Oh I've enjoyed the read I got what you were saying no problem from me.
At first I didn't knew how serious you are about the subject so I didn't want to waste much time on it, usually I'm dealing with Conor fans that are total casuals when it comes to weight cutting and size of fighters and they just tell me to look at the weight ins result and that's that XD buy you seem to be into this so I will have a proper response for you, be warn I tend to be long sometimes. XD
Cheers, I appreciate that.
I think I have a rough grasp of how weight cutting works. We don't have sports here aside from Boxing where cutting weight is a factor, but before watching MMA, it was put a bin bag on and sweat the lbs off. I still feel from watching debates in the US where you have wrestling and MMA longer than here that weight cutting is not as straight forward as it seems, and it's different for each fighter. I've listened to Lockhart in the past and he seems more detailed and has a different approach to it than Dolce who only works with 2 or 3 clients per year and monitors everything the fighter he's looking after does. I think there's some things they agree on and one of them is sweating off the weight in the sauna, which they feel is damaging to a fighters organs - or as Dolce put it "frying their organs in a cooker"
think Conor at first wasn't this expert when it comes to weight cutting since most of the fighters that aren't ex wrestlers don't ever had massive contact with weight cutting and even some of those don't do it the best way possible but they do have experience and get the job done in the end they make the weight one way or another.
No, and Kavanagh said it best I thought when he said he didn't get in to Martial Arts for weight cutting, but it is the nature of the game. He talked about how most of his research on weight cutting was reading about it online and even when Conor was in CW's, he looked good, but we can't forget he was fighting some fighters that probably weren't the best opponents in the world.
I have a few opinions on that Diaz fight, but the most important one is that Conor learned that his left hand is not a sure fire way of finishing someone most of the time. And I think he learned a lot of valuable lessons in that fight and part of that was his training and nutrition and that while fighting at a weight that he hadn't being used to fighting at, the preparation wasn't right. He was supposed to fight at 155 and would have had a weight cut, albeit not a big one. But, I do remember Cruz saying that having that weight cut/depriving yourself of food and water does something to you. I've never cut weight, so I don't know first hand if that's true or not. Supposedly Conor had stopped working with Lockhart when dos Anjos pulled out and upped the calories eating crap - which seems ridiculous for a fighter to do so close to a fight. Though I think he was highly confident he'd put Diaz away early.
Conor is a huge FW if we think about it not just lbs wise but a combination of factors he is huge from the overall stats like height, reach, lbs, frame wise etc everything and keep in mind he doesn't have any extra muscle mass like others (Mendes) or any extra fat when he is on FW he is the smallest possible version of himself and he had a bunch of weight cuts that were kinda in the limit he look like he lost 25+ lbs and didn't necessary do it the correct way.. I think he got a hang of it in the end but with age and those type of severe weight cuts at a base of 145 lbs % wise it's to much to do it on a regular and when the opportunity for him to go up make more money, get more fame, have a safety net with the lower division, it was clearly the choice to make and he run with it to the best of his abilities.
Yeah, well I think he's filled out a lot as he's got older. When he started doing media for the Siver fight, he looked and sounded terrible. I remember he made 145 or that fight, and before that had made 146. For a while I thought that 1lb difference made him look ill, before realising that's when he was being dragged all over Boston in the lead up to the fight and the cut was probably harder being on the go. Poirier had similar stats to Conor and he never looked bad at the weigh ins - though he might have being better at cutting weight, or didn't have all the outside interruptions - but I always thought he looked good on the scale and probably carried more muscle than Conor. Holloway is a little bit taller too and he doesn't have much muscle on him - he seems similar to Diaz - but I think he'll eventually go up to 155 later in his career.
Mmmm. That cut for Mendes was the worst of all. He was still recovering from his knee being injured and talked about how he couldn't do much at the start of his training camp. That's another thing that Kavanagh and Roddy talk about; that at 145, the camp is more about getting the weight off, rather than focusing on his skill set. They've being big advocates of him moving up to 155, but at the same time, they can only give their opinion on that.
The week of the fight he flew from Vegas to New York to Connecticut to LA and then back to Vegas. When that whole drama went down with Brooks and Oliviera about him missing weight on purpose, it did pop up that being on a flight makes it harder to lose weight - I think it was Lockhart who mentioned it and that was part of the reason why he had her on birth control pills because she had a long flight to Brazil and it's harder to shift the weight. It did look like he lost a ton of weight in a short space of time. He could barely talk at the weigh ins.
I thought Rousey would beat Holm on account of Holm's previous fights, but before that fight they had Rousey on a ridiculous PR schedule and especially with that fight being in Australia, she had flew back and forth to promote and then flew back for the fight. She was slurring her words up on the stage at the weigh ins and I remember her saying something similar to Conor to the effect of 'being Champion is not about turning up at the gym and then for the fight' there's the media in between. I sort of laugh when people say Conor and Rousey are given special treatment, but they're the faces that draw in the people who might not watch MMA regularly, and all that promotion has to be taxing. Even the most anti Conor or Rousey fighters can't deny that - but that's a different debate for another day.
As for Nate first time around he was using the weight as a negotiation tactic more then anything and the second time they started talking weight when Conor used that point with the media and his fans and casuals to point out why he lost at how big of a fighter Nate is and what a hard mountain to climb this will be so to say, so Nate in response also started talking about it at first kidding around that yea he such a monster 200 lbs then at the end of it probably downplaying it a bit, I don't believe he was indeed like he said low to mid 170's on fight night in fact I think he has low 180's the first fight and around the same for the second fight as well low to mid most likely while Conor was 177-178 first time and a bit smaller the second time 172-173 that only accentuated the difference between them more.
Oh for sure. He knew that was the fight the UFC, Conor and from what I read online the fans wanted to see the most. Regardless, they were always going to fight. They had contacted Diaz as an option for 189. In short; I think Conor badly underestimated Diaz in the first fight. I did think Conor would TKO him as Diaz is so hittable and he started talking about not having a camp - it seemed like he was saying he was beaten already, and that's when I wished Cerrone would have being given the fight. My thoughts after that first fight with Diaz was that maybe Conor wasn't used to fighting with that extra weight on him. He was going for the KO punch from the off, throwing spinning wheel kicks and blew his load. Only 3 months or more prior to that, he had being cutting down to 145 and I thought maybe his body needed time to adapt to fighting at that weight. I don't know, but maybe Diaz walking through Conor's shots fucked with his head too and he was in a situation he wasn't used to before.
The first I heard of Diaz being 200lbs was a video with a Boxing coach (not Perez) and Diaz on it. Hmm. Conor does hypothesize about his opponents before the fight and I do remember him saying 'he's more than a LW now' and him having to do a weight cut. I looked at the fight the way I thought it was weight wise. Diaz is a LW, but I would say that he'd carry that extra weight better because of his frame. But Conor asked for the fight at that weight so if he lost, he had no excuse on that front in my eyes. It's hard to say what weight a fighter is from looking at them, but I do think Diaz was heavier. As for being 190 on the night, I don't think that was true. Just to bring up Rumble again - there are similarities with him and Conor - as Rogan kept mentioning what Cruz said before the fight, he wasn't sure Conor had the gas tank to go 5 rounds with Diaz as he is a striker and puts a lot of power behind his shots. Rumble knocked Cormier down in their fight and just faded after that when Cormier grinded him down and subbed him.
The point we are interested here is weight cutting so the main idea here is to get as low as possible before having to do the big water cut for the weigh ins and so you start by eating less and less each day, strictly the essentials and then you enter those 48 important hours (big weight cutters cut little by little and drain themselves a lot), there are different strategies they use for weight cutting, some use the stay in the bath with salt and covered in towels strategy, others use the plastic bag on a treadmill, that "Dolce" weight cut when they mess up with your water retention and you piss out every 3 fucking ours or wtf he had Chael doing or the good old sauna when you do sessions and check your weight after each of them until you are on point (we even had dudes that used diuretics so you shit out all the water, or even removal of blood, or some even more old school bro sciences shit like stand on your head before the weight ins and the scale will say 1-2 less lbs just ask Bas about that shit) etc a lot of strange stuff in the world of weight cutting and you do what ever works best for you, what you are most comfortable and used to and what ever is easier but you make that weight.
Yeah, that's what should be interesting for the Alvarez fight. Conor talks about fighters being flat footed and being predictable - which I thought he was in the latter part of the 1st Diaz fight and for the whole of the second one. Lockhart was talking about water loading, microcannotpronounce what he's saying and how fighters who stay in shape all year round are ideal for holding that water weight and being able to eat. I think that can only benefit Conor in the Alvarez fight and he should be lighter on his feet and be a bit more diverse with his striking and trying to stop the take downs. I think he will get taken down, but I wouldn't be surprised if he gets back up. You referenced the Mendes fight and how easily he took Conor down. Firstly, Mendes was one point away from making the '08 Olympics I read somewhere. The knee injury that people talk about, it wasn't injured during the fight, but it had only healed up and there was a concern he could re-injure it in that fight from my understanding.
There's examples of Conor being able to grapple in previous fights against Brandao and Holloway, though they're not Alvarez. I couldn't argue/debate that Conor hasn't really shown much from his back since he was in the UFC, but I do think he showed instances that he knows what he's doing from the Mendes fight, even though his BJJ is not the greatest. Alvarez clamps down and gets people up against the fence which is difficult to get up from as we saw in the Pettis fight. But I don't subscribe to the fact that Conor's ground game is weak because of the Mendes and second Diaz fight. I hope it does go to the ground, but Alvarez has some power in his hands as well and I expect he'll move differently on the feet from working with Henry, so there's more than being taken down to worry about. I have a feeling Alvarez will be a bit overwhelmed on the night as he's talked about his pre fight jitters before and is a bit of a slow starter. But we'll see what happens soon enough.
