Wrestling Blogs - Mike Tamillow

I’ve always been good at math. I’m probably one of the few people that actually enjoys it. Wait…I hate the math, but I like the understanding behind the math. For example, last week’s blog I tried to solve how much a casino makes of a billion dollars of blackjack bets. I did the wrong equation. If the casino wins 51% then I have to consider both the casino and the individuals playing blackjack putting a billion dollars up. The casino should leave with 51% of two billion dollars or twenty million more than it invested.

Before going on I want to review the first rule to good nutrition… That is: no one really knows anything. There are studies that prove that something called your ‘ideal bodyweight’ will make you live longer, but most people are meant to have a healthy amount of body fat. There is evidence for a natural bodyweight, but that doesn’t address exercise. For some people to reach their ideal body weight they have to reduce their calorie intake to about a thousand calories a day, which probably isn’t healthy either. From my understanding many nutritionists aren’t certified and the ones that are, are certified under the current understanding of nutrition. No one knows anything because nutrition is different for everyone.

I would also like to mention that I learned nutrition from reading the encyclopedia of body building (by Arnold Schwarzenegger), as well as finding out how my own body works. If you think eating broccoli and salad is healthy for you, I would like you to try eating only salads for a few days and tell me how you feel. If you’re anything like me, than eating two, fully loaded, quarter-pounders, two hours before a workout helps your workout more than eating three eggs and a grapefruit. Vegetables provide necessary vitamins, as do fats. However, you can take pills that substitute for the vitamins just as well, there isn’t a noticeable difference between getting your vitamins from food or pills. Glycemic levels in certain foods determine how fast your body breaks them down. This is one reason why broccoli is considered healthier than candy; it takes longer to break down. But even in this aspect, it depends on what you want to get. Right before a match I would rather have a snickers than a salad.

So this week I’m going to try to do the math right. Before I start I’d like to get some facts I’m going to use:

Water makes up 60% – 70% of your body weight. Muscles are 70% - 75% hydration. Blood is about 90% hydration. Fat is between 10% - 15% water.
1 gram of fat is 9 calories. 1 gram of carbohydrates is 4 calories. 1 gram of protein is 4 calories.

Remember everything on my blog is my personal understanding.(it may not be true, but neither is the nutritionist advice backed up by a multi-billion dollar industry, that has a lot to make on the fact that you believe they know what they’re doing.)

Therefore: Since I know that 453.6 grams is a pound, I can calculate for a pound of food. The calories burned or gained in a pound of food are 1814 + 114(calories for every 5% fat the food contains) I figured this out by determining a pound of protein and/or carbohydrates (4x453.6). Then I add in the difference between the calories in fat and those of carbohydrates [(9-4)*.05*453.6]. The general advice is that there are about 3500 calories in a pound of food, gained or lost. This would assume that the food is 75% fat by weight. You would either have to be eating a diet of 75% fat or burning 75% fat. During a workout, the longer you go, the more fat you burn. Towards the end of a three hour workout, you might be losing 75% body fat. So this isn’t an accurate calculation.

Using my understanding of my hydration levels I could say for every pound of weight I lose, I can healthily lose 2 pounds of water. The equation for this is simple. Assuming 66% of my body is water then one third is sustenance (calories). This rule also applies for the reverse. If I eat enough calories to put on a pound of food, then I will also gain three pounds. So when I look at the muffin I’ve just eaten, I have to consider how many grams of food are in it. Fat 11g, Carb. 26g, Protein 3g. That means with the 40 grams I’ve eaten I have to account for 120 grams of weight, about .25 of a pound. The muffin actually weighs 57 grams, my body will retain more water. When I lose that 40 grams working out, my body will also lose the excess water too. If I eat lettuce the amount of usable grams including water is smaller than the weight of the lettuce. My body is going to lose the excess water.

One of the major problems people suffer from is this. They can’t tell hunger from thirst. They eat and aren’t full, so they continue to eat. Then when they start drinking water their body retains all the water. Instead it is better to fill up on fluids before eating and then continue to drink a lot of fluids while eating.

Dehydration can be a major problem; a loss of more than 15% of the body’s water can be deadly. Between 10 and 15% dehydration has huge effects. Around 5% hydration causes dizziness and headaches. Even a loss of only 2% has shown effects up to 30% loss in athletic performance. It takes between 4 and 48 hours to recover from dehydration. I weigh around 200 pounds; my numbers are: 15% - 30 pounds, 10% - 20 pounds, 5% - 10 pounds, 2% - 4 pounds.

Loading up on sweats is not helping anyone. The only way to lose weight is to exercise. I can lose 6 pounds in a light, hour and a half workout with shorts and a t-shirt on. Why? Because I stay hydrated, if I don’t stay hydrated I can’t. In that hour and a half workout I can assume I really only lost about 3 or 4 pounds. If I load up on sweats it will only help to dehydrate a little more. It is a bad idea to dehydrate before 4 to 6 hours of competition. My body doesn’t think it’s in danger being dehydrated a short period of time, but if I give it too long it won’t recover properly.

I hate losing weight. It’s the worst thing in the world. Remember that little problem mother Teresa was trying to solve, world hunger, yeah well it isn’t helping. But, I’m showing, there is a way to lose 10 pounds in a day without it being incredibly detrimental. For example: If I do 2 workouts and lose a solid 5 lbs in an hour a half (I rehydrate also because I lost much more). I can afford to eat plenty also; I can probably eat a good 2000 calories, I take a multivitamin, I’ve probably lost my ten pounds. The two important things are that I am exercising to get the weight off and I am recovering and eating. There are more problems created by this though, over training right before competition, for example. The biggest problem arises when there is no healthy way to calculate a way to make weight without sacrificing muscle lose or hydration. Your body will eat away proteins when it has nothing left. It is better to sacrifice muscle than hydration. However, the even worse part about that information is that in cutting serious weight, the first muscle you sacrifice is fast twitch muscle. In wrestling fast twitch muscle is necessary since most takedowns occur in 1 to 5 seconds of action.

The simple fact is I weigh around 200 pounds. My opponent weighs around 200 pounds. No math equation is going to change that fact. If either of us had to fudge with numbers to really make it, we had to sacrifice something essential to our wrestling.

I can play with the math, but I hate math.