Rockhold had awful training camp leading up to fight with Machida

Based on Luke Rockhold's spectacular performance against Lyoto Machida at UFC on FOX 15, you wouldn't know he was hot on the heels of the worse training camp of his career.

In an interview with MMAFighting.com's Dave Meltzer, Javier Mendez, Rockhold's head coach at American Kickboxing Academy, spoke of Rockhold's setbacks during training camp, which included a nasty cough, sprained knuckle and a surfing-related head wound.

Luke had the worst training camp ever going into the fight. He split his head open surfing. He had the nasty cough that everyone's had, but he was yacking and yacking all the time. Look, all fighters are injured. He didn't care. He couldn't punch with his left hand. The hand was all jacked up. He got a shot for it. But if you talk to Machida, he probably wasn't at his best either.

Luke was hacking all the way through camp, but he never lost confidence. I'm not going to say I was that confident because we were going against a great fighter like Machida. My attitude going in was we can't screw up. We screw up once against Machida and he can checkmate us. I was 100 percent concerned because of how great Machida is at capitalizing on mistakes. Thank God he screwed up first. Once Luke knocked him down, that was Luke's world. The elbow to the temple at the end of the first round, that was the doom. Luke's got great ground control. That's his world. (Chris) Weidman gave us the blueprint of how to approach the fight, and we added to what Weidman taught us, so thank you Chris.

Instead of using this laundry list of ailments as a crutch, Rockhold ran straight through Machida, dominating "The Dragon" like no one had before. It wasn't as though Rockhold viciously made a stain out of a middling jobber. He had thoroughly dominated a former light heavyweight champion. The same man who took 185-pound overlord Chris Weidman to the limit a year prior.

Now, Rockhold finds himself on the precipice of a shot at Weidman and his middleweight gold, though Weidman will have to successfully defend his title against Vitor Belfort at UFC 187 in May.

"We both believe in ourselves," Rockhold said. "We both believe we're the best. I think I'm better than him. He thinks he's got his specialty and can take me out of my element with his wrestling. People don't out-wrestle me and don't control me. I wrestled before I was a fighter. I'm faster and pose more threats on my feet."