By Dan Ambrose: If middleweight contender David Lemieux (25-1, 24 KO’s) wants to ever have a good chance at capturing and retaining a title in boxing he’s going to have to lose some baby fat or trim down some of his muscles and move down to welterweight where he’ll have a better chance of success.

At middleweight, Lemieux is simply too small to compete against the bigger, stronger fighters like Marco Antonio Rubio, Sergio Martinez, Daniel Jacobs, Gennady Golovkin and Dimitriy Pirog. Lemieux is listed at 5’10 ½”, but how in the world is the guy that height when he looked at least two, possibly more, inches shorter than the 5’10” Rubio last Friday night.

Either Rubio is taller than his listed height or Lemieux’s listed height is bogus. To me he looks no more than 5’8”, maybe even 5’7”. That’s just too small for middleweight. It’s good enough height to beat the scrub middleweights, but not the good ones. Lemieux looked way too small against Rubio, and that was a big part of his problem in losing to the Mexican.

Now, I doubt that Lemieux will move down in weight, because I think his trainer believes he can fix Lemieux’s problems and have him still capture a title in a short period of time. I don’t think that’s possible. I suppose Lemieux might be able to be maneuvered around to beat one of the middleweight paper champions like Sebastian Sylvester, but I can’t see Lemiuex holding onto his title for any length of time because someone will come along and knock Lemieux out again.

Lemieux needs to skip the junior middleweight division entirely and move down to welterweight. I know the urge would be for his trainer to possibly put Lemieux at light middleweight to try and have him compete at that weight. However, with guys like Alfredo Angulo, Kermit Cintron, Saul Alvarez, Antonio Margarito, Pawel Wolak, and Sergiy Dzinziruk in that division, Lemieux would probably get spanked even worse than he did in the Rubio fight. Lemieux needs to trim down and fight welterweight, where his only real threats would Andre Berto, Floyd Mayweather Jr, Manny Pacquiao, Mike Jones and Kell Brook.

Those aren’t a bad bunch, and if Lemieux could get a fight against Mayweather or Pacquiao, he would be set for life. This is where Lemieux’s limited size wouldn’t be a problem for him. It would be a likely problem at junior middleweight, and we already saw how it was an issue in the Rubio fight.