When Volkan Oezdemir steps into the cage on Saturday, it will be 364 days since his last appearance. While some fighters take time away to work on things after a loss, it wasn’t that at all for “No Time”. Instead, he was going through quite a few new life developments that needed his attention.
“I opened my own gym. Also because my wife was pregnant and the baby came. So we did a lot of stuff on the outside – taking care of life, everything that was happening,” Oezdemir explained. “The baby and everything, being close to family, moving from the house and then opening my own gym – I had a lot of stuff happening.”
Those things are not a distraction though. Instead, he took the time away so that when he was ready to fight again, he could put all of his time and effort into just that. Now that he’s back in fighting camp for UFC Qatar, he’s right where he needs to be.
“Of course, it was good, but now everything was finished. I went back to the real training mode, training regime and focusing on the fighting itself,” he said. “I’ve been entering camp, looking for our next fight and being back in shape and ready to win my next fight.”
His new gym has turned out to be quite an asset for a training camp. Not only does he have all the space he needs to get his training in, but it also allowed him to bring people in to be around him. And that’s not even all he’s been doing to get ready for this fight.
“It was very good because I used that as a leverage also to bring other people close to my home so we can have also like good company around me and high level people coming to my place, which was very good,” Oezdemir explained. “And of course, you also need to be out of your comfort zone. So I keep traveling and going different places and always put yourself in the most difficult situations. So it was a mix of everything, but it’s good to have a little bit of myself in every direction.”
With all of that under his belt, he feels like he’s in the perfect place for Saturday’s fight with Alonzo Menifield. If things are running as smoothly as he believes they are, this should be a quick night.
“I see this as a one round fight,” he said. “This is definitely going to be a banger. I’m going to get my hands raised and it’s going to be like a good old scrap and it’s going to be very good.”
You can catch Oezdemir looking to get out of there quickly as part of the UFC Qatar main card. The fight card begins at 10am EST with the main card kicking off at 1pm EST on ESPN+.
