After Tate lost to Murphy by unanimous decision in her flyweight debut earlier this month, there were concerns about her future.
Since coming out of a five-year retirement almost in 2021, the former UFC women’s bantamweight champion has lost two of her three fights, and detractors claimed the most recent loss demonstrated her limitations.
Tate (19-9 MMA, 6-6 UFC) has made no secret of her goal to hold the UFC championship again, and she is confident that better times are yet to come. Tate acknowledges that something is still missing, though.
“I’m at a very great point in my life,” Tate said on her Sirius XM radio show. “Not like Chapter One. Chapter One was kind of toxic and a lot of turmoil and (fighting) was like my outlet and my identity. It’s none of those things for me anymore, so as I continue to evolve – and life is great. It’s very kush and I have everything that I need.
I don’t need to fight. I just want to, I want to do better than I did this time, so I’m not going to give up. But this is a whole new challenge. I just need to get my mindset a little bit more gritty, a little bit more right, a little bit more – ‘I’ve got to have it.’ Not just there to have fun. Like, ‘I’ve got to have it.’ I just don’t feel like I hit the nail on the head with that this time.”
“We’ll see. I need a little time to regroup” – Miesha Tate
Tate, 35, believes she has the answers to the octagon’s possible lack of grit. She plans to see a sports psychologist improve her mental preparation, which should help her perform better on fight night.
“As soon as I get a good sports physiologist and start to unravel or figure out how to channel, I think I’ll have more idea,” Tate said. “I don’t know how long it takes. It might be a really simple fix. The performance ,my physical ability, the shape that I’m in, the way I train, the skillset that I have, is all there. I just have to put it in the right place at the right time.”
Tate’s homecoming date is not the only unknown aspect of her destiny. She acknowledges that the first cut down to the 125-pound class was challenging and that the bout got postponed two weeks because Murphy contracting COVID-19 made things even more challenging.
Tate claimed that as a result, she is considering whether another weight loss will produce better outcomes.
“I definitely need to take some time to figure it out,” Tate said. “It was a really long camp, it got draw out two times. I don’t know if I’m going to stay at 125 or just go back to 135 where I can enjoy. The diet, for that long, made me want to blow my brains out. It was terrible. I think I might stay at 135. I don’t know. We’ll see. I need a little time to regroup and see where I go from it.”
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