By Dan Ambrose: Trainer Robert Garcia says that his fighter former WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. (49-2-1, 32 KOs) is busy working out and eating right getting ready for a fight against WBC super middleweight champion Badou Jack (20-1-1, 12 KOs) for the tail end of April. The Chavez Jr. vs. Badou fight isn’t official at this time, but Garcia expects it to be.
Garcia wants Chavez Jr. to lose weight at Big Bear, California before finishing up the training in Riverside, California. Garcia figures that Chavez Jr. can take off a lot of weight in the next three to four weeks, and they would still have a month and a half to get ready for the Badou fight.
In a recent video of Chavez Jr., he looked pretty big. My guess is he weighed in the 200s. But they’re probably only looking to take off 15 to 20 pounds to get him in the upper 180s so that he’s only 15 to 20 pounds over the 168lb limit for the Badou fight. Chavez Jr. could then dehydrate the rest of the weight off to make weight for the fight, and then balloon up to the high 180s or low 190s for the fight. Badou is likely going to be dealing with a bigger Chavez Jr., but not that much bigger. Chavez Jr. looks like his physique has really aged in the last four years since his fight with Sergio Martinez in 2012. Chavez Jr’s hands have slowed down. He was never fast to begin with, but he looks like he’s lost a lot of hand speed from when he was in his early 20s.
“It’s nothing official, but he’s [Chavez Jr] already in camp,” Garcia said to Fighthype.com. “He’s already training. He does train when I show up, and I’ve been showing up every day. He’s in a house in Big Bear where there’s nothing to do, and he only eats what the cook feeds him. So that’s going to be a big advantage there. The plan is to be up in Big Bear and lose as much weight as he can for the first three to four weeks. Remember, the fight won’t be until the end of April, so we got a good three months. So that’s a plan to finish up in Riverside. I don’t mind going up there because the kid trains. He listens to me. When he does work out, he trains for a good two hours.”
Chavez Jr’s problems aren’t just related to weight that he needs to take off for the Badou fight. Chavez Jr. has a lot of flaws in his game that are things that are likely beyond what Garcia can to help him.
Chavez Jr. still likes to fight on the inside too much, and he doesn’t seem capable of throwing a lot of combinations like he did when he was in his early 20s. He’s 29 now, and he seems to need to take a breather after throwing a handful of punches. In the meantime, Chavez Jr. is easy to hit and he’s getting nailed all the time by his opponents. In his last fight, Chavez Jr. struggled to beat a limited middleweight in Marcos Reyes last July. The fight took place at light heavyweight at a catch-weight.
Badou will make it very tough on Chavez Jr., and I have my doubts that he’ll be able to beat him.
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