Eugene Bareman, the coach for UFC middleweight champion Israel Adesanya, was a guest on Submission Radio recently to talk UFC 259.
Adesanya challenges Jan Blachowicz for the light heavyweight title Saturday night.
On Jan being the biggest challenge in Israel’s career
“This is Israel’s hardest fight by quite a bit. I think this is a jump up from any of his previous challengers. And for all intents and purposes within our camp, we are building ourselves as the underdogs. And we’re doing that based on we’re giving away this size and weight advantage that we sometimes have in our favour. Now, we’re gonna give it away. So, it’s just a very hard [fight]. What we’re about to attempt here is, people don’t understand, a very, very difficult endeavor and a very risky one, and one that makes for all us coaches and Israel, it makes the hairs on the back of our necks stand up. Because this is a true, true challenge. A hefty challenge. And it’s a scary one, and it’s one that gets you up early in the morning and wanting to attack it. And we’ve had a great camp because it’s just a highly motivating fight. And it’s a highly motivating fight cause it’s such a dangerous fight.”
On pioneering new breathing techniques and training for Israel and CKB
“We’ve invested a lot of time and a lot money and a lot of research into the breathing side of things and how different methods of breathing effect the central nervous system. Like, the game for us now is… look, we believe we opened up a little gap when we first came into the UFC. We believe that we had some advantages over teams and other coaches and other athletes. But nowadays, within a short period of time, we believe that gap is closing. And it’s up to us to keep that gap wide. And what we do is, we spend a lot of our time researching other methods that can help us keep that gap from shrinking and keeping it wide. And this, to be honest, is one of them. And we do believe that it will give us a really distinct advantage, especially in terms of recovery in between rounds. And it’s just another vehicle that we’re using to try and keep up one step ahead of everybody else. So, we will see if it becomes effective, but we honestly put a lot of stock in it. And first of all, there’s a lot of science there to back up what we believe will be a distinct advantage. So yeah, we’re looking forward to being able to use some of those breathing techniques to give us an advantage in this fight.”
On Jan’s confidence being a real strength going into his fight against Israel
“The second thing that makes him very dangerous is his confidence. And his confidence doesn’t get talked about a lot because it’s not the braggadocious type of confidence that is a little bit more in line with Israel’s type of confidence. It’s just a quiet unassuming confidence that I believe Jan has in his ability, and I believe Jan is extremely confident that Israel is not gonna have the tools to beat him.”
“A lot of people, they understand that they have to be confident in a fight and they try to exude that, but they try too hard. Their confidence, to be honest, with a lot of fighters, it’s not really there. They’re just hoping that confidence, through acting confident, they’re hoping that this confident will just arise out of nowhere. They don’t truly have it. But that’s not the case with Jan. I feel that he is genuinely, supremely confident that he can win this fight. And that to me, that’s like a very dangerous opponent. That’s an opponent that’s got nothing to lose. That’s an opponent that’s going to be willing to come in there and take risks that the other previous opponents haven’t been willing to do. So, two things. His physical advantages. And then this quiet unassuming confidence that he kind of walks around with. I think those are the two dangerous things that kind of underline this fight.”