UFC featherweight champion Max Holloway accepted a fight with Khabib Nurmagomedov for the undisputed lightweight championship on just six days notice, when challenger Tony Ferguson suffered a freak knee injury. ‘Blessed’ accepted, but initially wanted the fight to take place at welterweight (171). Holloway has long struggled to make 145, and had been recovering from a leg injury, which makes calorie-burning cardio problematic.
Holloway’s manager Brian Butler-Au of SuckerPunch Entertainment appeared recently on Ariel Helwani’s The MMA Hour, and explained how it went down.
We said we would do it at welterweight, said Butler-Au, as transcribed by Nick Baldwin for BloodyElbow.com. And UFC wanted it to be a title fight. So we reevaluated.
Butler-Au then reached out to nutritionist George Lockhart.
George crunched the numbers; it took about an hour, hour and a half for George to do all that, check everything out,” said the manager. “He came back, said he can 100 percent do it, it’s gonna be a grind for him, but if anybody can do it, Max can, and he can do it in a healthy manner.
Lockhart spoke with Marc Raimondi for MMA Fighting, and provided his side of the story.
It was a lot of math, a lot of calculations and a lot of f*cking stress in a short amount of time, said Lockhart. I was like, ‘f***.’
Honestly this would be so easy to say, ‘No, man, he can’t do it’ and it would be no stress on me. But the kid, I know he wants it. I know Max wants it. He’s actually excited about this s***. He has so much weight to cut, but he was excited. It was like he had a challenge. He’s just like, ‘Let’s do this’ and I’m like, ‘all right.’
The plan is to put the fighter into ketosis and then do cardio. Without any carbs, Holloway’s body should begin to burn fat.
“Anybody that follows us and knows what I do, this is tied for the largest weight that I’ve ever done,” said Lockhart.
He’s gonna have to push his body. But it’s gonna be low impact. It’s not like he’s gonna be sparring and grappling and stuff. His body doesn’t have the ability. That would be dangerous. So we’re doing low impact, but high volume.
We always look at performance. We want to keep performance high. During the entire camp, we’re trying to make sure he’s getting better, getting better, getting better. Where, at this point, it’s not about performance, it’s all about weight. The only time performance is gonna come into play is Saturday night. So, there’s gonna be things that we’re gonna do that are not gonna be great for his performance. They’re gonna accelerate the fat-burning process.
Max I know is gonna do it to a tee. I know he’s gonna be able to push himself to where most people aren’t willing to go. So, I’m excited.”
If there is any consolation for the Holloway, it is that Nurmagomedov too is going through a miserable cut. They were even cutting side by side.
https://twitter.com/SandhuMMA/status/981079230820831232
However, the whole concept of two athletes depleting themselves to a point of near collapse just a day before the toughest physical challenger of their lives remains dangerous and irrational.
