Top Finnish MMA fighter Anton Kuivanen is seven weeks away from indisputably the biggest fight of his ten year career. The 31 year old fighter who’s heading into his thirty first professional fight talked with MMAViking.com’s Iikka Nikkinen about his preparation and new gym in Tampere, Finland where Kuivanen was teaching two classes at MMA Team 300.

The home gym of Kuivanen GB Gym in Helsinki, Finland recently moved into new location and the team will get much needed space around them. “We’re still finalizing the move, the training facilities are a bit bigger than our previous gym. We’re still waiting for a cage to be built. It’s important for an MMA gym to have a cage to train in these days”, said Kuivanen about the new gym.

Kuivanen is preparing for a rematch against Eric Reynolds at Cage 31 in September 19th. In their previous fight Reynolds sent waves throughout whole of Finland by knocking out the Finnish star in just thirdy seconds.

“We’re kickstarting our fight camp next week, we’re gonna go through Reynolds’s latest fights with my coach Sammy Hämäläinen and from those tapes we’re going to set our course for this training camp. These past couple of weeks I have been training quite hard and next week I’ll let my body heal up a bit and then we’re going to go super hard for three weeks, a lot of match specific training. Then we’re going to tone down the intensity of the training as the match date comes closer and closer. Going to be drilling a lot certain things that are going to help me secure a victory against Reynolds in September.”

Some fighters and trainers have different approaches when studying the next opponent. Some fighters build everything around the certain small things their future opponent does and they lay a foundation for the upcoming match from the fight tapes. Kuivanen mentioned that they do not study their opponents too specific, only if they have a very unique fighting style.

“Relatively small part of our fight camp is watching tape of my next opponent unless the opponent has a super unique fighting style. I like to study my opponent as soon as the contract is signed.”

Kuivanen acknowledges the fact that is is important to be prepared for your opponent, but also understands that dwelling too much on what your opponent does can have a negative impact on your own performance.

“I don’t want to stress too much on doing specific things in the match. I can’t just focus on these few certain things I need to be ready for everything. You have to find this certain balance between these two aspects, before I had perhaps a too abstract view of my match and I just went into the fights without properly thinking, now we focus on certain strenghts and certain weaknesses from my opponents. After these aspects have been properly aknowledged, we turn the focus on me.”

The fight was announced early June, giving both Kuivanen and Reynolds a lot of time to prepare for the Cage lightweight title fight. It’s rare in MMA to have such a long time to prepare for a fight, Kuivanen’s previous matches were announced just four weeks before the match. Kuivanen has experience preparing for an opponent for this long as for his bout against The Ultimate Fighter winner Michael Chiesa, Kuivanen had three months to prepare.

Preparation for the bout did not change much, except that Kuivanen along with his coaches did not feel like they needed to study any tape of Reynolds so early, only now as the fight is just under two months from now they have started to study Reynolds.



“I knew that the fight was going to happen so early that I did not feel like I needed to study the tape immediately after the announcement. Instead I’ve been drilling my technique a lot and focusing on improving as a fighter and we’ve been doing a lot of cardio workouts, focusing on movement. I don’t think that this affects me, I asked for this fight and after a week from that point the fight was announced. I’ve had a few weekends when I’ve had a vacation where I haven’t thought about the fight at all and I think that’s a good thing, keeps me relaxed and brings to the gym hungry.”

Sitting next to Kuivanen for this interview was Cage matchmaker Timo Lampen who looked ecstatic about the upcoming title fight. According to Lampen this fight is the most important fight in Finnish MMA history. The bout was originally supposed to serve as the main event for Cage 26, but Kuivanen was injured in training and the bout did not take place. Reynolds has not defended his title yet and when Lampen was approached on the matter he responded that there were not any other fight to be made with Reynolds than a rematch with Kuivanen. Now finally after two years since that shocking victory, Reynolds is soon ready to board the plane and defend his title in Finland.

“From Cage’s point of view, this fight is very important, it’s important to have our champion to defend his title. So yeah it’s easy to say that this fight is Cage’s most interesting fight ever. The first fight ended super quickly, Reynolds landed a solid punch that shocked everyone in the arena.” – Lampen

Kuivanen also realises that this match is very important for his long career, this bout determine where his career will go towards. There has been a lot of rumours circling his return to the UFC if he is succesful for the whole year of 2015. Finland is buzzing about MMA right now, mainstream media has caught up with the sport as two of Finland’s major organizations have secured broadcast deals with two mainstream media outlets and the UFC stars like Makwan Amirkhani and Teemu Packalén have really helped bring MMA into the conciousness of Finland.

“This will be the first time in my whole career in Finland where I come into the cage before my opponent, will be interesting to experience that.”

Kuivanen doesn’t want to dwell too much in the near future or let his emotions play too big of a part in the match. He’s focused on training and doing his utmost to recapture the title he lost two years ago in a shocking fashion to Eric Reynolds.