Former Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) women’s bantamweight champion Miesha Tate has no plans to retire from mixed martial arts (MMA), despite dropping two straight fights — including her flyweight debut against Lauren Murphy at UFC Long Island earlier this month on ABC.
But “Cupcake” does have some work to do if she wants to remain competitive.
“As soon as I get a good sports psychologist and start to unravel or figure out how to channel, I think I’ll have more idea,” Tate said on her Sirius XM radio show. “I don’t know how long it takes. It might be a really simple fix. The performance, my physical ability, the shape that I’m in, the way I train, the skill set that I have, is all there. I just have to put it in the right place at the right time.”
Tate retired from MMA after an uninspired loss to Raquel Pennington at UFC 205 back in late 2016, then made her triumphant return to the Octagon with a technical knockout victory over Marion Reneau roughly five years later. What followed was a lopsided loss to No. 2-ranked Ketlen Vieira, a performance that sent “Cupcake” down to flyweight.
For how long remains to be seen.
“I definitely need to take some time to figure it out,” Tate continued. “It was a really long camp, it got drawn out two times. I don’t know if I’m going to stay at 125 or just go back to 135 where I can enjoy [my life]. The diet, for that long, made me want to blow my brains out. It was terrible. I think I might stay at 135. I don’t know. We’ll see. I need a little time to regroup and see where I go from it.”
Tate turns 36 in just a few weeks.