Yair Rodriguez suffered his first defeat in the UFC when he suffered a second round TKO loss to former UFC Lightweight Champion Frankie Edgar at UFC 211.
The TUF Latin America champion says that at UFC 211, all of his worst fears came true.
“All my fears came true that day because I lost,” Rodriguez said to BJPenn.com. “It was the most important fight of my career, because I knew that fight was enough to put me right there for a title shot. So now that I went through that stuff, I look back and I see all the things that I’ve been through, and I notice some changes in my attitude and my training that I didn’t notice at the time, and nobody told me [about]. I thought that it was good, and I kept on going like that. It’s not a bad thing, it’s not like I stopped training or anything like that. I was actually going harder than normal. I just centered myself on being a fighter, on being an animal, and I totally lost energy. I forgot about everything else. I let small things bother me all the time.”
Rodriguez now has a 6-1-0 record under the UFC banner, which includes a win over former two division champion BJ Penn.
In the end, the TUF Latin America Champion is chalking the whole thing up to experience.
“You get experience, going through all this process,” he continued. “Now that I’ve learned from it, I think I’ll be good after it. I think I’m going to come back stronger. Things have changed a lot from that fight. I think it was something good.”
When Rodriguez dropped the fight to Edgar, it was the first time he suffered a defeat in almost five years.
