Chris Leben “Yeah, I’m flat-out broke right now”

Source: MMAMania

Brian Hemminger (MMAmania.com): Are you going to be taking a different approach to the weight cutting process? After the Brian Stann weigh-in you had the issue with the candy and then obviously, the craziness before the Mark Munoz fight affected your performance as well.

Chris Leben: I don’t know what it is, man. I learn my lessons hard I guess. Definitely I’m a little bit a creature of excess. Every day is excess and that’s always been my mantra. The nice thing about this Chris Leben 2.0 as you were saying is now health is my obsession. I’m already substantially lighter than I normally am.

Most people that I run into that knew me from before say, “Hey, you look like you’re 2-3 weeks out from a fight right now.” That’s good. My weight is about 212 and I’m not up at 220 or 230 which is where I get sometimes when I’m 2-3 months out. We’re gonna continue to tighten it up from here. My plan is I want to come in and show up to Vegas at no more than 200 pounds.

Brian Hemminger (MMAmania.com): You train a ton, that’s pretty much all you’ve been doing the last several months. You train and you teach. You’ve mentioned that you’re boring now. Is there any concern that you’re training too much, perhaps overtraining?

Chris Leben: There is, definitely. I’ve had to remind myself, “Hey Chris, you’ve got three months until this fight.” I’ve had this talk numerous times already with my coach with him reminding me, “Hey, you’ve got plenty of time. You need to slow down a bit.” Again, I think that’s just my personality of everything in excess and there’s somewhat a bit of anxiety and nervous energy that I have going on right now and training is what helps me alleviate some of that. Absolutely but looking at it, if you’re gonna be guilty of one or the other, overtraining or undertraining, I think overtraining is the way to go.

Brian Hemminger (MMAmania.com): In your chat with Ariel Helwani earlier this year, you mentioned that you experienced some financial difficulties following the Mark Munoz fight. Have you taken any life lessons from going through that?

Chris Leben: (laughs) Yeah, I’m flat-out broke right now. Being broke sucks. It’s probably one of my biggest things where I just feel terrible. I feel terrible for having put my wife through so much and all because of the poor decisions that I’ve made. The year’s been hard. The year’s been a struggle. The only thing I can say is it’s already happened. It’s water under the bridge. The only thing I can do now is try to make sure it never happens again in the future and prepare for the future now.

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