Tag: WMMA

Hyped women’s strawweight prospect Mackenzie Dern was the talk of the UFC last week when she missed weight by seven pounds heading into her bout with Amanda Cooper at UFC 224 from Rio de Janeiro.

Even though she weighed in at nearly a full weight class above Cooper, her opponent chose to continue with the bout at a catchweight after Dern relinquished 30 percent of her purse to her. Dern won the match with an impressive first-round submission after rocking skilled striker Cooper with a huge overhand right.

She then made even more headlines by somehow debuting on the official strawweight rankings despite her saying the UFC wanted her to fight her next contest in the new UFC women’s flyweight division. The vast weight miss prompted an obvious backlash from her critics on social media, and her rankings debut lead to some longer-tenured fighters in her division such as Felice Herrig and Angela Hill questioning the decision.

Regardless of your opinion of her, Dern has fans and media members talking, and that could mean her perceived position as one of the future stars in MMA is coming true.

Dern knows that her hype coupled with her weight miss comes with an amount of backlash. After what she saw online last week, she revealed on this week’s episode of The MMA Hour that some of it was hard to take seriously even though she knows it’s a serious issue she has to corral:

“It’s kind of crazy. I see people putting hamburgers in my hands. I want to take it serious and I want to show that this won’t happen again, but with some of the memes and stuff I have to laugh. It’s kind of crazy.”

A lot of the criticism directed towards her was due to the fact that she appeared to be a much bigger fighter than Cooper when the two finally met, and it’s not hard to see why when she weighed in at nearly the flyweight limit after reportedly arriving in Brazil at a lofty 139 pounds and finding herself unable to stand.

Yet while many claimed she was the much bigger fighter against Cooper, Dern said they were close in weight when they touched down in Brazil and didn’t feel all that much heavier in the octagon:

“As soon as I arrived the UFC weighed us and I was 138 and she was 134 or 135, so as soon as I saw that it thought, ‘She’s almost my size’. I knew my right punch was strong from the times I hit her, but I didn’t feel so much heavier or something. I wasn’t thinking about the weight anymore.”

She won the fight in dominant fashion, but the questions about her ability to make strawweight – a division in which she’s missed weight three times in six scheduled bouts – left her next fight’s weight class truly uncertain. With talk she should move up rampant, Dern confirmed her desire to stay at 115 pounds with the help of the UFC Performance Institute in Las Vegas.

The hyped submission wiz said she’s made weight at strawweight before, and closed with a guarantee she wouldn’t miss the mark again:

“I want to stay at strawweight. Hopefully, with the help of UFC Performance Institute it will be a lot easier and it will all be under control. If they told me, ‘It’s not good for you to fight at 115’, then I would go to 125. I’ve made 115 before, three times, so I think it’s a better weight for me.”

“I can guarantee [that I won’t miss weight again].”

The post Mackenzie Dern: I Can Guarantee I Won’t Miss Weight Again appeared first on LowKickMMA.com.

Rising female MMA star Mackenzie Dern picked up her second UFC win over Amanda Bobby Cooper at last weekend’s UFC 224, and she did so in dominant style.

However, the first-round submission (watch highlights here) that had the crowd roaring in the Jeunesse Arena from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was overshadowed by the fact she had missed the 116-pound strawweight limit by an alarming seven pounds, the third time she had missed weight in her seven-fight pro MMA career.

Dern expressed her embarrassment at the negligent miss directly after the fight, but during an appearance on this week’s edition of The MMA Hour, she opened up about how difficult the weight cut truly was. According to the Brazilian jiu-jitsu wiz, she began to notice issues with the cut when she spent hours in the sauna without any weight coming off:

“I started to get nervous on Thursday night. I spoke to my manager. In Vegas, I had a close weight cut, but in Vegas I was 100 percent positive I was going to make the weight even though I was the last one to weigh in. In Brazil, I told my manager on Thursday, ‘This isn’t like Vegas where the whole time I’m positive.’

“On Thursday night, I was doing a lot of hours in the sauna and the weight wasn’t coming off; I was just losing 500 grams or 600 grams for every two hours. I told [my manager], ‘I don’t think I’m going to lose this many kilos in 24 hours.”

Indeed she did not, so she then detailed that when it became clear she would miss weight, the presiding athletic commission and UFC doctors present told her she had to quit cutting weight if she still wanted to face Cooper at a catchweight:

“We woke up 5:30 and went to the sauna, did everything again for two hours and the weight wasn’t coming off. I was sweating, and then I’d go to the scale, but nothing had come off.

“[The commission] said, ‘If you keep going then we won’t have a chance to do that fight because you won’t be able to move, if we have to do a catchweight or something you have to stop now’. It was 9 o’clock already when they made the decision,” she remembered.

“The UFC doctors were there, they went to sauna, they met me there. They were the ones who made the decision; it wasn’t me who wanted to stop. I went to the bathroom to check my weight and when I came back they put me on the chair and they started to give me some ice and I said, ‘No, I need to cut weight!’ They told me to drink and I didn’t understand why.”

Dern then described just how impactful the cut was, as she reached a point where she could no longer stand up due to being depleted:

“I felt my body not reacting well. The other times I didn’t make weight it was in my head. I started to trip out a little — well, not a little, a lot — that my body was shutting down.

“For this one, I felt like my mind was right, but I remember telling my coaches, ‘It’s hard for me to stand up’, I started to feel it in my legs. Then I went to the sauna two more times and then I wasn’t able to stand up anymore. The water came out of my legs and the muscles in my legs were starting to not respond. They thought I wouldn’t be able to fight.”

Based on that, it was obviously a beyond rough cut for Dern, who has been told she will compete at women’s flyweight in her next UFC bout.

But that didn’t only become apparent when she realized she could barely stand. In fact, the commission almost wanted to pull her from the card when she arrived in Brazil earlier in the week, so much so that she had to dehydrate early and make a target weight to even continue cutting:

“[The commission] wanted to pull me on Tuesday when I arrived. I said, ‘No, it’s okay, I just flew 14 hours and I drank a lot of water and I didn’t do any exercise, of course I’m going to be heavy’, but they made me make a weight the next day.

“I dehydrated two days early to show I could make a weight. When I made that weight on Wednesday, they allowed me to keep on cutting. It was a little bit crazy the weight cut because I had to do a pre-dehydration to show I could make the weight on Wednesday.”

Finally, Dern revealed how much she weighed when she landed in Brazil, and it was an astonishing 23 pounds over the strawweight limit:

“When I arrived I weighed 139 pounds and a half. And then, on Wednesday, I was 131. It’s not typical, I like to arrive at the fight week at 120, but honestly when I got there on Tuesday I wasn’t scared yet because I was on the plane and everything and I was drinking. For me, it was still possible.”

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