Ronda Rousey removes a framed newspaper from the wall and smiles as she reads headlines celebrating a dominant victory over Gina Carano, a fight that has yet to take place.
Later that week, Rousey and her team stage a full dress rehearsal at her temporary training base in Las Vegas for her MMA comeback. Dressed in fight-night gear, she moves through her warmup before simulating a full cage walk with loud music and flashing lights, an elaborate visualization drill designed to prepare her 39-year-old body and migraine-prone mind for fight night.
“It just makes everything really special and fun,” Rousey told The Associated Press (AP). “It’s so nice that everything is considered.”
The mental work is part of a broader overhaul of her training as she prepares to face fellow MMA pioneer Gina Carano on Saturday night at Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California.
Nearly a decade after she left the sport at the peak of her fame and what she has described as the lowest point of her personal happiness in MMA, Rousey now has a cadre of top-tier coaches and support staff, a world-class training setup and full mental support for her return.
That is notable because Rousey became arguably the most famous athlete in women’s combat sports history despite having a fraction of the coaching help and outside-the-cage structure given to many top fighters.
Rousey previously trained out of a storefront fight club in Glendale, California, with Edmond Tarverdyan, a coach to whom she remained intractably loyal while the sport questioned his knowledge and suitability, to the point where Rousey’s mother, AnnMaria De Mars, publicly called him an idiot.
When asked how she looks back on her years with Tarverdyan, Rousey said: “We accomplished a lot, but I think we went as far as we could together.”
Many years later, Rousey has experienced what is possible outside those self-imposed boundaries, and she hopes to show it against Carano.
When Rousey began to explore the possibility of an MMA return last year, her husband, former UFC heavyweight Travis Browne, encouraged her to team up with his longtime trainer, Ricky Lundell. Rousey initially did not like Lundell in their first encounters, but the enthusiastic coach quickly won her over.
When they got to work, Rousey recognized everything she did not have in her first run in the sport.
She is receiving innovative coaching from a team led by Lundell, the accomplished grappler and jiu-jitsu athlete who has coached Jon Jones and Frank Mir. The upgrades in Rousey’s physical training setup are also significant, with access to a modern array of machines, sparring partners and recovery equipment. Lundell even converted his garage to install a sauna, a five-person cold tub and a hyperbaric chamber.
Lundell and his team provide data she had never seen before, including written debriefs of every training session. They hold regular video calls to analyze her progress. She says she now understands more about her strengths and weaknesses than ever before.
“He always keeps me in a great mind space,” Rousey said. “He keeps it very positive while still challenging me and giving me what I need. I’ve never seen a coach that’s so organized. A lot of training camps are very disjointed, and there’s a lot of egos pushing against each other. Ricky is really great at team building and keeping everybody on the same page and coordinated.”
The fake newspaper, which is changed for each of her training trips to Las Vegas from her family farm in Riverside County, California, is a motivational device. It is also a positive affirmation of Rousey’s work.
Most importantly, it represents the kind of structured support she says she rarely had when she felt alone and overwhelmed and fought from darker mental places.
“It takes so much off my shoulders that was on me before,” Rousey said. “It just makes everything as easy and enjoyable as possible.”
When Rousey lost her final two UFC fights and realized she needed to prioritize her health, including her increasing susceptibility to concussions, she left the spotlight of the cage for acting and professional wrestling, followed by marriage and children.
“I had to allow my body to rest and heal,” Rousey said.
Rousey spent years away from competition but not away from her sport.
She says she found a sense of mental peace and maturity that deepened her connection to martial arts, which has been central to her life since her mother taught her judo three decades earlier. She still keeps her skills sharp with occasional workouts, though she describes them as secondary to overall fitness and a healthier mental approach.
“As a martial artist, I’m not just memorizing moves,” Rousey said. “I’m learning concepts and philosophy, and those things never go away or change. You still develop them over time. If anything, they get more solidified into what you actually are, instead of superfluous little tricks that take up bandwidth when you’re training for a fight.”
Rousey recalled a conversation with filmmaker Taika Waititi in which he described his screenwriting process: He writes a script, sets it aside, then writes it again from memory, keeping only what he remembers most clearly.
“That’s how I think of martial arts,” Rousey said. “The core of what matters, the core of the philosophy, is what always sticks. That’s always in there.”
DAILYSABAH
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