IT was July 2013. Miguel Cotto had suffered back-to-back losses for the first time in his long and successful career. While a spirited performance in defeat to the imperious Floyd Mayweather was understandable, a wide points setback against Austin Trout appeared less so. Cotto needed to make urgent changes to his preparations but, at 32 years old (then), having been a pro for over 12 years and captured world titles at three weights, the Puerto Rican could have been reluctant to make fundamental alterations to his training regime. Instead he showed his humility and ambition by embracing new ideas, joining trainer Freddie Roach and strength and conditioning coach, Gavin MacMillan. Two wins followed, including a thorough drubbing of Sergio Martinez to win the WBC middleweight title, a world championship in a fourth division for Cotto.
Click below to read the step by step guide on how to train like Miguel Cotto.
Be willing to learn
Cotto is a legend and a sure-fire future Hall-of-Famer. He had worked with a number of trainers in the past, including the late, great Emanuel Steward. Having lost two successive bouts, it would have been easy for Miguel to blame this poor run of form on his age, wear and tear or the style of his conquerors. Instead, Cotto focused on the factors he had the ability to affect and employed a new training team. Roach and MacMillan suggested several new drills and routines and Cotto rose to the challenge. “He had gone through a rough time with the losses to Mayweather and Trout and he was at a point where he was really frustrated with his camps for a lot of different reasons,” MacMillan explained. “He was just used to, for his conditioning, he would run six days a week and other guys would have him doing Olympic lifting and things like that.
“What impressed me was his willingness to learn at 32 years old, like an 18-year-old boxer.”
From Roach’s dedication to the renewal of Cotto’s deft footwork and technical skills, to MacMillan replacing Olympic lifting with an accelerating isokinetic machine and mixing cycling into Miguel’s cardio line-up, the enthusiastic fighter approached everything that was asked of him with relish.
“Freddie and I are going over the basics and working hard every day,” Cotto confirmed. “Gavin has a great and respectful training philosophy that I have been following since day one. He is the best in the business.
“I have always had the same mentality to work hard every day and leave it all in the gym to have the best out of it on fight night. It’s still the same way.”
Build and recover
Before implementing new ideas, redundant ones must be discarded. The first thing MacMillan eradicated was Cotto’s Olympic lifting programme.
“I can’t be more against something than I am against that,” MacMillan outlined.
“It’s not great for any athlete. Olympic lifting has been sold worldwide as this improvement to athletic ability and explosion. But if you look at any Olympic lifter that’s been doing it as a career, by the time they’re 40 they have no back, no knees, they have nothing left. You beat the body up so badly that you’re always in a state of recovery.”
Much of MacMillan’s work was centred around minimising Cotto’s wear and tear and recovery time, while still getting him into peak fighting condition. This included using the accelerating isokinetic machine and pool work – using the natural resistance of the water – to strengthen his body without the correlating muscle breakdown associated with excessive weightlifting.
“He does massive repetitions but while it creates great resistance, there’s no weight-load,” MacMillan commented regarding the machine.
“Other than basic fatigue, there’s no tear-down effect on his legs. By the time he’s finished, he’s done upwards of 500 repetitions. That machine is worth its weight in gold, as it trains his cardiovascular system, strength and it can’t hurt him.
“We don’t swim. We use different devices in the pool to help strengthen him, using the resistance of the water. The resistance levels are completely determined by the speed of your movements and it forces you to relax. The relaxation component is huge in terms of power output because tension will inhibit power every time. You have to be loose and relaxed, there’s only tension at impact.”
There were other changes geared towards preserving Cotto’s body.
“Instead of running him I started using a bike and we’d do that fairly regularly,” Gavin added. “There’s no pounding on the legs and you can get a good sweat in without really wearing him out.
“When does a boxer run in the ring? He never does. Mostly it’s distance running which is an aerobic exercise. Boxing is anaerobic and it pushes the anaerobic threshold all the time. We’re trying to push the anaerobic threshold so he can maintain that as long as possible. If skill-sets are equal it comes down to who can do it longer.”
Another benefit of requiring less recovery time is that Cotto’s sessions with Roach can be used to their full potential.
“The biggest improvement any boxer is going to make is in their boxing skills and the execution of that,” MacMillan stated. “My job is to make sure the fighter does not lose because of his conditioning. It gives an advantage if we can get them athletic and moving quicker, but when they don’t have to deal with Delayed Onset Muscle Syndrome [DOMS], he can come in and work with me for two hours, his conditioning improves and he’s back at 1pm to work with Freddie and he doesn’t skip a beat.”
Go back to basics
Roach had previously observed Cotto from the opposite corner and this afforded him a unique insight into his new charge’s qualities and – more pertinently – his flaws. In Roach’s view, Cotto, a top amateur and former Olympian, had moved away from the diverse skill-set he had shown in the unpaid code and gradually become a limited brawler. So Freddie knew the talent and versatility was there, he just needed to bring it back out.
“I had studied Miguel for the Manny Pacquiao fight [a 12-round stoppage win for the Filipino in 2009] so there were already some things I thought I could work on,” Roach recalled. “I wanted to bring back his left hook to the body – I didn’t know why he had gotten away from his best punch – and I wanted to bring back more of his boxing ability. Everyone had been trying to make him into a puncher, but I thought he was a lot better when he was on his toes, looser and his combinations flowed better. Being on his toes, using his boxing ability, not being flat-footed and looking for the one-punch knockout, we worked on that with a lot of shadow-boxing and a lot of mitt work. When I work the mitts I try to become the opponent, do the things they do over and over.”
Cotto squashed an overmatched Delvin Rodriguez in October 2013, but Roach’s methods were fully vindicated in June when his man decimated Martinez, who many pundits had believed was the faster, more skilful operator. He did not look it on the night.
Work on your positioning
Cotto has respectable power and a great inside game, but as slippery operators Mayweather and Trout had proved, these strengths are largely negated if Miguel is unable to pin down his opponent.
“Cutting the ring off was a big issue,” Roach remembered. “He had good trainers before but I don’t know why they didn’t teach him how to cut the ring off. When Oscar De La Hoya first got with me, he didn’t know either.
“Ring generalship is a lost art and it’s very important to me and Miguel understands that. For the most part I don’t want him to be on the ropes, but he didn’t have a clear idea of how to cut the ring off, so we worked on that. Martinez likes to roam on the outside so it was very important.
“It was all on the mitts, I would get on my bike and run, I’d want him to control the ring and not allow himself to get into corners or on the ropes. He was following me in straight lines at first, putting himself into positions where he could be hit and we worked on that quite a bit; he picked it up quickly. It’s all in the positioning and footwork – that’s why Manny Pacquiao is so good at it. Miguel was a little heavy on his feet before but he’s lighter now because he’s boxing more and so his combinations come a lot faster. Speed is a great asset.”
Spar hard and focus on the opponent
Martinez has a unique style so finding another boxer of the same ilk was always going to be tough. Instead Roach wanted to find an ‘actor’ of sorts, someone who could imitate Cotto’s next opponent in the same manner as Freddie himself did on the pads. Step up, South African welter contender, Chris van Heerden and what ensued benefited both boxers.
“For Sergio Martinez, we got Chris, showed him a tape of Martinez and said, ‘Can you do this?’ he said, ‘I’ll do my best’, but Chris was actually harder than the fight. He picked up Martinez’s style so well that he actually adapted that to his career and I’m his trainer now.”
Roach’s Wild Card Gym in West Hollywood, California is infamous for its gym wars, sparring sessions that fans would gladly pay to see. Roach firmly believes sparring should closely replicate a real fight and thus must be competitive, with very little holding back.
“I have my guys go all-out in sparring but the one rule is that if you hurt a sparring partner, you don’t finish them because we might need them tomorrow,” said Roach, displaying a pragmatic side. “I believe in hard work and you can’t go halfway in sparring, because then you can pick up bad habits for the fight.”
Cotto agrees with his trainer’s philosophy.
“I like to work hard and the sparring partners make me work and go forward to get to the 100 per cent that I need to achieve,” he told us.
Replicate to succeed
There have been numerous reported instances of fighters doing things in the build-up to fights that mirror what they can expect on the big night itself. This can be as simple as sparring at similar times of day as the bout or inviting a sizeable crowd to watch sparring to help recreate that big-fight atmosphere. Team Cotto take things a step further by attempting to emulate an entire fight day – every Saturday. This enables the fighter and his back-up crew to become accustomed to the routine they will perform on the day and not find anything alien to them.
“We try to simulate like a fight day,” MacMillan revealed. “He’ll wake up, have a breakfast… we get him into the same routine where he’ll have a fight. We do that six or seven times in a camp. Everything in high-level sports is conditioned reflex, you have to make them simulate as closely as possible what they’re going to deal with in the actual fight. The more you can get them to adjust to that beforehand, the more mentally prepared they are.”
This articles was originally published in Fighting Fit: Train like the Stars. Download the Boxing News app for the full 164-page special edition.
