time for another weight class?

[Nameless]

I go with Bilbo on that one, passed a certain point, weight doesn't mean nothing from a human perspective, even that it is getting better not to carry too much to be more mobile and faster. To fight fully, Valuev would have to drop at least 40 pounds, would have more stamina, speed and mobility. At this stage, being the monster of the monster is impressive, look good on promotion but doesn't help anymore on the ring.

I don't think Valuev can drop 40lbs. I highly doubt the guy is capable of doing a significant amount of road work. Even though they weight around the same, Valuev's weight is detrimental to his body type as opposed to Shaquille O'Neil who has been running up and down a basketball court for years. Even now Shaq's body is starting to break down and I wouldn't be surprised if he has arthritic hips when he gets into his forties.
Plus look at Nikolay. He looks like a different breed of human, his porportions are all off. He may well be eating and exercising to his optimal ability and that's just the end result. The guy's got a carpet across his back for crap's sake.

There is a couple of way to make somebody lose weight beside running, swimming is very very good and doesn't hurt your articulations, doing well planned seance of sauna helps a lot more than what we can imagine too. There is a couple of other ways like that. 40 pounds considering Valuev's size isn,t too much, the guy weights something like 320-340 pounds, something like that. On a 7 feet frame monster, it's not that much, look at his physical, he definitely has some huge overcarried stuff. With 30-40 pounds less, he would be a lot more effective and personally, I think that for his frame, it is something achievable, just perhaps not with running as you underlined correctly.