How much can lowering pre-fight stress help Joseph Benavidez in title-fight rematch?

After his split-decision loss to UFC flyweight champ Demetrious Johnson at UFC 152, you could say Joseph Benavidez was in a little bit of a funk. Who could blame him?

I remember calling him a week or two after that fight to get a quote on some unrelated topic and listening to him explain how he’d gone from a three-training-sessions-a-day madman to shut-in who wanted to do nothing except stay home and sleep all day.

“You know that feeling where you wake up and you just want to go back to bed?” Benavidez said then.

And yeah, I know that feeling. I think everybody does.

But now that he’s got a second chance at the UFC flyweight title thanks to his rematch with Johnson (18-2-1 MMA, 6-1-1 UFC) at UFC of FOX 9 in Sacramento tonight, Benavidez (19-3 MMA, 6-1 UFC) insists he’s figured out where he went wrong. Now he knows the secret, he said in a recent phone interview. It’s all in how you think about it.

“Right now I’m happy about it,” Benavidez told MMAjunkie. “I’m happy with life, happy about the fight, and just excited for it. Last time I was obsessed about it. I don’t really know why I did that, but I just couldn’t help it. I’ve never felt like that before. I fought for the [WEC bantamweight] title against [Dominick] Cruz, and it wasn’t like that. It was just another fight. But this, I got so emotional and obsessed with that fight.”
The thing is though, how could you not be obsessed? Consider the magnitude of the opportunity. Being a UFC champion brings better pay, greater visibility, more respect, basically all the things fighters claim to want.

If you never wear the strap, that means you spend your whole career as a contender, hoping and waiting and never quite getting there. As Chael Sonnen likes to say, if you never become champion, then you don’t really retire – “you just quit.”

It’s got to be especially tough for Benavidez since this is his second crack at the UFC belt. If he goes 0-2 against Johnson, and if Johnson holds onto the title for the foreseeable future, this could very well be his last, best chance to become a UFC champ. Now that’s pressure.

But to hear Benavidez tell it, he actually feels far less pressure for this fight than he did for the first one, in part because now he knows exactly how bad it can get.

“Now it’s way easier, just because I’m never going to build anything up to be as colossal as that fight was to me,” Benavidez said. “Once I built that up and I didn’t win, that was the worst thing that could happen, according to how I’d built it up in my mind. I thought my life was over. I counted on that title and that win happening so much, and for it not to happen was devastating. At the same time, it was alright. I realized that later. I was with my family the day after, my girlfriend, my friends. Everyone still loved me. I had a good life, and I was doing what I loved for a living. That put it in perspective.”

So is it helpful to tell yourself that a title fight, even if it might be the last one you ever get, is no big deal? Better yet, is it even possible to believe it?

According to Dr. Ted Butryn, a professor of sport sociology and sport psychology at San Jose State University, a lot depends on the individual fighter. Butryn interviewed plenty of them for a study on the stressors MMA fighters face and the coping mechanisms they employ, and what he found is that different fighters react differently to pre-fight “arousal,” which he stressed was different from “anxiety, which we think of as negative.”

Arousal refers more to the excitement, good or bad, that fighters experience leading up to the fight. Some thrive on it. Others can hurt their own performance just by thinking about it too much and hyping its importance in their own minds.

“Some, due to personality, complexity of their skill set, type of opponent, and a number of factors, might have to remain really low-key to prevent becoming really anxious,” Butryn said. “Others can tolerate higher levels of arousal, and in fact might actually perform better if they are in a state that, for other fighters, would cause them to freak out. In the research it is called finding the ‘Individual Zone of Optimal Functioning.’”

According to Butryn, things can change depending on the type of bout a fighter is anticipating. If it’s going to be an emotional, not-so-technical brawl, a high level of arousal might help. If it’s more likely to be a clash of technical striking and high-level groundwork, maybe not. It also explains why different sports require different levels of arousal.

“In football, if you are a nose tackle and just have a goal of smashing whoever is in front of you, [that's a] high level of arousal,” Butryn said. “If you are putting on the 18th green in the Masters, where you are using small muscle movements in front of the world, most would tolerate much less.”

For Benavidez, the key seems to be to keep his levels low, to deescalate the tension and the stress that comes naturally with any fight broadcast live on network TV. At least, that’s what he’s telling himself heading into this one. It also helps that he’s already seen what happens when he tries the opposite approach.

“That was the worst thing that could happen there and I went through it, so now what’s the worst that could happen?” Benavidez said. “How bad could it be? Now it feels like Demetrious is just a dude and this is just another fight.”

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