Frank Mir was a documented user of testosterone-replacement therapy prior to its ban from competition nearly one year ago.

Mir hasn’t fought since the ban, and he’s spent much of the past 12 months figuring out how to move his career forward in the absence of TRT.

Mir said he discovered he didn’t really need TRT to maintain athletic after all. He said there were legitimate medical reasons for his use, but also that the prescription for synthetic testosterone was just a way to plug holes for a much greater issue.

“TRT was patchwork – it was putting a Band-Aid on the problem,” Mir told MMAjunkie. “I went to a medical doctor, but I wasn’t searching out TRT. I just purely went to the doctor and said, ‘Hey, I don’t feel good, I have no energy, I’ve got no motivation, I’m kind of depressed. I’m constantly – guys are making jokes that I’m the most injured they’ve ever trained with. Every other day something breaks down on my body. What’s going on?’ Then they’re like, ‘Oh, well this is available.’

“He did the blood work and found low testosterone. Now that they’ve banned it, I look at it and realized that wasn’t really the problem. Improper training and nutrition was the reason; training too hard and excessive twice, three times a day, Monday through Friday. That was what was causing low testosterone. Looking back I realize that was just a symptom of the problem. I was just training improperly.”

Mir has been an active fighter since his debut in June 2001. He was only 21 at the time and had limitless drive and energy, he said. But as he’s grown older, absorbed more damage, sustained more injuries and had to overcome a near career-ending motorcycle accident. Mir’s ability to recover slowed, he said.

It’s natural for athletes to lose an edge over time, but Mir said he wouldn’t listen to his body. He refused to taper back training and pushed through sessions just as physically traumatizing as 14 years ago. TRT made that push a bit easier, he said, but ultimately it was exactly what Mir called it: patchwork.

“It’s like, ‘Oh, you train improperly, but we’ll fix your hormone levels!'” Mir said. “It kind of helped out, but it still wasn’t the solution. The real solution was to train more intelligently, eat healthier, have longer off seasons where you train properly, not just sit on my butt and just wait for the next fight to be scheduled.

“Some guys, I don’t know why, they’re able to train three times a day, hard as hell and just kill their body, then they can come back the next day and not be sore. My body just can’t do that, and I was trying to keep up with other guys who are able to train at such a high intensity. Now I’m with trainers who are very smart about our training. I have days in the week where we go guns blazing and really hard, but the majority of my workouts are to rebuild my body to feel good.

“I still train several times a day, but now my schedule is so sane that I’m not destroying my body. The majority of guys train the other way and I think that’s why you see so many injuries in our sport. People train way too hard in the sport of MMA. I was a victim of that and those were the consequences I was facing.”

The ban of TRT came shortly after Mir had hit arguably the lowest point of his career. The former UFC heavyweight champion suffered his fourth consecutive loss against Alistair Overeem at UFC 169, and questions began to swirl if the 35-year-old’s career had hit its end.

It all came to a head at once. Mir’s losing skid combined with the TRT ban forced him to seriously reconsider his future in the sport. He admits retirement briefly crossed him mind, but said he’s “not satisfied” with his career and has more to accomplish. In light of that thought, he pursued answers to his problems.

One of the answers was a break from the sport, both physically and mentally, he said. Mir’s made 23 UFC appearances since his promotional debut in November 2001. That’s the most of any heavyweight ever, and eventually that fight time weighed a heavy burden.

“Recharging the batteries was a factor, but the main thing was just healing up from injuries in the proper way and giving them the proper time to perform,” Mir said. “Most of my training was limited, not by what I needed to do, but having to train around injuries. I was having multiple surgeries after fights and not really addressing them the way I should have and having a proper off-season. So it was leading to more injuries and really making a strong influence on the way I was fighting. I was having to fight around injuries and not fight because it was the most efficient technique to use.”

Mir (16-9 MMA, 14-9 UFC), who said he’s reinvigorated and well trained for the first time in a long time, returns to competition on Sunday at UFC Fight Night 61. The ex-champ meets Antonio Silva (18-6-1 MMA, 2-3-1 UFC) in the main event of the FOX Sports 1-televised fight card at Gigantinho Gymnasium in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.

Mir enters the contest teetering the cliff of the rare five-fight UFC losing skid. Despite his previous losses to elite competition in Overeem, Josh Barnett, Daniel Cormier and Junior Dos Santos, a victory is necessary for Mir to hold whatever relevance he has left in the heavyweight division.

The losses on his record don’t bother Mir nearly as much as his performances in those contests, he said. He knows every fighter who handed him a defeat could be a UFC champion on any given day, so he takes little shame in the outcomes.

“I didn’t really evaluate the wins and losses because the guys I’m fighting are very good fighters,” Mir said. “Anybody could have come up with losses to those individuals. I wanted to take time off because I realized even in defeat I wasn’t fighting up to the abilities I was capable of. I know I’m much better than that and that weighed a huge amount of my decision to take time off.

“My wife told me I shouldn’t even think about fighting for two or three months. She said I should take a vacation, sit around, enjoy spending time with my kids, and then evaluate what we need to do to fix this. I took time off, realized what I need to do and I’ll show it in this next fight.”

Mir said he couldn’t recall the last time he was in such a good place prior to a fight. Mir doesn’t have many regrets about his career, but he said he does wish he discovered TRT wasn’t his solution much earlier.

“The good thing would have been if TRT hadn’t been an option,” he said. “I would have probably got the solution that I came to now sooner.”

For more on UFC Fight Night 61, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.