JRE MMA Show #138 with Cory Sandhagen

Cory Sandhagen (0:14)

I'm good.

Joe Rogan (0:14)

You're on top of the world right now, dude.

Cory Sandhagen (0:16)

I'm a pretty happy guy right now.

Joe Rogan (0:18)

What a fight that was, what a fight. That was, in my opinion, one of the most technical and one of the finest performances in that division. That 135-pound division, to have a guy like you and Marlon go after it like that, that was a fucking great fight.

Cory Sandhagen (0:36)

Thank you.

Joe Rogan (0:37)

Really great fight. And you're on top of it right now, man. It's really exciting to watch.

Cory Sandhagen (0:42)

Yeah, I'm getting pretty good, you know?

Joe Rogan (0:45)

Yeah, for real.

Cory Sandhagen (0:46)

I've really been just plugging up some holes, figuring some stuff out. I feel like I'm at the part in the martial arts journey where I've gotten really good at being a really good learner. Like, I can learn super fast and super efficiently now.

And it's like big time paying off. Like, not only that, but I also, the space I was in before that Cheeto fight was unlike one that I feel like I've ever been in in my life.

Joe Rogan (1:15)

How so?

Cory Sandhagen (1:16)

You know, have you read like a decent amount of sports psych books?

Joe Rogan (1:20)

Yes.

Cory Sandhagen (1:20)

Where they'll sometimes talk about how you're almost having this out of body experience where you're almost like floating above the court or the field or whatever. It was almost like that, except I wouldn't use the word like floating above. But I got to a space in that fight where I felt like all of the thoughts and all of the distracting things that sometimes happen in a fight were completely ignored. And this like higher being, better version, like best no thinker, just actor was running the show. Like it's almost like I was watching the thing happen while I was in the fight. And there would be bits of me hopping in and being like, hey, throw this combination. Hey, take a little bit more of a risk. Hey, do this. And then that would get completely just watched.

And this whoever was fighting that night that didn't even feel like me was the person that was fighting. It was fucking cool, man.

Joe Rogan (2:14)

Wow.

Cory Sandhagen (2:15)

It was cool, dude. It was like, you know, like a psychedelic experience feeling type of thing. It was cool.

Joe Rogan (2:24)

What do you attribute that to? How did you get to that mindset?

Cory Sandhagen (2:28)

It's a lot of, you know, messing stuff up. Like, I remember the last time I was on was right after I had beaten Frankie. And I was in, it's just a bunch of different parts of the journey. And in that part of the journey, I was really in this space where if I could make myself more war, if I could make myself more angry, if I could make myself be up here, I would have success. That kind of stopped working a little bit after, like around the TJ fight, and then kind of during the Yawn fight. And then definitely I tried to be that guy against Song. And it was like too much of a distracting feeling where now my mindset's going into the last fight because it was such like a distracting feeling, just feeling like I have to get myself to a point of anger or upness before a fight where it just became distracting, where it was helpful before it became distracting in that song fight. I bailed on that, and I just tried to be as mindful and as present as I possibly could.

For like, and I know that those are like kind of corny words now, but there is some real substance to them when they're like really done well. And I would say maybe about six weeks before the fight, I had this moment where I was sitting on the couch because I put a lot of pressure on myself and I want to be a world champ real bad.

Where I was to the point where I wasn't enjoying any part of the camp, any part of the experience of fighting or anything.

And I was sitting on the couch and I just like, I think I was crying a little bit. And I was like, I can't fucking do this for the next five years of my life. You know, like I can't do this for the rest of my career. And I was like, well, what's got to change? And I was like, I got to lose, I got to take this pressure off of me. And I got to start enjoying every day a lot more than I am right now. And from that, like six weeks before the fight, I started doing that. And I really think that that carried into the fight and it made me be a lot less tense, a lot less tight. And it made me be able to fight with just like a completely free way of being.