Prochazka didn’t study tape of his opponent leading up to UFC 311. Instead he watched martial arts classics like Ong Bak and Kickboxer.
If Jiri Prochazka seems like he’s a guy that’s stepped right out of a martial arts movie, it’s because that’s how he’s modeled his life and training.
Prochazka just beat Jamahal Hill with relative ease in their UFC 311 fight, using impeccable head movement to dodge Hill’s punches and counter with his own devastating strikes. It was a big improvement from the Jiri we had seen take a ridiculous amount of damage against Aleksandar Rakic two fights ago. But Prochazka is always training and evolving, and he explained how martial arts movies inspire his style and psychology.
“For one week, like five days before fight week, I was in a, how to say that? Heat, like, body fever?” Prochazka said on the latest episode of the Joe Rogan Experience. “Fever. Yeah. Fever. But maybe I’m a little bit glad for that because every time I’m trying to push my preparation too much, every time I hurt myself or or I’m over-trained. Right? So that’s why I’m maybe just a little bit glad for that.”
Rogan asked Prochazka whether he watched film on his opponent and Jiri seemed to misunderstand, instead saying he rewatched martial arts movies while battling his illness.
“I just watched the Spartans. 300. Yeah. Ong Bak, I watched Ong Bak,” he said. “That’s why I was really inspired. I was really hungry to to see something, because long time I didn’t see some good movie. These old classics of fighting, Jean Claude Van Damme with Kickboxer and all these things. That’s what made a spark inside me, a true love for martial arts. Because in the movies, they live that, really live that. And they have no other chance to solve their problems just by martial arts.”
“After watching Ong Bak, I’m still realizing what is the best style, what is the best movements, best deadly techniques, what to do. And after I watched Ong Bak, I see the right. Like, in my next chapter I want to see really how to use that, because I’m a man who’s taking the piece here, taking the piece there, and making it together.”
Prochazka’s recent trips to Thailand and Japan were both inspired by movies, as was one of his early forays into the wilderness where he isolated himself and battled the rocks, trees, and waterfalls.
“I was inspired by, Masutatsu Oyama, who was the founder of Kyokushin karate,” Prochazka said. “And I saw his movie and how he spent more than one and a half years in the mountains. He trained in the mountains under the waterfall in the winter and he made for himself a really, really unshakable mind, self confidence, so deep because he found a way to overcome, how to rule his body. He’s describing that in his book: the mind without the thinking, like without the thoughts, pure mind, pure focus. Pure consciousness, right here, right now.”
“I took that my own way. I think it was 2014, 2015, I took a tent and I went to the mountains and I slept there for like one week, two weeks … I ran there, and I punched the rock. And I just want to fight with the environment, like, with the nature around me. And in the end, you can realize there is no fighting. There is nothing. This is the pure life, because the pure life has one reason: to overcome everything around and survive, survive, survive.”
“This is the nature of what is in us,” Prochazka concluded. “The deeper you can go in this uncomfortable environment, the deeper you can understand life and be a philosopher about that. Like, understand more deeply.”
Prochazka called out Alex Pereira following his win over Hill, and Pereira accepted that challenge despite already being 2-0 over “The Czech Samurai.” First, Pereira has Magomed Ankalaev to deal with in March. That’s led Jiri to say he’ll happily fight again, as each match is just an opportunity to evolve more before attempting to win back the UFC light heavyweight title.