Anderson Silva, you’re just too fat to fight Georges St-Pierre.
That’s the latest critique handed out by GSP’s trainer, Firas Zahabi, who says that the UFC middleweight champion will have an unfair advantage at a catchweight limit.
Silva regularly fights at 185 pounds, with occasional trips to the 205-pound light heavyweight division—seemingly with no ill effects. As Zahabi told Ariel Helwani on Monday’s latest edition of The MMA Hour, Silva’s “ballooning” tactics should be nixed by cutting to 170 pounds (translation via MMA Fighting):
“You know, the thing is, the next day he’ll balloon up over 200, and I don’t think that’s fair,” Zahabi said. ” I don’t think that’s a fair fight. If he can make the cut to 170, that would be great. Georges has to fight everyone at 170, and that’s the case. Really I think it would be even and fair. Even if [Silva] would balloon up the next day, he would be weakened by the weight cut, there would be something there.”
Zahabi also reaffirmed GSP’s belief that going up to middleweight would permanently destroy the champion’s carefully-crafted welterweight physique, rending him unable to go back down in weight.
If that’s truly the case, it seems the burden is on Silva to find some way to slim down to St-Pierre’s level.
For his part, St-Pierre has often informed outlets such as SportsNet.ca that Silva “used to fight at 168 pounds” in Japan, yet currently walks around at 230 pounds when not training.
Silva did indeed weigh-in at 168 pounds for his Shooto middleweight title fight against Japanese legend Hayato Sakurai—more than 11 years ago. But at a glance, it seems physiologically unlikely that the 37-year-old Silva could cut weight the same way he did back when he was 26 years old.
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