Max Holloway's weight cut

Max Holloway has made 145, 155 and 170 in the UFC, and the higher the number, the less the scale has cost him. The two most useful entries in his record are the cut a commission stopped in 2018 and the one his nutritionist called nothing to fear in 2026.

The scale record

In every fight listed he was on or under the limit, and the one time a cut went wrong he never reached the scale at all. The pattern to read is the margin. At 145 he weighed in on the number or half a pound under, four times across six years. At 155 he used the full allowance once, at UFC 300, and had a pound or half a pound in hand after it. At 170 he had a pound in hand and a nutritionist calling the cut nothing to fear.

A large 155er is a 170er

Minton's line in fight week was the most useful thing anyone said about this fighter's weight, so take it literally.

Between camps, a fighter should sit 12 to 15 percent above the division limit. That is the range from which a camp removes weight through food and a fight week removes water without either doing damage.

Now put his own numbers against it. In 2018 he said he was possibly over 180 when fight week arrived. That is 24 percent above 145, and already above the top of the lightweight band, in a year when he was still the featherweight champion. By 2026 Minton was describing a man who had spent two years adding size for 155 and had become, in his words, a very large 155er. A very large 155er sits at the top of the lightweight band or beyond it, which is the bottom of the welterweight band. So 170 still needed a cut, and it needed a small one.

My reading, from the outside: the cut shrank because the limit moved up towards where his body already lived, and harder training had little to do with it.

Why 145 ended

The featherweight rows in the table are the quiet ones. Four title weigh-ins, all at 144.5 or 145, no misses, no second attempts. The scale never recorded a problem, and he was the one who said there had been one. In 2018 he put it as having made weight more than twenty times, through the hard cuts and the easy ones. At 32, after the UFC 308 loss, he said he was done with 145 and that the version of him at 155 had not been the full version yet, because he had kept one eye on going back down for the title. He wanted, in his own words, to get in the lab and put some size on.

That is the honest version of moving up. A fighter who made a limit at 20 can usually still make it at 32. The question is what it costs on the way down, and whether the fight after the scale gets the athlete or the remainder. Choosing the division is a decision about the between-camps weight, not about the weigh-in, and his between-camps weight had left featherweight years before he did.

2018: the cut somebody else stopped

On the Sunday before UFC 223 the lightweight title fight lost its challenger to a knee injury, and Holloway, the featherweight champion, took it on six days' notice. By his own account on The MMA Hour afterwards, he was possibly over 180 when fight week arrived. His nutritionist at the time said the cut was tied for the biggest he had ever run.

Over 180 to 155 is more than 25 pounds in six days, about 14 percent of body mass. UFC fighters take 5 to 8 percent out in a fight week that follows a full camp, and two weeks buys one or two percent through food. Six days buys almost nothing through food. Nearly all of that 14 percent had to be water.

He said doctors checked him on the Thursday morning, before media day, and kept checking. On Friday morning the commission and the UFC made a joint decision, in the commission's words, that he was medically unfit to attend the scales. He never weighed in. His message afterwards was that he wanted to keep going and they were stopping him.

That last sentence is the whole lesson. The athlete is the one person who cannot be trusted with the decision to end a cut, because he is the one who has been told his whole life to keep going. The decision has to belong to someone else, and it has to be assigned before the week starts. In 2018 the person who made it was a commission doctor, which tells you that the plan did not contain one. The decision to stop it is yours, and it should never be a stranger's. His opponent that week had his own night like this a year earlier.

One clarification, because the two get merged. His withdrawal from UFC 226 three months later, with what his team called concussion-like symptoms, was not a weight cut. His team said the symptoms began before the cut started, and he said so himself afterwards: he had made weight more than twenty times, and this was something else.

When the cut stops being the camp

Minton described the camp for UFC 329 as one where the team could focus purely on performance, on how to recover from the morning session and do the next one better, and said that for a performance athlete this makes all the difference. The result on the scale was 170, one pound under the limit, with a cut that nobody in the camp had to plan the week around.

Compare the two kinds of fight week. When the cut runs the week, the scale is the opponent until Friday morning: the last sessions are shortened to protect the water cut, food is chosen for what it leaves in the gut rather than what it puts in the legs, sleep is broken by the hours spent losing water, and the corner's first question on Saturday is how the refill went. Khamzat Chimaev's week in May 2026 is the public version of that, down to the last twenty minutes of the window. When the cut is a formality, the same seven days go to the other man.

That is what a camp looks like when the between-camps weight sits inside the band. Food follows the training load instead of the scale, the water cut is a formality at the end, and fight week is spent on the fight. The site's meal plan by phase shows the same structure in the direction most fighters need it. The calculator shows what a given gap means at your own weight.

Common questions

What does Max Holloway weigh?

On the scale, between 144.5 and 170 in the fights listed above. Between camps, the only figure he has given publicly is from 2018, when he said he was possibly over 180 at the start of a fight week. No number for 2026 has been made public.

Did Max Holloway cut weight to fight Conor McGregor?

Yes. His nutritionist, Tyler Minton, said in fight week that there would still be a weight cut for 170, and that it was not one to fear. Holloway weighed 170 on the scale.

Why was Max Holloway pulled from UFC 223?

He took the lightweight title fight against Khabib Nurmagomedov on six days' notice in April 2018 and, by his own account, started fight week possibly over 180 pounds. On the morning of the weigh-in the commission and the UFC ruled him medically unfit to attend the scales, and he never weighed in.

Was the UFC 226 withdrawal a weight cut problem?

No, by his own account and his team's. He was withdrawn with concussion-like symptoms that his team said began before the cut started, and he later said it was not a weight cut issue.

What weight class is Max Holloway in now?

His last fight, in July 2026, was at welterweight, after two lightweight fights for the BMF title. His next fight had not been announced at the time of writing.