Ohio State assistant performance dietician Nancy Siegel explains the process behind wrestlers making weight at the Covelli Center Oct. 7, 2025. Credit: Sandra Fu | Managing Photo Editor
When most people hear of athletes “cutting weight,” they picture plastic sweat suits, starvation and misery.
Inside Ohio State wrestling, achieving competition weight looks more like careful planning than punishment.
Assistant performance dietician Nancy Siegel spends most of her days inside the Jennings Wrestling Facility engaged in face-to-face conversations that help her understand athletes well enough to keep their journey to making weight safe and on track.
“We want to stay pretty close to our weight class,” Siegel said. “We also want to do that by not really depleting our muscle mass.”
Athletes have access to DEXA scan machines, which precisely measure body composition to manage weight, improve performance and prevent injury. The scans give coaches and trainers detailed data on muscle and fat distribution, allowing them to tailor nutrition and training plans for each athlete.
Ohio State wrestlers are instructed to approach match weight gradually throughout the week. Siegel focuses on hydration, “carbohydrate timing,” the strategic consumption of carbs around exercise to maximize performance and recovery, and calorie manipulation.
If dehydration becomes part of the final stretch to squeeze the little amount of weight left off, Siegel said it’s controlled.
“We don’t ever want to be really dehydrated as an athlete,” she said. “But as a wrestler, cutting that percentage of weight, you might have to be a little bit dehydrated.”
To better understand what is happening inside the body during this process, Dr. Catherine Saenz, an assistant professor of exercise science at Ohio State, highlighted fluids as a key component in gaining and losing weight.
“Depending on their weight-loss tactics, fluids are a common thing that they’re starting to control a lot more,” Saenz said.
She said that the wrestler’s level of awareness of their bodies comes from repetition. These wrestlers have been cutting weight weeks before matches throughout their careers, which makes them knowledgeable about how their bodies feel and how they will react.
“They’re probably very in tune with their bodies, and know how to push that boundary and still stay within their performance limits,” she said.
Siegel said her job also involves reframing how people view wrestling culture.
“There’s really not a lot of education as much as there should be,” she said. “Those guys, maybe high schoolers, who are eating ice chips all day and not even eating anything, that’s where it gets scary.”
At the collegiate level, she said, cutting weight is supported, not improvised.
“We have a lot of resources at their fingertips, and I’m available to provide those to them.”
