By Dan Ambrose: For those boxing fans who have become accustomed to seeing heavyweight contender Chris Arreola (30-2, 26 KO’s) routinely weighing in between 249 to 263 in the past three years, it’s kind of alarming to see how much weight that the 30-year-old Arreola has dropped for tonight’s fight against the puncher Nagy Aguilera (16-5, 11 KO’s) in their scheduled 10 round bout at the Home Depot Center in Carson, California.

Arreola and Aguilera will be fighting on the undercard of the Super Six tournament semifinal match-up between Andre Ward and Arthur Abraham, so the Arreola-Aguilera fight will be getting a lot of attention because of the great fans that will be tuning in tonight. Arreola weighed in at 234 at Friday’s weigh-in, which is 15 pounds lighter than Arreola fought at in January when he destroyed an over-matched 2nd tier fighter Joey Abell in a 1st round knockout.

Arreola, who had lost two out of his last four fights going into the Abell fight, seemed to be very pleased with his performance and was happy with his speed and energy in that fight. Indeed, Arreola did look a lot quicker than he did when he was losing to the likes of Vitali Klitschko and Tomasz Adamek while weighing in the 250s for both fights. However, to take even more weight for a fight against Aguilera might not bring the kinds of results that Arreola is looking for. He not only looks to have taken off fat, but he also seems to have taken off a fair amount of muscle as well.

It may not matter because Aguilera isn’t in his class, but if the fight goes past six, we could see Arreola looking weak and running out of gas. Once you’ve gained a lot of weight like Arreola has, it’s very hard to take that kind of fat off without being weakened in the process. You have to take the weight off slowly and do it the smart way by eating correctly, but not dieting. You can’t drastically limit calories because then you end up losing muscle, and Arreola looks to have lost some muscle with his recent weight loss.