Pennsbury Wrestling

Bucks County Courier Times By Jennifer Wielgus New PIAA wrestling regulations have helped eliminate drastic weight fluctuation and promote a healthy environment. A wrestler’s Thanksgiving, it turns out, is a lot like everyone else’s. Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes. All the fixings. But the athlete has one extra thing on his plate, something his jovial family members probably leave on the table. Self control. “You can have a little bit of this, a little bit of that, but you don’t have to eat a pound of turkey,” says Tom Vivacqua, wrestling coach at Council Rock North. “Proportion the stuff,” adds Harry S Truman coach Steve Given. “It’s an easy thing.” Not so easy for most people, and thus, not very common. But a high school wrestler will tell you that just because he says no thanks to a second helping of cranberry sauce doesn’t mean he’s starving himself to cut weight. A wrestler must monitor his food intake on a daily basis during the season in order to fit into his desired weight class at competition. In the past, the extreme measures used by some wrestlers to drop into a lower weight class – and thus gain an advantage over a smaller opponent – have cast a shadow over the sport. But area coaches and wrestlers say the times have changed. They know more about nutrition, and new rules imposed on them by the PIAA and wrestling’s governing bodies have made weight maintenance a much more exact science. It’s very possible, they say, to be a healthy wrestler. “Coach [Joe Kiefer] used to tell us that when he would wrestle in college, he used to see guys in latex suits go into the boiler room and jump rope for a couple of hours,” says Pennsbury senior Pat Frain. “Fortunately, I never had to do that. I maybe had to run a couple of extra miles, cut down on my intake of food, but nothing where I was on my deathbed. I would never risk my health to that extent.” High school wrestlers compete in 14 different weight classes, beginning with 103 pounds and going up to the 275-pound, or heavyweight, division. Wrestlers begin weighing in an hour before the start of a meet, using digital scales that measure to the tenth of a pound. Each wrestler must weight at or below his weight class number, or he cannot compete in that class. A wrestler is designated a certified weight by his doctor prior to the season, and he cannot wrestle below that weight unless he gets recertified. Many coaches monitor their wrestlers’ eating habits every day – sometimes asking the athletes to write down their daily diet – to make sure they’re practicing discipline but also getting enough fuel. So they resent the widespread perception that wrestling is an unhealthy sport because of its strict weight demands. “People will go to a football game, and there will be numerous athletes out there competing who will be walking around with 20 or 30 percent, or even more, body fat,” Kiefer says. “Nobody’s talking about the unhealthiness of that. Yet because we’ve got the wrestlers down to 7 or 8 percent body fat and we ask them to control their weight and eat healthy, people are finding fault with that.” That could change, though, due to increased vigilance by the PIAA over weight issues in wrestling. Wearing rubber sauna suits has been an illegal practice for some time. This year, the organization modified its wrestling regulations for the first time in more than two decades, and two important points highlight the changes. In order to wrestle in a particular weight class during the postseason – say the 130-pound class – wrestlers must weigh in at that weight – in this case, at no more than 130 pounds – in 50 percent of their regular-season matches. Previously, wrestlers could compete in various classes throughout the regular season and then drop into a lower class for the postseason. That presumably allowed for rapid, potentially unhealthy, weight loss tactics. “Maybe now we’ll have more instances of people starting at a particular weight and staying there the entire season,” Kiefer says. “There won’t be as much going up and down weight classes and things of that sort.” The second biggest change is that wrestlers are no longer allowed to leave the weigh-in area after they’ve been officially weighed. In the past, if they missed their weight class by a fraction of a pound, wrestlers used to have until the end of the weigh-in period, about half and hour, to try to lose that last one-tenth of a pound. “They’d go to the bathroom and spit or urinate, or go run in place, jump rope in a bunch of sweats and try to get the weight down,” Frain says. “Now, the wrestlers should be more prepared before the tournament to be at least a half-pound under. You can’t procrastinate until the last minute.” Vivacqua agrees. “That’s going to make us be way more responsible,” he says. “The kids have to make sure they’re not even close [to going over their weight].” Inevitably, wrestlers will still need to shed a few pounds here and there during the season. Experts say there is definitely a right way and a wrong way to do so. Karen Plansinis, a certified sports nutritionist who serves as a consultant and Internet columnist for the Pennsylvania Amateur Wrestling Federation (PAWF), counsels wrestlers to start before the season and lose the pounds gradually, dropping body fat and keeping lean muscle mass. “Like the Special K commercial,” she says. But Plansinis knows the gradual approach is not always possible. “Because wrestlers are mostly kids, adolescents, they don’t think that far ahead,” she says. “So what happens is they get closer and closer to the season, they still want to drop a bunch of weight , and then they’re putting themselves on a 500-to-800-calorie-a-day diets and restricting fluids, and that’s the wrong way.” Plansinis worries about that binge-and-purge cycle and also about the low-carbohydrate diets that recently have become popular. By steering clear of all bread products, she says, wrestlers can deplete their bodies of crucial energy stores. “If you don’t have enough carbohydrates stored in your muscles, you’re going to poop out real fast,” Plansinis says. Frain estimates that a typical wrestler keeps his diet between 1,200 and 1,600 calories each day during the season, as opposed to a “normal” 2,000-calorie diet. Wrestlers try to avoid junk foods such as sodas and candy and fatty foods pizza and french fries. They opt instead for salads, rolled lunchmeat, fruit and lots and lots of water. But it’s not easy to monitor and control the cravings for all those old favorites. “Guys will starve themselves, then go eat a whole pizza after the match,” Frain says. “You need to manage that out over the course of time.” Coaches are optimistic that their guidance, added to the influence of new rules and increased education among wrestlers, will discourage extreme weight cutting practices and thus change the image of their sport for good. “I think that in the sport of wrestling and other sports where weight control becomes an issue, we’re trying to do the right thing,” Kiefer said. “We’re trying to educate people and we’re trying to develop some good habits.” Says Frain: “Maybe the new rules will make the rest of the community find out that maybe it’s not that bad of a sport, maybe I will put my son or daughter into it and see how it goes.” Jennifer Wielgus can be reached at 215-949-4213 or jennifer.wielgus@phillyburbs.com --------------------------------------------- One Wrestler’s Diet Pennsbury’s Pat Frain, a 171-pound senior, goes through this diet on a typical day: Breakfast: “In the morning, I’ll have a glass of water and some fruit – bananas, apples – usually two to three pieces. Then I’ll go through the day with a bottle of water in my hand, sipping that.” Lunch: “I’ll try to have a salad, maybe put a little bit of chicken in it. I try to keep my dressing down, because that’s the fatty part of the salad, so I don’t drown it. They have salads in the cafeteria – small and large – and I try to get the small of course. During practice, you lose a good amount of weight, typically 3 ½ or 4 pounds. I go home and have a lot more water, and I try to eat a sensible dinner, not too big.” Dinner: “Maybe chicken with a side of string beans and maybe a little treat. I like to maybe not have three really big meals a day, but cut it down to five small meals a day to keep my metabolism from going up and down, up and down and keep it generally steady.”