Ultimate Fighter season one cast member Mike Swick is set to return to the Octagon at UFC 189 against Alex Garcia. It’ll be Swick’s first UFC bout since 2012 and he thought he was retired.
“I mean I never officially retired, but after that last fight, that was I guess the turning point in my career where I knew that if my health didn’t get better that I couldn’t do this,” Swick told Submission Radio. “You know, I just couldn’t eat the food I need and get the recovery that I needed to compete at that level and feel good. So I literally took it completely out of my mind. I completely assumed I wasn’t going to fight. I accepted it and I just continued to build this gym and develop fighters and train fighters. Which is a great process because in during [which] I found my health and I figured out how to basically fix my health without taking all the medications that they were having me on. I’m literally the healthiest I’ve been maybe in my whole UFC career.”
Swick also addressed his 2012 come back attempts.
“I had situations where….so I was on medication at that time which didn’t help my body, and it actually helped in the begging, even though it wasn’t very good. The problem was when I’d ween myself off the medicine during fight camp, it came back. So I kinda like prematurely announced that my health was great, even though it technically was better because I was relying on this medication. And when I took them out to be able to train proper and get that out of my system and just focus on training, it went back. So now here I am at fight camp, getting ready for fights, and I’m having the same issues. And so I shrunk down. For both of those fights I was weighing basically 170 pounds fight day, or weigh-in day. I didn’t have to cut any weight and I was just real depleted. So the first fight was a great ending. The ending was awesome. It was a great knockout or whatever, but the fight itself was horrible. You know, both of those fights. If you look at the actual fight and my performance during those fights – whether I won or not – it wasn’t good performances, and I definitely wanted to fix that. I want to come back and show that, that wasn’t me.”
Jose Aldo vs. Conor McGregor headlines UFC 189 on July 11 in Las Vegas, Nevada. No word yet on which portion of the card the Swick-Garcia bout will be featured.
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