Brett Johns was stripped of the Titan FC bantamweight title last week when he missed weight for his title defense against Anthony Gutierrez and following his decision victory, he explained that he suffered an injury during his training camp.
Along with the injury during his training camp for this fight, Johns came down with an illness on fight week and this was a major factor on why he was unable to make weight.
The now former Titan FC champion explained on The MMA Report Live today all the details on why he could not make weight last week.
“As soon as I had the injury, we basically sat down and spoke to my coach Chris. I was not very confident about taking the fight because obviously Gutierrez was a tough opponent,” Johns told The MMA Report. “My first instinct was like, ‘we are going to have to pull out of the fight.’ It literally happened on a Tuesday and I did not train until about after two weeks after it. This is going back maybe about five or six weeks ago. I was not confident at the time going for the fight. My coach Chris had faith in me and said ‘look, you will be ok on the night of your fight.’ Basically, we went ahead with it and as far as the illness goes, it was a bit crazy. I have always struggled to cut weight and this fight, the weight cut went brilliant. I was cutting weigh in Alabama for Walel Watson and I was in the sauna from the 5 o’clock all the way till 11-12 o’clock mark. I was in the sauna for a long time. I obviously did not stay in there for the whole session. I was in the sauna a lot.”
“This time, I woke up on the Friday. I did the first part of the cut and I did the sauna from literally 6 o’clock in the morning till 8,” Johns continued. “I was more or less about two pounds off weight. I was like, ‘that is brilliant’ and I went back to my bedroom. My coaches said we would do the rest of it later on. We are two pounds off at 8 o’clock in the morning and the weigh-in was not till 4. My coach went downstairs and then I started to feel unwell. I started shaking and my stomach started to be really thin. My coach came back up and saw I was not in a good state. [Titan FC COO] Lex McMahon took me and my coach Chris and my other coach Sam to the physician. They noticed that my stomach was inflamed because of the illness. I really could not cut after that. I was in too much pain. That was the reason I did not make weight. To be honest, it was one of the easiest cuts I have had in my career.”
While the injury happened during his training camp, the injury did not become public knowledge until after the fight was over. Johns did admit that the injury cause him to scale back training for his fight agains Gutierrez.
“To be honest, all of people back home — we kept it quiet because it’s not something you want the other camp to know about. So we kept that quiet. It was hard and we had to train around the injury. I could not run as often as I wanted too. The running is for the weight cut and I really did not need to run this time. With Watson, I ran a lot to lose the weight. This time, it was an easy cut. We did not run much because of the knee. When we were sparring, I was getting really frustrated. When I’m in the gym, I do not do anything less that 5×5. That is the way I work because those are championship rounds. My coach kept telling me that we are doing three rounds. I was not happy doing three rounds knowing that since my fight was 5 rounds.”
After the decision was announced at Titan FC 34, the promotion announced that they are targeting Johns and Gutierrez to have a rematch for the now vacant title. Johns stated that he believes his injury will not require surgery and will sit down with his team to figure out when he will fight next.