UFC light heavyweight Paul Craig moved into the top 10 of his division with a vicious first-round triangle choke win at UFC London. For a fighter whose UFC record was once 2-3, he’s bounced back, hard. On The MMA Hour, he credited a sports psychologist with his winning streak.
“It’s about adding little bits to your game plan, it’s about adding little bits to your camp, like working with a nutritionist, like working with my conditioning coach.
Paul Craig Credits Sports Psychologist With Winning Streak
It’s just about dealing with all these people. Like, a sports psychologist made a huge difference to my self-belief. But then it’s adding all them together. One of them on their own didn’t make me better, it was a whole host of things.”
The shift in Craig’s mindset led to other changes, like taking advice from other people. Once the mindset changed, then it was about bringing in other people in my camp. Because right at the start, we were very, very secretive. We didn’t want to have anyone else that wasn’t a part of the team in the camp.
So I didn’t have a conditioning coach, I didn’t have a nutritionist, I didn’t have a sports psychologist. Once we had the sports psychologist on board, and he kind of opened up my mind and opened up my attitude, and then I allowed loads more people in to try and help me.
I wanted to do it all on my own, and I wanted to be like, ‘No, I’ve done this on my own. I don’t need anybody else.’ In this sport, you can’t be like that. You need to have loads of people around you, you need to have positive people around you. That was not a thing that happened as well.
Through your journey, people will come and go, people will take a pound of flesh from you, and it’s about staying with people who are good for you and dropping people that are bad for you. It was a whole host of things.”
Craig still sees his psychologist weekly, using it to refine his game and continue improving. “It goes back to, it’s not just one area where I need to improve.
There was an area where I needed to improve and we spoke about that, and we dealt with that, and we sort of improved it. It’s an ongoing process. It’s not like once you’ve done it once, ‘Actually, you’ve spoke to a sports psychologist, you’re cured.’
It’s about dealing with it weekly. We have weekly sit downs, we discuss stuff that potentially are gonna happen in camp, we look at what happened previously in camp, and we discuss how we’re gonna move forward.”
