Since being stopped by Thiago Santos in October 2017, Jack Hermansson has found career-best form, winning four straight and achieving a top 5 ranking as well.
The success is no mystery to ‘The Joker’ either, pointing to a clear adjustment that he made following that aforementioned stoppage defeat. When asked about key individual fights by Fightful’s Harry Kettle, Hermansson didn’t hesitate, “that was the (Thiago) Santos fight for sure, my last loss that I had. That’s the fight where I did some things to turn things around,” Hermansson said.
“I was analyzing myself, why did I lose this fight? What can I do for that not to happen in the future and I got myself a mental coach. I started to talk with him and my question was ‘what is it that Georges St Pierre, what has he done different from everybody else?’ In a sport where it’s about inches you know? Just one hit on the chin and it can be over. What has he done to be able to defend the belt so many times without failure?
That’s my question and my mental coach, he told me that, ‘well, the only thing you can think about is the things that you can control, that you can do better. Let’s see what that is.’ We then basically just scanned my whole life, everything that I do and we then started picking and fixing things. That’s been helping me getting more mentally prepared, more physically prepared for everything. I think that’s what you see right now: the result.”
However, while the adjustment has helped Hermansson, he’s aware that not every mental coach will truly help the world’s best fighters. “The thing is that in the mental coach business, there’s a lot of freaky stuff. I think it’s really important to find the right one that can help you because there’s some weird stuff there as well. I’m not into all of it but I think it’s important to find the right one and you’ll have a lot of help from it.”
Regardless of the reason why, Jack Hermansson has certainly been thriving as of late and after beating ‘Jacare,’ a title fight feels in touching distance too.
Check out the video above to see Hermansson’s full interview with Fightful.
