MONTREAL — Very few people know Georges St-Pierre as a fighter better than John Danaher. So when the UFC welterweight champion’s longtime jiu-jitsu coach says he sees a “young, fresh-faced Georges St-Pierre” again, that’s a good sign.
But he also said it wasn’t easy for him to get back to this stage.
Of course there would be challenges for a fighter who suffered an ACL injury last December and then underwent surgery that sidelined him for more than half a year without him being able to train MMA.
But as a result of the time away, when St-Pierre had finally done the necessary rehab for his injury and was ready to get into his normal training mode, he started his fight camp for Saturday’s UFC 154 championship fight against interim belt-holder Carlos Condit at what Danaher calls “point zero.”
What is point zero?
“A year of almost no physical fight training, which is nothing more than rehabilitation,” Danaher said. “You’re talking about an elite combat athlete who hasn’t done any combat sport for one year. Nothing other than physical rehabilitation, which of course doesn’t count as combat training.
“We started fight camp at the lowest point he’s ever been at in his career. Those early weeks were tough. I’m not going to lie to you, they were very, very hard indeed. He showed tremendous mental toughness, worked through a difficult four-week patch and then in the last four weeks he turned it up and now he looks like the Georges St-Pierre people expect.”
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Danaher, who has been working with the fighter for about a decade, described a little bit about the specifics in getting St-Pierre back to 100 per cent — or, as GSP said on Wednesday, “120 per cent.”
“Initially there were straightforward physical adjustments. You’ve got a torn ACL and obviously movement is difficult. In general when you have bad knees, movement on the ground particularly when you’re on your back is relatively easy — you can come back first with movements on the ground when you’re working on your back — so when Georges first started training again, our primary emphasis was on his bottom position on the ground,” Danaher said. “As he started to regain his physical prowess then it was more to top position on the ground and then back to standing position. Standing wrestling, his boxing, his kickboxing, etc, etc.”
Leading into Saturday’s UFC 154 main event, St-Pierre has admitted to having lost his passion for the sport. Danaher, who has naturally spent a lot of time with St-Pierre over the past 10 years and as such knows his routines fairly intimately, is able to offer his own first-hand perspective of what he saw from the champ as he prepared for fights.
Danaher said that indeed there was an element of burnout, but it was more toward the end of his fight camps.
“Put it this way: Georges loves to train. One of the happiest people you’ve ever seen in your life is Georges St-Pierre training when there’s not a fight coming up. He loves to experiment, he loves to learn. He’s one of those guys who will be training when he’s 60 years old,” Danaher said. “But what I felt was as fights got closer, that joy and learning was replaced by the drudgery of competition, of expectations that people had for him, of the pressures of the crowd, etc.
“You would see in the last two weeks there was a fading in enthusiasm. So it was kind of difficult to live up to people’s expectations. I don’t see that this time. I see a young, fresh-faced Georges St-Pierre that I would see years ago.”
Of course, this is just his return fight and he’s quite aware that if they’re not careful, they could find themselves in a similar situation down the road. So as much as St-Pierre has made adjustments in his training, so have he and his other coaches.
“We’re learning as coaches as much as Georges is learning as an athlete. We’re starting to go towards peaking Georges later in the fight camp. So that we don’t bring him to a peak and hold him for extended periods of time, where there’s a danger of burnout. We’re starting to learn the idea of timing the peak correctly, so that it builds to a crescendo and then immediately (he) goes out and fights.”
On Saturday, we’ll see if he’s peaking at the right time or not. But either way, it appears he’s no longer burned out.
