LONDON \u2014 Tom Aspinall has his sights set on the UFC heavyweight championship and he believes his time with another heavyweight champion put him on that path.<\/p>\n
On Saturday, Aspinall \u2014 No. 12 in MMA Fighting\u2019s Global Rankings \u2014 fights No. 7 Alexander Volkov in the UFC London main event. Aspinall is 4-0 in the UFC with four finishes and a win over Volkov would put him at the front of the contenders\u2019 line.<\/p>\n
At Wednesday\u2019s media day, Aspinall spoke about how past training sessions with heavyweight boxing king Tyson Fury took his career to another level.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think Tyson Fury\u2019s helped me the most mentally,\u201d Aspinall said. \u201cObviously, I improved a lot. My skill set improved, my boxing improved, definitely. It brought me a long way skill-wise. But more so mentally. If Tyson Fury ever gets a watch of this, \u2018Thank you.\u2019 I\u2019ve never actually had the chance to thank him for it. He has completely changed my career and the outlook of what I\u2019ve got on combat and fighting.<\/p>\n
\u201cWithout him I wouldn\u2019t be where I am right now because my mentality\u2019s changed completely since I trained with him. It was quite a long time ago now, I was in my early 20s, I wasn\u2019t sure if I wanted to carry on with this sport or box or maybe stop fighting altogether. I didn\u2019t know what I wanted to do and yeah, he just completely changed my whole outlook on everything so I appreciate it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Watch Aspinall\u2019s full media day scrum above in which he also discusses wanting to get the chance to show more of his all-around game, treating Volkov like any other opponent, the UFC bringing in a potential backup for Saturday\u2019s main event, and more.<\/p>\n
Jos\u00e9 Youngs contributed to this report on site.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" LONDON \u2014 Tom Aspinall has his sights set on the UF<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":17314,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10049],"tags":[1098,12884,1023,1206,806,3752,5667,920,860],"class_list":["post-17313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mma-fighting","tag-another","tag-aspinall","tag-believes","tag-championship","tag-heavyweight","tag-london","tag-sights","tag-time","tag-with",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/martialartsclique.com\/ma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/martialartsclique.com\/ma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/martialartsclique.com\/ma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/martialartsclique.com\/ma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/martialartsclique.com\/ma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/martialartsclique.com\/ma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/martialartsclique.com\/ma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/martialartsclique.com\/ma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/martialartsclique.com\/ma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/martialartsclique.com\/ma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}