A former amateur boxing champion, McCann says she made the decision to switch to MMA after her particular boxing category was not included in the Olympic games.<\/p>\n
“The highest level for me wouldn’t be an Olympic medal, so I thought what else can I do?” says the athlete.<\/p>\n
Her subsequent decade-long career in MMA brought her considerable success.<\/p>\n
She won 14 of her 22 fights, and is one of the most successful – and high-profile -women fighters in British MMA history.<\/p>\n
But it has taken a toll.<\/p>\n
“It’s four Olympic disciplines in one,” she says.<\/p>\n
“So imagine how much you have to commit your life to being an Olympic athlete for one Olympic discipline, [then] imagine doing that for four.<\/p>\n
“The negative side” she says, was “how heavy it is on the body over long periods of time”.<\/p>\n
“There wasn’t a lot of women doing it when I was – so I was constantly training with people who were a little bit heavier than me, and it just took its toll on my body in the end.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A former amateur boxing champion, McCann says she made the decision to switch to MMA after her particular…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":57239,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[2560,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-57238","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-boxing","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57238\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}