Former two-division world champion Lawrence Okolie has been warned that he will have to get in better shape to compete after moving to heavyweight last week.
The renowned ex-cruiserweight and bridgerweight champion was making the 200lb limit as recently as May of last year when he was defeated by Chris Billam Smith. But on Saturday night in his debut at heavyweight he was a whopping 260lb+.
And he has admitted that he when he’s fighting closer to the world level in future, he will have to drop a few more of the pounds.
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Lawrence Okolie gained 60lb in just over a year from last cruiserweight fight
While he is a giant at 6’5″, Okolie was massive relative to other ex-cruiserweights moving up in the past few years. Notable names like Oleksandr Usyk, David Haye and Evander Holyfield always stayed just over the limit at around 215-220lb.
But for his first outing at Frank Warren’s Magnificent Seven show in London last week, he was over 260lb. He managed to make quick work of 18-1 Hussein Muhamed in that fight, but even with a first round KO came in for criticism.
In between his 260lb and 200lb weigh-ins he did pick up the bridgerweight belt from Lukasz Rozanski back in April. He also managed a first round KO in that one, but decided to stick around up at heavyweight instead of defending.
Lawrence Okolie admits he must lose weight for big heavyweight fights
The 2016 Olympian is now looking to quickly move up the ranks and pursue a third world title. In order to do that, though, he admits he would need to be a whole lot more lean than he was against Hussein in Wembley.
“This was a short camp so I focused on getting in condition as opposed to leaning up,” he told soccer legend Martin Keown on TalkSPORT. “It was more so ‘can I do the 10 rounds of training or whatever?’ Going forwards, obviously I’m going to have to lean up a bit.
“If I’m fighting a Zhilei Zhang or a Kabayel or one of these top heavyweights there’s things I won’t be able to get away with. That’s like having extra body fat, so I’ll have to be moving a little bit more direct with my approach.
“So I’ll probably need to be maybe like 240lb, Joe Gallagher [his coach] is on me and he got it. For this camp he was just like ‘don’t worry about the weight just come in and make sure you’re smashing out all these rounds’ and we done like 30-40 rounds a week and with big guys.”