Photo via Asian MMA
Loma Lookboonmee on “Powerful and Humbling” Response to Mental Health Advocacy
Loma Lookboonmee tests skills with Elise Reed at UFC 284: Makhachev vs Volkanovski on February 11th.
Lookboonmee appeared on Bowks Talking Bouts and touched on several subjects like working with event headliner Alex Volkanovski before the card, using her platform for mental health advocacy, and so much more. Excerpts from our chat are below.
Loma Lookboonmee
Lookboonmee working alongside event headliner/ UFC lightweight title challenger Alex Volkanovski at Bangtao Muay Thai ahead of UFC 284
“Whenever Alex is around, I always take the opportunity to watch him train. He’s the world champion right now. He is an amazing fighter, an amazing person. I love watching him train. It’s exciting at the gym. It’s great having him around. Like I said, I take absolutely every opportunity I have to watch him and watch what he does.”
The tape studying dynamics for Reed and Lookboonmee’s general approach for her opponents
“I watched a video of my opponent once. My coach sat me down, said this is who you’re fighting. We watched the video together but after that, it’s up to my coaches. I really trust George (Hickman) to take notes. To make a fight plan and a game plan for me. I don’t like watching my opponents.”
Lookboonmee continued, “I’ve always been like this and other than watching the fight maybe once with George, I won’t watch any more videos. I feel like when people say they’re a good knee fighter and then I think well I’m a good knee fighter, I just get in my head and get overwhelmed. To the point that I don’t want to throw any knees in the fight. So I think for me, I’ve always just left this with my coaches.”
UFC 284
Lookboonmee using her platform, following her last UFC win, to advocate for open dialogue about mental health struggles and the importance of that to her
“It was absolutely unbelievable the response I got. I cried when I opened nearly every single message. So many people reached out to me. The support and maybe the motivation that I gave them. Seeing all these messages from everyone, it was so positive, so powerful, so meaningful, it made me want to pull myself out of the darkness that I was in.”
“It was so emotional for me to just see this outpouring of support. People that were going through the same things as I was. It was also just so powerful and humbling having people tell me that I made them want to get better and I helped them. I made their day better and how much my words meant to them, it was very powerful. Very humbling and very emotional for me. I wasn’t expecting any of it.”
