'We just destroyed ourselves’: 17 years later, Gina Carano returns to a sport transformed
Back then, the goal was simple: Outlast everyone in the room. Now, as she prepares to face Ronda Rousey on Netflix, Carano steps into a world far removed from the one she left behind.
Gina Carano had one key word to describe the difference in MMA training now compared to what she experienced her first time around, back in the mid-2000s, when the sport was still finding its legs. Smarter , Carano told reporters at a recent media event to promote her fight with Ronda Rousey on the MVP MMA event that airs on Netflix this Saturday. That was the word for it.
“Smarter training,” Carano said. “Because we used to go into the gym and just beat the living hell out of each other. Now it's smarter, there's recovery.
It’s just a smarter sport now than when I came up and we just destroyed ourselves. ” Ask just about anyone who experienced life in a working fight gym back in those early days in MMA’s evolution and they’ll tell you she’s right. There was a time when many people believed that the only way to prepare for an MMA fight was to walk through fire in practice day after day.
It was a world of extremes, you might say. Hard sparring sessions that left participants splayed out and unconscious. Conditioning routines that resembled medieval torture techniques.
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