Dan Hooker has done some critical reflection following back-to-back losses.
Hooker admitted that he won’t become a UFC champion after his three-fight win streak in the lightweight division was ended last year.
In typical ‘The Hangman’ fashion, that didn’t stop him from wading right back into the fire when making a quick turnaround to face another top opponent.
However, Hooker’s loss to Benoit Saint-Denis has seemingly had a big impact on where he believes his career is at following some honest admissions from the fan favorite.
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Dan Hooker admits he’s not been dedicated to his training camps since his 2022 win over Claudio Puelles
Before Dan Hooker was beaten by Arman Tsarukyan last November, he was in the best form that he’s been in for quite some time.
Despite this, ‘The Hangman’ recently revealed that he knows where he went wrong in his recent losses, and it started during his three-fight winning streak.
Hooker told Submission Radio that he believes he’s been “cheating the grind” and not being as dedicated as he needs to be.
“I was able to coast through the Jalin Turner fight and I was able to coast through the [Mateusz] Gamrot fight but then I’d been coasting for so long that when it came to the Arman fight and the ‘BSD’ [Benoit Saint-Denis] fight, yeah you can’t coast for that long. You have to get back on there and you have to put in the work.”
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Photo by Mark Kolbe Photography/Getty Images
Hooker believes that all the time he spent being completely dedicated before this allowed him to get away with it before it caught up to him in his recent outings.
‘The Hangman’ believes that the last time he was putting in maximum effort during his preparations was when he snapped a two-fight skid by beating Claudio Puelles in 2022.
When his coaches assumed that this wasn’t the case for his huge win over Gamrot in 2024, he corrected them.
“I was like, ‘Nah, brother. I drank every day that camp. I had the foot off the grind stone that camp too.’”
2026-04-08 23:00:00
