That was for his 59-second blowout of Chris van Heerden at Manchester Arena in April 2022 but Benn has since campaigned well above the welterweight limit, even eating himself up to just shy of 160 pounds for his victorious second fight with Chris Eubank Jr in November.

But an hour after that win, in the press conference room at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, the 29-year-old made it very clear he was returning to welterweight to pursue a WBC title shot.

That meant a complete refocus in strategy. No longer would Benn’s nutrition and training be geared towards competing with a man who has spent his whole career between middleweight and super middleweight. Instead, only a few months shy of his 30th birthday, he would be stripping the best part of a stone off his body weight.

The first steps towards that was a short-notice fight with Regis Prograis at a 150-pound catchweight back at Spurs on April 11. He won wide, but it was not vintage Benn against the experienced southpaw.

The victory however, paved the way to his dream shot at the WBC welterweight title on September 12 against Ryan Garcia, in the Californian’s first defense. The question is, four years and four months on from that Van Heerden victory, can Benn rediscover his previous levels of power down at 147 pounds?

The man tasked with ensuring a positive answer is Dan Lawrence, Benn’s Head of Performance who has been part of the team for the best part of eight years. Initially in a specific strength and conditioning role, these days Lawrence overseas everything from training, recovery and nutrition. “My role is head of performance,” Lawrence tells The Ring. “So anything under that big P word, performance, is in my remit."

With 15 years experience in boxing, alongside the likes of George Groves, John Ryder and former undisputed junior welterweight champion Josh Taylor, Lawrence is considered one of the best in the business but Benn’s middleweight move and back down again represents a unique challenge.

Following a summer training camp in Portugal with some of his Premier League football clients, Lawrence arrived in Essex at the start of the month to “essentially get the band back together” for this camp.

“It officially started on July 6,” Lawrence says. “Conor did do a pre-camp in Majorca with our assistant coach Pedro and a few friends. He wasn’t completely dialled in but it was about getting some runs in and doing some base work. Then when I got here we certainly turn that screw a lot more.”

Running, it turns out, will be the key to Benn’s welterweight return. Lawrence still lives by a mantra coined by his old friend Ryder: “old school values, modern methods.”

This increase in road and track work meant that Benn has focused specifically on his lower limbs since his victory over Prograis.

“The reality is, he'll want to run more,” Lawrence says. “Even if we presented the research of doing shorter, sharper intense work on the assault bike I know he's going to want to run. It's ingrained.

“So I better get ahead of that and make sure his body can physically deal with the demands of running. Because of that, we have to do some direct work around that lower limb to best mitigate any potential injuries for the acute spike in running volumes that we're going to be getting when in training camp.”

“When simply running, you've got two to three times your body weight in terms of ground reaction forces. When you're sprinting, you've got four to six times your body weight, and sometimes even higher in elite sprinters. So we need to prepare Conor’s body for that and we’ve put everything in place.”

Lawrence and his team are under no illusions that Benn will face an arduous journey back down towards championship weight but the key was not getting too heavy before camp had even started.

“We do set an upper limit,” Lawrence says. “The upper limit generally speaking for a 147 fight will be 165 pounds.

“Coming in at 180 or 185 pounds just wouldn't work because it becomes fat camp for the first four weeks. That would therefore lead to more of an aggressive weight cut, it would reduce training quality and potentially increase the risk of illness as well.

“Also, a key part of coming in too heavy is it increases psychological stress around making weight. We want to reduce that as much as possible.”

For Benn that means never having to worry about what or when he’s eating. “All of that is taken care of, of course,” Lawrence says.

“I'll build the nutrition plan and work collaboratively with a chef, Dan Sargeant, DS Performance Chef. I build the plan, he makes the food. We're completely aligned in that regard so Conor doesn't have to worry about it.

“We had to put on lean muscle tissue to get up to middleweight to compete with Eubank, therefore we knew that we'd have to lose some lean tissue now.

“But we also knew we had the data to say we could make 147 safely and effectively. We knew we'd have to go into a bit of catabolism, a bit of wastage and had to eat into the tissue. So, we had to focus on a calorie deficit without there being a performance decrement or drop-off.

“The good news is that Conor is very on it and very disciplined when it comes to this. He likes to know every detail. What I can is that as we speak, we are in a very good place weight wise.”

Benn, Lawrence, head coach Tony Sims and the rest of the team will do the majority of camp in their usual Essex training base before heading to Los Angeles for the final few weeks. Then, it will be over to Vegas for fight week.

Lawrence is confident that he and the team will have done absolutely everything in their power to give Benn the best possible chance of returning from Sin City with the very same green and gold belt his father Nigel won.

“The structure and system that I run here is wild,” Lawrence says. “Every member of the team works synergistically with one sole goal in an athlete-centred model.

“Conor Benn, the athlete, doesn't focus on anything other than the fight. We focus on his travel, we have a chef, we cover every single detail, and everyone works in sync and synergy with each other.

“We have a hyperbaric chamber and ice bath to maximise recovery, he will see a soft tissue therapist two to three times a week too. As a team, we have covered everything so that Conor will be the best he has ever been.

“But really, the bottom line is this: Conor Benn's a f—----g savage.

“I'm not just saying that. I’ve worked with a lot of athletes, fighters or otherwise, and this man is something else. He's a savage who will leave no stone unturned in this preparation.”