By Jason Kim: For some fighters, 29 is over-the-hill. Heavyweight Chris Arreola (29-2, 25 KO’s) is now 29-years-old and he’s looking more and more like he’s not the fighter that he used to be and may no longer have it for some reason. On Friday night, Arreola struggled to beat a smaller and weaker puncher in Manuel Quezada (29-6, 18 KO’s), beating him by a 12 round unanimous decision at the Citizens Business Bank Arena in Ontario, California.
To Arreola’s credit, he knocked Quezada down three times in the fight but was unable to put him away despite having him on the deck all those times. While it’s great that Arreola was able to get the win and all, since winning is the most important thing. But Quezada was the type of fighter that a lot of the top of heavyweights would have likely breezed through in a quick knockout victory.
But Arreola looked painfully slow and his power seems to be completely gone for some reason. You can’t say his power just now disappeared because didn’t look overpowering in his recent 12 round decision loss to Tomasz Adamek last April.
And you can’t say that Arreola is over-trained because he weighed 250 for Adamek and weighed even more last night at 256 lbs. The only way I could see Arreola being weight drained is if he started training camp weighing in the neighborhood of 300 pounds.
In that case, I could see why Arreola’s power may have disappeared. Losing 40 to 50 pounds of blubber will sap strength in many cases if the weight is taken off over a two month period.
I know Arreola came into training camp for the Klitschko fight weighing near 300, but if he did the same thing for the Adamek and Quezada fight, then that probably explains why Arreola isn’t punching with the same kind of power he was when he was routinely weighing in the upper 230s during his best years.
If Arreola is using training camps as a fat farm, then he deserves to look bad because training camps weren’t meant to be used to take off massive amounts of weight. Arreola is supposed to be staying in relatively good condition year round, but something tells me he’s not. I don’t know what Arreola can do to change this other than having his trainer move in with him and live in the kitchen to guard the refrigerator.
But the trainer would have to tail Arreola all day long to make sure that he doesn’t stop off at a fast food joint and engulf a massive amount of fattening foods and drink beer. If Arreola was to stay in the 250 neighborhood and come into training camp at that weight, he could easily fight at 230 or maybe even less than that.
In looking at Arreola’s physique, he appears to be 40 to 50 pounds overweight. I know it would be impossible for him to take it all off, but I think he could at least take off 15 pounds during training camp to come in at 230 for his next fight if he steered clear of eating massive amounts of food and came into training camp at 255 instead of 300.
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