Glover Teixeira extended his win streak to four at UFC on ESPN+ 29, with a painful-to-watch beating of the lion-hearted Anthony Smith. Afterward, arguably too much of the discussion centered on whether the ref or Smith's corner let the fight go on for too long. Inarguably, not enough discussion centered on Glover's remarkable performance.
In a recent interview with MMA Junkie, Teixeira's head coach, The Pit founder John Hackleman, discussed why Glover won.
“He has so many natural attributes and he has such a hard work ethic,” said Hackleman, as transcribed by Farah Hannoun and Danny Segura. “So in conditioning – he has our ‘Pit’ conditioning program and that’s kinda well known, Joe Rogan’s talked about it, a lot of people talk about it. But with that said, some guys seem to take it to an extreme like Court McGee. Sometimes they train a little too hard that when it comes to fight time, that training has been left in the gym or they don’t have as much for the cage.
“Now, Glover trains as hard, he does the old ‘Pit’ training, but now he’s also doing some of that, I think it’s called PI*, the UFC guys do so. They send him workouts to combine with ours, it seems to work like a charm because he tends to push a little too hard. But now with these PI guys, they’ve kind of kept him in check and give him different workouts for his other days and they’re shorter and more efficient than mine.”
“He’s a genius when it comes to working out and training. So he’s taken those two and, on his own, created his own hybrid system of training. He’s taken the ‘Pit’ old school training, this PI training, put them together and you saw the results. That was the result of his conditioning.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emVzPo8OmGs&feature=emb_title
*UFC Performance Institute