Nate Marquardt’s armbar win over James Te Huna in June snapped a three fight losing streak for the former Strikeforce welterweight champion. He’s now set to try to get a win streak going as he takes on Brad Tavares at UFC 182.
Marquardt sat down with Submission Radio to talk about several topics.
On where he is in his career and what he has learned in recent years:
“I feel very good, very healthy. I feel like a big portion of my career I fought with some of the wrong training ethics. I just trained too hard, too long, I was too hard on my body and I was eating the wrong foods, and now that all that’s cleaned up and I’m more confident to take time off and things like that when I need. I’m just healthier.”
“When I get injured, of course I’m not gonna heal as fast, but also I get injured way less because I’m not overtraining.”
On Tavares and his gameplan:
“He’s a very tough fighter. He looks strong and he looks like he’s tough. Like he can take a punch and he can recover from bad positions. He’s a very good striker, he’s got good combinations, good kicks, good punches, good knees and he gets up well off the ground. Even in the fight where he fought Yoel Romero he was able to get up off the ground every single time. He was never held for very long really. So I was really surprised at that.”
“I kind of look at this fight real similar to my last fight as far as game plan, because I feel like it’s something if I come in with a super set game plan it might steer me in the wrong direction, but we’re going to look at some technical aspects of the fight and then sure there’s going to be opportunities for specific things, but I’m not gonna try to dictate one specific game plan or another.”
And, on if he has ever been intimidated going into a fight:
“I would say not intimidated. You know one time when I fought Anderson Silva, it was the first time I’d ever encountered this I would say, where like we’d seen each other all week or whatever and we we’re just good to each other. Then he was at the weigh ins, and then all of a sudden it’s time for us to just square up or to go face to face and suddenly, like he put his head like real aggressively like right on my head. And I remember, like it threw me off because I never encountered that, wasn’t expecting it. And you know I could feel an adrenalin rush, I was angry and it definitely got in my head you know. Where I should have just said yeah whatever, like we’re fighting tomorrow. There’s no reason to get pumped up right now.”
“In training that was properly a different story. Especially earlier in my career, because a lot of the time you’re training with guys that are much better than you at something. So I remember the first time boxing with a world champion and I hadn’t really done any boxing before. I was just doing my kickboxing sparring stuff, and all of a sudden I’m in there with a world champion boxer, and that’ a little intimidating.”