During the school year many students here at Darien High School will choose to participate in a sport where one’s weight, or more oftentimes diet, is essential to winning a meet or game. Some athletes can eat what they want whenever they want; other times players are on such a strict diet that they refrain from eating all together on game days.
The wrestling team at DHS has the strictest diet of all the sports teams in Darien because each wrestler must make a specific weight class in order to compete.
Once you are put into a certain weight class, it is important to stay within that weight class, otherwise you will have to compete in higher or lower weight class than you are used to.
In a sport like this, it is important to not just let yourself go during the off season because in the end it is a lot harder and more frustrating to lose that weight that you have obtained during those months.
“My weight class is 170, so when I weigh in I have to weigh less than that or I have to wrestle at 182. I weigh around 10-15 pounds over during the off season and already started dieting down so I can make weight in December,” John Forlivio, a senior at DHS, said.
However, players must make sure that they are dieting in a healthy way so that will not harm their body. Leading up to a match, wrestlers will try to eat as healthy as possible, which means restricting their consumption of food that could potentially make them gain weight. In the days leading up to the meet or game, most athletes will cut their intake of carbs as well as water in order to maintain their body’s natural body weight. Very small meals are also encouraged in order to manage their balanced diet.
Wrestlers refer to dieting as “cutting” as they strive to make the cut for a certain weight class. The goal is to be able to barely make a lower weight class, because if you qualify for a lower weight class before your match you will face a smaller opponent-which gives a wrestler a slight advantage over their opponent.
While everyone should watch their junk food intake, wrestling is not the only DHS sports team where students are conscious about their weight and diet. In sports like swimming and diving, you want to be able to pull yourself through the water as fast as you can, and eating tons of chips and junk food will not necessarily help you accomplish that goal.
“We [DHS Swim Team] definitely watch what we eat because we want to make sure our bodies are staying in good swimming shape and we don’t want our eating habits to interfere with that. I think that if we are not eating healthy then we will not perform to the best of our ability and all of the work we have put into the season will quickly go away,” Senior Captains Cameron Kirby and Rebecca Liu, of the Swim Team, said.
According to Kirby and Liu, The most important thing a swimmer can eat before their race is bagels, pasta with olive oil, or bananas, because these types of foods help prevent cramps.
Even in football guys are watching their calorie and food intake. On a game day, football players need to eat something that will give them the strength and energy to endure through the entire four quarter game.
“During the football season I watch what I eat to a certain degree just to make sure I maintain my weight, but apart from that I don’t watch it that much,” Michael Stovall, senior football captain, said. Though all sports use various pieces of equipment in order to play their game, each sport uses one instrument in common: our bodies. So research what foods you can eat that will help your body to perform to the best of its abilities in the specific sport you play.
