Damon Jackson: An Old Dog With New Tricks

Over two days, Jackson dropped 22 pounds and was ready to go, but both fights remained intact. Does he know how crazy this whole scenario sounds?

“It's my job,” he laughs. “I've been a personal trainer since 2004, 2005, so I really enjoy the fitness part of it. I enjoy cutting the weight off and doing it the right way, and I take a lot of pride in being able to do it. A lot of my clients were complaining about losing three or four pounds and it annoys me because I'm like, you know what, I'm gonna make weight and I did it in a day and a half - and they all saw me. I trained everyone like normal, cut the weight on the side and it wasn't even that big of a deal. It was like 22 pounds I cut. I’ve got people saying, ‘I want to lose six pounds this year.’ No, we're doing that this week.”

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Call it another notch in the old school street cred belt for Jackson, who will be adopting the nickname “Action” this Saturday against Pat Sabatini in honor of his brother, Bradly, who sadly passed away last weekend. And after three consecutive victories, that approach seems to be working, as Jackson shows the young kids how it’s done. But in all seriousness, does he see a gap between the vets and the up and comers, not just in MMA, but all sports?

“I definitely think there's a gap there where people are so much smarter on how they train,” Jackson said. “You have all these things where you can track your recovery so you can train a little smarter and maybe don't train as much as you used to. You might not do as many live goes or you might not do much sparring, and so it comes with pros and cons on that side of things. I think that there's too much information for kids to have. They have all this information and they look at it and there's just some days when you just gotta shut up and get it done because the work's still gotta get done even though your Fitbit says your recovery is this low. It cracks me up and it's really kind of scary because the potential that these kids have to be something greater than any one of us is there, but having all the information makes them very weak-minded, and they don't make their own choices. They're so scared to make their own choices, and you hear these people have these horrific injuries, but that's like one out of a million, whereas everyone's banged up when they go into a game or a fight, so you can't skip training. You gotta get it in somehow, someway. So I think there's definitely a pretty big gap there, and I don't want to be a hater on the young guys, but I think there's too much information.”