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Big John McCarthy worried that fighters aren't 'truly educated' when it comes to cutting weight

Stephen R. Sylvaine / USA Today Sports

Referee Big John McCarthy has been around mixed martial arts longer than perhaps anyone associated with the sport today, and while he's surely seen things come a long way, there's at least one area he sees as needing further development.

After Renan Barao and Henry Cejudo both had to drop out of UFC 177 recently after suffering health issues following intense weight cuts, McCarthy expressed concern that fighters may still lack a firm grasp of dropping weight for a fight. As he told The MMA Hour:

I don’t think fighters are truly educated as to exactly what they are doing to themselves, and I mean doing to themselves over the long term of their life. You know, the weight thing is a huge problem in everything that it’s involved in, be it wrestling or MMA -- any time someone is losing the weight that some of these guys do, draining their body of fluids, the electrolytes, it’s a problem for everybody involved. Not just the fighter, but the promoter and the promotion itself because you have situations where fighters don’t make weight.

We can't necessarily speak to how well informed UFC fighters are in this regard - and there appear to be experts like Mike Dolce out there doing effective, healthy work - but we can cop to not knowing the dangers and best practices for cutting weight back in our high school wrestling days.

There are strong incentives for fighters to learn the science associated with weight cutting, as entering a fight in peak condition rather than drained and exhausted is an obvious advantage. Hopefully, that incentive eventually outweighs the incentive to make a tight cut and enter a fight heavier than one could otherwise.

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