Former women’s bantamweight champion Miesha Tate‘s time as a flyweight may have been short-lived.
Tate made her flyweight debut at UFC on ABC 3 on July 16 with aspirations of making a run at a second UFC divisional title. She took on Lauren Murphy and suffered a unanimous decision loss. The defeat and weight cut has Tate considering moving right back to the 135-pound division.
“I definitely need to take some time to figure it out,” Tate said during her Sirius XM radio show. “It was a really long camp, it got draw out two times. I don’t know if I’m going to stay at 125 or just go back to 135 where I can enjoy. The diet, for that long, made me want to blow my brains out. It was terrible. I think I might stay at 135. I don’t know. We’ll see. I need a little time to regroup and see where I go from it.”
Tate doesn’t need to fight at this point in her life. She’s living comfortably, but has no plans to retire. The 35-year old wants to regroup, reassess, make changes and continue to compete.
“I’m at a very great point in my life,” Tate said. “Not like Chapter One. Chapter One was kind of toxic and a lot of turmoil and (fighting) was like my outlet and my identity. It’s none of those things for me anymore, so as I continue to evolve – and life is great. It’s very kush and I have everything that I need. I don’t need to fight. I just want to. I want to do better than I did this time, so I’m not going to give up. But this is a whole new challenge. I just need to get my mindset a little bit more gritty, a little bit more right, a little bit more – ‘I’ve got to have it.’ Not just there to have fun. Like, ‘I’ve got to have it.’ I just don’t feel like I hit the nail on the head with that this time.”
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To get her mindset ‘more gritty,’ Tate plans to seek out a sports psychologist. Not knowing the process of sports therapy, Tate was unsure when she’ll return to the octagon.
“As soon as I get a good sports physiologist and start to unravel or figure out how to channel, I think I’ll have more idea,” Tate said. “I don’t know how long it takes. It might be a really simple fix. The performance ,my physical ability, the shape that I’m in, the way I train, the skillset that I have, is all there. I just have to put it in the right place at the right time.”