LONGVIEW, TX, November 30, 2011 – What do you do after you’ve faced the biggest challenge of your professional career and come up short? Dust yourself off and do it all over again. That’s what Team JG Texas fighter Josh Foster is seeking to do when he takes on Alliance brown belt and former collegiate wrestler JJ Holmes this Saturday at XKO 13 in Arlington.
Foster will be heading into this fight looking to shake off the sting of his last loss to Bubba Bush at Legacy Fighting Championship 8 in Houston just this past September. That was a fight in which the fight just did not go his way. “That sucker was the strongest man I ever went against in my entire life,” he says about that fight. “It was crazy. I had a kimura on him and felt I had it past his hip so I thought I had the submission but then he just muscled up out of it. He was so strong that I couldn’t nothing with him but just lay there.”
Putting that loss behind him, Josh has since worked on his weaknesses in the event that he face another fighter with the same strengths as his last opponent. By his own account, he’s spent the majority of his training time since that fight working off his back to get up over and over and over again. He’s lost count of how many times he’s drilled getting back up but it’s an area that he feels has improved enough where he can keep the fight where he wants it to be – standing.
With that as his defined strength, you would think that he would want to take on another striker in his next bout in order to gain what he might perceive as an “easy” win. That’s not the case though. Instead, he’s decided to face JJ Holmes – a fighter with every bit the grappling pedigree of his last opponent. Like we said earlier, Holmes is a BJJ brown belt that’s qualified for the ADCC and a 2x NCAA qualifier while wrestling for Eastern Michigan earlier in his career before he made the jump to MMA.
Some people might think Josh Foster is crazy for taking this type of fight after coming off a loss to another grappling specialist but he doesn’t care.
“I’ve been training as much as I can,” he says about his preparations for this fight. “I don’t think he (Holmes) is anywhere near as strong or fast (as Bubba Bush). He won’t be anywhere near close to that. Even then, I would say that he might have the upper hand on me with his wrestling but he still tries to bang with people. From what I’ve seen he doesn’t have a very good chin so I’m going to try and use that to my advantage. I think he’s going to try and come at me real wild and I’ll be ready for that. And if he tries to take me down and hold me down, I’ve been working on getting back up so we’ll see how that works. Hopefully I can keep the fight where I want it to go. I’m going to be 100% more aggressive in this one. It’ll be all out or nothing.”
Fighter Acknowledgements
I just appreciate the fans that keep up with me and promoters that want me to fight on their shows. I don’t hear a whole lot of boos and everybody’s been positive win or lose so I appreciate that. I want to thank my coaches , especially JC Cox along with Josh Lee, Mike Ambern, and everyone else that I train with. Our strength and conditioning coach Dustin out of Titan Training has really been helping by getting us ready with our cardio and strength training so it’s been fun getting ready. Last, thanks to our sponsor Mark (Watson) with 5 Star Grills. He’s a straight guy and has been really supportive and helps us.
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