In high school wrestling, before you hit the mat you have to make the weight.

"It's actually kind of difficult, because most days, like before matches and stuff, you can't really eat anything, so that really tires you out," says Harrisonburg senior wrestler Alex Martinez. "I mean, it's a full-time job."

High school wrestlers haven't always done that job the right way.

"It's pretty easy to tell if they're doing it too quickly," says Harrisonburg athletic trainer Garie Storie. "I'm not so sure about Virginia, but there have been wrestling deaths because kids were cutting weight too fast."

"You hear rumors. Kids that start at 135, 138, and cut all the way to 103," says Will Crockett, the head wrestling coach at Turner Ashby.

"A lot of mornings you'll see kids running to make weight," says Turner Ashby senior Bryce Kiser. "The day of tournaments, you'll see them running around in a bunch of sweats, back and forth, trying to get rid of that extra half-pound or pound."

"I think in the past people have used really aggressive methods," says Crockett. "Rubber suits, sauna work. I mean, there's all kinds of things people have done."

Harrisonburg wrestling coach Mike Dickerson says, "Those horror stories are a thing of the past. Today we can't do that stuff. It's monitored. You don't need to do that if you work hard in the wrestling room."

The Virginia High School League has a program in place to make sure wrestlers maintain a healthy weight.

"Basically, each child has to take a hydration test. Each athlete has to take a hydration test," explains Crockett. "And then they have to have a body fat test."

"And once we enter those weights in, the computer will calculate how many pounds per week a wrestler's allowed to lose," says Dickerson.

"It determines what weight each wrestler can wrestle each week," says Storie. "So it breaks it down each week."

If a wrestler doesn't meet that minimum weight, he can't wrestle.

"It's actually simpler," says Crockett. "I mean, I coached ten years ago. Ten years ago, you had to look at a kid and make an assessment on your own."

"The only thing we have to do is just monitor it pretty closely, and the computer does the rest for us," says Dickerson.

However, it's still up to coaches and trainers to teach kids the right way to lose the weight, particularly by watching what they eat.

"Most teenagers don't always have the best diet," says Crockett, laughing. "If you work with teens, I work at the school, and it's always like that."

"They need to eat proper portions, the proper foods," says Storie.

"More of like less fatty stuff and more salads," explains Turner Ashby junior Will Zigler. "More high-protein stuff."

"You'd be surprised how much you cut out, just by cutting out that food, how much weight you can drop," says Kiser.

"You don't have to starve yourself," says Dickerson. "If you eat three healthy meals a day, and you work out hard, the metabolism will kick in, and it's pretty easy after that."