Has The Alistair Overeem Workout Plan Influenced Our Expectations For Jon Jones?

Before the sweat had a chance to dry on Jon Jones' brow following his dominant performance against Rashad Evans, Dana White had already announced that the next challenger to his 205 pound throne would be Dan Henderson. By early next week, rumors were starting to spread that the fight would take place later this summer, at UFC 149 in Calgary. The UFC has shot those rumors down, instead stating that they would likely hold the fight in the early fall.

By this time, everyone is well aware that there are precious few challengers remaining for Jones at the light heavyweight weight limit. In fact, after Henderson, there is really no one else who fits the bill. Some will argue that Alexander Gustafsson will be ready by that time but he has yet to be booked into a fight following his victory over Thiago Silva at UFC on FUEL TV 2 earlier this month and he has exactly zero victories over top ten opponents in his current five fight win streak, leading me to believe that such talk is a little premature.

With this decided lack of challengers, most of the talk about Jones' future involves a move up to the heavyweight division, and soon. The move seems a foregone conclusion to such an extent that Dana White is already cautioning Jones against doing it too soon.

I have to admit that I'm a little surprised to hear such strong declarations about Jones' future. After all, there has been a grand total of zero UFC champions who have vacated the title in one division to pursue a second title in the weight class above.

Middleweight champion Anderson Silva has twice dipped his toes into the water at light heavyweight, both times destroying his opponents.

Yet Silva has refused to make the jump a permanent one despite going through a considerable stretch of less than stellar challengers, something very similar to what Jones could be facing should he defeat Henderson.

Welterweight champion Georges St. Pierre has been long rumored to be on the verge of moving up to the middleweight division to challenge Silva in a highly anticipated superfight but he too has stayed at his natural home.

It's not only the champions who avoid this practice. Very few UFC fighters have ever moved up a weight class during a successful stretch in their career. Randy Couture, Dan Henderson and B.J. Penn are essentially the only fighters to have had success at two weight divisions in the UFC's history, although their situations are quite different than Jones':

• Penn jumped between the 155 and 170 pound divisions and rarely cut weight for the fights at 170.
• Henderson fought at 185 and 205 numerous times during his Pride and early UFC careers, and his story is similar to Penn's: Cut weight to get to 185, basically fought at 205 as a 205 pounder.
• Couture fought at 205 and as a heavyweight, yet he rarely weighed in at more than 220 for his heavyweight tilts.

Trying to find a fighter that added a bunch of weight and moved up a division permanently during the prime of their career is pretty difficult, if not impossible.

So why are people so confident that Jones will just move on up in the next year or so? I believe that Alistair Overeem has a lot to do with it.

Overeem, of course, spent the majority of his career at light heavyweight before putting on a bunch of muscle in his late 20's, becoming a heavyweight and re-igniting his career.

Jones' size compares very favorably to that of Overeem, when the Dutchman was fighting at 205 pounds:

Jones is 6'4 with an 84.5 inch reach and cuts from about 225 pounds. Overeem is 6'5 with an 81 inch reach, and he also cut from about 225-230 pounds. It would be pretty reasonable to say that, all things being equal, Jones will follow a path similar to Overeem and end up in the heavyweight division.

Except not all things are equal.

Overeem has long been suspected of using performance enhancing substances to help him put on muscle. Since he signed with the UFC, he has been involved in two very suspicious situations relating to performance enhancers.

He failed to provide the Nevada State Athletic Commission (NSAC) with a urine sample in a timely fashion for a random drug screening in December of last year, prior to his UFC debut against Brock Lesnar. Overeem was granted a conditional license to fight Lesnar, one of the conditions being that he undergo two more random drug screenings within the next six months. One of those drug screenings took place following a press conference to promote UFC 146 in late March. Overeem failed the screening. His testosterone to epitestosterone ratio was reported as being 14:1, more than twice what the NSAC allows (6:1).

Overeem explained to the NSAC that the reason for his elevated ratio was an anti-inflammatory shot he was given to heal a rib injury. While the commission ultimately believed that Overeem did not intend to cheat, they still ruled that he could not apply for a license to fight in Nevada for a period of nine months.

Of course, none of this proves that Overeem used performance enhancers to gain all that weight. It simply makes it a lot more likely that he did.

And if he did, then should we really be sitting here, expecting Jon Jones to undergo a similar growth spurt?

I say no, we shouldn't.

Even more troubling is if Jones eventually does move up to heavyweight, will he be forced to answer the same questions that have been asked of Overeem?

It seems to me that it would be incredibly unfair if that was the case.