Ronda Rousey is back in MMA with support and structure she lacked earlier in her trailblazing career

INGLEWOOD, Calif. (AP) — Ronda Rousey takes the framed newspaper down off the wall. She smiles warmly while she reads the headlines celebrating her glorious, dominant victory over Gina Carano — in a fight that is still a month away from actually happening. Later that week, Rousey and her team hold a full dress rehearsal at her temporary training base in Las Vegas for her mixed martial arts comeback. Wearing her fight-night gear, Rousey goes through her warmup before making a cage walk complete with loud music and bright lights in an elaborate visualization exercise to prepare her 39-year-old body and her migraine-prone brain to thrive at showtime. "It just makes everything really special and fun," Rousey told The Associated Press. "It's so nice that everything is considered." These mental exercises are just a fraction of the massive upgrades in Rousey's training regimen as she prepares to take on fellow MMA pioneer Carano on Saturday night at Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California. Nearly a decade after she left the sport at the peak of her fame and the nadir of her personal happiness with MMA, Rousey now has a cadre of top-notch coaches and support staff, a world-class training setup and full mental support for her return. That's noteworthy because Rousey became arguably the most famous athlete in women's combat sports history despite having a fraction of the coaching help and outside-the-cage structure given to many top fighters. Rousey previously trained out of a storefront fight club in Glendale, California, with Edmond Tarverdyan, the coach to whom she remained intractably loyal while the entire sport questioned his knowledge and suitability — to the point where Rousey's own mother, AnnMaria De Mars, publicly called him an idiot. When asked how she looks back on her years with Tarverdyan, Rousey said: "We accomplished a lot, but I think we went as far as we could together." Many years later, Rousey has experienced what's possible outside those self-imposed boundaries, and she hopes to show it against Carano. When Rousey began to explore the possibility of an MMA return last year, her husband — former UFC heavyweight Travis Browne — encouraged her to team up with his longtime trainer, Ricky Lundell. Rousey actually hadn't liked Lundell in their initial encounters, but the enthusiastic coach quickly won her over. And when they got to work, Rousey finally recognized everything she didn't have in her first time around. She is getting innovative coaching from a team led by Lundell, the accomplished grappler and jiujitsu athlete who has coached Jon Jones and Frank Mir. The upgrades in Rousey's physical training facilities are massive as well, with access to a modern array of machines, sparring partners and recovery equipment. Lundell even ripped out his own garage to install a sauna alongside his five-person cold tub and hyperbaric chamber. Lundell and his team provide her with data she had never seen before, including a written debrief of every training session. They hold regular video calls to analyze her progress. She knows more about her strengths and weaknesses than ever before. "He always keeps me in a great mind space," Rousey said. "He keeps it very positive while still challenging me and giving me what I need. I've never seen a cat that's so organized. ... A lot of training camps are very disjointed, and there's a lot of egos pushing against each other. Ricky is really great at just team building and keeping everybody on the same page and coordinated." The fake newspaper, which is changed out for each of her training trips to Vegas from her family farm in Riverside County, California, is a simple motivational device. It's also a warm, positive affirmation of Rousey's hard work. And most importantly, it represents the type of thoughtful support that she almost never got back when she felt alone and overwhelmed, when she fought from darker mental places. "It takes so much off my shoulders that was on you before," Rousey said. "It just makes everything as easy and enjoyable as possible." When Rousey lost her final two UFC fights and realized she needed to prioritize her health, including her increasing susceptibility to concussions, she left the spotlight of the cage for acting and professional wrestling, followed by marriage and two children. "I had to allow my body to rest and heal," Rousey said. Rousey spent many years away from competition, but not from her sport. She said she found a mental peace and a maturity to deepen her connection to martial arts, which had been her central reason for being ever since her mother taught her judo three decades earlier. She still kept her skills sharp with occasional workouts, but she said that's all secondary to overall fitness and an improved mental outlook from the time away. "As a martial artist, I'm not just memorizing moves," Rousey said. "I'm learning concepts and philosophy, and those things never go away or change, you know? If anything, you still develop them over time, and it's not something that gets lost. If anything, it gets more solidified into what you actually are, instead of these kinds of superfluous little tricks and other things that take up your bandwidth when you're (training for a fight)." Rousey recounts a conversation with film director Taika Waititi in which he described his screenwriting process to her: He writes a script, sets it aside and then writes it again from memory, realizing that the lines and plot points that he can remember the most clearly are the truly important parts. "That's how I think of martial arts," Rousey said. "The core of what matters, the core of the philosophy is what it always sticks. That's always in there."