UFC heavyweight champion Tom Aspinall has already undergone one eye surgery and will have another one later in January as attempts to recover from the double eye-poke he suffered against Ciryl Gane in October, and speaking from experience Michael Bisping has urged him not to return to fighting too quickly afterwards.

“The one thing you can’t do with an eye is rush back,” Bisping said on his podcast. “That is the one big lesson that I learned. Because I did that. I rushed back too soon. I rushed back to sparring. I rushed back to competition and I never saw out of that eye again.

“So Tom has got to take his time. If he’s having surgery, he’s definitely going to be out for at least a few months.”

Bisping also backed up his fellow color commentator Joe Rogan, who has expressed his concern regarding the possibility that Aspinall’s surgeries might not be successful.

“It will probably just be a minor thing like a realignment of the tendons but things can go wrong,” Bisping said. “Joe [Rogan] is absolutely correct, 100 percent, when he says things can go wrong.

“My retina was reattached after it was detached against Vitor Belfort and then it re-detached and then they fixed it again and then I got glaucoma. Because once you start messing around with the eyes, in fact just like any part of your body, once you start going in and messing around with it, it’s never the same again. It’s never quite as strong and things can go wrong.”

Meanwhile, Some people have been surprisingly critical of Aspinal despite his injuries, believing that the star wanted a way out of the fight with Gane, but Bisping strongly disagrees that was the case.

“Some people out there, they don’t know what they’re talking about,” Bisping stated. “This is the heavyweight champion of the world. He’s not a duck. He’s not trying to get out of a fight. He wants to come back and kick Ciryl Gane’s ass. He put that in a tweet recently. The man’s pissed off and I can’t wait for the comeback.”