CrossFit Open is coming up, still got time to cut weight?
With just a few weeks to go to the Open, or any important other competition (non-weight class based), is it still smart to do a weight cut?
As competition time is approaching, we often start looking for opportunities to fine tune our performance. Weight or more specifically, body-composition is typically something that’s looked at. This is frequently driven by the idea that a lower body weight will improve relative power output and will therefor boost performance. Which could be true but, to cut to the case right away; with just a few weeks left, trying to lose weight is probably not a great idea. That doesn’t mean that some athletes might not benefit from losing some body fat. However, this should be done in the earlier phases of the season prep, not when training is ramping up. To answer why, we need to get a few things straight first:
When we talk about losing weight in a non-weight class based sport, we almost always mean losing body fat. To lose body fat, one needs to be in a calorie deficit (no discussion here, please). However, from about 12-6 weeks out of competition we’d expect training intensity, and often volume, to increase, demanding adequate nutrition. Which often means intake at maintenance level or even at a slight surplus to make sure we benefit most from training and adequately recover. As you can see: these things don’t go well together. Let’s dive into the details a bit more.
Recovery
As the energy we use for daily life, training and recovery all come from the same bucket, cutting short on calories can have a detrimental effect on our recovery from training. Especially in times when training is ramping up, less energy will be left for adaptation & recovery. This means that your body will down regulate it’s metabolism to a certain degree, to compensate for the reduced energy availability, resulting in a reduced adaptation to training in the best case, or just straight up under recovery in the worst case. Leading to an increased risk of injury.
Strength
A lack of sufficient nutrition, it can also negatively impact muscle mass. When in a deficit, the body does go and look for calories internally to compensate for the lack of energy intake (in addition to down regulation of certain metabolic processes). Even though it would be super nice, for all those calories to come from fat. This isn’t the case. A significant part of the calories come from breaking down proteins. This can, to a certain extent, be offset through doing heavy strength training. But daily CrossFit workouts are probably a bit too metabolic to do so. Which is why doing high volume high intensity CrossFit training in a deficit will probably lead to some loss of muscle mass.
Energy & training output
The last major argument is that, in order to be in the best shape going into the competition, it is crucial to touch upon competition-like intensity often in the weeks leading up to it. Being on a calorie deficit both directly and indirectly reduces your ability to do this. Directly, by simply lowering the amount of energy you can put into a session, indirectly by impeding recovery lowering the amount of hard training sessions one can do. Simply resulting in you being less well peaked on game dame.
Is there anyone that should still try to cut weight before the Open?
Well, I would argue in this case, only when it isn’t a late weight cut but part of an ongoing process. If cutting weight is your main priority and performance is less important to you, then by all means keep cutting weight.
So with a few weeks left before the Crossfit Open kicks off (or any other non-weight class based competition), trying to lose some body weight is not a good idea if you care about performance. Not only is it negatively impacting your training output and therefore ability to show up in peak fitness at game day, but it’s also impeding your recovery making you more susceptible to injury. For most athletes, even the ones that might benefit from losing some fat mass, waiting for the off-season to shred some unwanted mass is probably the better choice. The key here is to look at your priorities and act in a way that you can maximize those. If that means weightloss, then by all means, keep cutting, if that means performance, than eat to fuel and crush your competition.