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Posted by Mika Frankl
Recently while at Jackson’s/Winkeljon’s MMA I had the chance to interview one of the newest additions to the gym, 2-UFC Heavyweight champion Frank Mir, who will be in the co-main event fight at UFC on Fox 7 against Strikeforce Heavyweight Grand Prix champion Daniel Cormier
MF: You’re out here training at Jackson’s/Winkeljohn’s, we have all known for a long time that you did your own thing, want to elaborate for us on what caused the change for you to come out here to New Mexico?
FM: I think the biggest influence was actually my wife. We sat down after the loss to Dos Santos and talked about what we could do differently what we couldn’t do differently. She called me fat – ‘you know you’re fat and not focused’. We kind of broke down what the problem was. Went through our journals; looked at how many times I showed up late to training, left early from training, rescheduled training, canceled training, and then we looked at the factors that were leading to those adjustment and the lack of full focus. And it was always the fact that I put my wife and my kids before my career. I think it’s an admiral quality. I admire other people that do that, maybe it’s why I try to do it myself. But, as she said, maybe 8 weeks before a fight I should put my career first and focus more on that and that way in the end it is my family coming first because I’ll succeed more, be more successful so in the long term its actually the more mature thing to do. It takes a little more focus and the solution was to leave home during the week. I go home on the weekends and still train with my old camp, sleep at home Friday and Saturday nights, but Sunday thru Thursday I’m here at Jackson’s so I can have a full night to focus – and in the first week we actually saw it happen. I came out here to train went to sleep every night at like 9-10 at night and woke up 7 in the morning actually went for a jog before I even came to the gym at 9:30. You know, went home between training sessions took a nap, read my book, messed around a little bit with the iPad, got back in the gym at night trained and went over stuff after practice. I been staying late like an hour and a half after every practice working on new things – really focused. First night back [at home]; I was supposed to spar the next morning with some old teammates I really enjoy training with Eric Smith and my 3 year old son has a cold and at night he’s waking up every couple hours, I’m up with him. Easy to say I had a bad training day, I’m tired and my wife is like ‘as much as it sucks that’s why you travel when you train’. You can see the difference now. She goes ‘you can’t help but want to be a father, you don’t stay in bed’. I know a lot of fighters more disciplined then I am and when it gets close to a camp they tell their wife to sleep in one room with the babies and they go in the other room and no matter what they hear they stay asleep; sorry guy that just ain’t me, so I put 500 miles between me and my family while I focus on the camp and then on the weekends go home and see them.
That is just the start of the interview, uncage the rest by playing the video below…
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