Heavy.com gets the scoop:
Heavy.com: Was this the first time you tried to cut from 220?
Anthony Johnson: Yeah, I never get that high. That’s the heaviest I’ve ever been in my life. But I got an injury when I was getting ready for Matt Brown, I hurt my knee again. When you get injured, you don’t do much. You sit around and eat and get fat. That’s exactly what I did.
Heavy.com: What weight do you usually start at?
Anthony Johnson: Usually I start at 210. That ten pound difference made a big impact. You know what I mean? It kicked my butt, but I was prepared for it. I was prepared to just grind it out and get down to 171. And I was in the sauna for an hour and I lost three or four pounds right off the bat. I knew it was coming off. That’s why I said that if I had another hour or two, I would have been able to make it. I got out of the sauna, and I think I was out too long because my sweating stopped, and when I got back in the sauna I couldn’t get anything else off. That’s what broke me.
Heavy.com: What were you at the day before the weigh-ins?
Anthony Johnson: Well, I was working with this trainer, a friend of my agent. He wanted me to try barely eating anything but getting a lot of fluids in me. So we did that, and I was 192 on Monday and I should have been less than 185 on Wednesday and I wouldn’t need to make the hard cut on Friday. The trainer told me, “drink a lot of water and don’t eat too much”. So I did that, and then on Thursday I did a three hour workout and dropped from 198 to 183. I was 192 and I drank all of this water that he wanted me to drink and got back up to 198. Doing his thing, it was cool but I think the process got started too late. If I’d done things the way I always did, I would have been fine, but trying this new method, this new way of doing things, really jacked my body up.
Johnson also says he’s looking into moving up to middleweight. He also promises to organize all his coaches, trainers, even his agent for a meeting on Monday to sort out the situation so his trainings so more smoothly in the future.
Best of luck Anthony.
Meanwhile, Yoshiyuki Yoshida might have just caught an enormous break.
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