Whenever the UFC has a fight coming up that they want to promote, they’ll hold a media breakfast on Friday or Saturday morning. I always make it a point to attend, because let’s be honest, who doesn’t love free food? But it’s not just the food. Th…
Whenever the UFC has a fight coming up that they want to promote, they’ll hold a media breakfast on Friday or Saturday morning. I always make it a point to attend, because let’s be honest, who doesn’t love free food?
But it’s not just the food. The main point of these breakfast meetings is to spend time with a few fighters who are in attendance to promote upcoming fights. This morning, our attention was turned towards Josh Barnett and Daniel Cormier, who meet in the finals of the Strikeforce heavyweight grand prix next month in San Jose.
We all know Barnett is a great orator. Years spent in Japan doing professional wrestling has honed his speaking skills, and he’s one of the best in the business. What we didn’t know is that Cormier is very nearly on his level.
The heavyweights sat in front of us for an hour and discussed all manner of topics: catch wrestling, Fedor Emelianenko and his lack of name-value oppponents, the state of American wrestling and how Cormier thinks the U.S. Trials will go this weekend, how the Strikeforce heavyweight grand prix ultimately played out and much more.
It was a completely enthralling discussion with two of the most intelligent fighters in the game. And after it concluded, I found myself thrilled at the prospect of seeing them get in the cage and face off. It’s an incredible strategic matchup that just isn’t getting the attention it deserves, at least not yet. Perhaps it’ll start getting some love once we have this nasty business between Jon Jones and Rashad Evans in our rear view mirror.
I can only imagine that fan interest would go through the roof if the UFC put Jon Anik between Cormier and Barnett and allowed the public to see what I saw this morning. Look for video highlights here on Bleacher Report in the near future – you’ll see exactly what I mean.
Caged In authors Jonathan Snowden and Jeremy Botter are on the ground for UFC 145 in Atlanta alongside Kenda Perez, the host of Bleacher Report’s The Ultimate Show.The team is bringing you plenty of exclusive interviews and stories from …
Caged In authors Jonathan Snowden and Jeremy Botter are on the ground for UFC 145 in Atlanta alongside Kenda Perez, the host of Bleacher Report’s The Ultimate Show.
The team is bringing you plenty of exclusive interviews and stories from fight week, but Jeremy and Jonathan are also giving you a small peak behind the curtain with daily diary updates. The goal is to give you, the reader at home, quick glances at all of the fighter interactions and media events that normally aren’t covered by media outlets during fight week.
It’s Friday, which means it’s time for official fighter weigh-ins, but the team will bring you so much more from one of the busiest days of the week.
You may bookmark this post for all of Thursday’s updates, and remember to follow Jeremy and Jonathan on Twitter for more.
Former UFC champion Rashad Evans is alone in a room with coach Al Fuentes. Evans knows that in order to beat Jon Jones—the reigning light heavyweight kingpin considered the odds-on favorite to not just win this fight, but to cement his place in h…
Former UFC champion Rashad Evans is alone in a room with coach Al Fuentes. Evans knows that in order to beat Jon Jones—the reigning light heavyweight kingpin considered the odds-on favorite to not just win this fight, but to cement his place in history—he will need to be sharp.
Boxing, kickboxing, wrestling, grappling—these are a fighter’s tools. No one can win without them, and Evans trains them every day with experts in each field.
“Everyone in my camp has a great vibe,” Evans told Bleacher Report at the UFC 145 open workouts. “Mario Sperry is one of the best coaches I’ve ever gotten a chance to train with. He’s so cool and relaxed, you know? Henri Hooft is one of the best coaches I’ve had as well. He’s super chill and relaxed. They’ve got different vibes and relate to me in different ways.
“We all have our own unique relationships. It makes it easier to train. Because if they think I’m doing something (wrong) they’ll be up front with me. They won’t treat me like some kind of superstar…They really care.”
But Rashad and a growing number of MMA stars have learned there is another powerful tool that’s just as important as anything martial—as important as the wrestling he learns from Mike Van Arsdale, the jiu-jitsu he trains with Sperry, and the kickboxing lumps he takes from Hooft and Tyrone Spong.
Al Fuentes, despite his background as a collegiate wrestler and coach at Arizona State, isn’t teaching Rashad how to jab or shoot the double leg. Fuentes isn’t sharing revolutionary techniques to maximize the deadlift or how to push the body with interval work. He’s training an organ even more powerful than the fist or the shin—Al Fuentes is helping Rashad Evans mold his mind into a dangerous weapon.
“It’s so important,” Fuentes told Bleacher Report in an exclusive interview. “You have this camp, all fighters do, and it’s usually eight to 12 weeks long. And you can do everything physical you need to do there. But when it comes to fight time? If your mind isn’t in the right place it doesn’t matter how physically ready you are…
“A lot of fighters use negativity to try and motivate themselves. They tell themselves ‘I’m not doing enough’ or use adrenaline to try to get themselves worked up. The traditional way for a fighter to motivate themselves is to get emotionally angry and super psyched up, or they have to talk down to themselves to get themselves going.
“That’s all stuff I try to get my fighters past, to help them reach mental maturity. To help them understand the science behind the mental game and to perform. That process starts with the understanding that the more chemicals you fire into the body, the worse it will be for you.”
Evans, the former light heavyweight champion, is all in. He’s made Fuentes a regular part of his fight-week entourage and works with him several times during fight week.
“It helps out a lot,” Evans said. “I like to bring him to every fight. It’s so easy to get pulled away from yourself. Being able to mentally recenter myself, breathe, and get everything under control, it keeps me ready to go.”
Who Are You So Wise in the Ways of Science?
Talking with Fuentes, even for a half hour, can leave you feeling ready to take on the world. He’s an interesting dichotomy, a mixture of new age mystic and grounded athlete. His revolutionary approach to the mental game honestly changes fighter’s lives, not just their games.
“This is way more important and way more productive than anything they’ve ever done,” Fuentes said. “It gets way better results and it’s been proven by all the people I work with.”
What Fuentes does is a little different than traditional performance coaching, probably because his background is a little different than the typical mental coaches. An All-American wrestler at the University of Findlay, Fuentes didn’t start considering how to improve athletic performance to help a client. He focused his life on performance issues to help himself and figure out why his own athletic career wasn’t as successful as he’d hoped.
“I started developing my breathing techniques back then,” Fuentes said. “I needed answers about my own shortcomings. I needed answers about my own self sabotage and I didn’t get them. When I would go see other counselors or other psychologists, they just wanted to talk. But didn’t want to give me any solutions. It was really frustrating.”
Like most athletes, Fuentes was a physical person. There was a time for talk and introspection, but on the field of play, it was detrimental to be stuck in your own head. Athletes, he knew, were used to hard work, drilling and repetition. Why, he wondered, couldn’t that ethic apply to the mental side of the game as well?
“I logically and intellectually knew what I didn’t want to feel, I didn’t need (a sports psychologist) to tell me that. I just wanted to fix it…If you can give (athletes) an exercise that helps them work their mind, that sounds great to them,” Fuentes said. “I knew myself, as an athlete, if you could show me something to do, I would have no problem doing it. If you’d told me I could do a thousand pushups and my problems would go away, I would have done 2000. That’s where I got the concept of using the physical body to control the mental body.”
Breathe in, Breathe Out
In athletics, it’s considered a given that at least half of the game is mental. Yet, almost the entirety of an athlete’s training effort is spent in the physical realm. To achieve peak performance, Fuentes believes athletes need to devote more time to controlling their own minds and bodies. And it all starts with breathing.
“Everyone breathes, and it’s an autonomic process,” Fuentes said. “The body just does it. The problem with that is, because it is automatic, we don’t think about it. We don’t think about how breathing is effecting our bodies. And we certainly don’t try to control it. The one time we do try to control it, it’s already too late.
“When you start thinking ‘Man, I should take a deep breath,’ you’re already way too late and the chemicals in your body have taken over and you’re not coming back to a very relaxed place unless you’ve been training your breathing.”
Fuentes’ breathing system allows the body to send the right signals to your brain. The brain and the body are intimately connected. When the brain checks the body to see how things are going, Fuentes believes it senses the distress that comes with labored or inconsistent breathing. And the end result are exhausted fighters who are a step slow.
Evans had felt the connection between the mind and the body in his own Octagon experiences. When he spoke with Fuentes, it was like a switch clicking on. Energy is not limitless and when you waste it on unproductive thoughts and anxiety; the result is a less effective athlete.
“It’s easy to get too excited. It’s easy to think about the fight. For it to be the only thing on your mind,” Evans said. “I’ve had many fights where I thought about it too much. It was in my mind so much that when I got into the fight I was already exhausted. By the first punch I was already (gasping for breath). I couldn’t breathe. It’s good to just wait for the time to open up and fight.”
The Visual
The second part of the Fuentes system involves cutting-edge visualization techniques. These aren’t the garden variety “picture yourself holding the trophy” techniques many sports psychologists utilize. Proper breathing allows the athlete to be in control of his body and mind. The visualization process allows the athlete to use the brain to their advantage.
“I work with a lot of professional athletes in a lot of sports and there’s not one that didn’t already do some form of visualization,” Fuentes said. “When I talk to them and try to explain that it is a different kind of visualization, it’s hard to grasp. They think of their fight, punching or kicking, but it’s much more than that. We’re going to a very heightened state of awareness.”
The visualization is so specific and intense that a fighter can essentially learn to ignore pain and discomfort with the power of his mind. UFC light heavyweight Kyle Kingsbury had separated ribs going into his UFC 104 fight with Razak Al-Hassan. With Al’s help he focused his energy on the ribs, with some amazing results.
“Anytime there was any attention brought to that rib it brought me to a very relaxed place,” Kingsbury said. “During the fight there was twice in the second round when I was kicked directly in the injured rib. There was no panic. I was very calm and relaxed and knew what I needed to do to win.”
If it seems a bit like meditation, that’s because it is. Fuentes prefers the term visualization because it eliminates the spiritual and religious connotations from an ancient art. But the two are one and the same. Fuentes, however, draws the line at the suggestion that his work with Kingsbury may have been hypnosis of some kind.
“If it was hypnosis, that means I would be in control,” Fuentes said. “I teach all of my athletes how to be self-empowered. So they have to be conscious during this process of visualization. Otherwise the system doesn’t work.
“What we’re really doing is helping them connect on a whole new level. And when they’re at that level, their ability to change their chemical body structure and their mental structure is amazing.”
The Session
It starts like any other session with a headshrinker. Al Fuentes and Rashad Evans just sitting and chatting about how things are going. But Al isn’t looking to help fighters solve personal problems—he’s looking to help them get to a mental place where they can succeed. And that involves the body every bit as much as the mind.
A heightened sense of awareness, an intense focus on his own body creates a comfortable feeling. When the mind and body start partnering together, that’s where we find the system at its best.
“A lot of athletes have a hard time getting into the zone. Sometimes they just magically fall into it, but they don’t know why,” Fuentes said. “We actually help create that experience.”
After Evans is zoned in on his own body, the breathing techniques begin. It’s not a silent process. If you’re picturing monks and a temple, that’s the wrong mental image. Fuentes walks Evans through the whole process, coaching him along the path. And then the performance training goes to a whole new level.
“I take an athlete and put them in their physical movement,” Fuentes said. “I create a physical visualization. Typically their eyes are closed and I’m programming this mind and body connection. So they can start feeling more, instead of just doing.
“Most athletes, they go in and they do. Whether it’s punching somebody, kicking a bag, lifting, running, swinging a baseball bat or a golf club, they just do. Very few athletes feel. I want you to feel first and do second. That’s a lot of training and that’s what the physical visualization I’ve developed does.”
While he didn’t discuss his strategy, Evans and other fighters Fuentes works with makes no bones about the fact he helps them execute it and get results.
“Ever since I lost to (Lyoto) Machida, I’ve always brought Al with me and I’ve always had great results,” Evans said. “It’s about having a great performance and having the performance that I want to have. You can go into a fight and even win a fight. But it’s another thing to compete the way you want to compete.”
Jeremy Botter: Thursday of fight week means that the guys who are competing on Saturday night are starting to, well, get a little bit tired of fight week.They have literally answered every single question the media can throw at them on numerous occasio…
Jeremy Botter: Thursday of fight week means that the guys who are competing on Saturday night are starting to, well, get a little bit tired of fight week.
They have literally answered every single question the media can throw at them on numerous occasions. I have witnessed this first hand. We journalists like to think we have a new spin or a new angle for a story, but most of the time we do not. We’re simply replicating the questions that the guy before us asked, except we think we’re a whole lot smarter than he was. We are not.
You could tell the dreariness of fight week was getting to Matt Brown, who was not in a very good mood during today’s open workout session at Georgia State University. Actually, “not in a very good mood” would probably be an upgrade on the happiness scale for Brown. But can you blame him? He’s suffered through endless media engagements to hype his “war in the south” preliminary bout with Stephan Thompson. I’d be inclined to frown a lot, too.
And then there was Michael MacDonald, who spent as much time as he could telling anyone who would listen about God and his upbringing in church.
They do not give out showmanship awards for these open workouts. But if they did, that award would go to Jon Jones. The light heavyweight champion swept into the room 35 minutes late, walked to one end of the gymnasium and proceeded to take off each individual piece of his new UFC-created line of merchandise, then headed to the mat. The congregated media swarmed around the mat, jostling for photos and videos. It was clear that the real superstar of UFC 145 had arrived.
Jones shadowboxed and hit pads, then strode over to sign autographs for fans. Jones has always been good about spending as much time as possible with the fans, and I’m amazed he did so again today, with the biggest fight of his career looming in two days. Perhaps the UFC is right, then, by anchoring their ship to Jones and pointing him towards mainstream success.
This weekend is UFC 145. The main event pits UFC light heavyweight champion against former-teammate Rashad Evans. It’s a fight that has been slowly building for over a year and one that will decide who is the best fighter in the division.Rashad Evans p…
This weekend is UFC 145. The main event pits UFC light heavyweight champion against former-teammate Rashad Evans. It’s a fight that has been slowly building for over a year and one that will decide who is the best fighter in the division.
Rashad Evans presents some interesting stylistic matchups that Jon Jones hasn’t seen before in his UFC career. Those, added to the fact that they were former training partners, makes this the most intriguing light heavyweight fight of all time.
Because of these factors, I have several questions.
Can Jon Jones handle adversity?
This tends to be a question every time that Jon Jones fights a veteran. It was one that was asked when he fought Shogun and it was asked again for the Machida fight. It’s a valid question though. For all of his talents, Jon Jones is still extremely young and doesn’t have the experience to draw upon should he be put in a bad situation.
It’s easy to overlook because of how physically dominant Jones actually is, but Rashad Evans’ experience and fight IQ may be a difference maker in this fight.
Will his chin hold up?
Again, this is asked whenever Jon Jones has a fight. It’s why the fight with Rampage was interesting on paper. As limited as Rampage Jackson is at this point is his career, he still has the punching power to put someone to sleep.
The same can happen with Rashad Evans. Evans has the same power as Jackson but isn’t as limited in his striking abilities. He’s also made massive adjustments in his technique and arguably has the best footwork and head movement in the light heavyweight division. All of these factors make the fight with Jones an interesting one.
How will Jon Jones do off his back?
In his entire UFC career, Jon Jones has only faced wrestlers in three of his fights. His opponents? Matt Hamill, Jake O’Brien, and Ryan Bader. As good as they are at wrestling in MMA, they aren’t in the same league as Rashad Evans. Evans has firmly established himself as the top wrestler at light heavyweight and has a brutal top game.
It’s easy to overlook this fact as Jones has never had to fight off of his back. But as Mike Tyson once said, “everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
Has the trash talk gotten into his head?
Jon Jones can say that he doesn’t care about what Rashad Evans has said in the media but it’s hard to not let those words get to him. Evans has been incredibly open about Jones and former trainer Greg Jackson. On some level that has to be getting to Jones, who has been very defensive of his trainer. Evans is the first fighter that Jones has faced who has trained with the Jackson camp. It’s very possible that Jones may lose focus because of what Evans has said about him and his coach.
Did the long build burn him out mentally?
Let’s be honest, the press conference was kind of a dud. But that should have been expected. The fight has been built up for over a year and at some point both Jones and Evans had to have burnt out talking about each other. It doesn’t feel like there is any animosity anymore because of how much these two have spoken on record about each other. Media obligations can take focus away from what is important and that may be the biggest issue that Jones has heading into the fight with Evans.
Wednesday’s UFC 145 pre-fight press conference was nearly devoid of the kind of intense trash-talking we’ve seen between Jon Jones and Rashad Evans over the past year, and for good reason.It’s been over a year since Jones and Evans were first scheduled…
Wednesday’s UFC 145 pre-fight press conference was nearly devoid of the kind of intense trash-talking we’ve seen between Jon Jones and Rashad Evans over the past year, and for good reason.
It’s been over a year since Jones and Evans were first scheduled to hook up in the cage. Back then, the split between the fighters was fresh. The animosity was easy to conjure up. The wounds were new and the hurt feelings still at the forefront of their minds.
The chances are pretty great that, if they’d faced off in August 2011 when they were originally scheduled to, the level of pre-fight banter between the two light heavyweights would be at an all-time high.
But so much changes in a year, and with three days before the fight, Jones and Evans are simply tired of talking. They’re much more interested in the actual fight at this point. Jones seems to realize that Evans presents a stern test, but he still sees weaknesses that he believe he can exploit.
“I feel stronger and my technique’s getting better and cleaner. I realized the power of flexing your abdominals when you try to strike. I definitely feel as though I’m hitting harder,” Jones said in a press scrum after the conclusion of the press conference.
“And I’m excited. I wobbled Rampage a little bit when I hit him, and I wobbled Lyoto when I hit him. And I think out of all those guys, Rashad has the weakest chin. I think he has the weakest chin of anyone I’ve fought since 2010, and I think I’m going to exploit that.”
Jones has a valid point. If I had to point out one weakness in Rashad’s game, it would be his chin.
This is not to say that Evans has a weak chin because I don’t think that’s the case. It held up pretty well against Chuck Liddell and other lethal strikers. It’s just the one thing you can point to when discussing areas in Rashad’s game that Jones might be able to exploit.
We haven’t seen true knockout power from Jones. At least not yet. But we have seen a drastic improvement in power since he entered the UFC with a tough fight against Stephan Bonnar. And we know Jones would love nothing more than to finish Evans by knockout on Saturday night.
I guess what I’m saying is this: Nothing Jon Jones does on Saturday night will surprise me because I’ve learned not to be surprised by anything he does.
Former UFC champion