Seeing Joe Lauzon walk to the cage is something that MMA fans young and old have grown accustomed to. 

He made his UFC debut in 2006 (an upset KO of former UFC champion Jens Pulver) and since then has had over two dozen trips to the octagon. But for those keeping track, it’s been a while since we’ve seen Lauzon - 16 months to be exact. That time, according to Lauzon, was much needed. 

“I’ve been in the UFC for so long now, it’s a little bit easy to get into a rutt and just keep doing the same things over and over all the time,” Lauzon said. “We took some time, we took a step back, reevaluated everything we were doing.”

And Lauzon wanted to be sure he was doing it the right way instead of just rushing through superficial changes. 

“Sometimes you make changes and it takes a little bit of time,” Lauzon said. “You can’t just expect to make a change and have immediate results.”

These changes were sparked, in part, by his current three-fight losing streak. Most of it, though, comes from his last fight with Chris Gruetzemacher, where he felt like he just couldn’t do what he planned to do. 

“For my last fight, I was really unhappy with how it went in general,” he said. “I tried to stick to the gameplan - I try to be pretty good about game-planning and figuring things out. I felt like I didn’t do a great job. I tried to, but I just didn’t do a very good job.”

As far as specifics on those changes, Lauzon was mostly tight lipped. Some can be attributed to the fact that he likely doesn’t want to give away too much heading into his hometown bout this weekend. However, he said it’s also hard to describe, because there was just so much. 

“We focused on a lot more strength and conditioning stuff. We focused on a lot more striking things,” Lauzon shared. “We really tried to change up quite a bit of things. It’s tough to say one or two things - we did a lot.”