During a recent interview with Ariel Helwani on The MMA Hour, former UFC welterweight champ Johny Hendricks revealed his thoughts and feelings about not making the weight cut and being forced out of the fight against Tyron Woodley.
Hendricks revealed that while he was training for the fight, he felt that something was not right but he still pushed through with the sessions.
“That’s when my body sort of started feeling different. I tried to push through it, went and did another session trying to work out, and that’s when I was like, okay, something’s definitely wrong. I didn’t know what it was, I just knew something was wrong. Both my left and my right side started to hurt at that point. I went to the hospital and that’s when I found out that my intestines were dried up and I had a kidney stone in my right side,” he said.
Although this unfortunate event resulted to him backing out from fight, he was somehow thankful that he didn’t push himself to continue.
“There’s a point where I was sort of grateful that I didn’t continue, because it took [my body] a week to get over what happened. That’s what sucks more than anything, is that you work so hard to showcase what you have, and all of a sudden the diet that we were on backfires,” he added
After the incident, Hendricks and his mixed martial arts team researched for a possible cause why he suddenly had kidney stones..
“We did a lot of research, and I was eating a lot of deer meat and a lot of high-protein animal protein, which, that’s the leading cause of kidney stones and your intestines failing you. I had no idea, because I usually eat a lot of fish and a lot of chicken. I wanted to eat more protein, a lot of cleaner protein, so we focused more on that and it ended up backfiring. I think that if I would’ve eaten more chicken and salmon, I wouldn’t have been in this situation,” Hendricks said.
During the time that Hendricks was modifying his diet in order to reach the MMA target weight, he revealed that he experienced a lot of signs indicating that he needed to do something about his diet.
“There was a lot of signs that were telling me that I needed to change up my diet, and it wasn’t my weight. My weight, I hit 189 three weeks out of the fight. That’s the first time, and I have proof because one of my coaches was sitting there, they were all worried, ‘we don’t know where your weight’s at,’ they were sort of getting in my face. Like, ‘hey, let’s hit 189 then. I can do that.’ I was walking in at 193. I hit 189, and then that’s when everything sort of started to fall apart,” he went on explaining on what took place.
Looking back at what happened, Hendricks admitted that this served as a learning for all of them to get a nutritionist and trust the experts.
“It’s a learning curve. It sucks that I had to learn this way. I wish I still had a nutritionist, but it’s just one of those things, sometimes you’ve got to learn the hard way. And like I said, going from the Matt Brown fight to this one, I was like, ‘dude, this is going to be awesome. Another easy weight cut.’ I was getting my weight down the way I wanted to. I felt strong. I felt big. I was drinking plenty of fluids. I was like, this is going to be a cakewalk. And in return, the time that I’m the most confident is when it goes the worst,” he said.