Strength and conditioning coach John Connor spends most of his time advising Dubliners on how to lose a few pounds, but his expertise has also helped Conor McGregor and Carl Frampton become UFC and boxing world champions

We’ve all had a laugh at the Rocky training montages over the years, but not so long ago the average fighter’s preparation wasn’t a million miles away from necking half a dozen raw eggs, pounding the pavement to exhaustion and blattering seven shades out of frozen and unsuspecting animal carcasses. The elite warriors of today are more discerning characters, however, and their physical preparation for battle must be tailored accordingly.



Leading the way in Ireland over the past decade has been the Irish Strength Institute, a personal training service founded by John Connor and Eoin Lacey in 2004. The pair have opened three facilities in Dublin and one in the Algarve, and have quickly grown into the premier strength and conditioning and nutrition specialists in the country. When Conor McGregor’s head coach, John Kavanagh, came calling in 2008, Connor and Lacey set up the strength and conditioning unit within Kavanagh’s famed Straight Blast Gym in Dublin and agreed to look after all his MMA fighters.

Speaking to Connor a couple of days before his most famous client aims to become the first man to hold two UFC belts simultaneously, the 36-year-old coach is reflecting on when he first met McGregor. “Conor had only had a few fights and was nowhere near the UFC at that stage. It was around the time Tom Egan became the first Irishman in the UFC and it was dawning on John Kavanagh that he couldn’t keep doing absolutely everything himself. So John invited Eoin and I in and we took over the nutrition and strength and conditioning side of things. We’ve worked with a host of UFC stars including McGregor, Cathal Pendred, Paddy Holohan, Gunnar Nelson, Artem Lobov and Aisling Daly, and we’ve all had great success together.”

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With a master’s degree in exercise and nutrition science, time served under the renowned strength and conditioning godfather Charles Poliquin, and a PhD in health and human performance underway, Connor isn’t short of certificates, but he says he has gained more knowledge from being out in the field than in the classroom.

“I’ve travelled the world learning from what other guys are doing. I’ll go to a gym in the UK or the US or Australia and spend time chatting to different coaches about their methods and philosophies. Then, back in Dublin, we do our own experimentation and evaluation to figure out what works and what doesn’t. The fields of nutrition and strength and conditioning are always evolving and parts of them are unrecognisable from even ten years ago.”

He continues to learn from others, but Connor is a respected teacher in his own right and it was while delivering one of his seminars that he came across the current British Boxing Board of Control trainer of the year, Shane McGuigan.

“Shane was on one of my courses in Dublin and another in Rhode Island, along with Daryl Richards and Steve Broughton [two other integral cogs within the Team Frampton machine], and we quickly hit it off. I passed on my knowledge and we all now learn from each other’s experiences. When Shane began training Carl Frampton they came to visit us for testing and treatment and I’ve been involved ever since in some shape or form.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Conor McGregor in training. Photograph: Julio Cortez/AP

Connor’s involvement with an athlete tends to vary fighter by fighter, and even fight by fight, according to the needs of the camp. He was McGregor’s main strength guru for years, running him through his drills in the gym and helping him recover and improve after anterior cruciate ligament surgery. But when the UFC featherweight champion ran out of steam and lost to Nate Diaz last March, Connor switched his focus to improving McGregor’s cardio fitness and drafted in the relevant specialists accordingly.

Frampton is based in London, where Richards attends to his strength and conditioning, so Connor now adds most value with his soft-tissue expertise during fight week. “It’s sports massage in layman’s terms,” he says, “but at a very high level. Regardless of how well you structure your training, you’ll always pick up a few bumps and bruises along the way. MMA guys in particular, due to all the grappling, tend to be carrying knocks all the time. With some fighters I’m there throughout the camp providing fascial stretch therapy, but for Carl I’ll fly in only for fight week. We start with some really deep muscle work to break down scar tissue and adhesions because his body will need time to recover from that manipulation. Then it’s a question of fine-tuning. If something is weak, we’ll strengthen it. If something is tight, we’ll loosen and stretch it.”

Wherever he fights in the world, two-weight world champion Frampton is always much happier to have Connor close at hand. “He’s a great guy to have around,” Carl tells me from his training camp in London, where he is preparing to defend his WBA featherweight title against Léo Santa Cruz in Las Vegas next January. “Daryl is in charge of my strength and conditioning throughout camp now but John is the man to work on my muscles and joints during fight week. He gets everything firing on all cylinders and I feel the effects immediately after a session. I’ll shadow box and feel looser and, as silly as it sounds, it’s as if my hands are lighter and I’m punching faster.”

I saw Connor’s magic hands in action in the changing room in Manchester in February on the night Frampton beat Scott Quigg to add a WBA bantamweight belt to his collection. Josh Taylor, now Commonwealth super lightweight champion, felt a stiffness in his neck as he warmed up and looked to Connor for help. A stretch and a rub later, Taylor was good enough to walk out and blow away a durable opponent in less than five minutes. Connor is an apparent genius at oiling the joints and making aches and pains disappear in an instant. But as a strength and conditioning expert, he knows the key to combat sports today: power.

“Power is what every fighter wants, but it is the hardest thing to train. Improving endurance is not a problem, increasing strength isn’t too bad either, but power is perhaps the toughest thing to add and, conversely, one of the easiest things to ruin though over-training or choosing the wrong exercises. Conor and Carl both hit very hard naturally and so it is as much a question of managing their power as anything. From a strength and conditioning perspective, my priority is keeping my client healthy. I then make them stronger before I make them more powerful. Some people skip the initial foundation steps and end up doing more harm than good.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Carl Frampton preparing for his fight against Léo Santa Cruz. Photograph: Presseye/INPHO/Rex/Shutterstock

A fighter’s style also dictates how they should be trained. Connor recalls conversations with Frampton’s manager, Barry McGuigan, who was worried that his man wasn’t being readied in the same manner he had been years before. McGuigan was always a volume puncher so needed a certain cardio fitness to execute his gameplan. Frampton, on the other hand, is built to out-box and stop opponents with knock-out power and so requires a different preparation.

McGuigan himself is quick to praise Connor’s contribution. “John is a great guy,” says McGuigan. “He’s very professional, extremely competent and I like him because he is a straight talker. His knowledge, and that which he has generously passed on the Shane and the rest of the boys, is so important today as the sport continues to squeeze bigger and bigger athletes into smaller and smaller weight classes. In my day we weighed in on the day of the fight and I maybe added five or seven pounds before the first bell. Today it’s double that and beyond, and guys like John are experts in managing a fighter’s weight through a camp to take advantage of the system.”

Despite rubbing shoulders with Ireland’s elite athletes – rugby and GAA players are also on the client list – Connor’s bread and butter is still the general public’s never-ending quest for a fitter, healthier lifestyle. “Fat loss for the general pop,” is how he cheerfully describes it. I wonder about the stark contrast between working with some of the greatest fighters on the planet before lunch, and Joe Everyman with his beer gut and chronic back pain after. He uses a variation of the rocks, pebbles and sand in a jar parable to explain from a nutritionists’ point of view.

“We all more or less have the same big rocks in the jar. One will be a desire to look good naked and so I’ll focus on calorie intake and the ratio of proteins, fats and carbs. Now, that stuff is a given for an athlete – and they already look good naked! – so with them it is all about the pebbles and sand. That may mean tailoring supplements and playing with the timing of their calorie intake to try to provide the slightest edge that can make all the difference in high-level competition. There are no general guidelines anymore; everything must be specific and personalised.”

Connor is firmly established within both boxing and MMA circles and is quick to highlight the overlaps and the opportunities for the two disciplines to learn from one another. “Patrick Hyland [Irish super featherweight boxer] comes into the SBG to work with John Kavanagh and I know Conor often goes to see Paschal Collins in the Celtic Warrior boxing gym. And I remember a few years ago Carl came down to Dublin and put on a boxing seminar in Owen Roddy’s [McGregor’s striking coach] gym. They can definitely learn from one another, especially with MMA now in an era of strikers dominating. Top boxers tend to be very good at controlling the distance of a fight and I think that’s an area the MMA guys are looking at right now.”

He dismisses the bizarre rivalry that some fans have created between the two sports. “It’s like comparing rugby and soccer,” he says. “Like saying Brian O’Driscoll would out-rugby Robbie Keane – of course he would, it’s a different bloody sport!”

But the opportunities for boxing to learn from MMA, and vice versa, are certainly real and Connor believes a young coach such as Shane McGuigan is in prime position to reap the benefits of an open-minded approach to his craft.

“Shane’s a young guy from a strength and conditioning background so he is very open to introducing new ideas to his fighters. And you can see the success he has had, partly because of that. Old-school boxing gyms have their merits, but many are stuck in the past, doing too much steady-state cardio, not enough strength and conditioning, and employing out-dated approaches to nutrition and weight-cutting. There’s an attitude that, if it has worked this long, we’ll keep doing it. But MMA is such a young sport and it is bringing in people from a lot of different backgrounds who all have something to offer. It would be stupid to ignore them.”

At the same time, he concedes that some go too far on the science-based approach and forget about other necessary and less glamorous fundamentals. “All sports have tactical, technical, mental and physical components to them and the secret is to find the correct balance between all four. Sometimes a guy can be a perfect physical specimen, but just lack some mental toughness or the desire to simply work hard. You see it all the time in boxing, the guy in perfect shape losing to someone not apparently as ripped and fit. Carl and Conor are the exceptions. They always look like better physical specimens than their opponents and they invariably win too!”

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McGregor will have his hands full with the UFC’s lightweight champion Eddie Alvarez in Madison Square Garden on Saturday night, but I can’t end the conversation without asking an opinion on the seemingly ludicrous rumours of a match-up with Floyd Mayweather. Connor, a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu purple belt himself, is smart enough to know that each man would be an unbackable underdog in any contest outside their own speciality, but his loyalty to McGregor ensures he has to make some case for the Irishman.

“Conor can take a punch and Floyd is not renowned for knockout power,” he says. “I can see Conor surviving into the 12th then kicking Mayweather in the leg, taking him down, submitting him and just accepting the DQ. He won the boxing match, but I won the fight, he’ll say!”

“Yeah, right,” I instinctively laugh, before considering the circus the event would be and furtively checking to see if the bookies are offering odds on such shenanigans.

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