Paddy Pimblett is a big Lightweight.
The English “Baddy” is reasonably tall and long for the division yet is also heavily muscled on fight night. His size advantage is a key part of his success, notably in his career-best win over Michael Chandler — another beefy Lightweight — whom Pimblett was really able to bully with his own size and strength. After fights, Pimblett is notorious for gaining a ton of weight in the off-season to the point that he’s unrecognizable.
In a recent YouTube clip, Pimblett
talked about the weight cutting process and revealed his fight night numbers. According to Pimblett, he’s able to weigh in at 155 pounds and then rehydrate all the way back to 191 pounds roughly 36 hours later — an astonishing 26% rehydration.
“You’re never actually that weight,” Pimblett explained. “People think you walk around at that weight — I’m only ever 70kg for an hour or two, but I get back in the cage at 87kg.”
These are hard numbers to believe. Undoubtedly, there are massive weight cuts followed by significant rehydration in the UFC, but Pimblett’s numbers are way beyond anything ever reported. Whenever the UFC visits California, the California State Athletic Commission (CSAC) records the competition weights of the athletes in an attempt to curtail excessive weight cutting. Most UFC fighters regain about 10-12% of their weigh-in weight by fight night, but heavy cutters like Paulo Costa and Geoff Neal are in the 16-18% range, which for those two larger men equated to about 30 pounds.
Pimblett fights at a smaller weight class than either Costa and Neal, yet he’s putting on 15 more pounds than either of them? Unless he’s stepping into the Octagon wearing jeans, steel-toed boots, and Rampage Jackson’s chain, that number feels unrealistic. That said, we can only speculate until Pimblett happens to fight in “The Golden State.”
Regardless, Pimblett’s size didn’t help him much at UFC 324 versus Justin Gaethje, as he wasn’t able to hurt or take down the veteran brawler. Since suffering his first promotional loss, Pimblett has yet to announce his fighting return.
