Newly crowned UFC interim heavyweight champion Tom Aspinall has revealed that he suffered a back injury in the run-up to his fight with Sergey Pavlovich.
The pair went head-to-head for the interim heavyweight title in the co-main event of UFC 295 and it was Aspinall who emerged victorious with a first round knockout.
Considering Aspinall had very little preparation time after accepting the fight on two weeks notice, his performance and manner of victory was an impressive one, but now it turns out that the British fighter had to deal with an injury which had huge consequences for his training camp.
"I actually pulled my back and didn’t really train at all,” Aspinall told the ESPN's Laura Sanko.
“So I injured it on the first week after I found out about the fight. I’ve not been able to train for, like, the last week and a half. I didn’t have any training camp.
"I had about, like, five days of training camp. I didn’t have a visa. I was unsure if I could get here. It was just the wildest two weeks ever. Everything was just going wrong.”
All that chaos in the build-up however was worth it for Aspinall who became the third British fighter from the UK to win a UFC title after Michael Bisping and current UFC welterweight champion Leon Edwards.