On Sunday, around 3 a.m. local time, the new Co-op Live in Manchester, England, will fire up for the start of the UFC 304 main card. The lights will flash. The stadium sound system will scream “Baba O’Riley” as giant screens play an almost poetically violent video of UFC highlights that sends goosebumps down the spines of even the most seasoned cynics of this tortured sport.
Then, around 6 a.m., the main event will be wrapping up and a throng of fans will be stumbling out into the light of a new morning. All of this is what you might call an unconventional time for a professional sporting event. Or, if you’re UFC interim heavyweight champion Tom Aspinall, you might call it “Absolutely terrible” for the home fans.
But what about wrestlers? How do they prepare their brains and bodies for late-night competitions?
Ask the fighters on the UFC 304 main card this question and you’ll get a variety of answers.
“I haven’t changed anything yet,” UFC lightweight Paddy Pimblett said, speaking to Yahoo Sports last week. “I think we could change the schedule a little bit and start getting up at different times and stuff like that, but I think it’s ridiculous. What’s the point of coming to the U.K. and doing a U.K. card, but doing it on American time?”
The goal, from the UFC’s perspective, is to maintain the regular pay-per-view schedule for North American audiences. Every analysis of the company’s financials suggests that the majority of UFC’s pay-per-view revenue comes from the United States and Canada, so where possible the company prefers to maintain its regular television schedule, though it relies on eager international ticket holders to adjust as needed.
For American fighters, this could be an advantage. If the event is held at its usual time, even if it is on British soil, they may not have to make many adjustments.
“Me, for one, I try to stay in the American time zone,” said Belal Muhammad, who challenges Leon Edwards for the UFC welterweight title in the main event. “I’ll go out and fight fight week, like a normal fight week, and try to sleep during the day… But at the end of the day, it’s a fistfight. Whether it’s day or night, if he’s in front of me, I’ll be awake.”
King Green, an American boxer who faces Pimblett on the preliminary card, echoed that sentiment. For him, adjusting to different time zones and having his body in a state of turmoil from the demands of travel is just part of the fight game.
“I’m winging it, bro,” Green said. “It’s like jet lag and blah, blah, blah. Sleepless nights. It’s been crazy, but I don’t care. I came to fight. Nothing else matters. I’m a warrior. When they tell me to get up and go, I’m going to get up and go and fight and fight with all my might.”
But according to Dr. Jeffrey Durmer, a neurologist who specializes in sleep and its effects on athletic performance, athletes who ignore these issues are at risk for doing just that. Durmer has been the sleep performance director for the U.S. Olympic weightlifting team and has also worked with other Olympic teams to maximize performance through sleep.
“It’s one of those things that people often overlook,” Durmer said. “It’s not just about athletes. It’s a systemic problem in our culture, the way we just ignore the importance of sleep.”
According to Durmer, Muhammad’s goal of staying on U.S. time in anticipation of UFC 304 has some validity. If the main event is scheduled to begin at the usual time for a fight in, say, Las Vegas, it makes sense for Muhammad to prepare as he would for any other UFC event back home in the United States.
“I would take this approach as well,” Durmer said. “But one thing I would recommend to those fighters is to be prepared for the sleep deprivation that comes with the trip, because all the normal cues won’t be there when they get there. That’s going to be something they’ll have to adapt to quickly, and that means having a strict, precise plan for how they’re going to manage things like their light exposure, their eating and drinking schedule, because all of those things play a big role in circadian rhythm.”
For fighters trying to stay in their regular time zone, Durmer said, he would recommend doing things like wearing sunglasses when attending media responsibilities during fight week.
“They should definitely avoid excessive light as much as possible,” Durmer said. “Keep the sweatshirt on, keep it dark, try not to provoke too many wakefulness reactions.”
For British wrestlers, though, the calculus is different. These wrestlers are already accustomed to sleeping by the time this event is just getting underway. Ideally, Durmer said, they would gradually prepare their bodies for that change over a series of weeks. That’s what the U.S. weightlifting team did ahead of the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. That meant strictly controlling sunlight exposure and slowly adjusting eating, sleeping and training schedules.
One fighter who came up with a similar approach with the help of his own sleep specialist is Edwards, the UFC welterweight champion. Since he already lives and trains in England, he knew he would have to adjust his training schedule to prepare for a fight at an unusually early hour in the morning.
Prior to this fight, Edwards worked with Dr. Ian Dunican, who has a PhD in sleep and performance. With Dunican’s help, Edwards set up a training program to gradually prepare his body for a pre-dawn title fight.
“At first, I thought I had to immediately switch to training at 5 a.m. and things like that,” Edwards said. “But he basically told me I didn’t need to do that. Instead, I should just gently change my sleep and training schedule hour by hour each week, just to let my body slowly adapt to training instead of switching from one day to the next and becoming completely nocturnal, where you lose sunlight, which is what my body needs.”
For Edwards, this required some cooperation from his trainers and training partners. A boxer can only do so much in the gym, so preparing his body to perform early in the morning meant convincing those around him to adjust their schedules accordingly.
But as anyone who has spent time in fight gyms or around people from the boxing world knows, it’s not always an early-morning crowd. That’s where Edwards’ personalized approach to training camps came in handy, he said.
“I have a small team,” Edwards said. “It’s not really one of those American gyms where there’s like 50 guys, 50 coaches, each doing their own thing and trying to find training partners. I have a solid team around me that, if I need to train at two or three (in the morning), they’ll show up to help me. The camp is built around me.”
According to him, this is exactly the approach that Durmer would recommend to boxers participating in this card who are already based in England. Simply showing up on fight night and winging it, relying on the power of adrenaline to wake up the body and prepare it to perform at the highest athletic level, is “a very bad idea.”
Pimblett, unfazed, insisted that he was not prepared to show up at the gym at four in the morning.
“I don’t think it’ll make a huge difference, because we’ll just get in the cage and fight, you know what I mean?” Pimblett said.
Still, he acknowledged, the timing of the event could be an advantage for the American fighters on the card. “I mean, me, Leon (Edwards), Tom (Aspinall), Molly (McCann), Arnold Allen… We’re all at a disadvantage compared to all the fighters coming in.”
Well, that may not be the case for Edwards. With a title at stake, a little extra preparation could go a long way on Sunday morning in Manchester.
