DENVER, CO — Blue belt competitor Jason Riggs, 31, has spent the past six weeks researching competition nutrition, watching twelve hours of YouTube content on weight cutting, and buying three supplements he read about on a BJJ forum. His final, distilled competition protocol, confirmed by sources close to him, is to not eat anything between Wednesday evening and Saturday weigh-ins.
“I’m doing a modified fast,” Riggs explained Tuesday, approximately forty hours into not eating anything. “It’s not just starving. It’s strategic. I’m letting my body access its stored energy reserves.”
His registered division is 169 lbs. Riggs weighs 168.
“He doesn’t need to cut anything,” said his training partner, Claire Ostroff, 27, a purple belt who has competed seventeen times. “I watched him eat a sandwich on Monday and immediately start calculating if it was going to cost him the weigh-in. The sandwich was turkey. He was fine.”
Riggs has read extensively about the science of competition nutrition, including a blog post about how Gordon Ryan cuts weight (“he has a team and a protocol and a medically supervised saline drip situation — that’s what Jason took away from it”), a YouTube video by a fitness influencer who does not train BJJ, and a Reddit thread from 2019 titled “best way to drop 8 lbs in 4 days” that received mostly negative responses.
His current plan: nothing Wednesday, nothing Thursday, half a protein bar Friday morning (“to keep the engine running”), and then whatever food is nearest to him the moment he steps off the scale Saturday. He has already identified the location of a Chick-fil-A 0.4 miles from the venue.
“I’m going to be sharp,” Riggs said. “Lean. Dangerous.”
By Thursday afternoon, he had described himself as “a little foggy” but “mentally very clear about the foggy part,” and had sent four voice memos to Ostroff asking whether she thought a banana would “break the fast.”
His match is at 11 AM. He will almost certainly gas out in the second round, not because of the weight cut, but because he hasn’t done enough cardio. These two things are unrelated and he will not connect them.