Khabib Nurmagomedov: evaluation

Transcript context

…Right. I think he doesn’t skip his training either. He never missed one back then. I believe that we both ended up there because we both, you know, hate to lose, and we both really want to win. And, you know, recently I came across this idea. There are athletes who simply want to win, and then there are some for whom victory isn’t enough. They want domination. I believe that he is one of those as well. They want domination. And for that, what does a person have to do? They have to train. They have to grind morning and night. And there was this thing with us. After the morning, my father never let us sleep. When I say the morning, I mean after Fajr, the dawn prayer. He just wouldn’t sleep himself, so we couldn’t either. So every morning, six, seven, we’d be out doing our warm-up. Some people might call it a warm-up, but when you show up at the stadium in the morning, you run five kilometers, you do sprints, you work with resistance bands, you work on the pull-up bar, you do push-ups, dips, jumps, you know the bands then work with a partner, drilling and so on. That’s about two hours of work. You drop two, two and a half kilos there. Not really a warm-up, but Father always called it that, right? That was a full morning training at seven AM. Then I came home to rest, and at four o’clock, we’d head to the gym. The training would start at five o’clock and end at seven. By eight, I’d be home, and by eleven, I’d rest up. And yet I kept thinking that something was missing. Like, I know that I have a start, a competition coming up in like forty or thirty days, and I would wake up and I’d be like, “Let me go to the sea. I’m gonna go down to the sea, do some running, some sprints on the sand, work out, and so on.” And so many times, I ended up going out for a third training session as well. Sometimes Father would say, “Rest. In the morning, we’re gonna have a heavy workload.” But sometimes I wouldn’t tell Father. I’d just go out at night, head out, and train. At night when everyone’s asleep, when nobody’s around, I’d grab one of my close friends, give them a call, have them pick me up, then hop in the car and head to the sea. I’d train for an hour or an hour and a half, come back, and crash. Next morning, I’d get up and start all over again. And just this routine, nonstop. And when I see guys, you know, when they do just one training session or like they say, “On Wednesday, we have a morning training, then an evening sauna session.” What do you mean? You have to fight in fifty days. You have a huge fight ahead and you want to take a rest in the middle of the week? Well, rest on Sunday. On Saturday, do a morning training, hit the sauna in the evening, take a complete rest on Sunday, and start all over again on Monday. That was just my approach. Everyone does it differently. I don’t know. I just think it has to be in your head. You’ve got to want it incredibly badly. So you believe that to be a champion, you have to train like that, you have to be that serious for the majority of people?…

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