Miesha Tate’s last fight against Lauren Murphy went so badly that it led to a lot of people suggesting that it was time for the former bantamweight champion to retire, but it seems that she’s not ready to hang her gloves up just yet.
Instead, Tate has revealed that she plans to keep fighting and is going to see a sports psychologist after coming to the conclusion that it’s her mind that’s holding her back from performing at the level she believes she is capable of.
“I’m at a very great point in my life,” Tate said on her Sirius XM radio show. “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.”
“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 continued. “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.”
It certainly seems as if something has to change as Tate really did look a shadow of her former self in the Octagon against Murphy in her flyweight debut.
On that note, Tate has also suggested that she might move back to bantamweight for her next fight.
“I definitely need to take some time to figure it out,” Tate said. “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.”
