Johnny Walker put a lot into his scheduled return at UFC 311 following some big changes that have taken place in his life and career. Unfortunately, the light heavyweight contender was unable to reap the rewards of his hard work after a rib injury forced him to withdraw from his prelim bout against Bogdan Guskov.
The Brazilian is currently coming off of consecutive losses following an up and down trajectory in recent years. During that time frame, he was training out of SBG Dublin under John Kavanagh and Walker is very grateful of this experience. However, there were some key areas that he didn’t feel like he was fulfilling in his preparations whilst being based out of Ireland in recent times.
After spending some time at different gyms, his led him to moving his entire life to Las Vegas where in the combat sports capital of the world, he has everything he could possibly need at his finger tips. Walker gave two specific examples during a recent interview with MMA Junkie regarding holes in his training camp that had recently appeared.
The 32-year old believes that his last defeat inside the Octagon came about because of one specific reason with another key factor being his lack of training partners. Walker did have a small stable of guys to work with at one point whilst he was training in Dublin but that hasn’t been the case as time has gone on and finding bodies to work with at Xtreme Couture is not exactly difficult.
“We had the best coach there. John was a very high-level coach,” Walker said. “He did the best for me. He improved my game a lot, but I just had one or two training partners. The last fight against (Volkan) Oezdemir, I was adapting myself to get ready as best as I could for the fight. I was doing boxing sparring in the ring. … In the fight, you can see I brought him close to the fence, which was wrong because I was sparring in the ring. You can’t spar in the ring and fight in the octagon. It’s totally different. In the octagon, if you step close to the fence, the guy is going to take you down, or the guy is going to knock you out because when you’re close to the fence, it’s the worst place to be. The guy (Oezdemir) knocked me out because I brought him to the fence.
“This is the worst thing you can do in MMA. The environment wasn’t perfect for MMA. At SBG, I had just one training partner. Here in Vegas, I have the UFC PI for strength and conditioning, for nutrition, for recovery. At Xtreme Couture, I have high-level guys between top 10 and top 15. Light heavyweight and heavyweight, and Sean Strickland. Every day I have a high-level guy to train with. You need challenges, and now at Xtreme, I have that challenge. …I have everything now for recovery, for nutrition, for training, coaching. Now the light heavyweights are in trouble. Now you’re going to have the best version of Johnny Walker because I’m just going to be better. Now my career is going to fly.”