UFC Newcomer Reveals Monster Weight Cut For UFC Liverpool

Originally, Gunnar Nelson was slated to take on Neil Magny at UFC Fight Night 130, which took place last month on May 27 in Liverpool England, but Nelson was forced to withdraw from the bout due to injury, leading the UFC to sign Craig White, who accepted the bout on short notice.

Ultimately, White suffered a first-round stoppage loss to Magny, but it’s not been revealed that the real struggle may have come before White even stepped into the cage.

Recently speaking with MMAFighting.com, White admitted that he cut a concerning 46 pounds to make the 171-pound limit. And this wasn’t the first time he had endured a difficult weight cut either, as he said that he cut nearly 40 pounds prior to a bout against John Redmond in 2014:

“In that moment, the Redmond cut was the first thing that crossed my mind,” White said. “At that stage, I was out of camp and I was the heaviest I’d ever been. All I could hear in my head was, ‘You’re 98 kilos (216-pounds) — what the f*ck are you doing?’ Two seconds later I accepted the fight.

“For the John Redmond fight, I did 17 kilos (37-pounds) in nine days, it was horrendous. I got rid of eight kilos in water that time. I had never used salt baths before that. I genuinely felt like I was going to die when I was walking to the scales that time,”

And White wasn’t the only fighter competing in Liverpool that endured a difficult weight cut, as headliner Darren Till missed weight for his bout against Stephen Thompson. A video was then later released chronicling Till’s weight cut. 

In regards to that video, White claimed that his cut ‘would have made Till’s look easy’:

“The Till video is a strange one for me,” he said. “There are parts of it where you can see that he’s struggling and I definitely sympathize with him. I just don’t get why you need seven or eight guys to do these things with you. Another thing I couldn’t help but thinking was, ‘If people saw a video of my weight cut it would have made Till’s look easy.’

“I was doing two 15-minute baths for every hour. I started at eight at night and I didn’t go asleep until two in the morning. Then I got up at five in the morning and I did another four baths. Normally I can do 82 kilos (180-pounds) to 77 kilos (170-pounds) in five or six baths, but it took me 14 [baths] in total to hit weight in Liverpool.”

What do you make of White’s comments?