SB Nation exclusive interview with UFC's Aaron 'A-Train' Simpson

The UFC's Aaron Simpson tells us about handling the first loss of his career, becoming a vegetarian, opening his new state of the art training facility, and his philosophy on fighting.

via SB Nation-

How have you coped with your first professional loss? What sort of re-evaluation process did you and your team do to try to figure out how to improve?

If I could have fought three weeks after like Leben did against Akiyama, I would have in a second. My hat's off to him for doing that, it was pretty impressive. I didn't have my best performance. I felt like I had a great first round and felt like I just needed to replicate that for two more rounds, but there wasn't much of a reevaluation process aside from doing some blood work and trying to figure out why I hit a wall like that. I'm not used to something like that. I want to get back in there, but the infection set me back and it wouldn't be smart to jump right back into the cage in September or October. I'll be ready by November.

Speaking of hitting the wall, Kenny Florian, who was doing color work in place of Joe Rogan, was commenting throughout your fight with Chris Leben about your fast paced tempo. Do you think your work rate was too high during that first round and that led you to hit the wall?

There's a lot to be said for that. With my wrestling background we're go go go. You only compete for six or seven minutes depending what style you're in so you want that fast pace. You want to put the pressure on. In order to make that a 15 minute fight, and eventually a 25 minute fight, we need to fight smarter. I like to try to compete at a pace not many fighters can keep up with. A lot of guys just cant handle it. I think the biggest example of that would be Cain Velasquez. I think Lesnar is going to have a fight on his hands because of the type of pace Cain can keep. That's the kind of tempo I want to keep. I feel I can, and that's how we trained at Arizona State. It's much more exciting that way. I don't want to slow it down and tip toe around and lay on someone. I want to make it exciting out there, but sometimes it opens you up to what happened with me with Chris Leben. He fought a smarter, better fight that night.

Leben is pretty amazing about how he draws fighters into brawling with him.

Maybe I didn't respect his toughness as much as I should have. In the fight I was saying to myself 'jeez this guy is legit. He can really take a punch.' I hit him pretty hard with something that would really hurt a lot of people, and it didn't drop him. He is who he is for a reason and he's where his is for a reason. He has a ton of experience and has fought some great fighters. He's probably right where he needs to be on his climb to the top.

check out the rest of the interview after the jump