Five of the Worst Weight Cuts in MMA History
Apparently there’s this thing called the 17 Day Diet that allows you to lose your hideous gut as long as you eat nothing but Fritos for 17 days. Or something like that. I can’t be bothered to do actual research. But the point is this: It’s just another bulls**t fad. As MMA fighters have proven for years, the only way to effectively take off pounds is to dehydrate yourself until you nearly die – a miracle diet known as “brutal weight cutting.” Here are some of the sport’s greatest success stories.
* Ed. note: Just kidding. The “weight-loss plans” depicted in this article are not to be followed under any circumstances, and Dr. Mike seems like a super-nice guy despite the questionable amount of product he puts in his hair.
Sean McCorkle
Lost: 55 pounds in three months, before his submission win over Mark Hunt at UFC 119 (9/25/10)
After charming his way into a UFC contract, Indiana-based super-heavyweight Sean McCorkle was faced with a dilemma — making 265 pounds for the first time since middle school. “Big S**y” had 12 weeks to come down from his walking weight of 320, which forced him to get very familiar with chicken breast, apples, and oatmeal.
By weigh-in day, it seemed like the world was conspiring against him. “The cut was an absolute nightmare, and the commission scales were off the morning of the weigh-in,” McCorkle explained. “I told them that and the commission said they weren’t. I said I couldn’t possibly be three pounds heavier [on the day of weigh-ins] than I was last night when I didn’t eat or drink anything. So I went to cut an extra three pounds that morning. It took me two hours to cut the weight. Then I weighed in at 263 pounds and I wanted to strangle somebody.” Compared to that, making Mark Hunt cry “uncle” with an armlock was the easy part.
Jake Shields
Lost: 20 pounds in one day before his split-decision win over Martin Kampmann at UFC 121 (10/23/10)
Though he’s best known as a 170-pounder, Jake entered the UFC following a three-fight stint in Strikeforce that kept him at or near the middleweight limit. His weight cutting skills were clearly rusty, and he was forced to suck out 20 pounds of water in the 24 hours leading up to UFC 121′s weigh-ins. As a result, Shields’s much-ballyhooed UFC debut turned out to be a dull, hype-deflating performance, capped off by a somewhat controversial win on points.
“I don’t want to make excuses,” Shields said in the post-fight press conference, “but that was my first time cutting to 170 in a while. I do think I dropped too much weight. If that was a factor, I don’t know, but I pulled out 20 pounds in a day…Will I do that again? No, never. I’ll never drop that much weight again.”
Rory Markham
Lost: One lung, before his knockout loss to Dan Hardy at UFC 95 (2/20/09)
We’re not sure where Rory started his weight cut, but he ended it without the full use of a major organ. As the story goes, Markham suffered through an awful cut in London before the fight, and cramped so badly after weigh-ins that one of his lungs collapsed. Markham had no idea how much he’d damaged his body until after the fight, when a suspicious doctor decided to x-ray his chest. “That was the worst weight cut I’ve ever done,” Markham said later. “I know what hell is like.” Despite the awful experience, he decided to take another ill-advised crack at welterweight in his next fight. Markham came in seven pounds over, got TKO’d by Nate Diaz, and was fired by the UFC.
Zoila Gurgel
Lost: About 30 pounds for three consecutive fights during Bellator’s Season 3 115-pound tournament
The fighter formerly known as Zoila Frausto only had about a year and a half of professional MMA experience under her belt when she accepted a spot in Bellator’s 115-pound women’s tournament — despite the fact that she had spent the majority of her career competing at 135. In the end, it was a storybook run for Zoila, culminating in a shock upset of Japanese MMA icon Megumi Fujii, but getting into the cage every month was agonizing. We’ll let MMA Rising tell the tale:
Dropping close to 30 pounds every four weeks, as her shell-shocked body clung to every bit of nutrition that it could, a weakened Frausto was only able to undergo limited training as she stuck to a strict diet. Discouraged and on the verge of a collapse, Frausto worked only on cardio while eating bland foods in an effort to lose weight for her fights. The trying times even led to Frausto dreaming of eating regular foods, only to repeatedly wake up at all hours of the night in a panic that she would weigh in heavy.
Amidst the emotional and physical rollercoaster, Frausto was still expected to fight three times in order to win the Bellator tournament. On August 19th at Bellator 25, she used a size and strength advantage to hand Jessica Pene the first defeat of her career. Six weeks later, while still struggling to maintain weight near 115 pounds, Frausto earned a controversial Split Decision victory over Jessica Aguilar at Bellator 31…
As Frausto continued to battle the struggles of limited training and even more limited food, she had to prepare for the biggest fight of her career; a showdown with pound-for-pound standout and MMA legend Megumi Fujii. Though dehydrated and unable to adequately train, Frausto managed to stay on her feet for nearly the entire fight with Fujii and earned another close decision win to become the first Bellator 115-pound women’s champion…
As she returned to a more normal schedule following the tournament, Frausto opted to remain on a strict nutritional diet, even through the holiday season. With her body still in shock, any little bit of food resulted in large gains of weight until Frausto was all the way back up to 155 pounds.
Frausto last competed at a more natural weight of 125 pounds, outpointing Karina Hallinan in March at Bellator 35.
Anthony Johnson
Lost: 44 pounds before his knockout win over Yoshiyuki Yoshida at UFC 104 (10/24/09)
The notoriously massive welterweight came in at an unforgivable 176 pounds before his scrap against Yoshida, and was so exhausted by the cut that he could barely walk without assistance on weigh-in day. So what went wrong? Rumble had suffered a knee injury while preparing for a scheduled fight against Matt Brown earlier in the year, and ballooned up to 220 while rehabbing. He thought he could pull it off — dropping from heavyweight to welterweight in a single training camp — but things went south in the week before weigh-ins.
“When you get injured, you don’t do much,” Johnson said before the fight. “You sit around and eat and get fat. That’s exactly what I did…Usually I start at 210. That ten pound difference made a big impact. You know what I mean? It kicked my butt, but I was prepared for it. I was prepared to just grind it out and get down to 171. And I was in the sauna for an hour and I lost three or four pounds right off the bat. I knew it was coming off. That’s why I said that if I had another hour or two, I would have been able to make it. I got out of the sauna, and I think I was out too long because my sweating stopped, and when I got back in the sauna I couldn’t get anything else off. That’s what broke me.”
Honorable Mentions:
Quinton “Rampage” Jackson
Lost: 45 pounds in eight weeks before his unanimous decision loss to Rashad Evans at UFC 114 (5/29/10)
45 pounds is a daunting drop, but unlike the other fighters on this list, Rampage didn’t have to ruin himself to make it happen. All credit for that goes to Mike Dolce, the “Dolce Diet” founder who has become a patron saint of weight-cutting lost causes. As Dolce himself explained, “That was one where everybody – even guys on his team, his management – they wrote it off as being nearly impossible…But I was able to get him to lose forty-five pounds in eight weeks, step on the scale, feel great, then go out there and compete with Rashad [Evans] the entire time.”
James Irvin
Lost: An unspecified amount of water, muscle, and possibly bone, before his TKO loss to Alessio Sakara at UFC Live: Vera vs. Jones (3/21/10)
We actually have no idea what James Irvin went through to make 185 pounds last year, and frankly, we don’t want to know. Irvin looked like a dying man at the weigh-ins for his fight against Sakara; even before he was stopped in the first round, it was clear to everyone watching that his desperate drop to middleweight was a terrible idea. Luckily, he returned to light-heavyweight in his next fight, and things have been going just great since then.