Edwards hired a specialist to prepare him for a 5 a.m. fight at UFC 304, and now Aspinall is cribbing his notes.
Thanks to Leon Edwards, Tom Aspinall has a plan in place to deal with the time zone craziness imposed on UFC 304 that has him fighting at 5 a.m. local time.
Aspinall and Edwards are set to headline the big Manchester pay-per-view, which is set to kick off at 10 p.m. ET, which is 3 a.m. in England. That means the fights will go til around five or six in the morning, which is a crazy thing to expect from mixed martial arts competitors.
Aspinall, who holds the interim heavyweight title, tried to get the UFC to move the start time but was shot down. Now he’s trying to mitigate the effect such an early start will have on his performance, and he’s getting some help from welterweight champ Edwards.
“I have a mad theory on what I was going to do, and it’s completely different to [his],” Aspinall said in a new YouTube video. “Now I’m just going to copy Leon’s version.”
“At the start I was similar [to Tom],” Edwards said. “I was like ‘Oh, I’m going to have to sleep in the day and be awake at night.’ But when I spoke to [a specialist], he said you can’t do that cuz your body needs sunlight, you need daylight. So he basically said somehow you have to adjust it so you don’t have to train at 5:00 in the morning, you have to get your body used to about 1, 2 in the morning, and after that you should be fine.”
“Because when I’m fighting at 11, I’m not training at 11. I’m done by 6 in my house. So he says moving the clock a little bit hour by hour, six weeks out, bit by bit, get to about 2 o’clock, and that’s where you want it. You’ll still get sunlight, you’ll still be able to train. So it’ll be good.”
“My first thought was I’m going to go to Vegas,” Aspinall said. “And we’ll do the last four weeks of the camp there and I’m going to come back. And then I thought, ‘You know what? Being 6’5, sitting on a plane for 12 hours, that alone f—s you up.’ So I don’t think I’m going to do that.”
“I think I’m going to copy your model,” Tom concluded before adding “Did you pay for that?”
“I did pay for that,” Leon replied with a laugh. “You can’t have it.”