Four years before Rob Wilkinson PFL Gold won, he was confronted with a debuting Israel Adesanya in what his last UFC fight would be.
The big difference between those two outings was the weight class; After losing his UFC contract, Wilkinson Breed to slightly heavyweight and has become great success. After the Coronavirus population has cost him two years of fighting, he registered with the PFL and won their 2022 season at 205LB.
Now he competes back for the $ 500,000 PFL World Tournament and is about to launch the efforts of the promotion in Australia. He takes on UFC and Bellator veteran Phil Davis in the opening round of the new format and believes that he first gets the most difficult task.
Rob Wilkinson was confronted with horror weight cut to fight Israel Adesanya
In an exclusive chat with bloody elbow prior to his fight with Phil Davis on Thursday evening live on ESPN, Rob Wilkinson detailed how difficult it was to make the middleweight limit. He did it in the short term for his first UFC fight, but says that the match with Israel Adesanya on UFC 221 was his toughest cut ever.
“I started fighting in the middleweight when I was 19 years old,” he explained. “I then lifted weights, but also tried to reduce the weight. The last time I fought in the UFC against Izzy I had to lose about 30 pounds in five days and I didn't use a dietician, I didn't have a specialist who helped me.
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“I was just doing it what I had done before and I really noticed that I couldn't recover and that I gassed very early.
“I was released from the UFC, took some free time and realized that it was a good time to put on a little more muscles, so I am not a lower light-heavy weight because 20 pounds are a big leap. But I started to have kickboxing around 210 pounds and I felt much better and knew it would be my new home.”
Israel Adesanya Taunts Rob Wilkinson about weight problems at UFC 221
In 2018, the UFC would do their official weightings on stage on what is now the 'ceremonial', with a huge crowd in the combat arena. Wilkinson struggled visibly to climb only eight steps on stage and initially missed the long -term limit of 186 pounds before he used the towel to strip and weigh again.
“The cutbacks became pretty bad if I think of them compared to what I am doing now,” Wilkinson continued. “They were just a lot more, I hate to think about what I used to do to arrive, it was rough, like – time and I never even thought of the fight until I made the weight.
“I was so stressed about it … I remember that event [UFC 221] Yoel Romero and Luke Rockhold fought in the main event and Yoel Romero had less weight to lose than me and did not make weight. Probably smarter, to be honest, he would have thought: “I'm not going to make weight, but at least I'll win the fight.”
“I had to be full of naked, I could hardly walk on the scales and to the scales that I had my hand on my coach almost all the time, so that I could get up … I just remember that I was confronted with Izzy because the face-off was immediately.
“Izzy was a bit to complain about, he could see how f – ed I was and said that I f – ed, I didn't have time to get ready. We had less than 24 hours to rehydrates for that fight, so I had a shorter time and he could see that. I just had to think, I had to drink some water!” “