What are the main differences between fitness training for wrestling and other sports?
The big difference is the type of fitness you need for wrestling. Because you know a rugby game is going to last 80 minutes or a basketball game is going to last 40 minutes, you train your fitness to that. You also know how the pace of the game is going to go depending on what position you play. With wrestling, a match can go however long and the pace of the match can vary depending on your opponent and other factors. When you train for a specific sport you’d be doing a lot of match simulation training which is mostly at a steady pace of movement. When I’ve been training for wrestling, I tend to use a lot of interval training where I go at a steady pace for a certain amount of time and then change it up to a high, intense pace for a short period of time, which matches the ebb and flow of how a wrestling match would go.
How do you get the balance of training that’s for physical appearance and more functional training for wrestling?
If you look at pure bodybuilding, you’re talking about packing as much muscle onto the frame as possible. When bodybuilders are out there posing they’re on stage for a minute, a minute and a half. With wrestling, personally I feel you do need to look like an athlete but that athlete could be a shotputter, a gymnast, a rugby player — there’s lots of different body shapes sizes. I think everyone should do some aspect of bodybuilding training to develop more muscle for show because if you ask the general public “Who’s strong?” they’ll say “A guy with big muscles” even though if you looked at a powerlifter they’d probably think he was more fat than muscly.
But also you’ve got to take into account the nature of wrestling: picking up your opponents, slamming them down, getting yourself up off the mat, moving around the ring, all manner of dives. You can’t go full into the bodybuilding: you’ve got to think “Right, I need to have some functional training and fitness and strength” so you can do all the aspects of wrestling that don’t just correlate to picking up a barbell in the gym. I’ve got a punchbag and I’ll place it on the floor, pick it up, put it over my head and slam it down on the floor, and I’ll do that in repetitions alongside some steady pace bike work, which replicates as best I can in a gym what you do in a wrestling match. Having that flexibility and those functional movements — being able to jump high, being able to explode quickly, being able to pick up awkward and odd-shaped objects — is key to go alongside the traditional bodybuilding training.
What difference does it make to training to be in wrestling which has no off-season like most sports?
A bodybuilder trains for 9 months to a year for one day and that training will include putting on muscular size where you tend to lose conditioning because you’re increasing your carbohydrates and your general food intake and then they go through the dieting process where they aim to cut their body fat. As a wrestler, I pride myself on having a pretty athletic-looking physique alongside carrying a lot of muscle, so it’s taken me a good number of years to find a dieting routine that allows me to train effective so I don’t over-fatigue myself or go into overtraining where your body almost works in reverse and starts to shut down. With my dieting it’s trying to find that balance of getting enough carbohydrates and enough of the essential dietary requirements so I can train effectively and then go out and perform effectively without putting on too much bodyfat.
How does the daily schedule of a wrestler affect your nutrition management?
It’s just about timing your meals. My diet is primarily what’s called an intermittent fasting diet so I wake up in the morning and have a protein shake and then wait until mid-afternoon to eat, which is going to fuel me for my performance that evening and then as soon as the show’s over I’ll be looking to eat again to aid my recovery overnight. Being a wrestler on the road is very different to other sportsmen: guys are performing at least Friday, Saturday, Sunday whereas other sportsmen are performing Saturday afternoon or Sunday lunchtime.
A bit like the bodybuilders are preparing everything for one date, professional footballers or rugby players will have a diet controlled throughout the week to peak their performance at 3 o’clock. For a wrestler it’s about tring to take in the right nutrition and still trying to eat as well as you can while on the road: sometimes that can be difficult because when you get out of a show at 10 or 11 at night, it’s generally only McDonalds, KFC and kebab vans or motorway service stations that are open, so you’ve got to try to find the healthiest option or go through the process of preparing your food and taking that to shows with you in a coolbag.
Because of the diet that I’m on, I’ll tend to eat at least an hour and a half before the show and then it’s a few hours till after the show when I cool down so I don’t find it too much of an issue. I know some guys who use a different diet where they’ll eat six or eight times a day can struggle to fit their meals in because you don’t want a heavy meal sitting in your stomach when you’re out there trying to perform for 15-20 minutes so definitely it’s about trying to find that balance.
What tips do you have for working out on the road, often in unfamiliar gyms?
I tend to keep my workouts kind of simple when I am away. You might be in a hotel gym that has very little equipment or you might be in a gym that doesn’t have your favourite piece of machinery. So I tend to think about what I’m going to be training, look round the gym and see what equipment they’ve got and then adjust my workout around it.
If for example they’ve only got one machine that works your chest, or they haven’t got the amount of weight that you’re used to at your home gym, then I’m going to be doing a pyramid up. That’s where you start with quite high reps at a low-to-medium weight; as I increase the weight I’ll drop the reps down; then I’ll go back in the opposite fashion after I’ve hit the top of that pyramid with maybe three to six reps at the heavier weight.
When I’m back at my home gym, which has tremendous amounts of equipment and weight, I’ll be trying to pre-exhaust that muscle because I know I might be going to somewhere that doesn’t have that much stuff. It’s about being sensible on the road and making sure that 45-60 minutes you do in the gym is hard work, regardless of what you’re actually doing.
How should you adjust training when you’ve picked up an injury?
I’m pretty lucky as my full time profession is as a physiotherapist and I’ve got a good knowledge of knowing how you can train for rehab purposes and then reeducating [muscles] so I always explain this to other wrestlers as a scale. A small amount of pain is absolutely fine: if you took a scale of 0 to 10, if you’re going from 0 to 2 while training, that’s absolutely fine. If the pain is between 2 and 5 but settles very quickly, say within 20 minutes of stopping training, that’s also fine because you’re not doing any damage to the structures. If you’re going above 5 or the pain level is staying high for a long time after the workout then you’re working that injured tissue or tendon too hard and causing damage.
If you know you’ve got a muscle injury you can still train it as long as you stay within those safety zones. If you’ve got joint injury, say an ankle sprain or a damaged ankle, then stability is an issue so stay away from free weights and dumbbells and use machine weights. Whenever you train free weights, the smaller muscles around the joints are moving not just to lift the weights but to stablise the joint, so if that joint’s injured you’re asking the muscle to do too much.
When you go to a doctor with an injury, do they usually understand what’s actually involved in wrestling and the physical demands?
Some surgeons, particularly orthopedic ones, will see a lot of sportsmen and when they ask what you do and you say you’re a professional wrestler they’ll pull a bit of a funny face because you’re normally the first one they’ve ever met. But it’s about explaining it using sports they’ll be more familiar with: you can talk about the impact you get when you’re playing rugby along also the throws that you’ll get in judo.
I know a lot of wrestlers suffer damage to their ACLs and meniscus in their knee and the rehab for that and the point at which you can return is pretty standard for all types of sport: there are specific milestones that you have to reach. It’s more difficult when you are talking about things like muscle tears or broken bones because there’s no set formula: it depends on the injury and the ability of the person to heal. With that, doctors often err on the side of caution and I agree that’s the best thing because the last thing you want to do is come back too early and run the risk of not only reinjuring the area that was injured but also causing injury to another associated joint or muscle. Or if they are protecting an area because it doesn’t quite feel right, they run the risk of injuring another body part.
Can an injury pose a risk to your opponent?
When you’re working with your opponent there’s a big reliance by the person giving the move to expect the person they’re performing the move on to be able to hold and position their body in a certain way. It’s very important that everyone is at their best possible fitness and not trying to hide or carry an injury: it just runs the risk of both people ending up injured because if somebody doesn’t quite land or post in the correct way then the person giving the move is equally at risk of getting injured as the person receiving the move.
How can wrestlers minimise the physical toll of travelling?
I do a lot of miles and it is nice to stay in a hotel and be able to drive the next morning after a decent night’s sleep, but sometimes it is unavoidable if you’re trying to get from Scotland down to Exeter the next day. I make sure that every time we get out at the services I’m doing a few lower back stretches and mobilisation exercises just because if you’re jumping straight in a car after the show, you haven’t necessarily had that time to cool down. You can also be quite cramped in the car so you do potentially put your body into uncomfortable positions or stuck in positions, so getting out and mobilising is important. You get a few odd looks when you’re doing repeated leaning back from standing or stretching your hamstrings, but I’d rather have a few odd looks that wake up the next morning with a niggle or a tight back. I’ve started adding yoga into my workout routines to keep myself a bit more flexible so I have stretches that I’ll do pre-show, post show and at breaks when I’m on the road for a long time. You don’t really want to be sat in the car for longer than two hours without a break if you can help it or you’re going to stiffen up.
Do you face any stigma about having a good physique such as fans assuming you either can’t or don’t have to do as much in the ring?
There is a certain stigma: the one chant I’ve heard for the last few years is that apparently I’m a shit Chris Masters! If fans see me work and the style that I work, I am a bigger guy that works a particular style but I can, when the match calls for it, do the dives or stuff that people don’t expect to see out of me. I do believe we’ve changed away from the 80s model of everybody being a bigger guy. I always say to people there should be body guys, there should be big powerful powerlifting type guys, there should be fantastic gymnasts and everything in between. If you look at the Olympics, not everyone looks like a 100 meter sprinter but not everyone looks like a shotputter. Each athlete has a physique that’s suited to their spot and with wrestlers your style and your wrestling technique matches your physical capabilities.
Is there a temptation to do more athletic moves just to prove you can, even if it doesn’t necessarily fit a match story such as powerhouse vs high flyer?
I’ve got a couple of bits that you don’t often see guys my size doing, like an over the top rope dive — the Undertaker dive — and if I was doing that every match it would lose its shock factor. But when I do it I tend to choose the right time to get the necessary reaction. But I also think that if I was wrestling a programme with a guy like Will Ospreay and he was flying around doing all these dives and he was outsmarting me, I could [do a dive] to surprise him. As long as you’re telling a good story and the moves make sense, it adds a little bit to potentially making that match more special.
