to the sport.’

Garry explains that the final week isn’t really about losing body fat. Instead, fighters are attempting to temporarily strip away large amounts of water weight in order to make the contracted limit.

‘If I weigh 84 kilos at the start of the week and I’ve signed a contract to show up at 77 at the end of the week, I have seven kilos to lose,’ he says.

How Weight Cutting Works

The methods involved are extreme and can even be dangerous.

Garry describes manipulating carbohydrate, sodium and fibre intake in order to reduce the amount of water his body retains, alongside ‘water loading’ earlier in the week.

‘We might drink eight litres a day every day for four days,’ he says. ‘What it does is essentially it tricks our body to continuously pee it out, pee it out, pee it out.’

Why Weight Cutting Can Be Dangerous

To state the obvious, this is not a weight-loss protocol to try at home. Or anywhere. Rapid dehydration and aggressive weight manipulation carry serious risks and, as Garry himself repeatedly points out, the entire process is inherently stressful.

‘You’re doing something that isn’t natural for any human to do,’ he says. ‘The stress is going to be caused. It’s trying to do it with the least amount of stress possible.’

That mindset also affects how he approaches the final stages of a cut. Rather than trying to hammer himself through endless conditioning sessions while already depleted, Garry prefers to minimise unnecessary physical work.

‘If you’re putting your body through a massive amount of stress already… don’t physically go out and exhaust yourself,’ he says.

The aim, as he puts it, is simply to get from A to B ‘with the least amount of stress on your body’.

Of course, there’s a reason fighters continue to put themselves through it: size. If everyone else in your division is cutting significant weight before rehydrating and stepping into the cage considerably heavier, refusing to play the game potentially means facing someone substantially bigger.

Garry says his natural walk-around weight can reach around 87kg. But even moving up one UFC division wouldn’t necessarily solve the problem.

‘I’ve trained with guys in the weight class above me and I’m like, yeah, there’s no way I’m fighting you,’ he says. ‘My natural walk-around is about 86, 87… I’m not fighting a guy who walks around at 97.’

That fighter may still cut all the way down into the division. And therein lies the arms race.

As Paddy Pimblett noted on a previous episode of the Built For Life podcast, even if athletes don’t like the process, you’d be putting yourself at a disadvantage if you were to fight at your walking around weight. Essentially, if one fighter does it, then all fighters are forced to do it.

Should Fighters Compete Closer to Their Natural Weights?

But Garry believes the sport would ultimately be better if fighters competed closer to their natural weights.

‘If we just let everyone go in fully hydrated and weigh in on the same day, I think the fights would be so much more interesting,’ he says. ‘I feel like there’d be so much more violence, whilst also more technique and more skill.’

Garry also believes eliminating the enormous cuts could have another upside: activity.

If he fought closer to 84kg, he says, making weight could be as simple as tidying up his food intake and dropping a small amount of water rather than embarking on a week-long process. That could mean recovering quicker, staying healthier and fighting more often.

‘Activity for me is so important,’ he says.

The difficulty is that weight cutting has become so deeply woven into combat sports that simply asking fighters to stop is unlikely to work. If there’s an advantage available, somebody will try to find it.

Garry suggests one possible answer would be to place limits on how much fighters are allowed to regain after weighing in – effectively preventing someone making the division limit before ballooning dramatically beyond it ahead of the fight. But he isn’t expecting the culture to change overnight.

‘It’s almost tradition now,’ he says. ‘It’s going to be so hard to get rid of.’

For now, Garry will keep doing what almost every elite fighter has to do: work within the system that exists.

‘I just do what I need to do,’ he says.

That doesn’t mean he has to pretend it’s healthy.

If there’s one thing Kori Sampson knows, it’s how to optimise your body composition for performance. To tap into his knowledge as an elite athlete and coach, we asked him to create a 4-week plan to help you move faster, recover quicker and keep pushing when the fatigue sets in – all while improving your muscle-to-fat ratio.

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With almost 18 years in the health and fitness space as a personal trainer, nutritionist, breath coach and writer, Andrew has spent nearly half of his life exploring how to help people improve their bodies and minds.    

As our fitness editor he prides himself on keeping Men’s Health at the forefront of reliable, relatable and credible fitness information, whether that’s through writing and testing thousands of workouts each year, taking deep dives into the science behind muscle building and fat loss or exploring the psychology of performance and recovery.   

Whilst constantly updating his knowledge base with seminars and courses, Andrew is a lover of the practical as much as the theory and regularly puts his training to the test tackling everything from Crossfit and strongman competitions, to ultra marathons, to multiple 24 hour workout stints and (extremely unofficial) world record attempts.   

 You can find Andrew on Instagram at @theandrew.tracey, or simply hold up a sign for ‘free pizza’ and wait for him to appear.