Caceres done with ‘weird cult of weight cutting’

Alex ‘Bruce Leeroy’ Caceres spoke with John Morgan for MMAJunkie following his win over Masio Fullen at UFC on FOX 18 Saturday. The fight was at 145, and after bouncing between three divisions, featherweight feels just right.

Caceres entered the UFC in 2010, via TUF 12, at lightweight; he lost in the quarter finals to eventual finalist Michael Johnson. He fought twice in 2011 at 145, losing both. Then he dropped to 135, going 5-4 with one No Contest, when a win overturned due to exposure to the demon weed marijuana.

Now he is at 145, a weight he can make with five pounds of sweating. He likes it, and thinks other fighters would benefit too from fighting close to their normal weight.

I say this all the time – if none of us cut weight, we’d still be fighting the same people, just at higher weight classes, said Caceres. So it really doesn’t make a difference. It’s just become a weird tradition – some cult tradition – where we’re all going to kill ourselves before we get in a fight. Now we’re in the fight, angry at somebody we never even met.

If you’re hungry the whole time, and you’re thinking about food the whole time – your body hurts, and you might pass out sometime – you’re not thinking about the fight whatsoever. You’re not training. You’re just focusing on getting the weight off. This whole camp, without cutting weight, I was able to just train. All I focused on was training, my techniques, and what I was going to do out there, trying to be myself out there, rather than trying to get some weight off.

There was no other outside thinking other than this match, other than this art that you call martial arts. There was nothing outside of that. It was just me and him.

Give the toll that extreme weight cutting is taking on fighters, including multiple deaths, Caceres’ plan, undertaken without any new rules, will hopefully be a model for every other fighter to follow.