By Dan Ambrose: Trainer Floyd Mayweather Sr. says that WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (42-0-1, 30 KO’s) is still battling hard just to try and get down to the 152 lb. catch-weight for today’s weigh-in at 2:30 p.m. for his fight on Saturday night against Floyd Mayweather Jr. (44-0. 26 KO’s).
The way Floyd Sr. sees it, Canelo will have taken off too much weight for him to have any power to win against Mayweather Jr. It’s never good when you’re still trying to make weight the day of the fight, especially when you’ve had to lose massive amounts of weight just to get to this point.
Floyd Sr. said to the Las Vegas Review Journal “He’s [Canelo] still trying to lose weight, and he’s down to just muscle. Where’s the power going to come from?”
Canelo actually has to drain the water weight out of his muscles just to get down to the 152 lb. limit for this fight. Canelo is rock solid at 170+ without any visible fat on his frame, so for him to have to drain down water fight to get down to 152, it’s a huge ordeal. All that weight has to come from somewhere, and it’s clear that he’s going to be draining a lot of it from his muscles.
Canelo has the bad luck of not being fat, because at least if he was 15-20 pounds overweight, he could have lost that weight and easily come in at 152 lbs. for the weigh-in today, and still be strong on Saturday after he puts a little bit of the weight back on. But with Canelo being a light heavyweight-sized fighter in the 170s without fat, all that weight is going to be coming off straight from his muscles.
It is going to be difficult for Canelo to muster up any kind of fight with him being weak. For fighters that drain massive amounts of weight off to make weight for a division that their body normally couldn’t fight in, you see their performance tends to do down. You see the negative effects in terms of fatigue early in the fight, even though they’ve rehydrated fully.
Your body really takes a big hit when it losses 20 pounds of water weight and the weight is quickly put back on 24 hours later. Things still aren’t back to normal even after you put that weight back on by drinking lots of fluids or connecting an IV line. Putting your body through such a major stressor like that right before an athletic event that requires a lot of aerobic activity is very difficult on it, and that’s why you see a lot of these fighters running out of gas early.
Things to watch for on Saturday night is for Canelo to be fighting only 45 seconds to 1 minute of every round, with him resting in between brief flurries. Look for Canelo to be up against the ropes a lot resting his weary legs. You can also look for Canelo to be using a lot of head movement, but not moving his legs. It takes a lot of energy to move your feet, and if you’re weight drained like Canelo will likely be, you’re going to minimize movement as much as possible. That’s why we’ll probably see Canelo standing with his back against the ropes moving his head like he did against Austin Trout, and trying to steal rounds by showing the judges how good he is defensively.
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