The karate instructor whose students were cutting weight badly

The dojo already decides what its students eat

The hall Tenzin Bhutia rents in Deorali has a wooden floor, a rack of shoes outside the door and a timetable that has changed very little in twelve years. An adult batch before the town is properly awake. Three children's batches stacked between four and seven in the evening. A second adult batch after that, mostly men who work in offices along the bazaar. A grading every few months, a state meet in winter, and for four or five students a year, something past that.

Nothing on that timetable is about food, and food runs through every hour of it. A boy of fourteen arrives at the four o'clock batch straight from school, having last eaten at half past eleven, works hard for ninety minutes and turns grey in the final twenty. A mother waits by the door to ask why her daughter is the smallest in her group and whether the training is stopping her growing. A man of forty, back after a decade away, wants to know what he should take so his knees stop complaining.

And in the six weeks before a state selection, one question arrives in a dozen versions: how do I get down a category.

Making weight is the part nobody is taught

The weight-class sports carry a body of practice that is handed from senior students to junior ones much as a kata is. Skip the evening meal for a week. Run in a plastic sheet. Spit into a bottle through double geography. Find a hotel with a steam room. Stop drinking from the night before, then eat a plate of rice and drink something sweet in the hour between the scales and the first bout.

Tenzin was taught that in the late nineties by a coach he respected, and he taught it onward, because in the narrow sense it works. The number on the scale falls. What else falls is not visible at the weigh-in. A student who has not drunk water since the previous evening is slower, handles heat worse and makes poorer decisions in a contact bout, which in this sport is not an abstraction. And a thirteen-year-old who learns that not eating is a legitimate competitive tool has been taught something that outlasts the medal.

The harder judgement is the one underneath it. Some of those students should have been moving up a category rather than down, and Tenzin had no framework for telling which.

Where twelve years of teaching runs out

He can correct a hip rotation in a glance. He has no comparable eye for a plate. When a parent asks what a growing child should be eating, his answer comes from his own competitive years, from whatever the sports shop on the main road happens to be stocking, and from a forwarded message somebody's father sent him.

The adult batch brings the other half of it: whey, creatine, mass gainer, the fat burner a colleague swears by. He had been answering those from packaging and price rather than from anything he could defend.

There is also the drop-off, which every instructor in the country watches and few connect to food. Students leave at fourteen and fifteen, in the board examination years, and the reason given is always studies. Some of it genuinely is. Some of it is a child who has been arriving at training underfed for two years, has stopped improving, and has concluded that they are not good at this. An instructor who cannot tell those two apart loses students he could have kept.

Advice that does not survive the kitchen it lands in

There is a second failure that matters more in a hill town than instructors usually allow for. Telling a family to give the child more protein means whey powder in the mind of a parent who cannot sensibly spend on it, and so nothing happens at all. The useful version of that advice is made of what is already in the house: eggs, dal cooked thicker rather than thinner, milk at a time that is not immediately before training, the fermented soybean a Sikkimese kitchen already knows what to do with, greens in the season they appear.

The weather sets the rest of it. Classes thin through the heavy monsoon weeks. Winter brings the gradings and the state meet together. Parents who work through the tourist months are not available for a conversation in October. Any advice an instructor gives has to survive all of that, and folklore does not, because folklore has no way of being adjusted.

What a sports nutrition course changes in a martial arts class

Four things, in Tenzin's account, and none of them is a new title on the door.

A weight plan measured in weeks, not in the last three days

The single change with the most effect. Body composition moves slowly and predictably if you start eight to twelve weeks out, and violently and expensively if you start on Thursday for a Sunday weigh-in. Knowing what a sensible weekly rate looks like for an adolescent, and what it looks like for a grown competitor, lets an instructor say no to the three-day method with a reason rather than out of nerves. It also lets him tell a parent, early enough to matter, that this child is competing in the wrong category.

The training day gets fed

Most of what goes wrong in a children's batch is timing rather than content. A student who eats at school by noon and trains at four is running the last third of the session on nothing. That is fixed by a small, ordinary thing eaten at half past three, not by a supplement. The same logic applies to the twenty minutes after a hard session, to a two-hour grading, and to a competition day with three bouts and unpredictable gaps between them.

Parents get a reason instead of an opinion

The published Indian dietary guidance gives an instructor something to point at that is not himself. That matters with the growth question in particular, where a parent is frightened and the honest answer is that training does not stunt a child but persistent underfeeding will, and that the two are easy to confuse from outside.

The adult batch becomes a different conversation

Half the evening batch joined to lose weight and the other half joined to be able to keep up with their children. Both are everyday nutrition work rather than sports nutrition, and both are things an instructor can now handle properly instead of deflecting.

There is a fifth change that is really a matter of travel. A team going down to a meet in the plains eats on a bus, in a hostel and at whatever is open near the venue, and the instructor is the person deciding what a dozen students put in their bags. Before, that was biscuits and bananas chosen by habit. Now there is a list, worked out in advance, that accounts for a long descent, a night in an unfamiliar bed and a competition morning where nothing local is open early.

What the week looks like afterwards

The Sports Nutrition course runs six weeks and is taught live and online, with every session recorded. Tenzin took most of his in the hour between the morning adult batch and the school run, and the rest through the monsoon weeks when attendance drops anyway and a Gangtok instructor has time he does not have in December.

Six weeks is short enough that it can be finished, which matters more than it sounds. Instructors who run daily batches abandon long qualifications at the halfway mark with great regularity, because the batches never pause and the course assumes a student with a free evening.

What changed in the timetable afterwards is small and specific. There is now a written academy position on weight cutting, given to parents at admission, which says what the dojo will and will not support. There is a one-page competition week sheet for students travelling to a meet, covering the days before, the morning of the weigh-in and the hours after it. He takes a short session at the parents' meeting before each grading, which has done more for how the academy is regarded locally than any medal. And the adult batch can book a separate consultation on everyday eating, priced separately, because a thing given away free is read as a thing worth nothing.

The lines an instructor does not cross

A child who is not growing, or who is losing weight without trying to, is a question for a doctor and not for a coach, and the correct action is to say so to the parent that week. An adult with chest symptoms, or on medication for sugar or blood pressure, needs their own physician involved in any change.

Disordered eating deserves naming separately, because weight-class sport is exactly where it hides and an instructor is often the first adult in a position to notice. Restriction that continues after the season, secrecy about food, a student who trains through obvious exhaustion: those belong with a specialist team, and the coach's job is to raise it early and carefully rather than to manage it.

The same applies to advice travelling sideways. Senior students coach junior ones in every academy, formally or otherwise, and whatever the instructor says about food will be repeated by a seventeen-year-old to a nine-year-old with the detail stripped out. That is a reason to give students the reason alongside the instruction rather than the instruction alone, because only the reason survives the retelling intact.

Supplements are the last line. An instructor who stocks or recommends them is vouching for them, and a seller's assurance is not a test result. The defensible position for a dojo is to teach food first, to decline to recommend anything a student's family cannot check, and to be plain that a competitor who wants to progress into tested competition carries the consequences of whatever is in the tub.

Is a nutrition course worth it for a martial arts instructor?

It is worth it if your students compete in weight categories, because that is where the current advice does real harm. It is worth it if you teach children, because parents ask and the answers travel. It is worth it if your adult batches are, in truth, weight-loss batches with a martial art attached.

It is not worth it if you are looking for a title that makes you a clinician, which this is not, or if you cannot give it a few hours a week for six weeks. The instructors it suits are the ones already being asked, already answering, and no longer comfortable with where their answers come from.