The elite fighters who have based themselves at Tristar in Montreal – such as Georges St Pierre, Rory MacDonald and Francis Carmont – use movement not static stretching to warm up. Here Head coach Firas Zahabi gives you one, simple, GSP-approved move that’ll help you ready for war like the UFC 170lb champion.

 GSP WARM-UP TIP

“One simple active warm-up, it’s for activation, you can see Georges do it often right before his fights. He’ll just jump up with high knees. He’ll jump up and raise his knees into his chest,” offers Zahabi. “It’s really important when you do this you land extremely softly. There shouldn’t be a sound when you land. 

“You should jump up, explode up, touch your knees into your chest, but the landing is the most important part. If you land with a thud, over time you will injure your knees or your back. Over thousands of reps you will have an injury. You want to land with no impact. 

“All plyometric training should be with the minimum amount of impact possible. And, of course, always done on a mat, never done on a concrete surface or wood floor.”

TOUGH AS A CHAMPION

As you’ll know, being away from the gym, or from competition can stymie your fighting instinct. Acording to Zahabi, finding a belief in yourself, like Georges St Pierre did ahead of UFC 154, can remedy that entirely.

Zahabi says: “My biggest fear was that he’d lost the razor’s edge. When you’re on a win streak, you create this momentum, you create this psychological advantage over your opponents. When you’re out for almost two years life goes on, guys are moving forward, guys are building their razor’s edge. They’re the same fighter but they believe more, and they have more of an instinct to dominate and kill. 

“And this is super important. If you’ve got the most advanced rifle but you’re too hesitant to pull the trigger it doesn’t do you any good. And that razor’s edge is what gives you that belief that you will score, that you will succeed.

“That belief is a powerful thing and I was worried that Georges had lost that. I saw glimpses of that fading away a bit sometimes in practice, but he had to regain it. A big part of that camp was regaining that belief early on.”