On Daily Routines, we profile successful leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, executives and athletes to explore their routines, schedules, habits and day in the life.
Born on 12 August 1988 to Irish parents Amber and John Fury, Tyson Fury was destined to become a boxer. Around the same time he was born, Mike Tyson had just knocked out Michael Spinks in 91 seconds to become the heavyweight champion of the world. John, a former professional boxer and bare-knuckle fighter, decided to name his son after Iron Mike Tyson and predicted that he’d be “the next heavyweight champion of the world.”
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It was an absurd dream at the time, especially given that the young boy was born three months premature and weighed just one pound. “The doctors told me there was not much chance of him living,” Fury’s father told The Guardian.
“I had lost two daughters in the same way who had been born prematurely. They told me there was not much hope for him. It was 1988, Mike Tyson was in his pomp as world heavyweight champion, and so I said, ‘Let’s call him Tyson’. The doctors just looked at me and smiled.”
Fast forward to 28 November 2015. Tyson Fury stepped into the ring as a relatively obscure name against Wladimir Klitschko, the reigning heavyweight champion of the world, who had ruled over the division for over a decade. In a huge upset, Fury defeated the champion via unanimous decision and captured the WBA (Super), IBF, WBO, IBO, and The Ring heavyweight titles.
In an emotional post-fight interview, Fury expressed his gratitude for the opportunity, “This is a dream come true. We worked so hard for this. I’ve done it. It’s hard to come to foreign countries and get decisions. It just means so much to me to come here and get the decision.”
All of a sudden it was as if Fury had reached the top of a mountain he had been climbing since he was a baby. A mountain his father predicted to doctors he would successfully climb just moments after he was born prematurely.
“I don’t have any goals with boxing anymore,” Fury admitted to Muscle & Fitness. “I’ve achieved every goal I ever set out to do: becoming heavyweight champion of the world with five different organizations, becoming Ring Magazine heavyweight champion, lineal champion—there’s nothing else I can achieve in boxing.”
With the biggest win of his life came the loss of motivation and the dramatic downslide into alcohol, drugs and depression. “I’ve been out drinking, Monday to Friday to Sunday, and taking cocaine. I can’t deal with it and the only thing that helps me is when I get drunk out of me mind.” he confessed to Rolling Stone in a 2016 interview.
I struggled with motivation after beating Wladimir Klitschko [in 2015], but with this challenge, I’m there again. In the beginning there was motivation to do all these things: for a young boy to run to the gym and be a boxer; to win an ABA championship, to win the English and British and Commonwealth titles. There was motivation to hunt down Klitschko for years. But after the Klitschko fight, I felt I didn’t have a purpose in life anymore.
Tyson Fury exclusive interview part II: ‘I don’t need the glamour. I just want respect from people. All I want is to be happy on a daily basis’ | The Telegraph
Fortunately for Fury, he overcame these battles and started his return to boxing in 2018 as a much happier fighter. “I’m in a very, very good place,” he told The BBC. “They say a happy fighter is a dangerous one and I am very happy at the moment. I think the two-and-a-half years out of the ring helped me. I’ve been boxing since I was a child and I needed that time off.”
Fury has fought six times since his comeback; his latest bout a rematch against Deontay Wilder, which saw Gypsy King dominate the American in a seventh-round technical knockout victory, to win the WBC and vacant The Ring heavyweight titles. As arguably the best heavyweight champion in the world, Fury is now set on a collision course with fellow British superstar, Anthony Joshua.
Tyson Fury’s training routine & diet
In his last fight camp for Wilder, a typical training week for Fury had the champ training six days a week. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday are boxing focused and feature two training sessions — mornings are dedicated to technique while afternoons are reserved for sparring.
Kristian Blacklock, Fury’s strength & conditioning coach, also adds in core work and stretching on those four days. “Wednesday and Saturday I have him and we do recovery running and strength and conditioning – this time more intense, explosive movements,” Blacklock said.
It’s not so much been the training that’s evolved, it’s been my lifestyle that’s evolved. I usually would’ve had a fight, trained really hard and got in great shape, and within a month after the fight I’d be terribly out of shape—like a hundred pounds over what I should be. And that would be the lifestyle: the food, the drinking, the not training all the time, not having a proper training program.
Tyson Fury Talks Otto Wallin, the State of Heavyweight Boxing, and His Mental Health Overhaul | Muscle & Fitness
“I’ve been to bed early and got up early so it’s been a really good preparation, I’ve had really good sparring,” Fury said to Talk Sports, describing his training routine for the rematch against Wilder. “Kristian has been here as usual, so plenty of strength and conditioning work.”
“We done about a month, five weeks at home of strength block, before we came. Then I had two weeks off over the Christmas period in Las Vegas, got acclimatised to the time zone and by the time the fight comes around I would have had eight weeks in camp as well.”
For the fight camp, Fury also enlisted SugarHill Steward, the nephew of legendary Kronk Gym trainer Emanuel Steward, to help him train for a knockout. “I don’t have any problem with [Fury] making it a war,” SugarHill told ESPN. “That’s the whole reason I was chosen to be his trainer – to be more technical, to be more aggressive, to have that Kronk attitude, that killer instinct.
Sundays are rest days, though not by choice for the heavyweight champion of the world. “On Sundays I feel so depressed,” Fury told The Telegraph. “Every Sunday it happens, just because I’m having a day off at home.”
“Monday is my favourite day of the week. My Monday is like everybody else’s Saturday. I get up, go for a run. Have a haircut or a shave. Get my car valeted. All because I like going back to work, to reality, to the grindstone. I hate holidays. I can’t go away and put my feet up to relax.”
Since his comeback, Fury has learnt to stay active in between bouts, instead of putting his feet up and going on eating binges as many boxers tend to do. “I run every day, I do cardio every single day of my life,” he told Muscle & Fitness. “While I’m not in the training camp I do cardio in the morning and weights in the afternoon. With weight training, I’ll break it up over five days, doing a different body part every day.”
“Over the last two years, I’ve maintained my weight even while I’ve not been training. It was always training camp, get out, go wild, training camp, and vise-versa same again, and again, and again. It took me until 28, 29 years old to realize that. Life is so much easier when you come into training camp and you’re already 80% fit and ready.”
For his diet, Fury linked up with sports nutritionist, George Lockhart, who has previously worked with UFC champions like Conor McGregor, Jon Jones and Holly Holm. In an interview with The Athletic, Lockhart outlined the 4500-calorie meal plan that helped Fury gain a bigger and stronger physique in his rematch.
Breakfast, 8am: “It starts off with fruit and Greek yogurt. He loves that. And he feels strong with that. He has that every morning. Obviously, we switch it up, but we have tons of berries so you get a lot of antioxidants.”
Pre-workout shake: “The pre-workout will basically, depending what time of the day it is, be beta alanine. He’ll get 4,000 milligrams of beta-alanine. We’ll give them 200 milligrams of caffeine and those are going to be the basics. The base for pre-workout.”
Intra-workout shake: “He’ll have BCAAs with a little bit of creatine and sugar.”
Post-workout shake: “He’ll get dextrose in a supplement form, a type of fruit for fructose. Then we’ll add a whey protein isolate for his post. An hour after that shake, he eats his meal.”
Lunch, 11am: “Tyson likes spicy food, which blows my freaking mind because being an Englishman, it’s usually not the case. I cooked him up some shit — because I’m half Mexican — that put my tongue on fire and he’s cool with it. He gets a curry almost every single day for inflammation. There are a million different curries out there, so I’m constantly coming up with new curries.”
Second lunch, 2pm: “He has to have at least one serving of seafood every single day. And then I try and do one red meat or chicken. So every meal he gets different meats, you’ll get a huge variety of foods. I try to get different meats every single meal. A chicken, a fish or last night he had sirloin steak.”
Dinner, 6pm: Whichever meat he did not have earlier in the day.
Second dinner, 9pm: “He’ll have his power balls, his energy balls. It’s basically almond butter, oatmeal, coconut, honey, pecans and dark chocolate chips all rolled into balls. A couple of those before he goes to bed.”
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