“I slapped the head off of him for nine minutes of that fight.”
He boasted about going from salads to steaks but those words came back to bite him.
Conor McGregor was training for a 155 lb UFC light heavyweight title defence when, in late February of this year, he learned Rafael dos Anjos would not make the fight. With minimal fuss, he accepted a fight with Nate Diaz.
There was wrangling over what weight the bout should take place at but McGregor told Diaz ‘to get comfortable’. They would do their thing at welterweight – 170 lbs.
Rather than dropping pounds in the lead-up to the fight, The Notorious remained close to his ‘walking around weight’ and had more energy than he knew what to do with. When he desperately needed that energy, in the closing moments of the second round against Diaz, it was nowhere to be found. He tapped out.
Looking back, McGregor can’t believe the preparation errors he made. Interviewed for their ‘Body Issue’, McGregor told ESPN:
“I am forever, forever learning. I think in the last fight, I mismanaged my weight.
“I was working with my nutritionist for the lightweight title fight to make 155 pounds. I was on track. Nine days out from the fight, I’m in phenomenal condition, and then the weight got changed [to 170] and all of a sudden I’m 10 pounds below and I’m like, I don’t need this diet because I need to eat up to the weight.
“So I threw that out. I disengaged from that. I started eating two steaks a day, two breakfasts. I’d have a coffee and some cookies with that, please, also.
“I’d be in the gym six to eight hours on fight week – ‘I’ve got bags of energy. I can do this all day’. But it came back and bit me in the ass. My body went into shock. I over-trained and then mismanaged the weight.”
McGregor has since brought in a slew of new training partners and ‘people specifically to monitor my cardiovascular’.
His rematch with Diaz is a little over six weeks away but he is confident he can right the wrongs of UFC 196. He certainly won’t be ploughing into the steaks and cookies.
“I feel like my gut has been emptied again,” he declared, “like I am hungry again.”
