UFC heavyweight contender Tom Aspinall is reflecting on his injury and how it has changed his outlook on his career.
Tom Aspinall was on the cusp of his first UFC title fight when he injured his leg inside the Octagon. Over the past few years, Aspinall was quickly rising up the UFC heavyweight rankings and has become one of the biggest stars in the UK. He headlined both UFC London cards in 2022 and everything seemed to be going his way until his main event fight against Curtis Blaydes.
In the main event of the second UFC London card of the year, Aspinall injured his leg in the opening round of his fight. The bout was called a TKO win for Blaydes and would be the first loss of Aspinall’s UFC career. He has had to take time off, undergo surgery and change his mindest since the torn MCL.
Tom Aspinall is using his time off from fighting to change his outlook on his career
Aspinall’s rise to fame in the UFC has not been an easy one. Although he has been winning and fighting in big fights, when it all came crashing down he realized that things had to change. He spoke about this on The Believe You Me Podcast.
“The reason I’ve been keeping a pretty low profile when it comes to like media and stuff, I just wanted a rest from everything. Two back-to-back main events and obviously, you get a lot of haters out there when things like this happen,” he said. “And I was not in the mood, I was not in the mind space for anything like that because the second that I was laying on my back in the O2 Arena everything changed. Everything changed. I just built up so long for that fight, I was making so many mistakes outside the Octagon as well as you know, in my training and stuff like that. And I felt like as soon as that happened, I just had a completely separate mindset to everything before and I’m going to come back with a completely new outlook on everything.”
Aspinall is on the mend and could be returning next year. In the meantime, the UFC heavyweight division is sort of up in the air. It seems Jon Jones might be fighting for the title against either Francis Ngannou or Curtis Blaydes in the first half of the year. As for Aspinall, he will be taking a much more mindful approach to his career going forward.
“It’s been like a really fast ride,” he said. “I went from people essentially not really knowing who I am and not really giving a sh-t to main event back -to-back. That’s fu-king big man. It’s been a lot mentally as well as physically and I feel like somewhere I just got lost along the way. I felt like I had to say, yeah, a lot of the time when I wanted to say no, a lot of people I got involved with shouldn’t have been involved, ended up agreeing to things that I didn’t really want to do. I felt like I was burnt out a lot mentally as well as physically and I’ve been really active and I feel like that takes a lot out of you mentally as well as physically.”
Aspinall has posted photos of himself in the gym and appears to be on the mend. He is still ranked sixth in the division despite the time off. He plans on making a change and doing things his own way going forward.
