Matt Brown was never much for huge, elaborate celebrations after any of his wins, but he understands fighters like Paddy Pimblett raising a little hell after he scored the biggest victory of his career when he finished Michael Chandler at UFC 314.
But Brown draws the line at completely abusing your body, and potentially sacrificing future gains, which is the biggest criticism he could aim at Pimblett after the Liverpool native revealed that he gained over 40 pounds in the days following his fight against Chandler. While Pimblett has often talked about packing on the pounds after all of his fights but then always getting everything back in order when it’s time to perform, Brown cautions him that strategy is almost certainly going to backfire on him eventually.
“If I were his coach, I would have some concern,” Brown said on the latest episode of The Fighter vs. The Writer. “What I tell all of my fighters is we have a short window here. You might be doing this for 15 to 20 years at most. There’s a lot that you can get out of it. Why not squeeze all the f*cking juice out that you can? It’s not a ton of suffering to not put on f*cking 40 pounds after a fight. You can enjoy yourself. Enjoy yourself with some moderation and then be back in the gym next week. Nothing wrong with that.
“You’ve got to have a good, relaxed mind when you’re training and going through this journey, but particularly when we’re young, we feel invincible. We forget how short all this is. When you’re 20, you don’t ever feel like you’re going to be 40 in your life. When you’re 30, you never feel like you’re going to be 50. Like that day’s just never going to come. I can just do whatever I do right now, just live in the moment.”
While Pimblett’s ability to gain and then lose the weight for his fights hasn’t affected any of his performances in the UFC yet, Brown knows that the 30-year-old lightweight is just now jumping into the deep end of arguably the toughest division in the sport.
Beating Chandler was a huge addition to his resume, but there are plenty of top lightweight contenders ahead of Pimblett in the rankings that he still has to go through before getting to a potential title shot.
“We push so hard to get something, and then we get it ,and we just relax,” Brown said. “It’s not a good way to look at it. He’s in an absolute savage division, too. He better keep his eyes on the prize because he’s in for some bloodthirsty motherf*ckers now.
“You’re not in LFA, Cage Warriors, wherever he came from. You’re in with the top motherf*ckers in the world now, especially when you’re talking the 155 division. They’re absolute savages in that division.”
Matt Brown criticizes Paddy Pimblett’s extreme weight gain: ‘It’s not a ton of suffering to not put on f*cking 40 pounds after a fight’
Matt Brown can’t help but question if Paddy Pimblett is doing more harm than good by celebrating the biggest win of his career at UFC 314 and then immediately packing on over 40 pounds in just a matter of days.
