“The Party” has shifted to Toms River, New Jersey.
“This has been the plan for a while, but I just wasn’t able to do it until this season,” Lance Palmer said of his move to New Jersey to work with Frankie Edgar and the rest of the crew commonly referred to as The Iron Army.
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Following a decorated collegiate wrestling career at The Ohio State University, Palmer made the transition into mixed martial arts as a member of Team Alpha Male, the Sacramento, California gym helmed by Urijah Faber with a history of turning talented collegiate wrestlers into standout prospects and elite fighters in the lighter weight classes.
After parting ways with Team Alpha Male in 2017, Palmer spent last year training primarily at Xtreme Couture in Las Vegas, but hanging out in the Nevada desert was actually a fall-back option.
“I wanted to do it last year, but Timur Valiev was in the season and they didn’t have bantamweight, so he just bumped up to ’45 and I didn’t want to step on any toes being the new guy coming into the gym, so I just went to Vegas instead,” explained Palmer, who earned nine points in the regular season before beating Max Coga, Andre Harrison and Steven Siler to claim the featherweight champion in Season 1. “Things worked out well, but this has always been my goal since I left Alpha Male in 2017 —to train with Frankie and Marlon and Eddie Alvarez and those guys.”
Already considered one of the top featherweights in the world and entering Season 2 with a 6-0 record under the PFL banner, the scary thing for the rest of the combatants in this season’s 145-pound field is that Palmer has integrated into the team seamlessly and struck up an immediate kinship with lead coaches Mark Henry and Ricardo Almeida.
“These guys welcomed me with open arms,” he said of his new team. “They’re all guys I get along with outside of the gym and that train hard, just like me. The way that Mark Henry is so involved in all the training sessions, all the sparring sessions (is tremendous).
“Ricardo Almeida is very technical and his game, the way he teaches things for MMA — because he’s fought before, it makes a huge difference,” he said of the decorated black belt, who fought 18 times before retiring at the end of March 2011 to focus on his family, teaching at his academies and coaching. “His knowledge of MMA grappling and MMA jiu jitsu is awesome for my game because my game is obviously grappling and wrestling, so we’ve meshed really well.”
Kicking off his second season in the PFL on Thursday with a matchup against promotional newcomer Alex Gilpin, Palmer enters the fray with three potential trilogy bouts looming on the horizon, having split his two fights with both Harrison and Alexandre Almeida while going 2-0 against durable veteran Steven Siler, whom he beat in the finals to win last year’s featherweight championship.
Although running it back with the same opponents time and again can get stale, the PFL format and ability to control your own destiny to a certain extent while remaining consistently active from May through until the end of the year have Palmer excited to get Season Two underway.
“It’s one of those things where you get sick of fighting the same guys over and over, so I’m glad there are guys like Jeremy Kennedy and (Alexandre) Bezerra is in there again,” he said. ”He’s somebody that I didn’t get to fight last year, even though he had a really close fight with Andre in the quarterfinals.
“I love the way the format is set out and wrestling my entire life was tournament structure and (that’s what) the postseason is — it’s an eight-man bracket where you go through quarters, semis and finals,” added Palmer, who was a four-time All-American in college. “These first two fights in the regular season, you’re trying to get points and there is a lot of strategy involved with it. You don’t control who you fight, but you can control your destiny a little better in order to get to the finals and get to the belt.”
Fighting five times in six months last season, Palmer said it was the best he’s ever felt in his professional career, mentally and physically, as he was able to stay in fight shape throughout the regular season and playoffs while still getting to take little breaks in between fights to recover and recharge.
“That’s the most active I’ve ever been in MMA and it’s the most fun I’ve had,” said Palmer, who is focused on stacking up victories and piling up championships to further bolster his legacy heading into this season. “It was the best my body has ever felt, the most focused I’ve ever been and so doing all of that in that short period of time is awesome.
“It was nice because I was still able to take two weeks off here or three weeks off there between certain fights because I’m not somebody who gets super out of shape unless I have six months in between,” he added. “I was still able to take those two weeks off, go home, spend time with my friends back home, get my mind out of it for a minute and come back fully focused.”
It’s an approach that worked like gangbusters for him in Season 1 as he posted the second most regular season points and navigated a dangerous playoff bracket in order to emerge victorious at the New Year’s Eve Championship Event at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
And he’s ready to do it all again in Season 2.
"For me, it’s about legacy," said Palmer. "It’s about how many times I won the PFL (featherweight championship) or how many times I was World Series of Fighting champ. Stacking up the belts and stacking up the wins are the most important to me for when I look back in the future.
“I take it one fight at a time, just like I did last year,” he said when asked how he replicates his success this season. “I’m confident that I’ll be back in the finals again this year, but I’m honestly not going to be in that position where I think that I’m the guy to beat and this or that. I always go into fights thinking like the underdog, not looking past my opponents, and being somebody where I’m always looking for the finish, but if it doesn’t come, it doesn’t come.
“It’s been a great camp and I’m really excited about getting back in the cage again,” he added. “It was a little bit of a layoff from December until now, so I’m excited.”