Making Weight with Matt Windle, The Sky Sports Diet

Making Weight with Matt Windle, The Sky Sports Diet

By Neil Perkins

They say TV adds 10 pounds to you, I’m in trouble. Sometimes we have to practice what we preach and on October 22^nd Matt Windle boxes against Don Broadhurst in a contest to catapult his career live on Sky Sports. My last appearance on Sky TV was brief and less than desirable, this time taking the role of coach I aim to ensure that even if I look portly, that my boxer looks good.

Boxers have a bad habit of ballooning their weight to excess and in Matt I have a boxer that can happily abstain from alcohol and other things associated to ‘bad living’ but food is his vice. Initially this fight was to be made for the Flyweight title (8 stone/ 50.8kg) I was a little concerned after making him jump back on the scales. Matt on his downtime had done what he’d become infamous for – ballooned his weight up to 59kg (9st 2lbs)! The poet and the boxer aren’t the only contrasts in Matt’s life, he has a habit of going to excess and would previously have his weight down to around 54.5kg (8st 6lbs) within a week back in camp (loss 4.5kg or 10 pounds) He would do this by restricting his calories to 600 calories per day and training twice per day. I call this an eating disorder – I am yet to meet a boxer that doesn’t have an unhealthy relationship with food. With the contest been made at Super-Flyweight (8st 3lbs/ 52.2kg) I am a little more relived, he’d have made fly weight (8st dead) comfortably with the training schedule and nutrition plan (not diet), the problem would have been the panic causing him to ‘rush’ weight loss and take foods needlessly out of his diet as he’d done previously. If you relate to my previous blog on over training and metabolic damage, you can see why this would be an issue.

The first two weeks of this camp we employed a nutritionist and rather than strip calories out of his ‘diet’ we included superfoods like blueberries, pomegranate and celery in diet with plenty of steak, chicken and ostrich. With him complaining about the volume of the food he had to eat, his 2,000 calories plus nutrition plan wasn’t what he’d been used to previously and he wasn’t yet at 54.5kg (8st 6lbs or 4.5kg/ 10lb weight loss) but instead at 56.5kg (8st 9lbs or 2.5kg/ 5lbs weight loss) the difference now to prior is that he

• Didn’t look drained
• Was firing on all cylinders
• Was eating nutrient dense food
• Wasn’t metabolically damaged

Now at 5 weeks out we have 4kg to lose and can comfortably dehydrate the last 0.5kg by restricting water intake on the day of the weight in, before re-hydrating on fight night. On fight night after the inclusion of some food groups that would have deliberately restricted five days prior to weigh in he will be fully fuelled and weighing between 1-2kg above his weigh in weight. Some boxers chose to do this to a more extreme scale, but I fear for a potentially long and gruelling contest that this would affect his performance, he will not be in a sauna, skipping with a bin bag on or running on the day of the weigh in, just restricting his water intake. Organically he will lose 4kg in 4 weeks.

We will put Matt on a base level of 1600 calories per day (excluding post workout), now Matt is smaller than the average man! At 5’4” and boxing at 52.2kg, a larger male would need to consume more calories than this if they aimed to lose weight. Restricting beyond this amount would risk his metabolic damage. He could if he was tight at the weight (making flyweight) comfortably and safely cut to 1200 calories (this is his basal metabolic rate) providing he was eating nutrient dense foods. But below this amount would/ could cause damage. As he has less to lose, we can sit above this level.

The Nutrition Plan, a typical day….

Breakfast

50g of Porridge Oats

75g of Blueberries

2 Whole Organic Eggs

 

Train 8am

Post Workout

Reflex Natural Whey Protein Shake

 

Lunch

60g Rice/ Cous Cous or 1 Tortilla Wrap

150g Chicken or 1 Ostrich Steak

Unlimited Green Leafy Veg

 

Mid PM

25g of Nuts

80g of Pomegranate Seeds

 

Train 7pm

Post Workout

Reflex Natural Whey Protein Shake

 

8pm

8oz Rump Steak

Unlimited Green Leafy Veg

 

Supplement Strategies

Reflex Nutrition who sponsor Matt supplement his diet with the following

Nex Gen: Quality Once Per Day Multi Vitamin

Zinc Matrix: Pre Bed Zinc Supplement

BCAA’s: Something Matt takes 45 minutes before training to preserve lean muscle mass.

 

Burning the candle at both ends!

This is approximately 1800 calories per day and includes foods that Matt enjoys eating and that he benefits from eating. When you look at his intense training schedule, you see why he would need to eat such a volume when cutting weight. He would have trained twice per day previously on 600 calories per day! As an amateur he would do this and drop weight quickly initially before his body and metabolism would shut down and force him to adopt dehydration strategies. We have increased his understanding of food as a source of nourishment to aid his performance and he always had a good engine, now he is fuelling it properly, he will perform better. This is an elite level athlete who has had to learn the lessons of gradual weight loss by sensible means, in the past he has done it the hard way and made life difficult for himself. Reality is if your target weight loss is 2 stone, that you are not going to do it in a week and asides from the first two weeks when your body acclimatises that you are not going to lose more than 1kg per week. The next lesson we teach him is not to eat so much in between contests and not let himself balloon so much!

The lessons of the athlete can be applied to everyone.

• Eat nutrient dense foods
• Eat slightly less
• Move slightly more
• Lose Weight

I might reduce my calories and practice what I preach….after I’ve finished my breakfast.