"One thing that I did want to go over is like, okay, we have sporadic periods and when this happens, we tend to go up (in weight) a lot," Lockhart explained Monday on the MMA Hour. "What I wanted is lighter periods, a little bit more frequency, a little bit more regularity. This is something that we wanted to address. The actual birth control that was prescribed to her, it's got a compound that actually helps out with aldosterone. Aldosterone is an anti-diuretic hormone. Basically, when you start cutting weight, your blood volume decreases. When your blood volume decreases, the thickness of your blood increases.
"Now what happens is, your body, it's an amazing survival mechanism, right? It's always trying to keep a balance, a homeostasis. It's always trying to keep itself in check. So once these blood volumes go down, it's going to raise that hormone aldosterone. When aldosterone is raised, what it's trying to do is draw water back into the body, so you can increase the blood volume. When you draw water back into the body, obviously weight is going to go up, weight-cutting is going to be very, very difficult.
"So the biggest thing is, we look at it like, we want the frequency of the periods to be more regulated, they want to be lighter, and this is something we talked about. Like, hey, last camp, this something that we faced. And every single cut, we want it to get easier and easier. I don't want to have the same cut every single time. Like, ‘okay, well we did this last time, let's just do the same thing next time.' There's so many different variables that come into play with weight cuts. There's no weight cut that's the same, even with the same fighter. Principles stay the same. There's a lot of things that we had to do differently."
In prior interviews, Justino stated that she had a 12-week camp and entered fight week at 153 pounds in May for her UFC debut at the 140-pound catchweight for
UFC 198.
This time around, however, Justino only had an eight-week camp to prepare for UFC Fight Night 95, and Lockhart said that the stress of the surrounding circumstances caused her body to balloon up to 165 pounds as she prepared to begin her fight week weight cut down to 141.
"You look at these numbers, you say okay, this is a plus-one, this is a plus-two, this is a plus-three. And then, oh, you hit your cycle? That's like a plus-10 in the amount of water that a woman will hold," Lockhart said. "You've got women that will go up 12 pounds, 13 pounds, and that's not abnormal. You include the amount of stress during a fight week, again they're going to hold water, and then the lack of sleep. During this time, Cris hit every one of those [speed bumps].
"So the number that you saw, she was a lot lighter, and then she went up. If you have a woman that, let's say she's eating the same amount of calories every single day, she's working out, and then her weight goes up, and you take a look at this, you say, ‘okay, she's on her cycle? That makes sense.' You've got to stick with the numbers. You've got to stick with the truth. It is a big faith thing, but once you know this and you've done this long enough, you know, okay, this is just water weight.
"When you see the videos," Lockhart continued, "Cris literally hit her period. Like, it was the next day, she literally hit her period. So you're talking about stress? She'd just flown in, which is also going to make you hold a lot of water, all these attributing factors. You get off the plane and boom, you're like ‘holy crap, I'm 165.' And this for the average person, they're going to be like, ‘oh my God, there's no way I'm going to make weight.' But with me, I'm like, stick with the numbers. This is what we have been weighing. It shot up. These are the reasons."
The addition of birth control into her regimen ended up being one of Justino's biggest complaints about her weight cut for UFC Fight Night 95, and those tensions came to a head in an argument between Justino and Lockhart captured on Justino's fight week video blog. But when asked Monday, Lockhart shrugged off the encounter as nothing more than a product of an already inherently stressful situation.
"There's no other way that we can help out with aldosterone, there's no other way that we can help out with the periods, so that's something that I brought to her attention," Lockhart said. "She spoke with the doctor, and at the end of the day, Cris is very disciplined, Cris is very regimented, and she's like just about every other fighter. So many fighters, when you go back to like the IV ban, we've done it time and time and time again -- when the IV ban came, they were like, ‘oh my God, what am I going to do? There's no way that I can fight at the level I was fighting at without the IV.' We introduced the science to them and told them, okay, this is why the oral rehydration is actually going to be better than the actual intravenous hydration.
"But the biggest thing is, they want to do the same thing. I always use the lucky sock or the lucky underwear analogy. You've got that guy who is like, ‘I'm wearing the same sock or the same underwear, I'm not taking a bath for three weeks. Why? Because my last three fights, I won, and I wore these underwear or I wore these socks.' The mentality, it's very vulnerable, especially at the level that these guys are fighting at. So when you change this, and then we've got a video camera right when this poor girl is cutting weight, she's hungry, hits her period, you're darn right that she's going to be like, ‘what the hell?' Like I said, the numbers were all there, and then what happens is it shoots up. Why did it shoot up? Because of all of the variables that I had told you about."
