Kyle Nelson | Starting Fresh

“I think it was starting to affect my performance a little bit,” he said of the gruelling cut to featherweight. “I was having to malnourish myself a little bit too much in the training camp, and I wasn’t getting as good of training. It was getting hard to refuel and get my body back up to 100-percent after the weight-cut.

“I train with a lot of lightweights and welterweights, and I do well with them. I don’t think I’m a small lightweight. I just think it was a really big featherweight.

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“It was off-and-on,” Nelson said when asked if he could feel the negative effects of his weight cuts in the Octagon on fight night. “The beginning of my UFC career was definitely rough — the Billy Quarantillo fight was one where after the first three or four minutes, the energy wasn’t there. I didn’t replenish the muscles enough, so I was able to get a bit of an explosion the first two, three minutes, but then it died out.

“I got it dialled in for a few fights, but getting older, adding muscle — I always had to cut some muscle to get down to 145, but now it’s just getting to be too much,” he added. “The last weight cut against Steve Garcia was just a little bit heavy. I almost made it, it was pretty close, but I think — my training has felt so much better, and I think I’ll perform better at lightweight now.”

The ability to perform at their best is all anyone wants, no matter the profession, and having made the switch to the 155-pound ranks, the 34-year-old gets an immediate opportunity to make a statement in his new surroundings as he steps in with fellow veteran Matt Frevola in the opening bout of Saturday’s main card at Rogers Arena.

One of five graduates from the inaugural season of Dana White’s Contender Series that have remained on the roster since earning their contracts, Frevola parlayed three consecutive first-round stoppage wins at UFC 270, UFC 281, and UFC 288 respectively into a place in the Top 15 heading into his hometown return at UFC 295 in New York.

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Things didn’t go as planned that night at Madison Square Garden or 10 months later when he returned to action in Paris, but “The Steamrolla” remains a fixture in the “Second 15” of the lightweight division and is the kind of dangerous opponent that is a nice feather to stick in your cap.

“I think it’s great,” Nelson said of the matchup with the Long Island native. “The UFC is showing that they consider me good enough to compete against a guy like Matt Frevola right away, and I think that just shows that they have high hopes for me at 155.”

The last time Nelson made the trek to Canada’s western-most province, he registered a unanimous decision win Blake Bilder, the first official Canuck to score a victory that evening after his teammate and adopted Canadian Diana Belbita kicked off the event with a win over Maria Oliveira.

As much as it was a successful night at the office and halted a 3-fight stretch without a victory, the familiarity of stepping into the Octagon and competing in front of a packed arena are the elements Nelson identifies with most heading into this weekend.

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“It's nice it’s in Canada — it’s in (British Columbia) so it’s the exact opposite side of Canada, but it’s still in Canada, so that’s nice,” the Ontario resident said with a smile. “I’ve been there before, it was a couple years ago, so I don’t imagine it’s going to be super-familiar.

“The Octagon is familiar. The crowd, whether it’s a hometown crowd or an away crowd, it’s always a bunch of people in the stands, so that’s familiar; it will be nice to have them cheering for me again. But I go out, and I perform. It’s exciting it’s in Canada, but the crowd is generally the same, the Octagon is always the same, and it’s usually the same UFC crew behind the scenes, so it always feels similar.”

But amidst all that familiarity stand the two stark differences — no beard, new division — and Nelson is hopeful that those changes lead to a change in fortunes as he starts a new chapter in his career this weekend on the West Coast.

“It will be great,” he said of returning to the win column and earning a victory in his official divisional debut on Saturday night. “I’ve been off for a year, I shaved the beard, so I think I’ll be solidifying myself in the 155-pound division: Kyle ‘The Monster’ Nelson with the moustache now.

“I think it’s gonna be a new chapter and it’s gonna be really big for myself and my family.”