“You feel like you’re dying,” is how former UFC bantamweight champion Sean O’Malley once described cutting weight. After all, the main way fighters cut weight is by dehydrating themselves severely, which dehydrates your organs (including the brain) and makes your body feel like it’s dying of thirst. Remember Ilia Topuria weeping because of his grueling cut ahead of UFC 298, or TJ Dillashaw looking like a cluster of bones for his flyweight debut against Henry Cejudo? Excruciating!

Not to mention, cutting massive amounts of weight is positively dangerous in the Octagon, and can lead to fighters losing almost all their punch resistance. Alex Pereira’s famous toe-curling, out like a narcoleptic on sleeping meds knockout at the hands of Israel Adesanya was in large part, probably because he had to kill himself to make 185lbs at UFC 287.

And as you can imagine, the more weight you cut, the harder it is. This is why it was shocking to see UFC middleweight phenom, Bo Nickal, who is set to face Dutch former ONE Championship double champ Reinier de Ridder on May 3 at UFC Des Moines, post a video that showed him weighing 222.6 pounds!

The duo is set to clash this weekend in a 186-pound limit middleweight non-title clash, which means that the three-time NCAA wrestling champ will have to cut over thirty-five pounds of weight for the clash! Or will he? Fans are a bit more skeptical.

Fans react to Bo Nickal weighing in at 222 pounds days before the middleweight clash

The theme among many fans was that Nickal was not actually 222 pounds, and it was a joke he was playing on fans and perhaps even his Dutch opponent. After all, the weight and Nickal are not in the same frame anytime in the video, so the reading may well have been spliced from a different video. “No way he’s 222 😂”

One fan doubted the Penn State Alum’s ability to make 185lbs with less than a week to go for the Fight Night card. “No shot that’s real. No way he’s making 85” One fan, who did believe Nickal weighed over 220 pounds, felt that cutting so much weight was unhealthy and felt that he should just not even try to make weight and surrender part of his purse instead: “Just miss weight and take a lil pay cut, you’ll be right”.

Other fans were far more divided. One, for instance, felt that even if Nickal is 222 pounds, he has been wrestling since the age of five and knows well how to shed all that excess weight in a short period: “Y’all don’t realize Bo been a big dude and he also been cutting weight since he was a kid, so he knows how to lol”.

Another fan, who fell in the more skeptical category, felt that Nickal wearing a sweatshirt proves the video was not real, since if he was indeed interested in finding out his true weight, he wouldn’t have worn all those layers, which would add at least a couple of pounds on the scale: “Wearing the full sweatsuit on the scale is how we can tell this is a joke”.

Another fan who did believe the video felt that if Nickal indeed weighed so much in camp (let alone out of camp, where he is likely to be at least ten pounds heavier), then he was a “Weight bully 🤣🤣”

One fan was just happy that in MMA one needs to weigh-in a couple of days before the fight, otherwise there is no shot Nickal could have made 185, or rehydrated himself to fighting shape if he did make it: “Thank god you don’t have to fight the same day you make weight like in wrestling 😂”.

What do you think about Bo Nickal weighing in at 222.6 pounds days before the Reinier de Ridder clash?