By Austin Overmann
Cornell Athletic Communications

Clint Wattenberg '03 took his first steps into the Cornell wrestling room in 1998 as a three-time section champion and two-time state place-winner at Pleasant Valley High School in Chico, Calif. In 2017, after 19 years at Cornell both as a student and a full-time employee, Wattenberg took a leap of faith and left Ithaca to grow his impact on combat sports. Soon to be in his fourth year as the Director of Nutrition at the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Performance Institute, Wattenberg is already changing the game.
 
Using his knowledge of performance nutrition and exercise physiology, Wattenberg hopes to change how combat athletes take care of their metabolic health throughout the duration of their careers. For Wattenberg and his team, long gone are the overly restrictive weight cuts that can be damaging to an athlete's long-term health. Wattenberg has turned his focus towards helping athletes maintain a healthy lifestyle for all 52 weeks of the year rather than operating at an extreme caloric deficit leading up to a fight.
 
"I want to drive home the importance of a performance paradigm that can support training, recovery, adaptation, and at the end of the day, health and performance," Wattenberg said. "When athletes continue to be overly restrictive and prioritize weight cutting to such a degree, it will impact metabolic health and performance at some phase during their careers."
 
To understand his passion, you have to go back to Wattenberg's time as a member of the Cornell wrestling team from 1999-2003.
 
Like many collegiate wrestlers, Wattenberg struggled with weight cuts throughout the early stages of his career, cutting down to a number that put unnecessary strain on his body. As a nutritional science major, he was having a difficult time applying what he was learning in class to the mat. After two years of draining himself to make weight at 165 pounds, he finally found a solution that worked best for his body and bumped up two classes to his ideal weight of 184 pounds. There, Wattenberg grew into one of the top collegiate wrestlers in the country, earning back-to-back All-America honors in 2002 and 2003. He was inducted into the Cornell Athletics Hall of Fame in 2013.
 
Wattenberg credits Rob Koll, The David Dunlop '59 Head Coach of Wrestling, for being a pioneer when it comes to weight cutting in college wrestling.
 
"At Cornell, we were at the forefront of recognizing that sucking our athletes down to the lowest possible weight class was the worst thing possible in terms of achieving success in March," Wattenberg said. "Cornell really started bumping guys up with Jim Stanec in 2001, and it continues on to this day with guys like myself, Travis Lee '05, Joe Mazzurco '06, Jordan Leen '09, Cam Simaz '12, and Kyle Dake '13. A lot of programs continue to suck their guys down to the minimum possible weight they can wrestle, but the Cornell wrestlers continue to get stronger and thrive come March, which sets them apart in many ways."
 
After graduation, Wattenberg found himself back in the Cornell wrestling room as an assistant coach while he wrapped up his master's degree in exercise physiology at Ithaca College. At the time of his graduation however, there wasn't a position that existed at Cornell where he could best utilize this knowledge. Following the conclusion of his international wrestling career in 2008, Wattenberg decided it would be beneficial to both himself and the wrestlers he was coaching to become a registered dietician.
 
Without a full-time position available for him, Wattenberg volunteered and immersed himself into the world of eating disorders to gain experience. His hard work paid off when he was hired as an eating disorder dietician within the Cornell Healthy Eating Program in 2011. Two years later, his role expanded when he was named the Coordinator of Sports Nutrition for all 37 of Cornell's varsity teams, a position he held until 2017.
 
In 2017, Wattenberg decided it was time to impact combat sports at its highest level, taking his knowledge to the UFC as its Director of Nutrition at the UFC Performance Institute. Opened in 2017, the UFC Performance Institute is a 30,000 square foot facility dedicated to research and innovation within the world of mixed martial arts (MMA).
 
This wasn't Wattenberg's first experience with the UFC or MMA, however.
 
In 2009, Wattenberg traveled to UFC 100 to corner a young up-and-coming fighter out of Ithaca, N.Y. named Jon Jones. Throughout Jones' fight camp, Wattenberg coached his nutrition, wrestling, and strength and conditioning. Jones went on to win his fight against Jake O'Brien via guillotine choke and has since defended the UFC Light Heavyweight Championship belt on 11 occasions. After earning his dietician certification in 2010, Wattenberg himself took two MMA fights as a way to practice his new weight cutting tactics.
 
Wattenberg's experiences as a lifelong combat athlete and a performance nutrition specialist were vital towards his hire at the UFC and continue to have a major impact on earning buy-in and rapport with the athletes he sees daily.
 
"It was the act of making the mistakes myself, having been a lifelong combat athlete, and being able to apply those experiences to the craft that set me apart," Wattenberg said. "Having gone through it is more important in the nutrition space than it is in any of the other disciplines because the paradigm of weight cutting is such a foreign concept to most people. For myself in gaining buy-in and rapport, just walking around with a cauliflower ear is getting me a foot in the door with many of the athletes."
 
Wattenberg has helped implement major changes at the UFC when it comes to making weight cutting more sustainable and less detrimental to long term health.
 
"Some of the biggest things we've had success with start with expanding the time that athletes are focusing on nutrition," Wattenberg said. "We're trying to build more of a 52-week fight camp mindset, where you're not eating clean or having to restrict for 52 weeks per year, but you're considering the impact that fueling strategies have on each phase of the training cycle."
 
Wattenberg and his team have helped redefine how athletes are supported over the course of fight week in terms of fueling support, programming, and providing food and nutrition through the UFC's partnerships with performance nutrition companies Trifecta and Thorne. All meals and supplements are provided throughout the week and the UFC travels a chef for its athletes. When Wattenberg's program was first implemented, the UFC brought his team to only a handful of events in 2018, but that relationship has grown over the last two years, attending 20 events in 2019, and 37 of 39 possible events in 2020.
 
"We've already been tasked with going to 39 of the 41 events in 2021," Wattenberg said. "It's very resource heavy in terms of supporting athletes over fight week. It requires a lot of staffing, a lot of attentiveness and support on our side, but the response from athletes has been unbelievably strong, it has become a demand for us to be at every single event."
 
Wattenberg's performance paradigm has had a major impact on some of the UFC's top athletes. Most notably, former women's strawweight champion Joanna Jedrzejczyk, who was public about her struggles to make weight for her Oct. 12, 2019 fight against Michelle Waterson. Less than a month before her fight against Waterson at UFC Fight Night 161, Jedrzejczyk's body wasn't responding the way it needed to and she risked having to back out of the fight. She needed help and Wattenberg answered the call.
 
"We hadn't worked together previously and she had declined to work with me in the past," Wattenberg said of Jedrzejczyk. "She was kind of in dire straits and her body wasn't responding. With about three and a half weeks' notice we were able to connect and have some really powerful engagement and change the trajectory of her fight camp. Her situation is a real case study on the impact that repeated restrictive training camps and under fueling can have on an athlete and shows the impact of supporting with performance nutrition rather than a dieting mindset."
 
Despite all of the success he's had since joining the UFC in 2017, Wattenberg's job is far from over when it comes to impacting the culture of combat sports. There is still change to be made, but it can be tough to change the grind mindset instilled within most wrestlers and mixed martial artists.
 
"In the future, I hope we get to a point where there is more thoughtfulness provided to weight class selection and how athletes are determining where they are going to fight, basing it more on what they can do long term rather than just searching for short-term success," Wattenberg said. "I'm confident that a lot of the diagnostic measures that we're collecting now are going to be important in creating a culture change around how athletes are preparing and selecting those weight divisions. There has already been a significant change in mindset."