Jul-8-2008

Jon Fitch – The Road to the Championship – Week One

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It’s a little over a month before my welterweight title fight against Georges St-Pierre in Minnesota on August 9th and we’re into the intense part of the training – actually, the whole 12 weeks are pretty intense and there’s really no easy time. There is a rest week the week before the fight where you do a lot of recovery, but the goal during training is to peak your body at a certain point, so you have to listen to your body and how you’re feeling and alter what you’re doing according to that. If you overtrain, then you’re peaking too soon and you’re gonna be flat and not be there for the fight. If you peak too late, then you didn’t prepare properly.

One of the highlights of training last week was receiving my Black Belt in Guerilla Jiu-Jitsu from Dave Camarillo. If you’re wondering how Guerilla Jiu-Jitsu differs from other forms of the art, it’s much more aggressive and much more applicable to the fight game. Dave is all about finishing opponents; not controlling and outpointing opponents.

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting the belt, and I hadn’t even been thinking about it because I’ve been concentrating so much on the fight – I have another belt in mind. Plus, Dave has never really awarded a belt in fighter training. He usually does it during jiu-jitsu class. But this time he switched things up. AKA (American Kickboxing Academy) has really become a team in the past few years, and we really have that team aspect as far as coaching and training. In fact, we look and operate more like a college sports team than most other teams do. A lot of other teams are just a bunch of guys who train in the same place. So we’ve been having little meetings every day, talking about what we did at the workout and what we need to be doing better. And at one of those meetings, out of nowhere, Dave kinda sprung the belt on me.

As far as wearing it around, I did go and eat lunch with it because I didn’t want to leave it in the truck. I sat it in my lap and had it with me for a while. I was gonna start shedding the gi and just start doing no-gi jiu-jitsu from now until the fight, but I had one last session to make sure I broke in the black belt.

A lot of people have asked about the time it took to get here, and it’s been an uphill battle to say the least, but I just focused on one fight at a time, on my daily training and on the small things - the small steps that I needed to take in order to get better as a fighter. At the end of the day, for me it’s more important to be the best that you can be than it is to be the best in the world, because at that period in time, the rest of the world might not be that good. So you’re limiting yourself with that mentality, while I want to just constantly be improving to be the best I could possibly be.

You see a lot of people get to the top, they stay there for a little while, and while they’re at the top, they never really improve, and you never really see much change in their game. And then one day, somebody comes out of nowhere and knocks them off the top and they go from the top to the very bottom, they struggle, and then their career is over. We saw that with a lot of the old-school fighters. A lot of them had a lot of success, but they never adapted to the new fight game. They stayed one-dimensional and the sport surpassed them. I don’t want that to happen to me, that’s why I’m always working. And throwing the title into the mix, your motivation goes through the roof. Anytime you’re a little bit tired or feeling a little bit rundown, you just think about why you’re feeling rundown and what you’re doing all this for. It makes all the pain and all the fatigue just go away and lets you get right back in there and keep training hard.

It’s also important not to be distracted by the added obligations of being in a UFC main event, and for me, staying in control of my schedule is a big thing. If you let everybody pull at you in different directions, it’s easy to get thrown off. But I have a fixed schedule and I’m making everyone work around it. I’m not gonna let anybody interfere with my training. It might make some people upset, but it’s more important to me to be prepared for the fight than to have people know about the fight. You take two great fighters and put them together, people are gonna figure out that a great fight is gonna happen. Some fights promote themselves.

For more information on Jon Fitch, visit www.fitchfighter.com