Anthony Smith: I wish more fighters would move up a division
Anthony Smith: “I can’t stress it enough how I wish other guys that are struggling would give it a shot.”
Fighters often try to drop a division following a loss. Then middleweight Anthony ‘Lionheart’ Smith won three in a row and then got TKOed by Thiago Santos at UFC Fight Night 125 on February 3, in the fight of the night.
Then Smith moved up to light heavyweight. That’s a massive, 20 pound jump. But he knocked out legends back to back, taking out Shogun Rua and Rashad Evans in Round 1, earning his third career performance bonus.
During a recent appearance on the UFC Unfiltered podcast, Smith said more fighters should move up a division if they are struggling to cut.
I’m feeling great,” said Smith, as transcribed byJeff Cain for MMA Weekly. I can’t stress it enough how I wish other guys that are struggling would give it a shot. It’s not just the night of the fight. It’s the ten or eight weeks that I have in camp leading up to that where I’m not draining myself and I’m not miserable. I can just focus an entire training camp on just getting better and never worry about what the f***ing scales says.
I’m actually able to rest and recover a whole lot more and I’ve noticed that I’m not nearly as sore. Obviously, I’m not nearly as grumpy. I’m more in tune as to what is going on around me as far as practice and training and even in the fight with Shogun, it was weird for me to really focus on what he was doing and really getting him to react and kind of steering the direction of the fight instead of just going in there like I normally did at 185 and just putting my foot on the gas and going because I was already drained. I was exhausted. I just went in and acted like a buzz saw and tried to punch my way through a brick wall and hopefully they fell down. At 205, I can really focus on being a smarter fighter and I think those are the two things that I’ve really shown in my last two fights is I have the ability now to focus.
Smith fights #2 Volkan Oezdemir at UFC Fight Night 138, on October 27. With a win, the longtime middleweight likely gets a title shot at light heavyweight.