On November 10, 2017, 18-year-old Australian fighter Jessica Lindsay wrote “weight cutting is sick” on her Instagram page while preparing for a Muay Thai fight. Six days later, she died of extreme dehydration, having collapsed while out running, 30 minutes before she was due to weigh in. Her organs, her sister said, had shut down “one by one”.

Acute weight loss is a growing concern in combat sports. The practice of sweating out vast amounts of water to reach the required weight limit for a fight started in wrestling and has become hugely common in MMA and boxing. It’s not unusual for a UFC fighter to lose 20 lbs – often more than 10 percent of their body weight – in the 48 hours before a weigh in. They will stop eating and drinking, and then use a combination of saunas, hot baths and cardiovascular exercise to force their bodies to excrete as much fluid as possible. While extreme dehydration is less prevalent in boxing, it is still an option that boxers sometimes take to meet limits that are far below their natural weight. The thinking is that by shedding water weight quickly, only to pile the pounds back on after weighing in, they can gain a size and weight advantage over their opponent. Being the bigger and heavier fighter clearly has its benefits. In May 2016, Amir Khan was knocked out cold with one punch by Canelo Alvarez, who is said to have weighed as much as 30 lbs more than the 155 lsb limit on fight night.

Speaking to Betway, Dr Mike Loosemore MBE – chief medical officer for GB Boxing – warns that fighters are playing a game of “Russian roulette” with their health by playing the weight cutting game.

“First, there’s the danger of actually losing the weight,” says Dr Loosemore. “Sweat isn’t pure water – the salts that are in your blood are required for running your heart nice and smoothly. When you get very dry, you lose a lot of electrolytes. Those electrolytes are very important for the nerves that make your heart beat regularly. If they start misfiring you put yourself at risk of heart arrhythmia, heart attacks and death.” GB Boxing have strict guidelines when it comes to weight cutting, with “a dehydration of two percent of their weight considered safe”.

“Greater percentages than that, we wouldn’t recommend,” says Dr Loosemore, “because it’s just dangerous. It’s Russian roulette.”

We’ve recently had to shut down our forum for technical reasons.  While the forum wasn’t exactly a budding MMA community – with closed registration and maybe at best a handful of active users – it did have one thread which I would like to have preserved and kept going. The thread was titled something like “Websites that mention Fightmatrix rankings” and if I remember correctly, was started by our long time contributor Ked Becker. And the purpose of the thread was self-explanatory: to list all websites and other media sources which mention FightMatrix.com.

I’ve created a ‘Links & Mentions‘ page, which we will be using for outbound links to our friends and affiliates, and other major websites in the MMA & combat sports communities. I will also be using the comments section of the page to link or mention every website, podcast, etc. which make a reference to FightMatrix rankings, and I invite our readers to do the same.

If you have an MMA or other related website that you feel should be include in this new Links page, please mention it in the comments or use the Contact Us form.

2018 is a year of changes for us here at FightMatrix, and one change that most readers probably haven’t noticed (since there were only a handful of active forum users) is the disappearance of our forum.

We had to disable new user registration many months ago for technical reasons, and we now feel that the forum has outlived it’s usefulness. We also recently installed the Disqus comment and community system, so please leave us comments on our blog posts and pages! And if it’s a private matter, you can always contact us here.

Dear Readers,

As you may or may have not noticed, we’ve switched to Disqus as our new comment system. This is just one of many incremental updates we have planned this year, to improve the user’s (Your’s!) experience. Coming up next, ELO and Modified ELO ranking systems preview, and a forum redesign.

In the meanwhile, since the forum registration is closed, if you’re having any trouble with using the new comment system, please let us know via the Contact Us form.

As always – thank you for the continued support!

Lomachenko vs. Linares 

Date: Saturday, May 12
Time: 8 p.m. ET
Location: Madison Square Garden — New York City

In front of 10,429 in attendance, Lomachenko survived a knockdown in round 6 to win via TKO in round 10 after a perfectly placed liver shot to claim the WBA (Super) and The Ring lightweight titles. In doing so he became the fastest fighter ever to win titles in 3 different weight classes (only 12 professional fights) shattering the previous record of 20 fights, which was held by Jeff Fenech.

Dear readers,

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, we’ve upgraded our site layout to a more mobile friendly version. This is a work in progress and you will see some additional tweaks in the coming weeks. In the meanwhile, please let us know if you come across any problems: dead links, broken pages, usability issues on desktop or mobile devices, etc. Please leave your feedback in comments or use the Contact Us form and we will do our best to fix any bugs ASAP!

As always, thank you for visiting our site and please come back often – we’re looking to add some new features in 2018 and are open to your feedback about what you would like to see on Fight Matrix.

The Internet has had its impact on almost every industry out there. For gamers, it’s been a great way to experience gaming, allowing them to try out a different niche of gaming easily. With time, the concept of online gaming has changed too. We had those flash games around a decade back, taking up as little as a megabyte of space. Back in those times, internet speed was slow, and you couldn’t do much more.

Not anymore. And the games have changed as a result too. You could try out online gaming on all your favorite games, which includes the likes of PES, FIFA and even Counter-Strike. With download speeds often cross 50 Mbps, online gaming has taken on a new definition today.

Online gaming: Different Than Even Half a Decade Back!

The gaming sector has been largely influenced by the technological advancement all around. If you are into gaming, you must be aware how the online world has completely changed how people perceive gaming. First, gaming has become far more accessible than it ever was. You can sit on your drawing room sofa with your smartphone and play online till you are tired. You can play online pokies to your heart’s content, or try the more complex games. Either way, you will never be bored.

Due to a weight cutting death, One Championship rolled out changes to their weigh-ins and divisional ranges at the start of 2016.

Although online literature suggests they still do weigh-ins, I can’t find any legitimate pre-event weigh-in results since they rolled out this new program.  As far as I can tell, they come up with a fight-ready, perhaps slightly dehydrated weight for each fighter and put them in whatever division they fit.

What makes it more confusing is how they structure their ranges:

The upper-limit of Heavyweight remains unchanged, while all of the other divisions are staggered by one, with the exception of Light Heavyweight, which basically equates to a “Light” Heavyweight.  So, they tried to make the common naming convention “work” with their altered methods.

To incorporate a real-world example, Bibiano Fernandes is the promotion’s 145-pound champion.  In a fight-ready, perhaps slightly dehydrated state, he probably is about 145 pounds and as far as I can tell, this is where he is expected to weigh under their strange conditions — so this is pretty clear so far.

To OneFC, he is a “Bantamweight”, but at where he’s expected to weigh, he’d be considered a “Featherweight” to the rest of the MMA world, sans-Shooto, whose division ranges are staggered as well, but in the opposite direction.  However, in the rest of MMA, he would not be exempt from cutting an additional 10 or so pounds of water weight, so in all likelihood, he’d weigh-in at 135 prior to the event — a “true” Bantamweight.

As you may have noticed, our divisional limits are slightly higher than the standard limits, to accommodate for slight variances historically in organizations shifting things a bit, deciding to use the metric system and with another pound or two on top of that to allow for small weigh-in misses.  However, they aren’t so much higher to allow for OneFC fighters to be slotted in their “true” MMA divisions without breaking our own rules and ignoring actual weigh-in results.

Hopefully this clears things up.

So here’s a bit of the the backstory, at the 2017 UFC Athlete Retreat the UFC had brought out special guest speakers to give their own little “Ted Talks”. One of those guests was Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers, and one of the UFC athletes to attend was Leslie Smith (currently 2 fight win streak since fighting Cris Cyborg, exploded ear, 5 FOTN bonuses – 4 in Invicta – 1 in UFC). And Leslie Smith asked him about Unions.

What They Are Fighting For whether or not they unionize:

“The UFC can choose to either pay into our needs and respect us as employees with a say in all decisions affecting us.”

or

“Treat us like the independent contractors that we are being called and lighten up with the USADA supervision, uniforms and restrictions.”

“We need to have either the autonomy of being independent contractors like the UFC claims we are or we need to get benefits and a seat at the table as employees since the UFC treats us like employees.” – http://www.projectspearhead.com/

All this can be found on their website neatly under the “Why Associations” tab.

Next, is the process, which is also concisely explained and outlined on the website for Smith’s fellow fighters.

Although most people have heard of fantasy sports, millions of people actually play it. But you may be one of the few who has no idea what it really is, and that’s why we’re here today – to help you out in understanding the fantasy sports mania.

You may know that it involves putting together virtual teams that are based on real players. And then that you judge the performance on those imaginary teams based on how the real players do on the field. Sure, that’s the basics of it.

The entire thing began as a fun game that used to be played among friends. But nowadays, it’s turned into a multi-billion-dollar industry that even has influence on actual sports. And how it works is, the fans pick their favorite players in an online selection process, also known as a draft, in order to assemble a fantasy team. Then, the real-game statistics of those players are compiled and compared in order to see whose fantasy sports team has done the best job.

Since it involves payments and rewards, some deem it on par with actual sports betting, while others claim that fantasy sports require more skill than luck.