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There's really no way around it: Sage Northcutt looks like the byproduct of Captain America's Super-Soldier Serum and an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog model. In that regard, he's the perfect prince for the UFC: young, marketable, humble almost to the point of exasperation, and brimming with potential. But a few months ago, Sage Northcutt went and did the one thing he wasn't supposed to do quite yet. He lost. Now, with a fight with Enrique Marin at UFC 200 in Las Vegas looming, Sage is looking to get back on track. We caught up with the happy-go-lucky Ivan Drago lookalike to reflect on his first professional setback, and how he learned to bend frying pans—with his bare hands.

There's really no way around this—you're sort of a genetic freak. How does one get a body like yours?Oh, thank you very much! I started working out and doing martial arts when I was about 4 years old, and I was competing by the time I was five or six. So my mom and dad had me doing push-ups and sit-ups from a very young age.

How much training are we talking here?By the time I was 4 or 5, I was doing 250 push-ups and sit-ups a day. When I was 6, we bumped it up to about 500 push-ups and sit-ups a day. Some days it could even be 750 or 1,000.

Seriously?Oh, absolutely. Then, by the time I was 8, I started working out with weights, doing chin-ups, all kinds of stuff with weights at the gym.

**So in the 15 years since, how have your workouts evolved? **Every single day throughout the week, I'm working out with heavy weights with a lot of reps. My workouts don't just consist of push-ups and sit-ups and weights anymore. It has to be a little bit of everything. So you have the weights, you have the cardio, the conditioning, the wrestling, the jujitsu, the standup training. You need every aspect to be a well-rounded fighter. Depending on what specifically I'm doing with my wrestling or grappling, that determines what body part I'll be working with the weights. You definitely don't want to be working the same body part four hours a day and overtraining.

**If your penchant for bending frying pans is any indication, all those workouts seem to be paying off. Is there some secret technique that allows you to do that, or is it just sheer strength? **No, there's no trick to it. At least, not that I know of. Maybe there is some secret out there, but for me, I think it's just all the crazy grip work and the weird forearm strength I've built up since I was little.

**How does one go about developing that kind of grip strength? **I used to take a baseball bat and whip at the trees outside my house. I would hit the tree over and over to strengthen my grip. Another little part of it is from karate. Having to spin weapons and twirl them and passing them between your legs while you're doing flips and stuff, I think that built up a different type of strength. Just building up every little fiber and tissue in the forearms.

**One thing that's a little surprising about your training is that you don't spar at all before a fight. **Look at all the injuries that happen in the sport of MMA and in the UFC with people sparring. For me, with how much technique I can improve on, fine-tuning all the little things makes me better. There's always technique to learn and improve on. I don't believe I need to be sparring at this exact moment and possibly risk getting hurt. The sport of MMA is changing. There are multiple MMA fighters with the UFC that are changing up the way they train, going away from the sparring aspect. I know the UFC wants all the fighters to be healthy, so having sparring eliminated and the possibility of being injured eliminated, that definitely helps your whole career.

I wanted to talk a little bit about your last fight, against Bryan Barberena. It was your first loss as a professional fighter, but from other interviews you've given, it sounds like you weren't 100 percent going into that fight.Originally, I was supposed to fight Andrew Holbrook, at 155 pounds, so lightweight. About a week before the fight itself, he broke his foot. With about a week's notice, I was moved up to fight at 170 pounds. The reason me and my coaches even accepted that was because I had real bad strep throat at the time. We figured that it would help my body recover and heal up from being so sick if I didn't have to cut back all that weight. But about two days before the fight, the UFC had to actually take me to the emergency room. That's how bad my throat was inflamed.

The day of the fight itself, I could almost barely get out of bed. On top of all that, I had a wisdom tooth that was growing in my mouth that was causing massive headaches and a ton of sinus pressure in my nose. I really couldn't breathe out of my nose because of all that sinus pressure, and then having the strep throat so bad and with my throat so swollen, it was like breathing through a little tiny straw. My whole body was worn out. It was drained, and I just wasn't my normal self.

**Had you not been dealing with all those problems, do you think the fight ends differently? **I'm not making excuses for the fight, but it was difficult just walking into the octagon. I had to take my mouthpiece out about two or three times in a matter of 15 seconds, just because I couldn't breathe at all. It was like I was suffocating. Typically, when someone gets a choke on me, I have a pretty strong neck. It's usually hard to choke me. So when Barberena had me down there in the arm-triangle choke, I didn't have my normal strength or cardio. Any technique I possibly knew, it was like my body wasn't reacting to what my brain was telling it. I wasn't able to go for any underhooks or overhooks. I believe it would have been different if I wasn't sick. For sure.

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**It was also your third fight in four months. Do you think, with all those mitigating factors going on before the fight, that the best thing for you would have been to step back and not take the fight after Holbrook dropped out? **You know, sure, that may have been the best choice once we found out that my original opponent broke his foot. That probably would have been the best choice, because I was so sick. To tell you the truth, I've never really been sick like that before. Now we're making changes to help ensure that I stay healthy. Slowing things down to prevent myself from getting sick again.

**You entered the UFC with both a lot of hype and hate. Now that you've lost a fight and been forced to take a step back to heal up, have you given much thought to that dichotomy? **I don't create the hype. When there is hype, it's not me creating it. I'm just out there having fun in every single thing that I do. Sure, there are people who say negative things or maybe aren't in your corner or who are now second-guessing if I can do this. But there are also people who believe in you and that are pushing you up and helping you get better and better. I'm only looking at the positive aspect of it.

Be honest, are you always smiling?Yes, sir. I am smiling right now, actually. I'm always pretty much smiling.

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