Holdsworth out a year with post-concussion syndrome

Chris Holdsworth won The Ultimate Fighter 18: Team Rousey vs. Team Tate, on November 30, 2013, by choking Davey Grant in the second round. He had suffered a concussion before hand, but went through with the fight anyway, and was of course successful. He felt fine and took a fight with Chico Camus at UFC 173 in May, but suffered a second concussion during wrestling practice.

Chris Holdsworth is not a quitter. The second concussion left him with eye strain and sensitivity to light and noise among other symptoms, but he went through with the fight, and won.

Holdsworth, 27, has not fought or even trained hard since.

“I cut all that weight,” said Holdsworth to Marc Raimondi for MMAFighting.com. “I fight, get hit in the head. Then I started eating bad after the fight. Everything starts going out of wack.”

Being unable to train, Holdsworth fell into a depression.

“It’s hard to take time off when all you know is go, go,” he said. “That’s my lifestyle. I train every day and I train hard.”

“It’s just frustrating. When you get something taken away from you that you love doing so much — it’s your lifestyle — it’s hard on us. It’s really depressing and frustrating.”

“I definitely think people rush back from injuries and rush back from head trauma in general. These things take a lot longer than people think and everyone is like, ‘When are we gonna see you back?’ It’s like, man — when I’m healthy to fight. My health is more important than anything else.”

“I think I rushed back into things from the finale. I should have took some more time off. I just didn’t know any better. I was feeling good. I felt 100 percent, but realistically I still had trauma. I still needed to heal up.”

“As I’m getting older, I’m starting to learn that it’s better to train smarter than harder. We don’t get paid in the gym; we get paid to fight. You’ve gotta conserve your body and most importantly conserve your brain.”