How Rousey and Carano fought 'ring rust' with saunas, red light therapy and brain scans

Ronda Rousey (left) and Gina Carano are back in MMA this Saturday Sarah Stier/Getty Images for Netflix Share articleUsually, when ‘ring rust’ is mentioned around a fighter, it’s in reference to a year – two at a push – away from competition. In the case of mixed martial artists Gina Carano and Ronda Rousey, who meet at the Intuit Dome in Los Angeles on Saturday in Netflix’s first live MMA broadcast, the rust has been gathering for far longer. UFC Hall of Famer, Rousey (12-2, 9 submissions, 3 KOs) last competed in MMA in 2016, when she was beaten by Amanda Nunes in 48 seconds. Her opponent, Carano (7-1, 1 submission, 3 KOs), a pioneer of women’s MMA, last fought in 2009 when she suffered her first professional MMA defeat to Cris Cyborg in a headline event that was broadcast by a major national cable network (Showtime), putting women’s MMA on the map for the first time. Few doubt the commercial appeal of pitting two of the sport’s all-timers against each other, and organisers Most Valuable Promotions (MVP) will be thrilled at the interest in its first MMA card. But given their time out of the sport, and their ages (Rousey is 39, Carano 44), is there any risk attached to the event? Perhaps unsurprisingly, MVP has no concerns. “I think the opposite, right?” co-founder Nakisa Bidarian tells The Athletic. “They’re fresh. They have no injuries. They haven’t been through wars. There’s nothing holding them back from putting on a tremendous performance.” Not everyone shares that optimism. “Ring rust is a real thing,” says former UFC fighter turned MMA coach, John Wood, on a video call from Las Vegas. “You don’t know what you’re gonna get ‘til we get actually in the cage in terms of how they feel.” Wood, who owns Syndicate MMA, one of the most successful mixed martial arts gyms in the world, has skin in the game – he’s spent the last six months preparing Carano for her return to action, after he was approached by her husband, and former Muay Thai fighter and kickboxer, Kevin Ross about training her. Did he have any concerns given the length of time Carano had been out of the sport, and her age? “For sure,” says Wood. “I had to get her on the mat, had to see where she was at mentally and physically. Obviously she’s been out for a long time so the abuse of MMA wasn’t there, but the abuse of life – getting older and going through all the things she’s gone through – is still there.” That’s the case for both fighters. After Rousey stepped away from the UFC after her defeat to Nunes in 2016 she signed a full-time contract with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and continued her acting work by appearing in action film Mile 22. She also had two children. In 2024, Rousey released her autobiography Our Fight, in which she was critical of the WWE culture and working environment and also said she hid “concussions and neurological injuries” for years during her run as UFC bantamweight champion. In the same year, she apologised for having reposted a video nine years earlier that spread conspiracy theories about the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which killed 20 children and six staff members. She said it was “the single most regrettable decision of my life.” Carano left fight sports for the acting world, making appearances in Fast and Furious 6 and Deadpool, among other films. In 2018, she was cast in The Mandalorian, Lucasfilm’s first live-action Star Wars television series, but was fired in 2021 for posting conspiracy theories and right-wing views, including an Instagram post that compared life as a Republican in the U.S. to being a Jew during the Holocaust. In February 2024, she filed a lawsuit against Lucasfilm over her firing, alleging wrongful dismissal and sex discrimination. The suit was funded by Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, Tesla and SpaceX. The case was set to begin on September 25, 2025, but in August, Carano and Disney settled their dispute. Carano was lost in the fog of that lawsuit when she got the phone call from UFC president Dana White in December 2024 asking if she would be interested in a comeback fight against Rousey, who was nine months pregnant at the time. What drives a heavily pregnant woman to decide it’s time to fight again? It might sound like the punchline to a bad joke, but in Rousey’s case it was a “cascade of events”, starting with Mike Tyson’s return to boxing in a fight against Jake Paul at the age of 58. “That fight got more views than any fight had ever received” Rousey tells The Athletic via video call. “It wasn’t nostalgia bait, it wasn’t a cash grab, it was something that people really wanted and were missing from combat sports.” Not long afterwards, she saw Carano – the woman who paved the way for her to become one of UFC’s biggest stars – being interviewed, and an idea started to form. “I was sitting in my office chair about to burst and I saw an interview with Gina. She had been cancelled a few years before and you could tell she was going through some tough times and had gained a really unhealthy amount of weight. I was looking at her and looking at myself and thinking, you know what? We should reclaim our bodily identities together.” Rousey’s first call was to White. He was all-in on the idea (it later became clear the finances would not fit with the UFC’s model, leading Rousey and Carano to team up with Paul’s MVP) and put in the call to Carano, who saw it as an opportunity to focus on something positive amid her ongoing legal issues. “When you’re in a lawsuit, you have that elephant in the room with you every day you wake up,” Carano tells The Athletic. “It’s all-consuming. To think about something else besides the last couple of years and besides this lawsuit, I was like, yes, this is something I want to focus on and embrace.” She had already lost around 20 pounds after finding out she was pre-diabetic, but still had a way to go before she would be in fighting shape. The pair agreed on the end of 2025 as a potential date. While Carano’s training journey began with what Wood calls a “pre-camp camp, to get back in shape to start camp”, Rousey’s started with a visit to leading neurologist Dr Charles Bernick, on White’s suggestion. The former UFC champion had been prepared to return to the cage with the same mindset she’d taken into every fight previously. “I’m just gonna have to win without getting touched,” she says. “That’s how I walked into every fight, because I’ve been dealing with these limitations my entire career.” She says these include temporary vision loss, brain fog and lack of depth perception that would accompany strikes to the head. She had always attributed them to symptoms of concussion but Dr Bernick gave her an alternative explanation. “He thinks that these head impacts and bright lights are actually setting off migraines. And what I am experiencing are not concussion symptoms but migraine aura (warning signs of an impending migraine attack).” They started experimenting with different types of medication, mixing them with sparring sessions to gauge their effect on Rousey’s symptoms. Eventually, they found a preventative medication, approved by the California State Athletic Commission (CSAC), that works. Rousey says it has been life-changing. “I’ve been playing a game of zero errors for so long, which is why I felt like I had to end my fights so quickly (9 of her 12 professional MMA victories finished in the first 70 seconds),” she says. “It’s really freeing in a way, but I still have to be careful – I can’t just walk out and get my bell rung. I have to go out there with the same level of intensity and try to finish this the soonest that I can.” The CSAC follows Association of Ringside Physicians recommendations for regulating fighters over the age of 40, which include a magnetic resonance angiogram (MRA) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain, electrocardiogram (EKG, checking the heart for rhythm, rate, and structural abnormalities), cardiac testing, an exercise stress echocardiogram, neurocognitive testing, blood work, metabolic panel and ophthalmologic eye exam. “It’s been a lot,” says Wood. “Every day she’s like, ‘They want to hear my heart. They want to look at this. They want to test my pee.’ They’ve been running her through the ringer and making sure that she’s healthy and ready to go.” Asked what the biggest changes have been in their fight camps this time compared to the last time they fought, Rousey and Carano both reply (separately) with one word: recovery. For Rousey, that looks like doing one “super-long marathon training session” in the morning as opposed to two a day, and spending the rest of the day working on recovery, which looks like using the sauna, cold plunge and hyperbaric oxygen chamber (this involves breathing pure oxygen in a pressurized chamber, increasing the amount of oxygen that reaches the body’s tissues and accelerating the recovery process). “I have to almost put as much effort into recovery as I do into training now that I’m older,” says Rousey. A post shared by NetflixSports (@netflixsports) When Carano last trained like an athlete, few of these recovery protocols were in place for fighters. And it was only when she hit a wall during training for this fight that she realised how much she needed them. “I was breaking down,” she says, “hurting really bad. And then I started changing up the recovery and that was a game changer.” She lists saunas, cold plunges and red light therapy as key but says a change in her approach to nutrition has also been crucial. For much of her weight-loss journey she avoided carbohydrates, believing them to be “the bad guy.” But when she got back into training she realised how valuable they were to performance. “You actually can really utilize carbs right before your workout to have a better performance” she says. “I learned that a little bit late, so I suffered for the last year and a half. Now I’ve incorporated eating carbs before my workouts and it’s a game changer.” Wood has trained fighters of all ages and says that the biggest difference in training those of a more advanced age (particularly over 40) is injuries. “After 40, things start going sideways without really even doing much,” he says. “You sneeze and you throw your back out; you fart, you can’t straighten your head for a week. It’s just one of those things. “So a big part of this camp was making sure we do it right so no one gets injured. Getting to the fight after all these years is a big win in itself. But making sure that we’re healthy and able to put a product out there in Gina that’s actually capable of winning the fight, and I think that’s what we’ve done.” Fortunately, the fighters have had time to build up to this fight. That means they’ve been able to take an extra day off when it was needed instead of pushing through to the point of injury. But as fight night approached, Wood says it was time to take the training wheels off and see what was left. “These last two weeks, we said, ‘I want you to go as hard as you can with this, dude.’ I wanted her to feel like, here we go; this is a fight. Blow it all out. Go one round and just give me everything you got. I want you to throw up at the end of that round, just to get that feeling of, holy shit, this is how it feels. We’ve been testing and playing with different things mentally, physically, and she’s passed with flying colors. We’re ready for a fight.” In answer to those questioning the quality of the action they might see on Saturday, Wood simply points to the condition of former heavyweight boxing champion Tyson when he fought Paul in 2025. “I can tell you, these ladies are in much better shape than that, hands down. These girls, honestly, they’re gonna shock a lot of people.” Feeling ready physically is one thing. But how can you prepare for stepping back into violence? After so long away from physical combat, how do you ready the mind for staring into the eyes of someone who is there to hurt you? It’s hard enough, says Wood, for those who do it regularly. “It is the biggest, most stressful thing that anyone in any sport, in any profession can do. You’re locked in a cage with another human, that wants to beat the s*** out of you, embarrass you in front of millions of people. And you have to be OK with it. Everybody feels the same thing. Everybody is scared s***less. It is how we deal with it.” Rousey, for her part, has no fears on that score. “I’ve been in high-pressure situations my entire life,” she says. “Nothing will ever compare to the pressure of competing in an Olympic Games at the age of 17, when you’ve trained your entire life to try and make all that work pay off in one day. “And since I stepped out of MMA, I’ve been in pro wrestling and headlining WrestleMania. I have so many reps doing those kinds of things.” Carano points out that she has been through her own battles. “I feel like I’ve fought giants. The physical pain does not compare to the heartbreak of being hurt in your business or your career being taken from you. “So I have a different perspective. I’m embracing the physical; I actually look forward to it. I’d rather take the physical pain than the other pain.” Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms