Georges St. Pierre is arguably one of the most well conditioned athletes in the world and is said by many to be the best pound for pound fighter in the world today. His amazing strength, speed and skill has propelled him to one of MMA’s most coveted positions as the UFC welterweight champion. What does GSP do to prepare for the war in the Octagon? He trains with the best training partners, he maintains a consistent and intense workout schedule and he focuses on maintaining a proper diet.
GSP Trains With the Best:
“I always train with better wrestlers than me, better boxers than me, better jujitsu guys than me,” Georges St-Pierre says. “When you train with people who are better than you, it keeps challenging you. By challenging me it makes me better. It makes you better develop your skills than someone who is always training with the same people over and over again. I have a very good team. I train with guys who are going to the Olympics, and I train with some of the best jujitsu guys in the world. In every type of training I do, I train with better guys than me so I always develop my skills.
Workout Schedule and Intensity Level:
GSP, like many other professional athletes, trains six days a week, two training sessions a day.
MMA is not a marathon, it is more like a sprint. For that reason, GSP trains in short bursts of high intensity. GSP’s trainer Firas Zahabi elaborates on this concept:
“We do kicking and punching drills on the pads. It’ll be 20 minutes of warm up (10 minutes warming up and 10 minutes cooling down) and 40 minutes of actual work. [GSP] is actually hitting the pads with one minute of rest in between so now, if you calculate that, he’s doing three-minute rounds and he might go up to 12 to 14 rounds, depending on the day and how high the intensity. But we’re not going to do two hours of striking… that’s the difference between us and the majority of other people.”
Diet and Making Weight:
“I tend to eat as well as I can, but I use the diet to lose weight,” Georges St-Pierre says. “I weigh 185 pounds, and I have to be 170 on the scale [for the weigh-in], so in four days I’m going to lose 15 pounds. I’m gonna cut down the carbs, the sodium, and I’ll be eating a lot of greens and a lot of protein. By doing so, I’m going to restrict myself and make the weight. And after the weigh-in, I’m going to do the opposite by eating a lot of carbs and get all my weight back.
Georges St-Pierre ’s secret food is bananas!
“The reason he eats a banana is because when you go on low-carb diets, you lose a lot of potassium,” Firas Zahabi explains. “When you eat carbohydrates, you get a high level of potassium, so when you’re not eating carbohydrates, you have no more potassium, and when you don’t have potassium you get acidity in your muscles. So we give him bananas — bananas are high in potassium and sugar and, once he reaches his weight, we start giving him back high-potassium foods.”