Diaz coach: We were all worried about Nate's conditioning before UFC 196
Scratch what you heard leading up to and during the UFC 196 telecast -- Nate Diaz had virtually no training for his main event against Conor McGregor after accepting the fight on less than two weeks' notice. In fact, the fighter's conditioning coach Damian Gonzalez recently told MMA Junkie that he, Diaz and their whole team was pretty stressed out about Diaz's conditioning before he outlasted McGregor.
"I was worried. He was worried," he admitted.
"Everybody was concerned about his conditioning, especially the people around him."
Once Diaz signed on the dotted line to headline UFC 196 -- just a couple months after going three rounds against Michael Johnson -- he and Gonzalez adapted their usual workout routine to get as ready as they could for the mega-bout. "He was going to cram in a lot of work in short time, but he needed to recover from it," Gonzalez continued.
"Basically what we were doing was shorter workouts, but a lot of workouts throughout the day, doing short duration."
According to the coach, Diaz's only recovery came from resting, since he doesn't like to take banned PEDs. "But the volume was pretty high, with a lot of intensity and a lot of recovery," he continued.
"They can't take any illegal supplements; they're not really into all that stuff, so basically, it's just, when you're not working out, you're recovering."
In the end, Gonzalez believes that the new king's years as an endurance athlete, not just in MMA but in cycling, swimming, and running, gave him the ability to put McGregor away, despite not having a real training camp. "Conor is super explosive, and so for Nate, it was not necessarily his usual game plan of pressing the action. Because he knew the guy would come to fight," he reasoned.
"So it was more about letting him see what Conor has and conserve his energy and then adjust to that, and then pick it up.
"For triathletes, it takes a lot more than the average person for you to redline and make you tired. So when the other guy is redlining, that's when he makes mistakes. You have mental lapses. And even a split-second mental lapse in MMA, bad things can happen."
