Well, the scale turns out to to be the strongest of opponents once again.
Both Bellator and the UFC were bitten by the same bug last month: Khabib Nurmagomedov had to be hospitalized before his weigh-in and the much-anticipated showdown with Tony Ferguson vanished into thin air while THREE main-card fighters failed to make weight on our Bellator show in Oklahoma. While Brandon Girtz bravely carried on against the overweight Fernando Gonzalez (and paid the price), Steve Garcia and Kendall Grove both opted not to fight their opponents and the card had to be pulled together at the last minute.
Situations like these tend to bring opinions of the experts and the "Monday morning quarterbacks" about the hazards of weight cutting and the solutions that can fix them. Read some interesting rants and some reasonable thoughts the following week, but there are fundamental issues with any actual plan to combat the problems weight-cutting presents.
I've been following this sport since the late 90's and been competing in it since about 2000. Occasionally I get asked what has changed the most in terms of actual training and fighting. One of my most consistent answers is: weight cutting. I first saw Diego Sanchez when he fought Jorge Santiago at KOTC 37 in 2004. They were fighting at middleweight and they were not small middleweights at the time. If you had told me that Diego would one day fight Ricardo Lamas at 145lbs I would have thought you were insane. For a 185lb man, 40 pounds is over 21% of his body weight. That is a STUNNING loss for any person, let alone an athlete who is demanding a lot of their bodies.
Most fighters I started with fought in weight classes where they would be midgets today. I am 5'10 and was a fairly solid welterweight ten years ago, today I'm a good (not gigantic) lightweight. As the sport became more competitive in the mid-2000's, weight cutting techniques that were the domain of a few select wrestlers who had spent years mastering them became industry standard. Dietitians and nutritionists became a necessity for any big team and the science of cutting became a matter of desperate importance to any fighter looking to make a career.
Technique beats size, but technique AND size beats technique all by itself.
That was another consequence of the sport becoming more competitive: there were no more technical secrets. As teams got bigger and training methods disseminated, the technical advantages that gave smaller fighters an edge began to disappear. The days of Dan Severn getting caught in a triangle choke that he had never even heard of were going the way of the dodo. Every team had great BJJ training, every team had top-level muay thai, and every team had an all-American teaching wrestling. When everyone knows everything, the physical advantage of cutting more weight and being the bigger guy on fight night might be the crucial difference.
Fighters moving around the scale in boxing has been a fixture of the sport for its entire existence. The major differences between boxing and MMA are that:
1. There are fewer weight classes in MMA, and therefore more of a difference between them.
2. The grappling factor that is inherent in MMA makes the weight itself a much bigger factor.
Ask any competitive grappler and he will tell you: the difference between rolling with a guy who is 150 versus a guy who is 170 is incredibly significant. Weight changes at the world level in wrestling are comparatively rare. Buvasair Saitiev is widely considered the greatest freestyle wrestler of all time. He won his 3 olympic gold medals and 6 world championships all in the same weight class, an incredible span of 12 years.
When I met Sergio Martinez before his middleweight showdown with Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., I couldn't believe how small he was. Chavez TOWERED over him when they faced off, but when it came to the fight it didn't matter. In a sport where grabbing and holding illegal: speed kills and Martinez was the faster and more accurate fighter. In the fight he dominated the bigger Chavez for 11 rounds. Roy Jones Jr. won his first world title at 160, then went on to beat John Ruiz for a heavyweight belt, a virtual impossibility in MMA.
I worked with an actor (yeah, park cars in LA and you'll work with a LOT of actors) who was Italian, he had dark skin and wavy hair. He told me that he thought the fact that his ethnicity was somewhat vague would help him get roles playing a wide variety of characters. He soon learned that he looked kind of Latino, except when he was in a room full of Latinos auditioning for the same part. The same went for Middle-Eastern or Mediterranean: people who are BORN into a culture or ethnicity look way different than someone who is "kind of" pretending to be in it for a day. You often can't see that until you are face-to-face unfortunately.
The same principle applies to weight classes.
Benson Henderson is a big lightweight. He has always had a tough cut and he seemed at first glance like the kind of fighter who might benefit from a move up. When he came to Bellator he jumped right in against welterweight champ Andrey Koreshkov. In the press leading up to the fight, a lot of people were giving Ben a good shot of walking out with the belt. At the weigh-ins it looked like a man staring down a kid. Koreshkov, a natural welterweight, was gigantic after his cut and manhandled Ben for 25 minutes when they fought. Ben had fought at 170, but never against elite competition. That difference in level can't be overestimated.
In the UFC only 3 champions won a title after competing in a smaller weight-class for the promotion: BJ Penn, Randy Couture, and Connor McGregor. Of those 3, only Randy Couture ever defended his title, and even then it was only once (as of this writing Conor has yet to defend his lightweight belt). The fighters who have had the most sustained success in MMA tend to be comfortably sized for their weight class and couldn't drop even if they had to. The general rule of thumb is: if you can safely make a lower weight class, then you shouldn't be fighting at the one you are in.
When a fighter moves in weight to find success in MMA it is almost always DOWN the scale, and there is usually a beating that prompts it. Randy Couture moved down from heavyweight after being mauled by much bigger fighters in Josh Barnett and Ricco Rodriguez. Diego Sanchez began his stint at lightweight after being out-wrestled by Josh Koscheck and John Fitch. Kenny Florian moved to 145 after Gray Maynard rag-dolled him at lightweight. The list goes on and on. Fighters are nothing if not competitive. Once they feel that changing weight classes might give them a competitive edge, they almost always do it. No one wants to get out-muscled twice.
The simple truth is that 10-15 pounds is an almost insurmountable hurdle at the elite level in MMA. BJ Penn was the king of the lightweights in his prime, but was 2-7-1 at welter in the UFC with both of those wins coming against Matt Hughes. Robbie Lawler is a monster at 170, but was a so-so fighter at 185, compiling a record of 11-7-1. A dominant fighter at a given weight class often becomes an also-ran at the weight class above. There are a couple of exceptions (Rumble Johnson among them) but the rule still holds.
So we understand WHY MMA fighters make drastic weight-cuts: for the most part it works in their favor. It's when it doesn't work on the promotional level, as it didn't work out for the UFC and Bellator last month, that everyone freaks out. The problem is that none of the solutions are particularly effective, let's look at a few:
1. Modification to the existing classes
This happens every so many years in wrestling. Quite a few years back a wrestler (I believe it was at the University of Michigan) died of kidney failure while cutting weight. They immediately gave wrestlers an additional allowance to their weight limits to give them some breathing room. The issue became, and will always become, one of simple math and risk/reward analysis. If the weight classes are 170 and 160 for example and you give them a 3 pound allowance, a fighter who is light for 170 might be tempted to make that extra drop to 160 now that he has a 3-pound cushion. A modification of weight classes doesn't really do anything if the motivation to risk and cut remain the same.
2. Same day weigh-ins
This has been bantered around a lot in MMA. The issue is that it takes a process that is already risky and attempts to limit the risk by making it more risky, make sense? Its a double-down strategy (much like banning IVs) in that it makes the recovery time shorter with the idea that fighters won't want to drain themselves too badly and will cut more safely. The fundamental flaw is two-fold: the first (which I will go into more later) is that fighters are ALREADY risk takers. The idea that commissions will essentially DARE them to push their limits will be met with most fighter obliging and almost killing themselves to make weight and fight on the same day. The second flaw is that in most cases the fights will suffer and promotions therefore have little incentive to get behind the idea. Koreshkov fought Douglas Lima in a rematch last year. They gave a great fight and Lima walked out with a KO win. Both guys are giants (especially Lima) and I find it hard to believe either one of them would have had the energy to go past the first round without the proper time to re-hydrate. Watching two exhausted guys stagger around the cage is TV death and that would happen a LOT if fighters were required to weigh in the same day as their fights.
3. Adding weight classes
Some have advocated adding weight classes, therefore encouraging fighters to cut less because they have a belt to fight for that is closer to their natural weight. The issue with adding weight classes is that MMA promotions already have enough trouble building stars with the number of weight classes that already exist. Adding weight classes and then finding a champion and a pool of fighters to challenge him/her would be an unbelievably daunting task. The UFC already gets flack for the number of interim titles they hand out, imagine that with 3 or 4 more weight classes added to the field: you could get a belt at Target and fans would lose patience with the diluted talent pools.
4. Putting pressure on teams to "keep fighters in line"
Nobody likes coaching a fighter who doesn't make weight. The fighter looks bad, the team looks bad, and it costs everyone money. The problem is that, as much as MMA is becoming dominated by big teams (AKA, ATT, Jackson-Wink etc.), weight cutting is generally a matter of individual discipline. A coach knows when a particular fighter is or is not training, but they don't know when or how much they are eating. They also don't know exactly WHAT a fighter is eating, or whether they are doing those extra weight-cutting runs that are necessary for the ones who have trouble. I've seen fighters kicked out of gyms for not making weight and not being disciplined, but there is a little a coach can do to encourage a fighter to make weight other than stand next to him on the scale and deal with the angry stare of the promoters as they don't make it. This isn't the NFL. There are no such things as team fines and fighters are under no obligation to stay with a particular team. A fighter who is berated for missing weight will often just leave for greener and less-strict pastures, but it doesn't help anyone at fight-time.
5. Some medical test leading up weigh-is to determine whether a fighter's cut is safe
I hear this one a lot. It's kind of the MMA version of an old man screaming "someone should do something about this" at a pothole in the middle of the street. Who would administer these tests and what exactly would they be? Would an outside agency be in charge of it (expensive) or the promotion (improper)? When would they be done? What would the consequences be? There is no hard and fast rule for what kind of body type will or will not make weight. Douglas Lima is probably the biggest welterweight I have ever seen and is SHREDDED, yet he has always made it. Fernando Gonzalez looks like a thick lightweight and has failed on the scale multiple times. The "just look at him" argument falls flat when you look at the actual numbers. Weight cutting is also a matter of long-term discipline combined with last minute suffering. A fighter in the middle of camp might be well-overweight and still make it because they have the timing mastered, others are only a few over the night before and fail to shed the crucial pounds. I've seen very little rhyme or reason to who does or does not make it, I only know the the ones who DON'T make it rarely right the ship and tend to be dogged by weight issues their entire careers.
The undeniable truth is that weight cutting is an inherently dangerous part of an inherently dangerous sport. The nature of MMA and the athletes that compete in it is one of "big risk=big reward". To ask people who willingly get punched in the face for money to NOT take a physical risk that will give them a demonstrable advantage is an exercise in futility. I hate it when weight cutting issues cause a card to fall apart at the last minute, its a headache for the promotion as well as the fans. Hopefully a solution in presented in the near future but so far it looks like an arms race, and those tend to go on for a LONG time.
