Ulysses Gomez will fight for the Tachi Palace Fights bantamweight title on Dec. 2nd in Lemoore, Calif.

As the fight gets closer my mind starts to play tricks on me, I don’t know if this happens to every fighter but it sure happens to me.

Sometimes when I’m lying in bed trying to go to sleep I go through how my day went in my head.

I think about my training sessions and I grade myself on how I did and what I feel like I need to work on.

I try to have a goal and game plan for each training session and sometimes I stick to it and at other times I don’t.

At the end of the night I usually give myself a passing grade but there have been times when I had to give myself an F.

This is my last hard week of training and it’s the last final push, the last week to get it all out before I allow my body the short week of rest.

And as I type that “it’s the last week” it suddenly hits me, THIS IS MY LAST WEEK! I can’t believe that my fight camp has gone by that fast.

It literally seems like only yesterday that I was starting my camp and now I’m 8 weeks into my camp and it’s almost over. My mind starts to race, did I train hard enough? Have I done enough rounds? Am I ready to fight next week? Is my weight good?

I stop and think about how this fight camp went and how much work I put into this camp so far. I write in my journal every workout that I did the whole camp, I write what I did for that training session, who I trained with and how I felt after each session.

Every now and then I go back and read my journal and see what I did and how I felt. This gives me proof that I put in the work needed to become a champion, and not only that, but it allows me some piece of mind in knowing that I did what I needed to do.

So to answer the questions as far as did I train hard enough, I roughly put in on average 16 hours a week. Some people say that they train 8 hours a day but that’s ridiculous!

They might be at the gym hanging out for 8 hours but it’s basically impossible to train hard every day for 8 hours straight and come back the next day for five days straight.

I usually train roughly 3-4 hours every day. My workouts range from 1 hour-and-a-half to 2 hours per workout. I get in, train hard, get out and go home to rest for my next training session.

I always worry about my weight and even though this fight is at 135 pounds as opposed to my usual 125 pounds I still have to cut weight. Since Cody is so much bigger than me, I’m trying to keep myself as big and strong as possible until I have to start my cut.

I’m walking around anywhere from 145 pounds to 148 pounds and when I step on the scale and see those numbers I start to freak out. I forget that this fight isn’t at 125 pounds and I have to remind myself that my weight is good. I want to wake up the day of weigh ins at 140 pounds and cut 5 pounds that day which is pretty easy for me.

In order to do that I have to lose 5 pounds within these next two weeks which is very doable since I’m still eating a good amount and drinking plenty of water.

My goal for this last week is to get two good hard sparring session in this week and then from there on out it’s all about keeping myself sharp and most importantly keeping myself injury free. It will be a lot of drilling, working on my specific game plan that we have for Cody and maintaining my cardio.

I will start to taper down the intensity of my training sessions and work on more technical aspects. The most difficult part will be NOT allowing myself to train.

At times I want to train and sometimes I overdo it the final week and short myself on my rest time. Live and learn. Two more weeks and its go time, it will be here before I know it.

The Ulysses Gomez Experiment” is a weekly ProMMAnow.com blog series written by world top 10 ranked flyweight Ulysses Gomez as he prepares for his Dec. 2 title fight at Tachi Palace Fights 11. “The Ulysses Gomez Experiment” is part of our ongoing series of exclusive content written by individuals involved in the mixed martial arts industry.

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