Glover Teixeira showed off his supreme conditioning when he battered, bloodied and bruised Fabio Maldonado for 10 minutes at UFC 153. “I was pretty happy, but I wanted to finish to the fight – not the way that I did – I wanted finish the fight properly,” Teixeira shrugs. “He wanted to go again in the third round, but I think it was a good stoppage, you don’t want to injure anybody and I think he was pretty hurt.

"I was OK with the decision, but I wanted to finish him properly. I wish the referee would’ve stopped the fight earlier so I got the finish by TKO, but you’ve got to be happy with what you get.”

When most men would’ve gassed out from throwing the amount of ground strikes he did in the first round, Teixeira simply carried on into the next. But to help support his conditioning and make his weight cut a little bit easier, he also makes sure everything in his diet is as healthy as possible.

“I’m always training, but when it’s off-season and it’s more of a light training schedule – if you’d asked me about my diet a year ago, then I would tell you that I eat everything ­– but I’m at a whole different level now so I need to take my diet seriously,” Teixeira explains.

“For me to cut the weight and feel better about my weight, I really watch what I eat. I make sure that I eat good, clean food. Of course, I have my cheat days, especially when I’m not doing heavy training or I’m not cutting weight. I’ll have two cheat meals a week, but it feels so much better when you eat healthy.”

So what does Teixera’s diet consist of? “I eat a lot of chicken, a lot of eggs. I make sure I have my eggs in the morning with oatmeal. I have a lot of chicken salads. I love salads and I tend to have a salad wrap these days too. I enjoy grilled chicken. 

“I can’t say that I follow the diet 100%, but in some ways my diet is very similar to The Zone diet, but it’s one of the best diets for sure and one that I’ve been working with recently. The Zone diet consists of eating 40% protein, 30% carbohydrates and 30% fat. It has to be good fat and good protein though.

“It’s kind of a pain in the ass to do because you have to weigh it, but luckily for me I kind of know already how things weigh so it’s a little bit easier for me.”

Grover put together a phenomenal 20-fight winning streak from 2006-14, until he lost to Jon Jones in a championship fight in UFC 172. Since then he has won two more Fight of the Night prizes and is currently ranked #9 in the 205 lb division with a 30-7 win-loss record.