At around 3am local time on Sunday, the brand new Co-op Live in Manchester, England will be buzzing for the start of the UFC 304 main card. The lights will be flashing. The arena’s sound system will scream “Baba O’Riley” while the big screens show an almost poetically violent UFC highlights film that will give even the most seasoned cynics of this tortured sport chills.
Then, around 6am, the main event will be over and a throng of fans will stumble out into the light of a new morning. The whole thing is what you might call an unconventional moment for a professional sporting event. Or, if you’re interim UFC heavyweight champion Tom Aspinall, you can call him “absolutely terrible” for local fans.
But what about the fighters? How to prepare your brain and body to compete in the early hours of the morning?
Ask the fighters on the UFC 304 main card that question and you’ll get a range of answers.
“I haven’t changed anything yet,” UFC lightweight Paddy Pimblett said in conversation with Yahoo Sports during the week. “I think we could change the schedule a little bit and start waking up at different times and things like that, but I think that’s ridiculous. What’s the point of coming to the UK and getting a UK card but having it in American time?”
The issue, from the UFC’s perspective, is to maintain regular pay-per-view programming for the North American public. Every analysis of the promotion’s finances suggests that the majority of UFC’s pay-per-view revenue comes from the U.S. and Canada, so when possible, the company prefers to maintain its regular TV programming while trusting that enthusiastic ticket holders international tickets will adjust. as necessary.
For American fighters, this could be an advantage. If the event takes place at the usual time, even on British soil, you may not be required to make many adjustments.
“I’m trying to stay in the American time zone,” said Belal Muhammad, who challenges Leon Edwards for the UFC welterweight title in the main event. “I’m going there during fight week, like a normal fight week, and I’m going to try to sleep during the day. … But at the end of the day, it’s a fight. Whether day or night, if he is in front of me, I will be awake.”
That sentiment was echoed by King Green, the American fighter who faces Pimblett on the undercard. For him, adjusting to different time zones and having his body agitated by the demands of travel is just part of the fight game.
“I’m just playing it by ear, brother,” Green said. “It’s like jet lag and blah, blah, blah. Sleepless nights. It’s been crazy, but I don’t care. I came to fight. These other things don’t matter. I’m a warrior. When they tell me to get up and leave, I’m going to get up and fight and fight hard.”
But according to Dr. Jeffrey Durmer, a neurologist who specializes in sleep and its effects on athletic performance, athletes ignore these issues at their peril. Durmer served as the director of sleep performance for the U.S. Olympic weightlifting team and has also worked with other Olympic teams to maximize sleep performance.
“It’s one of those things that people often don’t realize,” Durmer said. “It’s not just athletes. It’s a systemic issue in our culture, how we simply disregard the importance of sleep.”
According to Durmer, there is some validity to Muhammad’s goal of staying on US time in anticipation of UFC 304. If the main event is scheduled to start at what would be a normal fight time in, say, Las Vegas, it makes sense for Muhammad to prepare as he would for any other UFC event in the United States.
“His approach, that’s the tact I would take as well,” Durmer said. “But one thing I would encourage these fighters to do is be prepared for the sleep deprivation of the trip, because all the normal signals will be off when they get there. This will be something that they will have to adjust to quickly, and that means having a very hard and fast plan for how to deal with things like light exposure, eating and drinking times, because all of these things play an important role in the circadian rhythm. ”
For fighters trying to stay in their normal time zone, Durmer said, he would recommend doing things like wearing sunglasses when attending fight week media responsibilities.
“They should definitely avoid as much excessive light as possible,” Durmer said. “Keep that hoodie on, keep the darkness on, try not to provoke too many awakened responses.”
For British fighters, however, the calculation is different. These fighters are already used to sleeping at the time the event is starting. Ideally, Durmer said, they would gradually prepare their bodies for this change over a series of weeks. That’s what the U.S. weightlifting team did ahead of the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. This meant tightly controlling sunlight exposure and slowly adjusting eating, sleeping and training schedules.
One fighter who has come to a similar approach with the help of his own sleep specialist is UFC welterweight champion Edwards. As he already lives and trains in England, he knew he would need to adjust his training schedule to prepare for an unusual morning fight schedule.
Before this fight, Edwards worked with Dr. Ian Dunican, who has a doctorate in sleep and performance. With Dunican’s help, Edwards set a training schedule to gradually prepare his body for a pre-dawn title fight.
“At first, I thought I should immediately switch to 5 a.m. practice and stuff like that,” Edwards said. “But he basically said, you don’t have to do that. Instead, you just gently change your sleep and training schedule hour by hour each week, just to get your body to slowly adapt to the training, rather than changing overnight and going totally nocturnal, where you’re losing the sunlight, which your body needs. .”
For Edwards, this required some cooperation from coaches and training partners. There’s only so much a fighter can do alone in the gym, so preparing his body to perform early in the morning meant persuading those around him to adjust their schedules accordingly.
But as anyone who’s spent time in fight gyms or around people who fight already knows, it’s not always a morning crowd. That’s where Edwards’ personalized approach to training camps came in handy, he noted.
“It’s a small team I have,” Edwards said. “It’s not really one of those American gyms where there’s like 50 guys, 50 coaches, everyone doing their own thing and trying to find sparring partners. I have a solid team around me that if I need to train at two or three in the morning, they will show up for me. The camp is built around me.”
This is exactly the approach Durmer would recommend for fighters on this card who are already based in England, he said. Simply showing up on fight night and winging it, relying on the power of adrenaline to wake up your body and prepare it for peak athletic performance, is “a terrible idea.”
Pimblett, undeterred, insisted he would not show up at the gym at four in the morning.
“I don’t think it’s going to make that much of a difference, because we’re getting in the cage and fighting, you know what I mean?” Pimblett said.
Even so, he acknowledged, the event’s timing could be an advantage for the American fighters on the card. “I mean, me, Leon (Edwards), Tom (Aspinall), Molly (McCann), Arnold Allen? We are all at a disadvantage compared to all the fighters that are coming.”
Well, maybe not Edwards. With the title on the line, a little extra preparation could go a long way on Sunday morning in Manchester.
