Don’t worry, as of right now, the plan is still for former UFC heavyweight champion Cain Velasquez to face Fabricio Werdum next Friday night at UFC 207.
Following that, Velasquez could be on the sidelines once more for an extended period of time.
In an interview with ESPN, the 34-year-old confirmed he is headed for back surgery due to bone spurs that are causing him intense pain. Velasquez underwent a similar operation in February.
“It’s an achy pain that goes down your leg, and it gets to a point where if you’re standing for 10 minutes, you have to sit down,” Velasquez said. “If you’re going out for a while, a half-hour, you know it’s going to be pretty painful. You have to sit down and take the compression off your back.
“The surgery is basically shaving off some bone to make room for my sciatic nerve. After the last surgery, the doctor said I might be pain-free forever, but knowing how I train and what I do as a fighter, the pain could come back. I didn’t really know how long I was going to feel good. It ended up being about a year.”
Velasquez will undergo the operation five days after his bout with Werdum. He admitted that he has been using Cannabidiol (CBD) to get through training and make it to the T-Mobile Arena for a rematch with the Brazilian.
“It’s the only thing that allows me to still train, and I’m not taking a harmful painkiller into my body that I’ll later become addicted to,” Velasquez said. “I don’t know how everyone is going to feel about me saying this, but this is just one of the hard facts we as fighters have to go through. In the past, in the NFL, players have gotten addicted to painkillers. I don’t want to be an addict of some sort.”
CBD is not on the banned list of substances under watch by the UFC for out-of-competition testing.