In his boxing debut, Matt Watson, one-half of the YouTube comedy team SuperMega, was beaten in record time by 41-year-old Nathan ‘Dad’ Barnett. This lackluster experience hasn’t soured boxing for Matt who plans to box again.
Watson blamed his 22-second defeat on over-training ahead of his boxing debut.
The social media sensation had been training with a boxing instructor for months before facing his opponent. In his debut, he was halted in under a minute.
Watson also revealed that he experienced a lower back injury during training that left him with shooting pains. He hopes to get it diagnosed in the coming days. He claims that his injuries may have contributed to his bad performance.
In an episode of the Super Mega podcast, Watson remarked, “I got that injury and here’s the thing, it’s because I over-trained in terms of physical fitness.”
“I put more work into physical fitness than actual boxing training. Think about all the impact exercises I was doing. I was doing a s*** ton of burpees and then I was doing these squat jumps with a medicine ball where you’re running forwards and backwards.”
“I was jogging and on top of that, when my back started to hurt my trainer was like ‘you need to stretch out your lower back, that’s why it hurts’.”
“Now looking back, those lower back stretches would have been good if it was anything but sciatic pain. It aggravated the problem and made it worse, so ultimately for about a week I was limping.”
“I remember being like ‘don’t tell them how bad it is’ because I wanted to f***ing fight, I’d been training so long for this. I f***ing did, I stepped into the ring and I fought. And with the adrenaline and everything, none of that made an appearance in terms of what I could notice.”
Watson says that facing Barnatt, who is renowned for being in excellent form as a result of his dance background, was a terrible match-up. Matt anticipated losing going into the boxing bout. If he returns to the ring, he’ll try to balance his work outs and find a better suited opponent.