NRL star loses 8kg in 4 days in 20kg summer shred

NRL star Andrew Fifita was a “fat mess”. He’s lost 8kg in four days as part of a 20kg summer shred body transformation.

Andrew Fifita is keen to get back to his best.

Cronulla star Andrew Fifita has cut 8kg in 4 days as part of a summer shred campaign that will see him run out in Round 1 carrying the fewest kilos he has in his entire career.

The wrecking ball forward has come out the other side of a rollercoaster off-season where he ballooned out to more than 137kg before an extraordinary pre-season camp in country NSW resulted in a complete body transformation.

The former NSW and Kangaroos representative says his off-season all changed the day he received a call from his twin brother David, who is playing in the English Super League.

Fifita, who was limited to just 12 games in 2020, realised he needed to take drastic action to adjust to the NRL’s new rules in 2021.

The Super League has already introduced a rule which will be introduced into the NRL this season which will see scrums scrapped when a ball is kicked over the sideline. Play will instead re-start with a play-the-ball.

On top of a season where the speed of the game was already increased dramatically through the six-again rule for ruck infringements, it was clear to Fifita that he could not head into 2021 as a “fat mess”.

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“I think the best thing for me was a phone call from my brother,” Fifita said to media, per NRL.com.

Andrew Fifita had a hot and cold 2020.

“He played the rules that we are playing under now and he just said ‘we need to go down to under 120kg’. He said it’s really fast, it’s different.

“I said what about when they kick out and he said it is straight on, it’s play on, and I was like ‘wow’.”

He admits his incredible weight loss was needed after finishing the marathon 2020 season in October and letting his hair down during his off-season tour of the NSW north coast.

Fifita is happy to confess to indulging in fast food during the journey.

But it all caught up with him just one week before he was due to arrive back at Cronulla for the start of pre-season training.

After stepping on the scales at 137kg, Fifita grabbed his brother Kyle and made the trip to Griffith where he went through one of the toughest mini-camps of his career.

“I didn’t want to jump on the scale and show the boys I was a fat mess,” he said.

“When I realised, I grabbed my little brother and said ‘I need to lose weight’”.

The results of the camp were staggering.

Cronulla fans have never seen this side of Andrew Fifita.

With a program made up largely of boxing and cardio while wearing a plastic bag under his jumper in the middle of a summer heat wave, Fifita says he lost 8kg in the first four days.

Combined with an all-juice diet which saw him ignore any solids until night time, Fifita is very close to the best shape of his career.

When at his peak condition, Fifita was the most damaging forward in rugby league, helping Cronulla to the 2016 NRL premiership.

He has lost a total 15kg since the start of his summer shred and plans to lose another 5kg to reach a playing weight of 118kg before the Sharks face St George Illawarra in Round 1 at Jubilee Stadium on March 14.