Issue 124
January 2015
Despite smashing it on the silver screen, Ronda Rousey is focused on one thing in 2015: returning to the Octagon and defending her belt from a horde of hungry challengers waiting to step into the Octagon with her.
If most people were in Ronda Rousey’s shoes they’d be shouting about their accomplishments from the rooftops. After all, it’s not often someone is able to become outstanding in multiple careers while most others require a lifetime to become productive in just one.
Aged just 27, Rousey has already won a bronze medal in the Olympic Games, the Strikeforce women’s bantamweight belt and the UFC women’s bantamweight belt. To cap it all, she’s started to make serious waves in Hollywood.
However, instead of reveling in the present, Rousey is more interested in what’s going to happen next. Despite all the plaudits and awards she’s received over the last few years, while filming The Expendables 3 ‘Rowdy’ began to compare the plot of the movie – she plays one of The Expendables’ new recruits who has replaced the older generation – to her own career.
Though the undefeated 10-0 fight-finishing machine is at the top of her game as the UFC’s standout female fighter and one of its biggest box office draws, she’s already considering how much time she might have left at the top of the pile before the next generation of female fighters stop knocking at her door and start kicking it down.
“The movie really made me start thinking about my own life,” Rousey explains to FO in an exclusive interview. “Like, how am I going to deal with retirement when it gets to be that time? When I can’t fight any more, how will that affect me when I see all these young, hungry kids coming up? It makes you think.”
With thoughts of her expiration date lying heavy on her head, even though her careers in mixed martial arts and acting are firmly on the upswing, it’s tough to imagine how someone with a schedule like Rousey’s is able to fit intense training camps into a life that’s constantly on the move.
She firmly believes her mental strength and refusal to let excuses get in the way of hard training have been the main reasons why she’s the most dominant female fighter on the planet right now.
“How I see it, it’s all about putting in the work and having motivation,” Rousey says. “You have to stay motivated – force yourself to be motivated. I’ve said this before, but to be the best for more than a day or a week you have to be really, really driven to sustain that level, and that’s difficult.
“Honestly, you have to make yourself get up and go train, even when you have every reason and excuse in the world not to. To reach your goals you’ve got to put in the hard work required to get there – and that sounds simple, but it’s not. You have to be persistent and you have to keep that simple idea in mind at all times. You’ve got to put in the hard work required to get there.
“Typically I have two to three workouts a day, and they could include wrestling, striking, boxing, running up sand dunes, grappling, strength and conditioning, judo, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, swimming. And I actually don’t lift any weights at all.
“Every muscle people see on my body is for a task. Whenever I want to be able to do a certain move or action, I put the work in until I can. And to be honest, I’ve never enjoyed weightlifting because there’s no problem solving. With fighting I’m solving a problem, so I don’t think about being tired.”
Her hard-work-pays-off attitude was on show during filming for The Expendables 3. While she played the role of dangerous bouncer Luna, she also began training for her fight with Miesha Tate at UFC 168.
To make things even more difficult, she had to train in a foreign country – away from all the essentials she was used to in terms of nutrition and diet. The battle with the scale can already be as difficult as the battle inside the Octagon, but Rousey was able to keep her normal diet and stay on course for her eventual title victory.
As for her time on set – during which she worked alongside action hero legends like Sly Stallone, Mel Gibson and Arnold Schwarzenegger – Rousey admits she was intimidated by the Hollywood heavyweights at first. However, she’s no shrinking violet and soon settled into the ensemble cast of icons and began to enjoy the experience of working with them. It turns out that such a daunting debut acting experience actually helped to make her a much stronger person.
“Oh man, the cool thing about starting with a movie like The Expendables 3 is that nothing after this can be intimidating,” she says. “It was kind of like how I did the Olympics before I fought for the UFC title.
“With the UFC title, I would try to think, ‘This is nothing compared to the Olympics so I’m going to be alright.’ I could use that to ground myself, and I really feel like The Expendables 3 is my Olympics of movies that I’m doing first. Everything I’m doing after that I can be like, ‘Well, it’s nothing compared to The Expendables 3. I’m going to be alright.’
“It was a great way to start, and it makes the whole movie world a little less scary and intimidating to me – but I’m very hard to scare and intimidate anyway. That movie makes every other movie feel so much more attainable. I think that movie is one of the most difficult to do right off the bat – and luckily all the guys were great, so I could look to them. And it helped that we were training for weeks to do some of the stunts, it wasn’t a CGI-fest.”
The lure of more movie roles is attractive, but Rousey’s career outside the cage has been put on hold for now. There’s one thing that has to take priority – keeping the eight pounds of gold that’s such an attractive accessory for her shoulder.
“I’ve got a lot of very important choices and decisions and options and all kinds of things that I’m not really spending any of my time or energy on right now,” she said. “Those opportunities only exist because I’m the UFC champion, so I need to protect the thing that allows me to do what I do. That’s the only thing that’s on my mind for 2015.”
Rousey’s first challenge is arguably the toughest test of her fighting career to date. A fight with fellow undefeated women’s bantamweight Cat Zingano is set for February 28th in Los Angeles.
The two were originally set to coach opposite one another on TUF 18 and fight at last year’s blockbuster UFC 168 event. However, a knee injury suffered by ‘Alpha’ kept the two from locking horns. More than a year later, Zingano finally returned to reestablish herself as the number-one contender and now she’s finally ready for a crack at the belt at UFC 184.
It’s a fight the champion has wanted for a while. She even met Zingano while she was recovering and promised her that she would get the opportunity when she was healed up. Rousey said she’d earned it. She even thinks her challenger could be the opponent who finally takes her into the deep waters of the championship rounds for the first time in her flawless career. However, Rousey is still unwavering in her conviction that she will hand the 32-year-old her first loss.
“I prepare for it to be a long fight. I just need an opponent to push me to that,” said Rousey. “Cat could be that person, but regardless of whether it’s a long fight or a short one I’m still winning.”
At this point in Rousey’s life, it looks like she’s developed the Midas touch for each of her chosen career paths. However, there’s one thing Rousey insists she’s won’t do: she’ll never take her current situation for granted.
She knows that even though her rise to the top has been meteoric, her descent to the bottom could be just as quick. With that in mind, Rousey hopes to continue to grow as a fighter and as an actress, breaking boundaries for the other female athletes who want to follow in her footsteps.
It’s a tough job being the best in the world at what you do,a pioneer and an icon, but Miss Rousey wouldn’t have it any other way.
THE EXPENDABLE LIFE
Professional athletes transitioning into the world of Hollywood action movies is nothing new, though there aren’t many who have done it quite like Ronda Rousey. Luckily for the UFC champion, she says, the role she had in The Expendables 3 was tailor made for her skill-set.
“I was ridiculously excited to even be considered for this because I hold Sylvester Stallone in such high regard,” she says. “I’m such a huge fan of his and I want to be an action movie star. “I believe I am the most dangerous unarmed woman on the planet, and that’s who I’m playing in the movie, so it was just awesome for me. It’s a role I’ve been filling for a decade and a half already.
“I’m usually the one tomboy chick and I always have been. They cut my hair short and called me Ronny when I was six. I was pretty much functioning as a boy until I hit puberty so I felt pretty at home!”
