Looking the part, losing the edge: Why weight-loss drugs could be a problem for athletes – Sportstar
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Updated : Aug 29, 2026 16:35 IST – 6 MINS READ
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Lean trap: Weight-loss medications make sense for those living with obesity, with fat to spare — not young athletes already carrying low body-fat percentages. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
A report recently claimed some Indian cricketers, including IPL players, are using weight-loss injections to look leaner on camera. The sourcing was anonymous. I cannot verify it and will not pretend otherwise, and nobody should be treated as guilty because a trend story exists.
But I am not dismissing the question either, because I get asked about it almost every week now. Not by patients with diabetes but by young fit people who do not need the drug at all, and increasingly by people who work in sport.
The timing is not a coincidence. Semaglutide, the molecule behind Ozempic and Wegovy, went off patent in India this year; more than 40 companies lined up generics and prices collapsed. Tirzepatide, sold here as Mounjaro, became India’s largest-selling drug brand by monthly value last October, seven months after launch. When a drug turns cheap and fashionable within the same 12 months, sport has a problem.
GLP-1 is a hormone your gut releases after you eat. It tells the pancreas to release insulin, slows stomach emptying, and signals fullness to the brain. The drugs copy that signal and hold it for a week at a time, so you eat less because you want less. For Type 2 diabetes or obesity, that is a real clinical advance, and I have no argument with a doctor prescribing it for a cricketer with metabolic disease. My argument is with using it to chase a photograph.
Start with the rules. These drugs are not banned, are not on the 2026 WADA Prohibited List, and need no therapeutic use exemption. Markers of both molecules do sit on WADA’s 2026 Monitoring Programme, in and out of competition. Monitoring carries no sanction, but it is how WADA builds a case, and a decision is expected in a year or two. Legal today is not necessarily legal for the rest of a career. A player buying an unlabelled vial through a grey channel is gambling with strict liability.
The part that matters more: what the weight is made of.
In the body-composition substudy of STEP 1 on semaglutide, roughly 60 per cent of the loss was fat and 40 per cent lean tissue. In the SURMOUNT-1 substudy on tirzepatide, the split was closer to 75 and 25. A quarter to two-fifths of every kilogram lost comes out of muscle.
Here is the caveat nobody quotes. Those participants were living with obesity, with fat to spare. A 22-year-old fast bowler at 12 per cent body fat does not, and with little fat left to mobilise, the ratio is unlikely to be kinder to him.
The training that protects that muscle also seems to fall away. A study presented at ENDO 2026 in June, the first large look at wearable data on these drugs anywhere, followed 753 American adults with obesity who started a GLP-1. Daily steps fell from about 5,047 to 4,487 and moderate-to-vigorous activity from 28 minutes a day to 22. Losing weight did not make anyone move more. That cohort averaged 52 years of age, so I am not putting those numbers on a professional athlete. But train slightly less inside a long deficit and you lose lean tissue from both ends.
Muscle is not cosmetic in cricket. It is your fifth over in a spell, your throw from the deep in the 48th, your ability to decelerate on a damp outfield without tearing a hamstring. Bone matters too. One randomised trial in adults at higher fracture risk found small reductions in hip and spine bone density on semaglutide. Fast bowlers already carry a lumbar stress-fracture risk, and that is not a group I would put into a long pharmacological energy deficit.
One argument here is not about vanity, and it deserves a hearing. Endurance capacity is usually reported relative to body weight.
An athlete of 70 kg with an absolute VO2max of 4.2 litres a minute reads 60 ml/kg/min. At 63 kg with the same 4.2 litres, he reads 66.7, an apparent 11 per cent gain with no improvement to the aerobic machinery. For a runner, a cyclist or anyone making a weight category, that is not trivial, and I can see a physician using it carefully with an athlete carrying surplus weight. That is my reasoning, not a published finding. But note what it is: a weight lever, not a fitness lever. If part of the loss is muscle, the absolute figure falls while the ratio flatters you. And cricket is not a power-to-weight sport. Nobody here is chasing a VO2max number.
Then there is match day. A drug that slows gastric emptying and blunts appetite works against everything we try to do with an athlete over five hours in Indian heat, and nausea and vomiting are known side effects. Add a player who cannot stomach fluid or carbohydrate at the drinks break in a city like Chennai in April and you have cramping, poor decisions late on, and heat illness.
Two more things worry me. Weight regain after stopping is the norm, and the STEP 1 follow-up found about two-thirds of the loss came back within a year. A career spent cycling up and down like that is not conditioning; it is churn. And appearance-driven weight loss in a 19-year-old is how disordered eating begins. That is not a weakness on his part. It is what happens when we tell young men their abs are part of the job.
If any of this is happening, the fix is not only at the pharmacy. Boards and academies set the demand.
Body-composition targets should come from performance requirements, not broadcast angles or sponsor shoots. Track muscle mass instead of shouting about the weighing scale, and route any legitimate prescription through the team doctor, in writing, with a medical reason.
There is no injection that gives you four hours of skill work. A six-pack is a by-product of good training and good food. It was never supposed to be the target.
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Published on Aug 29, 2026
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