Issue 127

April 2015

Gareth A Davies

MMA and Boxing Correspondent for The 

Daily Telegraph, London, discusses MMA’s ongoing weight cutting issues

While discussions and now thankfully some action has been taken to tackle PEDs in MMA – hopefully the rest of the industry will now follow the UFC’s lead on the matter – weight cutting needs serious attention, too. 

Let’s look back. Kelvin Gastelum was 180lb at the Friday night weigh-in for UFC 183. A doctor I’ve known for years and is involved in pro sports – often fight sports – was mystified by how the Mexican-American was able to fight 24 hours later at UFC 183 in Las Vegas. Many of us were when the 23-year-old weighed-in 9lb over the welterweight limit.

It made no sense why he fought Tyron Woodley, to the doctor at least. I felt reassured by my conversation with a person who has the medical facts at their fingertips. 

And this view was emphasized even more strongly when I recounted the explanation of the fight-week events that came from Chance Farrar, Gastelum’s head coach. 

Gastelum was at 179lb on the Friday morning, down to 174lb a few hours later, which is just three pounds off the welterweight maximum, and well within striking distance of the mark. Farrar described how events then took a turn, as Gastelum became “non-responsive” and began vomiting.

“He wasn’t vomiting food,” Chance recalled. “It was more like mucus. He was in a bad state where he couldn’t get himself off the floor. I had to pick him up.”

Off they went to the emergency room. Doctors told Gastelum he had flu-like symptoms. At the hospital, he rehydrated, and was medicated. The Nevada State Athletic Commission then cleared Gastelum to compete. 

And on Saturday morning, the decision was finally taken by the welterweight himself to fight Woodley, having already been stripped of 30% of his fight purse.

Here’s what my physician contact, who would prefer to remain nameless, had to say on what happens when fighters make rapid weight cuts: “There’s a whole host of physiological changes that happen to the body as a result of you trying to dry yourself out.

“What happens is your circulating fluid, the amount that goes around your blood vessels shrinks and as a result of that you get other problems from other organs.” The list of issues it creates for the body is frightening, but shrinkage of the brain is due to dehydration. 

“When the brain dehydrates, it shrinks. You can get kidney failure, you get the loss of kidney function, you can have coordination problems because of the brain shrinkage, you can get delirious, you can get confused.

“Extreme dehydration causes real problems. Let’s say one of the fighters gets violent vomiting: they could get extremely dehydrated. That’s one of the things they would always check for.

“Even mild degrees of dehydration can cause you problems with renal failure. Your kidneys just pack up and you can’t excrete fluid properly, you can’t excrete toxins and waste products. Eventually you get a build up of waste product in the blood. You’ll become ill quite quickly. ” 

The next step is dialysis. He adds: “You can also get a fast heart rate because your heart is trying to compensate for the same amount of volume but has less to play with.

“Low blood pressure is another condition, so whenever you stand up, because your circulation volume is so low, the blood just drains from your brain and you get dizzy, light-headed and sometimes you collapse from it.

“A big weight cut in a short period of time can have massive consequences on the body. Doing this every two or three months can’t be that healthy for you.”

Thankfully, fighters like Anthony ‘Rumble’ Johnson are no longer drying themselves out, as the doctor put it to me, “from the inside out.”

“The only way to go about stopping that from happening, other than making sure fighters get weighed every day prior to competition, is making sure they don’t deviate from a certain percentage from say, a week out,” he adds.

There have been other occasions. We’ve seen fights canceled in the past because of severe abdominal cramps caused by weight cutting. Surely, it’s time for measures to be taken.

Fighters are exactly that. They fight emotion, they fight pain, they fight adversity. They’re fighting themselves as much as their opponent. A lot of them are too stubborn for their own good. The doctor is the last person they’ll see. 

All too regularly, fighters will kick away issues, patch them up and carry on as normal. But they can’t do that. For their own good. The sport needs to change. It needs to evolve.