Frank Mir Re-Dedicated to His Craft After Move to Greg Jackson’s Gym

UFC heavyweight Frank Mir was born and raised in Las Vegas. And, with the city playing such a significant role in the fight game, the former champion never felt the need to leave his lifetime home.

However, after losing his last fight and looking shaky in the previous pairing, Mir decided it was time to pack his gear and head East to New Mexico to train for his upcoming clash with Daniel Cormier at UFC on FOX 7. Mir landed in Greg Jackson’s famed camp and, as the 16-6 submission specialist recently told MMAFightCorner, the move couldn’t have been a more welcome change.

“I just kind of knew, the wife and I had been talking about it, I’ve been in the UFC for twelve years, what I needed to do to step up my game and not training at home in my own backyard where I’m always a father and a husband first,” Mir told MMA Fight Corner in a recent interview. “I show up to practice late because I have baseball practice, I might leave early because I have a banquet or a teacher’s meeting to go to. Whereas now I travel, I know that Monday through Thursday, Friday morning, I’m just a fighter. I get to train and in between the practices I go home to the hotel room, take a nap and relax, and focus on practice.”

“Before I think I’d try go to practice and if I did a hard work out, I wasn’t going home and taking a nap, relaxing and recuperating. And now for 24 hours a day I’m a martial artist fighter. I go there and they put me through some hellacious workouts, it’s no secret I’m a little bit of a poor swimmer. Two days out of the week I’m in the pool treading water for my life.”

On Cormier’s abilities:

“I thought he couldn’t finish Josh Barnett because of Josh’s abilities, but then I realized ‘No, he doesn’t really have much finishing ability’. He can catch you with a punch, let’s face it, every (fighter) over 200 pounds has that ability to finish a fight if he catches you. But you got to have the ability to finish with the submission – you know definitive ground and pound where you actually finish somebody off against the cage and it’s menacing, not just finally the referee’s like ‘Well, you know, I guess the guy’s had enough. You really can’t put him away let me help end this fight for you.’”

SOURCE: MMAFightCorner
PHOTO CREDIT: UFC