At the upcoming Glory Last Man Standing PPV, Saturday June 21, the top ranked Joseph Valtellini will challenge Marc De Bonte for the Glory Welterweight title. In this exclusive Bloody Elbow series, Valtellini will walk us through his training camp, giving weekly updates as he makes his way to Los Angeles, and the world title clash with De Bonte.
I train my Kickboxing work at Ultimate Martial Arts with Kru Paul Minhas, my Strength and Conditioning with Costa Kladianos of Tempus Performance. I have trained with them for the last 10 years – my whole kickboxing career.
A typical training day for me is I wake up, check my weight. Get my meals packed for the day and head to work. After work I’ll hit up my scheduled session for that day (4 days kickboxing, 2 days strength work). I like to keep my sessions to less than 2 hours and at maximum intensity. Any longer than that and you have hit the point of diminishing returns. During the 8 weeks of camp we work mainly maintenance and explosive strength work, most of the true strength building is done outside of camp. During camp the focus is on technique, timing and sparring.
For weight, I like to do a slow weight cut. It never makes sense to me to do a big cut and pulverize your nervous systems and kidneys the night before a fight. How can anyone be expected to perform at their best doing that? And what benefit is the extra couple of pounds going to give if you’re drained? So I usually walk around 190 but always a 6-pack showing as I never want to be out of shape.
I also work as a teacher. Teaching is my passion and I learn things working with the kids that you can never learn in the gym. The problem solving and abstract thinking you get with teaching is invaluable as a fighter. Being able to inspire future generations in my work is the most rewarding thing and I truly feel blessed to have that opportunity. I’ve been working and training my whole career, so the job doesn’t affect my training at all as I’ve never known anything different.
After the Holzken fight [at Glory 13] I was back in training after a week. I felt that I did well in that tournament with my KO of Raymond Daniels in the first fight. I would have liked a little more time to recover before the last fight but I guess that’s the unpredictable nature of the tournament format.
When the De Bonte fight was announced everything was well under way. I had a feeling that I would be fighting on the June card so we had already planned out my training and diet. I don’t like to leave much to chance in training as we’ve been doing it for so long that nothing surprises us anymore.
But I’m always making small tweaks to my training to evolve as a kickboxer. If you aren’t constantly trying to improve, you will be left behind. I don’t want to veer too far off of what has made me successful to this point though. It’s a building process. To build a house you put in a strong foundation and add to that. No point in tearing it down every six months and starting from the bottom again.
Join us next week for more updates as Valtellini prepares for Glory.
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