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I'm looking for the details of the muscle workouts that Mike Tyson was doing when he was training.

I need to know what muscle groups he was concentrating on, and what workouts he was doing for those muscles, and the routine of these workouts. Daily scheduling would be nice as well.

JohnP
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Omar
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1 Answers1

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From what I've gathered in various interviews, it looked a bit like this. He would have huge peaks when he was getting ready for a big fight. This is what he reported doing daily, his average training time coming in at 55 hours per week.

  • Run 4 miles.
  • Walk 10 miles.
  • > 2,000 (decline) sit ups.
  • > 500 push-ups.
  • > 500 shrugs with a 30 kg barbell

He would do his run, eat breakfast, and fall back asleep. Then he'd spend the rest of the day doing calisthenics, sparring, bag work, and eating.

Most of Tyson's training was at the hands of Cus D'Amato, and you can read up more on the training plans he had for his fighters.

Eric
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  • That's actually a pretty silly training regime going off of today's standards. – Ellocomotive Dec 30 '14 at 01:04
  • @Ellocomotive Could you please tell why? – Omar Apr 04 '17 at 18:18
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    Has almost zero zilch nada to do with boxing. Shrugs don't translate to boxing. I can't see how they would. Times are way too long, incredibly so. No compound movements. No way to load up the movements with strength. Heavy reliance on volume over intensity. No regard to balance or movement. Too much to go into, but this is not how you should be training. – Ellocomotive Apr 06 '17 at 21:44
  • You hold a static contraction in the traps almost for the whole boxing match. and unless you have a better way to strengthen traps, shrugs seem like a pretty solid exercise for boxing. – NicoLA Apr 06 '17 at 23:37
  • I've seen him doing Barbell Squats and other Machine exercises aswell. There are some videos on youtube you can watch actually. For todays standards it may seem not the appropriate style of training, but it worked though. – mitro Apr 07 '17 at 05:07
  • @mitro, it's possible that whatever Tyson would do would have appeared to work, because he was an elite athlete -- an achievement that depends substantially on genetic endowment. In short: correlation is not necessarily causation. – Christian Conti-Vock Apr 07 '17 at 13:43
  • Hard work, is the essence and conditioning and strength training is just one tool in the equation. Whichever tool one may choose without the work and dedication even the best genetics are useless. Even Tyson had to do some work before becoming 'elite' – mitro Apr 07 '17 at 14:14