MF: Can you give a detailed overview of your
weekly physical training at the moment?
What’s your strength conditioning routine?
RW: My daily routine at the moment is split
up over week blocks. My performance coach
manages a lot of my loads and works out how
the sessions are structured so that I don’t hit
peaks, go too hard or redline too often. We’ve
structured the daily workout to a 9-5 workday.
I start at 9am with strength and conditioning,
boxing, grappling consecutively, and then
I’m finished by 5pm. I spend nights with my
family. I have dinner with them, I put the boys
to sleep and I can relax a little bit. It’s a little
hard on the body at first, but you get used to it.
Luckily for me, I have a guy who manages
the loads, so some days are easy, some are
light – we work on that. Tuesdays is usually
grappling, I get a break between the sessions,
then I do my kick boxing. We alternate the
routines, so Tuesday I’ll do the grappling/
boxing, then I’ll do 9-5. We work it like that.MF: We know you’re in camp at the moment.
What’s your cardio look like inside camp
compared to outside camp? Do you use your
grappling or pad work for cardio or do you run?
RW: We don’t structure training in camp
per se. We keep a steady training regimen
throughout the whole year and we keep that
running every day, every month of the year.
The loads and the small details of the training
change when we have opponents lined up- for example, we might have a high cardio
block and a high sparring block and that’s
managed by my performance coach.
In general, when I hit the pads I’m working
cardio, when we do wrestling I’m working
cardio, when we spar it’s a cardio session. We
do have a dedicated cardio day on Sundays
where we hit the sand dunes or the hills out in
Wollongong for specific road-work or cardio-
specific exercises like running or swimming.MF: What’s the most important element of
your training regimen and why?
RW: There’s no one important element to
how I train I guess, especially in MMA. The
way I feel is that if you focus too much on one
thing, like striking or wrestling for example,
your ground is going to suffer, and that’s where
you’re going to get exposed. And vice versa.
With that in mind, we try and make sure we
focus on an equal number of sessions during56 MEN’S FITNESS OCTOBER 2019
Not many
of us would
be willing to
get the crap
beaten out of
us for a living,
but this is exactly what Rob Whittaker
risks every time he steps onto the
Octagon – although if this champ’s
form is anything to go by, it’s usually
the other guy getting hurt. It takes
a special breed to make a successful
MMA fighter – you need to be fearless,
you need to be focused and you need
to be willing to work hard. Luckily,
Whittaker possesses all of these
attributes in spades. Here, we chat
to him as he prepares for UFC 243.
N
the week to ensure we are ticking all the boxes.MF: You can tell with your fights that you’re
a real all-rounder. It seems the crowd
doesn’t know where the fight is going to go...
RW: I enjoy striking. Anyone can see in
all of my fights I truly enjoy it. But I really
do work my grappling a lot. People haven’t
seen my grappling game yet, but that’s
because I haven’t wanted to take the fight
there. But that’s not to say that I won’t.
Who knows what I’ll reveal later on?MF: When you talk about grappling, is that sport
specific to MMA? Do you like putting the gi on?
RW: We do a lot of gi work; we do specific
wrestling. I went to specific freestyle
competitions for wrestling and I also enter
jiu-jitsu competitions just so that we can
hit those targets.