90 | FIGHT TRAINING GUIDE fightaustralia.com.au
FIGHTING FIT
Controlling Your Future
In fact, Butryn found that one of the worst
things a fighter can do is focus on wins or
losses. The stress it evokes is hazardous,
not only to a fighter’s day-to-day mental
state, but also to his performance once
he’s inside the cage.
“Sports Psychology 101 is about process,
not outcome,” Butryn says. “The successful
guys talk a lot about what they learned from
the loss. You watch the post-fight interviews
— and I almost do this in my head now —
but if you hear a guy saying, ‘You know, I
got beat up, but I hung in there, and I won’t
make those mistakes again,’ I know this
guy’s going to come back, because he’s
already talking about the process, what
he learned, and what he can work on, as
opposed to, ‘Oh, the ref screwed me or the
guy was greased.’ That might even be true,
but it’s not within your control.”
The term for this, in sports psychology,
is locus of control. Internal locus of control
— focusing on the positives and negatives
that you can directly impact — usually
equates to long-term competitive success
and a healthy mental attitude. By contrast,
external locus of control — obsessing about
cheating opponents, incompetent refs, or
blind judges — is a recipe for disaster.
Oddly enough, Dr Butryn said, this theory
holds true even in controlled experiments
where the test subject is being cheated.
Those who attribute failure to something
they did and something they can change —
even if they’re wrong — were more likely to
be successful in future competitions.
But this brings us back to money. When a
fighter’s financial wellbeing is based entirely
on results, how is he supposed to shift his
focus to the process instead of the outcome?
How can he ever truly ignore the fear of
losing and all the poisonous stress it brings
with it when every day the nature of this sport
reminds him that winning is all that matters?
While Dr Butryn admits there’s no easy
solution to that inherent conflict, he maintains
that if fighters want to be successful, it’s really
the only choice that makes sense.
“Focusing on the process can be a tough
sell, but I would ask, what else do you
have?” says Dr Butryn. “Are you going to
focus on the loss? You could look in the
mirror and do positive self-talk and say, ‘My
next fight I’m going to win. My next fight I’m
going to win,’ but that doesn’t get you the
win. It has to be about the process, getting
back in the gym and executing. Whether you
like it or not, that’s really all you have.”
“The hardest thing
about losing a fight
is talking to your
kids about it.”
— Matt Hughes“The hardest thing about losing a fight is beating
yourself up mentally, not doing what you know you
could have in training. That hurts the heart.”
— Diego Sanchez