By Harry Bullmore
“I’ve worked with World Cup winners, and Daniel Dubois has the best physique I’ve ever seen,” his physio Ravi Gill tells me as we stand ringside, watching the would-be undisputed world champion train.
It is not just his hulking frame or knockout power that impresses Gill either – it is Dubois’ ability to work hard and recover fast, which is vital if he is to go 12 rounds with Oleksandr Usyk on 19 July.
His regular 20-round training sessions play a significant role in forging this fight-ready fitness, but there is another training method he uses to supercharge his heart and lungs: running.
Most mornings, the newly-signed Brooks Running athlete covers between 5km and 8km at a fairly easy pace, and three times per week his strength and conditioning coach takes him to an athletics track for taxing interval sessions. But one of Dubois’ regular fitness tests stands above all others – his Saturday hill sprints.
His trainer Don Charles runs me through the weekly workout, and the session could strike fear into even the most-seasoned athletes. But in the interests of entertainment and providing a point of comparison for Dubois’ pre-fight fitness, I resolved to give it a go.
Complete the following sequence 20 times:
“On Saturdays, Daniel does the mother of all sprint workouts in Greenwich Park,” Charles says. He estimates the gradient of the hill starts at 20 degrees before climbing to nearer 40 degrees by the end.
“It’s approximately 120m from bottom to top, and he does it inside 20 seconds,” Charles adds. “It takes him about one minute and 15 seconds to get back down to the bottom, then he hits it again. He does that 20 times, and he’s recovered for every sprint.”
“This workout is about learning to push your heart to the max, recover, then push it again,” Charles says.
In boxing, athletes have just 60 seconds to recover between three-minute rounds. The ability to perform at a high level within each round is vital but being able to recover more efficiently than your opponent can give you the upper hand the next time the bell rings.
For this reason, pre-fight training needs to teach your body to work hard, while also practising recovering quickly from these intense efforts.
Hill sprints can have plenty of desirable physiological effects for an athlete too, such as increasing VO2 max – the maximum amount of oxygen you can take in and use during exercise.
As a fitness writer, I have tried a lot of athletes’ training plans such as those used by Olympic champion triathlete Alex Yee, CrossFit legend Mat Fraser and adventurer Ross Edgley. But this one intimidated me.
Why? Because there is no gimmick – it is just good, honest work.
I live outside of London, but luckily the capital does not have a monopoly on gradients. So I found a sufficiently steep hill in Bristol early one morning and set to work.
The first few rounds are fun. Most people stop sprinting after the age of 20-something, but there is a childlike joy that comes with running as fast as you can. Outdoor sessions also offer an intangible feel-good factor, so I was off to a good start.
This feel-good factor started to subside after round five. I tackled this workout in the midst of a heatwave, and as the sun rose, so did the mercury. Beads of sweat on my brow turned to torrents, my heart rate shot skywards, and my face bore an uncanny resemblance to ‘cranberry crunch’ on the Dulux paint colour charts.
But with a fitness tracker monitoring my efforts to keep me honest, my only two choices are to give up or keep moving. Somewhat reluctantly, I opt for the latter.
The next five rounds are a slog, and my reward for completing them is the realisation that I am only halfway there. At this point, my sprints lack the springiness I had enjoyed at the start, and I can feel my walks back down the hill become marginally more lackadaisical.
A glance at my fitness tracker afterwards shows me this is my slowest portion of the session, with paces falling from 28 seconds per interval to more like 34, and the walk back also taking a few extra seconds.
It is at this point that I remember Charles’ claim about Dubois: “He’s recovered for every sprint.”
I, on the other hand, feel far from fresh as I start my eleventh round – one of the many reasons why Dubois is an elite athlete, and I am not.
It is after the twelfth round that a switch flicks in my head. With 60 per cent of the workout in the rear-view mirror, my mind can now see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I begin to attack each interval with renewed vigour.
The next six rounds are the hardest of the lot, with the final few steepest metres of my route routinely knocking the wind out of my sails. But despite this, I shave a few seconds off my interval times to bring them back down to 30 seconds.
I still cannot touch Dubois’ sub-20-second efforts, even though he is a full 20kg heavier than me, but it is an improvement.
Finally, I find myself enduring the last couple of hill sprints before traipsing down the decline one last time and lying down on a bench. By this point my shirt is sodden, and my lungs heave as I try to bring my breathing back under control.
The session took me 38 minutes in total, and reduced me to a sweaty mess with nothing more than a hill. It is brutal, gruelling and effective, providing as much of a mental test as a physical one as I fought the urge to stop on several occasions.
This sort of workout falls under the banner of ‘type-two fun’: “Hurts to do, fun in retrospect.”
It might even creep into the realms of type three: “Not fun at the time or in retrospect, but makes for a good story.”
Either way, if Dubois is able to do this weekly at the paces his trainer Don Charles provided, Usyk has a seriously fit fighter to contend with on 19 July.