Tom Aspinall is leaving no stone unturned ahead of his interim heavyweight title defense against Curtis Blaydes on July 27 in Manchester at UFC 304.
For a native Englishman like Aspinall, that includes taking things back to his roots.
“You ever see the documentary Knuckle? You familiar with that? It’s a documentary about travelers, traveling communities in the UK island. And there’s a guy on there, big Joe Joyce, an old traveling legend, and big Joe Joyce reveals a few gypsy methods for getting ready for a fight,” Aspinall said Monday on The MMA Hour. “I wanted to resort back to a bit of gypsy heritage that I’ve got, so I thought, right, what I’m going to do is I’m going to make a little ring out of hay bales.
“When it gets to about 4 a.m., I get my alarm on, I go outside, do a bit shadowboxing in the hay bales — and then I do the old traveler method of dipping your knuckles in petrol for about 20 minutes as the sun’s coming up, and that hardens your knuckles.”
The 2011 film Knuckle delves into the world of Irish Traveller bare-knuckle boxing. The Joyces are one of the families most featured in the documentary, and a clip of Joe Joyce extolling the virtues of soaking his knuckles in petrol to harden them has since gone viral.
Aspinall, 31, said he is hitting that same old-school routine nearly every day ahead of his rematch against Blaydes. He’s serious about the preparation and the petrol is not a joke.
“These are some of the hardest knuckles in the UFC right here right now,” Aspinall said. “They’re like rocks.”
Aspinall said his 4 a.m. wake-ups are also part of his preparation for fight night. Though UFC 304 takes place in his native England, the timing surrounding the event is configured to fit around a North American broadcast schedule, meaning Aspinall will likely make his walk to the cage against Blaydes deep into the early morning in Manchester.
Outside of his morning work around the hay bales and “just getting my body used to being alert at 4 a.m,” Aspinall said he hasn’t given too much attention to the early start time.
“Look mate, if you can fight really well at 12 o’clock midnight, but you can’t fight really well at 4 a.m., you weren’t that [good] in the first place, in my opinion,” Aspinall said. “Like, there’s plenty of times that I’ve traveled across the world, fought in different time zones without even adjusting myself. And now I’ve had a full training camp at home, I’m right there ready to fight, so if that’s an excuse, mate, you’re not that good in the first place.”
“I spar at about 10 a.m. once a week, twice a week usually on a weekday,” he continued. “I have never thought — it never even crossed my mind to think, like, ‘Right, I’m going to start sparring at midnight just to get my body ready for it.’ Never. Never crossed my mind in like 30-plus fights or however many fights I have. And all the times I’ve got on a plane and traveled somewhere, it’s never bothered me about the time difference. Why should it start now? But saying that, I am preparing myself for it. I am waking up, I am doing the shadowboxing, I am taking it very seriously.”
Early morning or not, UFC 304 remains a seismic opportunity for Aspinall.
The English big man grew up a stone’s throw from the site of the new arena that hosts the card, Manchester’s Co-op Live. He also gets a chance to avenge his only UFC loss. Aspinall is a perfect 7-0 in his UFC career aside from his 2022 blemish against Blaydes, which ended in anticlimactic fashion after Aspinall suffered a knee injury just 15 seconds into the bout.
“This is this is a massive fight for me, both professionally and personally,” Aspinall said.
“When I got into the sport of MMA, which is quite a fair portion of my life ago now, this is why I got into it. All of this. There’s a lot of people out there trying to get to their dreams and get to their goals in life. This is the goal. This is the dream. This is it. In two weeks’ time, this is the dream — defending a UFC heavyweight title in my home city of Manchester in front of 25,000 Manchester fans is something that, probably half a percentage of the world gets to live the dream on this level. And I’m not talking about just fighting; I’m just talking about people with dreams and goals in general. No matter what happens on that day, I did it and I experienced it, and my whole life’s been leading up to this point.”
