Back in spring 2019, a few weeks after picking up a second-round submission win over fellow UFC lightweight Mike Davis, Gilbert Burns took his family on a vacation to the Florida Keys.
The victory was his fourth in five fights, all at 155 pounds, and represented the finest stretch of his career since the top MMA promotion signed him in 2014. But his wife, Bruna, was troubled by what her husband experienced before making it to the octagon for the April 27 bout.
“She said, ‘I cannot see you making weight anymore. That’s not healthy for you,’” Burns told The Post over the phone Tuesday.
Burns heeded the advice of his wife, which was echoed by his nutritionist. Enthusiasm from his coaches and manager over the change paved the way for a move up to 170 pounds and now Saturday’s UFC 258 pay-per-view headliner against welterweight champion Kamaru Usman at UFC Apex in Las Vegas.
These days, Burns (19-3, 14 finishes) looks back on the way he pushed his body to the limit by cutting weight to get down to 155 pounds as “a dumb mistake.” Living life as a man walking around at 188 to 190 pounds and a listed 5-foot-10 who needed to trim about 18 percent of his mass to make the contracted weight limited his potential.
“I couldn’t take short-notice [fights] because I needed that time to diet and make the weight,” Burns said. “And that was damaging a lot of my performance because I had to run every single day.”
More time running to trim his weight meant less time honing his skills and longer recovery time between training sessions. But the desire to make weight superseded what the athlete’s greatest asset — his body — was telling him.
“I couldn’t listen to my body because of the weight cut,” Burns said, “so I had to run every single day in order to make weight.”
Everything came to a head in Sunrise, Fla., against Davis, a short-notice replacement for injured Eric Wisely cobbled together less than two weeks ahead of fight night. Burns, who now fights out of Boca Raton, Fla., described “a horrible weight cut” in which he cramped up the night before Friday’s weigh-in during the process of dehydrating his body of as much water weight as possible in order for the scale to read “156” (non-title bouts permit an extra pound over the limit) or lower.
“It was so hard to make that weight. I almost missed the weight,” Burns said. “I was the last guy on the scale, making it at the very last minute: 156. That was so many hot baths to get the weight downward then. So my nutritionist, he saw half of the weight cut, and then after Friday he said, ‘You cannot do that anymore.’ ”
Realizing the wisdom from those in his support system, combined with the fact that he was already comfortable training at Sanford MMA with welterweights — including Usman (17-1, eight finishes), who was a teammate of Burns for several years before the champ left to train for this fight with Trevor Wittman in Colorado — was the impetus to stop ravaging his body.
Weight cutting as extreme as that which Burns experienced is common in MMA, especially the lower down in weight at which fighters compete. Some have it down to a science. Others are like Burns and struggle but, at the end of the day, hit the mark and make it to the cage the next day — and sometimes they have enough left in the tank to get the win, as he did two years ago.
And then there are incidents like what occurred at Friday morning’s UFC 258 weigh-in, when lightweight Bobby Green met that same 156-pound threshold not long before a scary moment that UFC president Dana White described to media members in the aftermath.
“Bobby Green just collapsed back there,” White said. “Doctors are looking at him. They’re trying to rehydrate him right now.”
Green’s bout against Jim Miller was scrapped as a result, nixing an anticipated main-card tilt between longtime veterans who’ve consistently beat the scale several dozen times each. Late Friday, his Instagram account relayed two messages: the first describing his weight cut as one of “three hills I have to get over in fighting,” and the other clarifying “I have air pockets in my lungs I guess and my kidneys failed,” and indicating he had assumed pain from a back injury suffered in training for this fight was all that was amiss.
It was Green this time, but others have been hospitalized before making it to weigh-ins, including among a host of others current (though ostensibly retired) lightweight champion Khabib Nurmagomedov one year before his title reign began in 2018.
Burns appears to have had no such issue with hitting 170 pounds on the nose Friday, matching the 33-year-old Usman and making official their championship bout. In speaking with The Post earlier this week, he coolly professed how good his body felt, even after a particularly nasty struggle with COVID-19, a diagnosis last July which caused the first of two delays in booking the two former teammates against one another — the other coming ahead of the planned December re-booking due to Usman reportedly needing more time to recover from injuries.
“I [felt] like s–t for like two to three weeks,” said Burns, whose apparent good mood dipped while thinking back on his first-hand experience with the coronavirus. “In the third week, I went and tested negative, but [didn’t] even try to come back to training. I wasn’t ready.”
Ascending stairs at his home left Burns exhausted, a common thread for many who’ve been afflicted with the disease that has gripped the planet for more than a year — regardless of whether they are a 34-year-old top athlete in their fighting prime. In August, nearly a full month after diagnosis, he was back in the gym to train. But his body wasn’t ready period, let alone prepared for the biggest opportunity of his career.
“It took me three weeks just to [get into] normal shape — not even fight shape — just to a normal shape,” Burns said. “That affected me a lot.”
Time passed, and Burns says his body eventually bounced back. He touts a heart rate that is “crazy, crazy low, like never before” and renewed strength, something he’ll need against a powerful former NCAA Division II wrestling champion with whom he’s spent incalculable hours on the mat over the years.
How well post-COVID Burns will fare remains to be seen, but his 4-0 run at welterweight since ditching the daunting weight cut leaves no doubt about his qualifications for this coveted opportunity. The former world-champion submission grappler outpointed Alexey Kunchenko and Gunnar Nelson in the second half of 2019 before becoming only the second man to finish former two-division title challenger Demain Maia with strikes in March in his native Brazil. That set up his first UFC headliner in May, which went down as a bell-to-bell thrashing of former welterweight champion Tyron Woodley to punch his ticket for a title shot.
Burns is the latest in a trend of success stories in which talented fighters achieve greater success after moving up in weight. Among the most notable cases is Dustin Poirier, a clearly gifted featherweight up-and-comer who couldn’t put together a sustained run while undergoing increasingly challenging weight cuts. Since moving up 10 pounds to 155 in 2015 after a TKO loss to future superstar Conor McGregor, Poirier has only tasted defeat twice in 14 tries while claiming interim UFC gold and, last month, exacting revenge on McGregor with a second-round TKO victory.
White applauds fighters like Poirier and, now, Burns “100 percent” for moving away from the practice.
“To keep cutting that weight throughout your entire career is just not good for you, man,” White told The Post on Wednesday. “It’s bad on a lot of different levels. Look at how successful … [Burns] has been. It was obviously the right move.”