Canelo down to 157.4; still needs to lose 5.4 lbs. for Mayweather bout

By Boxing News - 09/07/2013 - Comments

By Dan Ambrose: With one week to go before the huge Showtime pay-per-view fight on September 14th between WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (42-0-1, 30 KO’s) and Floyd Mayweather Jr. (44-0, 26 KO’s), Canelo still finds himself needing to shed 5.4 stubborn pounds of water weight to get down to the 152 lb. catch-weight.

Canelo, 23, weighed in at drained-looking 157.4 lbs. on Friday as part of the mandatory 7-day weigh-in for the fight, and he still needs to lost nearly 5 ½ pounds to make the fight.

I can imagine how terrible Canelo must be looking and feeling right now after having lost close to 20 pounds of water weight already just to get down to 157, and I think it’s going to be really tough on him to lose the remaining 5.4 lbs. to get down to the 152 lb. catch-weight.

In contrast, Mayweather Jr. weighed in at a comfortable looking 152.2 lbs., and that means he really doesn’t have to do much of anything to make weight, because he pretty much there already.

De La Hoya, the president of Golden Boy Promotions, announced the weights on his twitter page:

If Canelo is able to shed the last 5.4 lbs. to get to the 152 lb. limit, he’s not going to be in any kind of shape to fight. The guy right now looks like he’s gone through a huge ordeal just to get down to 157.4, which is understandable when you realize that Canelo probably started draining down from around 173-175 lbs.

Canelo has likely taken off around 16 pounds already in the form of water weight. If you think that’s no big deal, try to stop drinking water for a week to lose 16 pounds of your own, and then continue to without fluids until you’ve lost another 5.4 pounds on top of that.

You’re going to feel terrible, look terrible, and be in no kind of shape to fight even after you furiously pump water back into your system in the last 24 hours before the fight after the weigh-in on Friday, September 13th.

I was giving Canelo a small chance to win the fight, but not anymore. This is too much water weight for him to have taken off for him to win.

Well hopefully Canelo gets a clue after he loses this fight and moves up to middleweight or preferably to super middleweight, so that he doesn’t have to take off so much water weight each time he fights. You can get away with fighting at weight classes far, far below your own natural weight for awhile, but eventually your body can no longer this ordeal of losing huge percentages of water weight in a short period of time. Your performances suffer badly, you lose, you fail to make weight and gives you a clear idea that you need to beat at your own natural weight when fighting.

For Canelo, that’s probably super middleweight right now. I think even fighting at 160 would be tough on his body, because he’d still have to take off close to 15 pounds of water weight to make the 160 lb. limit. At super middleweight [168 lbs], Canelo would only have to lose around 7 pounds of water weight to make the 168 lb. weight.



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