If you saw Friday’s weigh-in, you might have noticed that Marcos Maidana (35-4, 31 KOs) had a little bit of fat around his midsection, notably along the sides and his lower abdomen for his rematch tonight against WBA/WBC welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather Jr (46-0, 26 KOs) at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Could it be that Maidana made a big mistake by letting his strength and condition coach Alex Ariza go? Ariza had Maidana looking trim and in top shape without the jellyroll around Maidana’s sides. There’s no excuse for a fighter to have that kind of flab hanging over his trousers when he’s had s full 9 weeks of training like Maidana has had for this fight.
Maiana and his trainer Robert Garcia have talked about him coming into the fight at a lighter weight, but that remains to be seen. What you could see at the weigh-in was Maidana walking around with visible flab hanging over his waistband of his trousers before the weigh-in. That fat wasn’t there for the last fight, and it shouldn’t have been there for this fight.
Garcia let Ariza go and then hired someone else to be Maidana’s conditioning coach. But obviously looking at all that ugly fat around Maidana’s sides, it’s pretty clear that something went wrong during the training camp. Maidana either didn’t work out hard enough with his strength trainer or he snacked too much while in training camp.
Maidana should have had a nutritionist monitoring all of his meals and calibrating the fat around his midsection. We saw Ariza measuring the amount of fat around Maidana’s midsection for his first fight with Mayweather, and he seemed to be tackling the fat problem in a scientific manner. But we didn’t see the same thing with Maidana for his rematch with Mayweather.
It leaves the question whether Maidana made a mistake of letting Garcia dismiss Ariza as Maidana’s conditioning coach when he clearly had him looking better last time than we’re seeing this time around.
To me, Maidana looks like someone who starved himself rather than someone who took the weight off the right way with exercise. When a fighter goes on a diet, they frequently lose muscle and the fat is often the last thing to go. Instead of dieting, Maidana should have taken the weight off weight aerobic activity on the track.
