Former UFC Welterweight Champion Johny Hendricks will be making his middleweight division debut at UFC Fight Night 105.
Hendricks has had his weight cutting issues at welterweight, but he promises a career rebirth starting with this weekend’s event, which is a far cry from his promises of retirement weeks ago.
“I’m just like everyone else: I can’t wait to see what I can do,” Hendricks said to MMA Junkie. “It’s going to be the rebirth of me, I can promise you that. I have the mentality back. I have the way that I want to fight. The way that I used to fight, it’s there. I just had to do a little switch up, and that little switch up was quit cutting so much weight… Right now it has been the fall of me. It hasn’t been about the fighting. It’s all been about weight cut. It may take me one or two fights to get into the groove of things at 185. It may not. Who knows? The way I feel right now, I’m actually excited. I haven’t been excited for a fight in a long time. Everything is all about the fight now. It’s about Hector Lombard and nothing else.”
The former welterweight kingpin leaves the UFC Welterweight Division on a three fight losing streak and it has been nearly two years since the last time he won a fight. The move to a new weight class may be best for the health of Hendricks as well, who went through a scare after a fight with Neil Magny.
“My kidneys shut down for five days after my fight (with Magny),” Hendricks said. “I bounced up to 219 on Sunday, and one of my friends is a nurse and she said, ‘You need to go to the hospital, your kidneys are failing.’ I was like, ‘I’m going to wait until I can’t. I don’t want to go.’ We got it, my kidneys were failing, so we did certain things. We shut down my water intake and there’s a lot of things I had to do. By Thursday, it rebooted and by Saturday I was 199. So I lost 20 pounds doing nothing. Every 30 to 40 minutes, I was going to the bathroom. This was the second time it happened where my kidneys were failing – my organs and all that stuff. I was going to kill myself (cutting weight). It took away from the sport, too. It was all about the weight cut. It was all about that instead of enjoying life. I didn’t get to do anything with my family and the normal stuff I get to do every day. At 185, I’m back to that. It’s back to being fun.”
UFC Fight Night 105 takes place on Sunday, February 19 from the Scotiabank Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada with Derrick Lewis and Travis Browne headlining. Fightful will have full
