In the world of amateur competitive fighting, Tylor Nicholson is a force to be reckoned with. He holds seven title belts, including BC Provincial titles for Muay Thai and boxing, as well as the Battlefield Bantamweight title in MMA.
Tylor began his fight career in 2012. Even though he was new to the fight scene, he was considered to be an excellent fighter by his trainers and peers. Naturally, there was quite some hype surrounding his first fight amongst those who knew him. Tylor lost that first fight, as well as the two after that. After his third loss in a row, something remarkable happened; he started winning… a lot. In fact, in the three years after his third fight, Tylor has only lost once.
When I asked him about those first three losses, he said “I felt a lot of pressure to win. I wasn’t even scared of getting hurt or anything. I just didn’t want to lose in front of my friends and family, and the pressure just kind of got to me.”
In between the third fight that he lost and his first win, Tylor made some changes to the way he trained and started talking the fights more seriously, but said the biggest change was psychological. “I’d lost three fights in a row – there wasn’t any more pressure, really.” That allowed him to forget about the people watching him and start concentrating in the ring. When that happened, the victories began rolling in.
Tylor never set out to be the champion that he is today, however. He figured out that he was a good fighter quite by accident. As a teenager, he used to wrestle with his friends and box for fun in the back yards at parties. He said “a couple of my friends trained and I was able to actually out-grapple them, and I’d never trained before.” One thing led to another, and Tylor became known as a boxer even though he’d never done any formal boxing. He even started carrying boxing gloves with him everywhere he went. He told me, “I actually saved people from getting into real altercations because I’d have two pairs of gloves with me and I’d be like ‘why don’t you guys just box? I’ll referee – it’s all good.’” Around that time, he walked into a gym because he “started craving getting better [with technique]” and found a friend training there. He stayed for the class, and afterward decided to join the gym. From that point onward, all the back yard boxing stopped, and he began to train more seriously, which has led him to where he is today.
Tylor’s success can be credited in part to his natural ability as a fighter, but his intense training routine can’t be ignored. He said he trains seven days a week. “When I’m working, I go right from work… and I head right out [to the gym], and I’m out there until nine-thirty or ten o’clock every night.” On his days off, he usually trains for eight hours. This includes swimming lengths, shadow boxing in the pool and resting in the hot tub in the morning, followed by three to four hours of training after lunch at his gym, Titan MMA in Coquitlam.
Tylor’s next fight is on October 29th where he’ll be competing for the Battlefield Featherweight title.
Written by Wade Findlay
