Sometimes I train in the middle of the night, all on my own. Can't sleep, don't want to sleep, get up, go to the gym, work. This is early for me, being here at half ten in the morning, this is really early, and I'm only here because I screwed up yesterday and kept you hanging around. Other times I'll call up my wrestling coach, or my jiu jitsu coach, or my deep-tissue guy, and want to really focus on one part of what I do. I train in all these different disciplines.

{Losing can be a great motivator] but not if it drains your confidence. One of the reasons I got into this game was because I wanted to learn how to get myself comfortable in uncomfortable situations.

You don't get to be world champion unless you do that.

I am in the fighting game, I don't care about anything else. I don't watch the news, I don't care about politics, I don't care about other sports. I don't care about anything I don't need to care about. This is my sport, it is my life. I study it, I think about it, all the time. Nothing else matters.

Fourteen weeks before the Mendes fight I tore 80 per cent of my ACL [anterior cruciate ligament]. That is the main ligament for stability. Every day in that training camp when I was working my way back, I was saying "real champions fight through any adversity". That is why I am a real champion and he is not. Look at my eye [he had seven stitches put in an old wound after an injury in training the night before we met]. Fighters fight on. Aldo got scared, he went running and I worry he will run again.

To do anything to a high level it has to be total obsession. Ask José Mourinho, he wouldn't know a thing about me, my sport - he knows football, and to get to high levels you have to be insane, nothing else means anything. I respect all forms of movement and lifestyles, but I am in a bubble. I wake up, it is in my head; I go to sleep, it's in my head, 24/7.

Late switches are part of fighting and I've handled them all.