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Johny Hendricks hoping 'major lifestyle change' will pay off in Octagon

LAS VEGAS – Johny Hendricks talks like a different man. He eats differently. He sure looks different.

The former UFC welterweight champion will face Stephen “Wonderboy” Thompson on Saturday at the MGM Grand Garden in the main event of a UFC Fight Night show on Fox Sports 1.

It will be his first fight since a failed attempt to make weight for an important match at UFC 192 in October against Tyron Woodley. Hendricks had had some difficulty making the division’s 170-pound weight limit before, but the planned bout against Woodley was the first time he’d missed.

It wasn’t a pleasant experience for him, mentally or physically. He’s a competitor, and he wanted to prove himself against Woodley, an old collegiate wrestling rival. He’d worked hard in camp and knew that a win over a talented and high-profile foe such as Woodley would be a big step toward regaining the title he’d lost via split decision to Robbie Lawler.

“As an athlete, as a fighter, you push and you work and you sacrifice because that fight is the prize; it’s what everything is all about,” Hendricks said.

Two days before the bout with Woodley, the night before the Oct. 2 weigh-in, Hendricks felt awful. There was a shooting pain in his side. He was 181½ pounds, and needed to lose 10½ more by the next afternoon to hit the division’s non-title limit of 171 pounds.

Johny Hendricks will face Stephen Thompson on Feb. 6 in Las Vegas. (Getty)
Johny Hendricks will face Stephen Thompson on Feb. 6 in Las Vegas. (Getty)

He’d cut weight his entire life, but his body felt different this time.

“It’s not so much that I got sick, but it was that it felt like someone was stabbing me in the side with a knife,” Hendricks told Yahoo Sports. “My intestines dried up and I had a kidney stone.”

That Thursday night, Hendricks went to the emergency room for treatment. He was given fluids intravenously and pulled from the card.

He didn’t feel right until three weeks later. As much as he wanted to fight, and even though fighters don’t get paid if they don’t fight, he couldn’t take the risk to his health.

“Let’s say that I would have continued to try to get to 171,” Hendricks said. “Who’s to say that my organs ... look, it took me three weeks to bounce back from 181. So, if I would have hit 171, and I got hit in the body or kicked in the body, that something worse didn’t happen. They told me I was drying up, and that’s why I was having those problems.

“Everybody around me was like, ‘Can you make it?’ And my intestines were drying out and I sort of didn’t want to do that.”

So he pulled out, and, predictably, he received a torrent of criticism. It is a fighter’s job to make weight, and Hendricks couldn’t do it. A mistake was made in the process, but he made the only choice he could make.

Asked if he felt he’d broken a trust with the fans, the normally mild-mannered Hendricks began spitting fire.

He wasn’t pleased that anyone would question him and said he’d had more than enough of the online critics.

“I’m at a point where I realize, I can’t win everybody over,” he said. “I’m over that. I can sit here and say my fans, my real fans, have stuck behind me and supported me and I’m very grateful for that support. But if someone wants to sit there and say, ‘Well, Hendricks can’t make weight, he can’t do this and that,’ well, I have a question for those people.

"Have you ever skipped a day’s work? Have you ever done anything wrong in your life? Of course, it’s happened to everyone. But do I sit here and rat you out or be rude or anything else? I don’t need to be an Internet warrior, because I have better things in my life. I’m so over those people.”

Hendricks made significant changes. He hired Louis Giordano as his nutritionist. He left Team Takedown and only kept boxing coach Tony Cabello.

As he looked back on his problems losing weight at UFC 192, he was alarmed. He noted that he was risking permanent long-term damage.

But he didn’t have the knowledge he needed to fix the problem. So he hired Giordano, overhauled his group and set out to do things right. Still, he conceded that there was a point when he wondered if he had come to the end of the line as a fighter.

“I’ve put my body through a great deal of stress for a long time making weight and doing all of this,” he said. “And I did worry [about whether I was finished]. I did in the sense that I did not know what was going on and I knew what was happening wasn’t normal. I didn’t know why my body shut down, because the weight cut before was easy. Perfect. I made it by Thursday and I drank water on Friday, the day of the weigh-in.

“So when I had the problems, there was a part of me that wondered if my body was done cutting. I wondered whether I had to fight at [middleweight] or should I just retire. Those were the questions I had to answer.”

He basically cut red meat from his diet, a huge sacrifice for a guy who said he loves steak and potatoes. He’s eaten a diet of primarily chicken, salmon, sweet potatoes and vegetables.

He’s got a new outlook and eager to get back in and show what he can do. He compared Thompson to former interim champion Carlos Condit, whom he beat in 2013, and hopes to make another title run.

He insists he’s no longer the guy who will eat poorly and blow up in weight between fights. This is a permanent change, he said, that will ultimately make him healthier and a better athlete.

“This is a major lifestyle change,” he said. “If I want what I want and I’m serious about it, I’ve learned I needed to rededicate my life. Some of the finer things in life, I’ll get to enjoy when I retire.

“But as of now, I have learned to focus on the task at hand. I can’t fight forever, so I’ve really made sure to dedicate myself to the right things. I’m moving forward and who knows, maybe by doing things this way, the right way, I’ll get an extra year of fighting out of this.”