Issue 123
‘The California Kid’ is a fitness paragon following an intense regime straight out of the Sunshine State.
Join Team Alpha Male as the WEC’s poster boy gears up for his first UFC appearance.
Athletics has always been a huge part of my life since I can remember,” says UFC bantamweight contender and former WEC featherweight champion Urijah Faber.
The news comes as no surprise, as few fighters can boast of such an enduring and accomplished career. ‘The California Kid’ has a seasoned fight record of 24-4-0 that has seen him polish off big names such as Jens Pulver, Jeff Curran and Dominick Cruz.
In the cage the 31-year-old’s intensity is unsurpassed, always willing to trade vicious punches despite his strong wrestling pedigree.
Twinned with his laid-back Californian image, Faber has become a firm fan favorite over his seven years as a professional mixed martial artist. He is also revered for his work rate.
A seemingly endless gas tank is testament to all the years he’s spent training. Even from a young age, Faber’s desire to push his psychical boundaries was inherent.
“I actually got my cauliflower ears boxing some big Mexican dude at weekends who was my pal during wrestling season,” he laughs. “As a kid I used to box with my buddies all the time.
I’ve played roller hockey and basketball. I wrestled all through high school and college to Division 1 and in my freshman years I was captain for the football team.”
Born in Isla Vista, California, in a small beach community, Faber was raised in a somewhat alternative lifestyle. His father worked as a construction worker, while his mother was a fashionista: they are both famously, as Faber calls them, “hippies.”
“The whole hippie mentality is to not worry about stuff and I think that’s led me in my life,” he says. “In our house, we never had any conventional medicine, everything was natural.
I was fed the best stuff on the planet. Once though, I remember having to eat raw for two weeks in elementary school to flush the body which sucked.”
Faber laughs. While some may wince at the thought of being forced to eat raw vegetables to maintain a healthy diet, he realizes he can accredit his parents’ leftfield culinary choices to his healthy diet today.
“It’s great now though because being an athlete I need a ton of calories for burning all day but the food still has to be real clean,” says Faber. “My parents gave me this mentality where, now, if I’m gonna have a hamburger it’ll be with the finest beef, stacked with the freshest vegetables.
If I’m gonna have ice cream it’s natural ice cream with cream, milk and sugar, without all the other stuff they put in it.”
While good food is a cornerstone to Faber’s success, he also holds an unparalleled work ethic. Training at the aptly named Team Alpha Male gym based in Sacramento, California, Faber immerses himself in a grueling training regime.
“I’ve got a great psychical therapist who I started working with after I broke my hand fighting Mike Brown,” says Faber that’s Russ Dunning, also interviewed here.
“He does strength and conditioning two days a week when I’m close to a fight and three days a week when I don’t have fight schedule. He really pushes me with agility, footwork, explosiveness and jumping drills.
I also do pull-ups and push-ups with different variations, like plyometric push-ups.”
For Urijah, training is a lifestyle rather than something necessary to pay the bills.
“I train all year round. I just don’t feel great unless I’m training,” he says. “Although I do implement serious strength and conditioning which helps out, the bulk of my training is MMA based.
My training is as close to fighting as possible. Functional training makes the most sense to me because I only have enough time to put in to things that are the most important and, for me, that is the stuff where the technique carries over.”
While partly substituting strength for practicality, favoring combat training to craft technique and provide the bulk of his strength and conditioning, a recent drop down to bantamweight has opened doors to cardio exercise that he didn’t engage in before.
“When I was fighting at 145lb I really tried to cut down on the running because I was trying to keep weight on. But now I’ve cut down to 135lb I employ more running into my regime,” says Faber.
“I’ll do runs that are about 25 minutes to 40 minutes depending on the surface. I don’t do too much long distance as I don’t want to stretch my muscles out like a long -distance runner.
I’ll do sprints in between the run. I simulate a fight whether it may be 15 or 25 minutes for my run, but I do it two to three times a week.”
Faber’s passion for training hard is evident within his daily routine, but it is not without its cons.
He admits hating sprints, deadlifts and his worst exercise: squats.
“I hate squats. The temptation is to always push it to the limit during workout and you can’t really do that if you’re not great at squats.
You gotta watch out for your back.”
Joining Urijah’s list of Achilles heels is his love of potato chips, French fries and vanilla ice cream dispelling any suspicions that he’s a health freak, in the kindest sense.
With such a demanding schedule, often training up to three or four times a day. Faber’s support network needs to be of the highest level.
Training at his Team Alpha Male gym with some of the best athletes in the business, including fellow bantamweight Joseph Benavidez and featherweight Chad Mendes, has allowed Faber to perfectly craft his fighting style by sparring with the industry’s most respected professionals. Faber also accredits Team Alpha Male’s flexibility to his success in the cage.
“Our schedule is pretty unique. It’s a show up situation so we have a lot of available practices throughout the day,” says Faber.
“ There are a couple of staple classes that everyone has to show up to then there’s a kickboxing and a sparring class a couple of days a week. There’s straight boxing and a wrestling class, and also jiu-jitsu classes every day.
Guys get to train their schedule around what are essentially their weaknesses. It really helps the individual to fit around specific areas of teaching.”
As the name suggests, Team Alpha Male forces fighters to dig deep into the testosterone -fueled masculinity that separates the wheat from the chaff. With its main focus on MMA training, Faber finds himself immersed daily in a clinic of precise and psychologically draining drills.
“We drill a tonne of different positions,” says Faber.
“We have some set unique drills that are jiu-jitsu based, MMA based and wrestling based. We do takedowns, punches to takedowns.
From the clinch we do a choke series, a leg lock series. We do an armbar, triangle, omoplata series. We do shadow boxing and pummeling. We’ll do some stuff against the cage and sometimes implement new techniques.
MMA practice is that specifically: MMA.”
It isn’t just in the cage or at the gym that Urijah displays an intense work rate. He injects his ethos into everything he does.
Not content with being an MMA superstar, Faber is a shrewd businessman. Launched last year, Urijah has championed Form Athletics, which delivers premium-quality MMA apparel to fans of the sport. Form has won plaudits for avoiding the usual MMA apparel clichés in favor of a clean sporty look and was recently absorbed by sportswear giant K-Swiss.
Faber’s life now consists of training, fighting and managing his business image – a demanding schedule for a guy who describes himself as “laid back.”
“I’m a relaxed guy but I’m extremely busy,” says Faber.
“I have someone who has my stuff scheduled out. I have face-to-face meetings, phone meetings and interviews pretty much every day.
My laid-back mentality has helped me to stay busy all day and not freak out. Being busy has always been a big part of my life and that’s when I feel the most normal.”
After accomplishing so much in mixed martial arts, Faber now pursues a philanthropic career as well as a pugilistic one.
His latest business venture, ‘Eat like a Champ,’ provides fans with advice on how to live and eat healthier.
“It’s a website that started with a friend of mine who’s a nutritionist and it’s basically giving education to people that otherwise wouldn’t get it,” says Faber. “There’s always a desire for people to get into better shape and have knowledge on how to be healthier but there’s not a lot of time for people to really understand.
It’s not a lack of desire, more a lack of education for people who aren’t being healthy. I’m just trying to get some information out there and create a community of people who can get together and interact to get some camaraderie in your goals and show the world the lifestyle I was lucky enough to be born into.”
As Faber enters 2011 with an impressive win over Takeya Mizugaki, he will hope to work his way through a brace of formidable bantamweight opponents and become a title holder once again.
It’s certain that should he continue to train with such passion and intensity, fans can look forward to more displays of bravado and courage that not only made him a WEC featherweight champion, but also a people’s champion.
DAVE ROWAN
Manager at Team Alpha Male
Q: How did you and Urijah hook up?
A: “We’ve known each other for a while but we’ve been working together for six months or so. I’ve got a couple of fights under my belt but I’m an old guy, 45. Urijah was having trouble finding time to organize morning classes for the pros. We’ve got about 35 kids trying to make a name for themselves and it’s just growing.”
Q :Who came up with the name ‘Team Alpha Male’?
A: “Urijah. He learned the phrase in college and liked it.”
Q: But Strikeforce women’s middleweight contender Miesha Tate trains there too. She’s the alpha female, right?
A: “Sure, she does her main training at the gym, she’s got lots of friends on the West Coast.”
Q: With fighters like Joseph Benavidez and Chad Mendes at the gym, are you specializing in lower weight classes?
A: “I guess people see us a lightweight and under type of gym. Each weight class does have different styles, and there’s stuff Urijah prefers to do. Urijah, Joseph and Chad are all small guys with little arms, if you’re 6’2” when they get those guillotines on you it’s hard to get out!”
Q: Urijah’s hippy upbringing is quite unique to MMA, does it reflect on the gym?
A: “It’s a great place to work, actually. If someone new comes in Urijah goes up and shakes their hand and introduces himself. ‘Dude, there’s pictures of you everywhere, they know who you are!’ But that’s just the way he’s been brought up. He’s a very polite individual, which I know sounds strange for the sport that he’s in. He just flicks the switch when he’s in the cage and the rest of the time he’s his own person. There’s no ego and that attitude gets passed on to the other fighters. And like Urijah says, it’s a ‘co-op’ – if you’re really good at wrestling you’re expected to share that knowledge, and in return someone else will teach you new things too.”
Q: Fearsome Brazilian team Chute Boxe has its own song, does Team Alpha Male?
A: “No we don’t! But Joseph Benavidez is the big joker character. You’ve gotta follow him on Twitter if you’re not.”
MASTER THONG
Dave Rowan, Team Alpha Male manager: “He’s from Thailand, he’s our Muay Thai instructor, he’s a super-smart individual. We saw him fighting on a card on St Patrick’s Day, 2007.
He was the fight after mine and he knocked his guy out in 14 seconds with a spinning back kick. He’s been with us since then. He doesn’t drive so the guys take him everywhere.
Against Aldo, Urijah really didn’t think those kicks would affect him as much as they did. So now in training there’s more Muay Thai, and blocking kicks.”
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