This article, first published in November 2025, has been updated ahead of Conor Benn’s fight with Ryan Garcia.Chris Eubank Jr was desperate for a pee.It was the day after his epic victory on points over Conor Benn in April, and he was in hospital recovering. Eubank Jr had been suffering from an unbearable headache, his face swollen almost beyond recognition and a small plastic tube emerging from his left hand and connected to a bag of fluids.Dragging himself from his bed and into the bathroom, Eubank Jr stood over the toilet and waited. But nothing happened. His bladder was full to bursting but his body could not — would not — let go.“That’s how dehydrated I was,” he told Steven Bartlett on The Diary of a CEO podcast a few weeks after the fight with Benn. “My body would not let any fluids go — it was holding onto everything… (it was) complete dehydration.”The damage done to Eubank Jr was partly a result of the brutality of the fight with Benn — who had come up two weight classes to make the fight — but also what had gone on in the build-up.Chris Eubank and Conor Benn’s first fight was brutal (Richard Pelham/Getty Images)In a bid to make the weight for the non-title middleweight bout, Eubank Jr had subjected himself to an extreme form of ‘cutting’ — the term given to the controversial and occasionally dangerous process by which boxers lose weight to make themselves eligible to fight at a certain weight division.It had involved essentially draining his body of fluid to meet the 160lbs weight limit and had sparked grave concerns over his well-being, most prominently from his father, former world champion Chris Eubank Sr, who told his YouTube channel that his son had been “killing himself” to make the weight. Eubank Sr did not want him to enter a rematch in November, but his son defied that advice, only to lose to Benn by unanimous decision.Now, it is Benn who is having to go through the agonising struggle to make the weight for his world welterweight title bout with U.S. star Ryan Garcia in Las Vegas. Benn must weigh no more than 147lbs, a limit he has not made in more than four years. “It feels like I’ve been dragged down to the pits of hell,” he told the BBC.It has sparked concern among some observers about the possible effect on Benn’s health, and underlined the toll cutting can take on fighters as they prepare for the biggest nights of their lives.Boxing rules state that fighters must make the relevant weight for their bout by the time they weigh in the day before their bout, a timetable that was introduced in the early 1980s.In most cases, competitors can then put on as much weight as they wish before the start of their fight, by both rehydrating with fluids and eating. In the case of the Eubank Jr-Benn rematch, a clause in Eubank Jr’s contract stated that he could only put on an additional 10lbs between his weigh-in at 11am the day before the bout and the re-weigh-in on the morning of the fight.That clause underlined the oddity of any Benn-Eubank Jr fight even happening in the first place.Yes, there was family history — their fathers having fought twice in the 1990s — but when Benn made his professional debut in 2016, the sons never looked likely to continue the feud. Eubank Jr was seven years older than Benn, five years further into his professional career and, more pertinently, boxing at middleweight, three weight classes higher than super-lightweight Benn.But as Benn built his profile and record as a professional, the two men were gradually manoeuvred into each other’s orbits. The potential for a seismic moment in British boxing history was too big, the financial rewards too great (Eubank Jr earned £8m from November’s rematch, and Benn £6m), for them to be kept apart.The grudge between Chris Eubank Jr (left) and Conor Benn has helped fuel interest in their rematch (James Fearn/Getty Images)To make the fight work, though, a compromise was needed in terms of weight.In 2022, that was initially decided as being a catchweight of 157lbs, three pounds beneath the middleweight limit of 160lbs that Eubank Jr had made for his most recent fight against Liam Williams, and 10lbs heavier than the 147lb welterweight limit Benn had grown into.But that fight, initially scheduled for October 2022, was cancelled when it emerged days before that Benn had failed two voluntary drugs tests for the female fertility drug clomifene.It took three years for the pair to be brought together again, with both agreeing to fight at the middleweight limit of 160lbs. On the surface, that suited Eubank Jr far better than his smaller opponent. To mitigate that, an offer was made to Eubank Jr; if he agreed to the 10lb rehydration clause, meaning neither man would be allowed to weigh more than 170lbs on the morning of the fight, there was even more money on the table.Eubank took the money, despite knowing that he would usually put on 14 or 15 pounds after a weigh-in, reasoning that while restricting what he ate and drank would affect his performance, he was still confident his boxing ability would see him prevail.That explains some of how Eubank Jr ended up spending two days in hospital hooked up to a drip after his first fight against Benn. There is a lot more besides, including Eubank Jr’s social media posts after the weigh-in (where he missed the weight by 0.05lb, earning him a £375,000 fine) showing him appearing to wear what is known as a ‘sauna suit’ to increase sweat loss, and implying that he intends to use a sauna.