Frank Mir reinvented
Saturday, July 4, 2009 - by Steven Marrocco - MMAWeekly.com
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 Getting Frank Mir to listen is no easy task. If you don’t have an intelligent argument, you’re not getting anywhere.

The current interim heavyweight champion had been in the game five years when he found Ken Hahn. He had settled into a routine: train for fights when they were booked, work the Spearmint Rhino at night, read a lot, hang out.

It wasn’t serving him well. He had made it back from the motorcycle accident that threatened his career, but after several lackluster performances in the Octagon, fans were ready to write his talent off as a casualty of inactivity.

“I think after the accident I got back in the gym, and the people around me were all about making money and showing up for fights just to get in shape, and I kind of approached it that way, and obviously, with not very successful results,” said Mir on a Thursday teleconference promoting his rematch with Brock Lesnar at UFC 100 next Saturday.

“I would never be in the gym learning anything extra, or improving on anything, it was just like you have a fight in eight weeks, you have to show up for this many hours and this is what’s required of you. It’s very monotonous and very much like a job and I lost my enthusiasm for training.”

Hahn had eight weeks with Mir before his fight with Antoni Hardonk at UFC 74. First on his agenda was to change Mir’s mindset about fighting. That would require some convincing.

“I told him if you’re a martial artist, you always talked about how you had a school and you did karate when you were younger,” Hahn told MMAWeekly.com. “Do you consider yourself a martial artist? ‘Yes.’ Okay, then you have to be one.

“‘What do you mean?’ Well, right now you’re living like a fighter. You’re not living like a martial artist. You work at the nightclub so you can work minimally doing things that you don’t have to stress your body out. You make a lot of money so you don’t have to earn as much. But what are you really doing now? You’re a vampire. You’re the club life guy, putting yourself in harm’s way because people are drunk and you have to help them out the door. Two, you’re in an environment where everyone’s always smoking, so that’s not good for you. If the UFC pays you a certain amount of money so you don’t have to do anything but train, that’s what you should do.”

But it wasn’t going to be that easy.

“He’s like, ‘well, I don’t feel motivated to train,’” continued Hahn. “Why aren’t you motivated to train? It’s because you’re not learning anything new. You’re not being pushed in the right direction. So, when people are tired, the last thing they want is to be yelled at, ‘you’re tired.’ So why don’t we change the environment you’re in, so instead of going for time, let’s just go for however long we can go. Instead of putting a five minute timer on and going as hard as you can and trying to survive that five minutes, let’s just spar for however long we can spar for, so that eventually, it wasn’t like, ‘how much time do I have left.’

Hahn’s goal was to get Mir sparring an hour straight.

“Everybody says his cardio is bad; that’s because whenever he got tired, people would yell at him and beat him up,” said Hahn. “If you’re always going to have negative reinforcement, you’re going to go into a survival mode of thinking. You’re gonna do the bare minimum and conserve your energy so you can go five minutes, so that at the end of the day, you’re coach is saying ‘he’s getting better, because he’s lasting.’ No, he’s not. He’s learning to conserve his energy so that in the last thirty seconds, he can show him something, so he won’t get yelled at.”

Training at Hahn’s level of commitment meant Mir had to train year-round. If he wanted to compete at the highest level, he couldn’t just show up eight weeks prior to a fight and hope to be his best.

“Once he realized that he could go longer and put it all on the table and I will recover, he trained harder,” said Hahn. "Before I got him he was going on talent alone. Now he’s 30 years old – there’s no more talent. You have to actually train your body.”

Mir started to win again, and convincingly. He railroaded Hardonk, came from behind to defeat Lesnar, and out-struck idol Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira. Equally important, he was back in the gym when he wasn’t booked.

"I went back the following Monday and was training again,” said Mir. “Not at the same intensity as you would before a fight; just back at the gym moving around, holding pads for the other guys, shadowboxing, and constantly keeping that flow going. That’s not something I would have done had I not met Ken.”

Hahn continues to believe Lesnar’s relative lack of experience will once again be his undoing next Saturday.

“I think the best thing for Brock would be get as crazy as possible and come out of the box like that,” said Hahn. “That’s how he’s going to beat Frank. If he tries to get technical and try to play the striking game, he’ll get crushed. If he tries to do the jiu-jitsu game, he’ll get crushed. He hasn’t been training long enough. How can somebody get better in six months?

“One, you have to have a really good instructor. Two, you have to have a bunch of really good guys that are willing to work with you at your level. If you go to Couture’s gym, there’s so many guys that are high level and famous, that they’re fighting each other for spots. Are they really trying to help you? No, they’re just waiting for someone to get hurt so they can slide into the spotlight.”

Like the few others that have faced Lesnar, Mir has been doing his best to find training partners who replicate the former pro wrestler’s size. It is, as he says, an almost impossible task. Too tall or too heavy – it’s one or the other.

Hahn says the key to a successful rematch is keeping Mir focused on the gameplan. The good thing is, he doesn’t have to argue as much to do so.

“We’re not gonna throw kicks like we did in the first fight,” he said. “In the first fight, he was still a little anxious with me and wanted to show he had learned. It’s a beginner’s mistake; why are you gonna throw a kick in the open field? This time, I think he’s going to feel him out, box him, frustrate him, because I think Brock’s going to throw hands and try to knock him out and I don’t see how that’s going to happen. Brock has no kicks, so we’re not worried about his kicks or knees. It will probably be a boxing match, then Brock will get hit with something, and get submitted or knocked out. Then in the third or fourth round, here come the low kicks, so we can further frustrate him. The biggest thing is if Frank stays relaxed and moves laterally, you’ll see a seminar.”