By Keith Idec
Timothy Bradley is taking a more practical approach to this training camp in hopes of avoiding the leg and foot injuries that hindered him during his first two fights against Manny Pacquiao.
Bradley believes overtraining and a vegan diet contributed to suffering those injuries. He has eaten meat and fish throughout training camp for their third HBO Pay-Per-View fight, scheduled for April 9 in Las Vegas, and has avoided placing too much physical strain on his 32-year-old body.
“I’m eating meat now, so that’s a good thing,” Bradley said during a recent conference call. “I’m back on that meat. I’m back eating fish and chicken, and steak once a week. I think that has a lot to do with it. I just wanna be able to fight this guy with a great game plan, fight Manny Pacquiao without being injured at all, and see what happens.”
The former two-division champion suffered a sprained ligament along the bottom of his left foot in the second round of his first fight against Pacquiao. Bradley later sustained a sprained right ankle on his way to winning an infamous split decision in that June 2012 fight at MGM Grand in Las Vegas.
In their April 2014 rematch, Bradley battled a strained right calf that occurred around the midway mark of another 12-round fight the Philippines’ Pacquiao (57-6-2, 38 KOs) won by unanimous decision at MGM Grand.
“I think [it was] diet and overtraining,” Bradley said. “Too much strain on my legs. We don’t run on off days anymore. We don’t do any of that stuff. Physically now, it just feels like it’s all down to a science. The way Teddy’s got this thing orchestrated – from the eating, to the way the workouts are spread out during the day, the proper rest, the rest at night, the water intake – everything’s all approved by Teddy. We’re not making mistakes this time around. No overtraining.”
Teddy Atlas, who became Bradley’s trainer 2½ months before his Nov. 7 victory over Brandon Rios, encouraged Bradley (33-1-1, 13 KOs, 1 NC) to take a smarter approach to training camp than he had while preparing for the first two Pacquiao fights.
“I understood that he had a 32nd birthday,” Atlas said. “When I look at the calendar and see somebody’s 32 years old, I think that, ‘You know what? It makes a little sense to train a 32-year-old, a five-time world champion, maybe a little bit differently than a 25 or 26 or 27. That’s common sense. Just understanding that with that kind of experience and some of the miles that have been incurred over the course of his career, that sometimes less is more. You’d do the same thing if you have a car. When it gets a little older, you don’t take it out on the highway at 100 miles an hour. You don’t do that. You might break it out fast on certain days. But other days you let it go at a more moderate, proper pace.
“So it makes sense and I just think that there is sometimes with the pressure of these fights, and there’s tremendous pressure on everybody in these fights to be the most prepared, you think that the answer is to do more physical work. And that’s where certain times you get comfortable, saying, ‘Well, if I do more I’ll be OK.’ But it’s like anything, there’s a proper degree of everything. You have to balance that. It’s a delicate balance, but you have to pay attention to it, you have to understand it, you have to be cognizant of it, you have to respect that, that, you know … the human body is a very special machine. And like any special machine, it has to be worked properly. It has to be maintained properly, it has to be pushed properly, it has to be regulated properly. And too much of anything can be a negative, so you try to be very aware of what is the right amount and what can be the wrong amount. And I always say to him, ‘We have an eight-week training camp. We’ve got to keep logs on the fire. We have to make sure we have what we need in reserve to burn throughout that training camp.’ So that’s my philosophy.”
Keith Idec covers boxing for The Record and Herald News, of Woodland Park, N.J., and BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.