Why Rashad Evans Started Twisting His Nipples Before Fights

He's very, very keenly aware of the mental battles that are going on and how much visualization is important and meditating. Lamy Basem. Lamy Basem, yeah. Guy was a competitive target shooter and he spent more time practicing in his head than he did practicing. Wow. More time visualizing. That works. That really does work. It does something. Like I said, when I was hurt for the rampage fight in training camp, I would visualize a lot. How would you do it? I would just sit there and I would just kind of like, I would go through moves in my mind and I would go through techniques and I would just kind of go over and over again to techniques in my mind. I would also do scenarios where I fight in almost every single situation. Like I find myself losing and then finding a way to come back after I've been rocked and just trying to find myself just mentally working through it. Mentally working a lot through it. Almost every single fight, like I'll go round by round. Really? Yeah, I'll go round by round and I'll just like, okay, I'll set up the scenario. Okay, I'll come out and I catch him with a punch. Then I'm just imagining what happens after that. Then I put myself in adversity every single time I can, as much as I can. So then that way I find myself always, I get myself out of adversity. I just find myself just smoking them. But it's always these different mental games and me just doing something to executing and always just doing it right. So it's almost like you were fighting without having to fight. You were getting the experience of fighting in your head by just visualizing it. Would you set a certain amount of time that you would do it? No, I would just go with the flow. You know, I had my wrestling coach in college, Tom Minko, he was always on, like I get nervous I get nervous, I don't know what to do with the nervousness. And he says, well, he says you're nervous because you're thinking too much about it. He said, just think about executing. Don't think about the outcome. Just think about executing your technique and just only think about executing your technique and how it feels to complete the perfect execution of a technique. When you hit the pad and it hits that and it sounds that, you know, they hear that pop, you know, how does that feel? You know, become attached to how you feel when you execute something. And then that's what you start to base your fight off of, you know, how you feel when you execute versus all the things that can happen if something goes wrong. Yeah, it's really interesting to see the different strategies that people employ in order to like focus the mind. You know, so many different fighters have different ways of doing it. Some fighters like to meditate. Some fighters like to shadow box their way through scenarios, almost like they they they're thinking about how the fight's going to go down while they're like slow motion doing things. Yeah, I would I would get in a mirror sometimes I'll yell in a mirror. I like yell up and feel like, come on. Like I would I would I would just you know, I would I would get into it because a lot of times I would get so nervous that I would be like, oh my God, I just don't want to freeze out there. I just don't freeze, you know. So I would like that's that's part of the reason why I started twisting my nipples. Like I go out there and I twist my nipples before the fight. And that was just to kind of do something stupid and silly. Right. But then it would allow me to just kind of relax. So I'm like, well, I'm not going to embarrass myself any worse than that. That's funny. I always I remember always wanting to ask you about that. Why do you guys do that? I was just do it just like, you know, I'm not embarrassed myself worse than that. Did George used to do that shit too? George would do it. Yeah, George George would do it because you know, he I don't know. I think he didn't like the way his nipples look when he first came out the shirt. I think that's a funny thing. A little puffier stuff. I didn't like that. That's funny. Some people don't like puffy nipples. Man, pull a lot of them and yank on shit. Yeah. Nipples on guys are weird things anyway. I know. You know, it looks even worse. Yeah. Well, some dudes have like big aerials. Yeah. And they're real embarrassed. They don't want to take their shirt off. They don't want to take your shirt off with a big area. Well, girl, it doesn't matter at all. But a guy with a big aerial is like, whoa, what's happening here? What's going on there? The titties just hanging out like that. Weird. It's pornographic. It's pornographic. That's what it is. That's for dudes when they get fat. That's a bummer, man. When they develop mantits. Oh my gosh. I know. That's a bummer. And when they don't care, they can slap you with them and stuff like that too. That's terrible. That's terrible. That's terrible. Oh my gosh. I'm just glad I didn't have nothing like that. I did get big, big to have some, some booby weight, but not that dang.