Like most fighters, Casey O’Neill knows that some of the toughest battles she’ll ever face happen in the gym rather than the octagon.
Especially when you consider that she rarely meets anyone her size.
“Only training with guys means I’m always the littlest fish in the sea, but we keep swimming,” O’Neill recently wrote on Instagram days out from her return against Roxanne Modafferi at UFC 271. Some days are good and some days may be bad .”
The revelation that O’Neill only works with male fighters might seem strange, especially considering she primarily trains out of Xtreme Couture in Las Vegas, which is one of the largest and most diverse gyms in combat sports. O’Neill told MMA Fighting, despite the fact that there are several female fighters in the same room, all of whom she regards as friends and colleagues — she said to MMA Fighting she prefers to have a male sparring partner when she is training.
“I only spar with boys. O’Neill stated that he doesn’t spar with women. It works better because I can work a bit harder, and nobody gets hurt.
” I love my girls at Xtreme and am happy to be friends with them. Some of the girls are smaller than me except for Miesha [Tate], Taylor Guardado and Taylor Guardado. Miesha has been doing her own thing while Miesha is training. The rest of the girls are strawweights or sometimes even smaller than that.”
O’Neill claims that she has had more issues training women than with men in the past. O’Neill said that although women’s MMA is becoming more popular in recent years it has not seen a large increase in female training. This can cause problems for gyms.
“I’ve had multiple things that, it just doesn’t work out the best,” O’Neill said. Because there are so few females involved in this sport, everyone’s egos get in the way. Because they don’t see me as an enemy, I enjoy being able train alongside the boys.
“If there’s girls in the gym and they’re in the UFC or whatever, they could maybe look at you as an opponent or something like that, or you could fight them down the line, and I’m never going to fight any of these guys. It’s a mixture of both, of whether I like it better or there’s been some problems in the past.”
O’Neill added that enjoys that she’s often outgunned by her male sparring partners when it comes size and power, even if some days are harder than others.
” I like training with people that are stronger than me and faster than my own, O’Neill stated. Because once they catch up, I’m able to keep up with them. I just try to train with boys all the time.”
To be honest, O’Neill stated that she loves training with her female fighters at the gym and works out together while getting ready to fight.
An ex-UFC champion Miesha Tate has been a shining example of O’Neill’s admiration for her. Tate would rather be a friend than an enemy.
O’Neill’s view of it is the same as why champions have resisted training with other top fighters from the same weight group in the past. This is because this type of environment is only begging for trouble to arise. Approaching her training with that mentality helps O’Neill get better while avoiding any possible drama between teammates.
“Me, Miesha and I are good friends. We have train together before and will likely continue training together. However, we won’t spar in the future and don’t go to the same gym sessions every day and things like that. It’s best to keep things separate.
“Like me, there are so few females involved in this sport. If I or she become champions, it would be something we could look into fighting. But until that time, we’re just passing each other in the gym .”
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