Success is never coincidence. Rather, an accumulation of causalities. This has happened with the career of the UFC featherweight champion, Ilia Topuria, who had been working behind the scenes for many years until his media profile exploded, in a good way, during 2024. As one is one and his circumstances, it is It turns out that El Matador, as he is nicknamed, had a team behind him that supported him in each of his steps. One of the key members in this process has been Aldo Martínez, better known as Doctor Aldo, who has been working as Performance Director of the Spanish-Georgian champion since 2023.
Since the physical trainer from Alicante, who has extensive training in this field, took over the reins, the parametric evolution has been abysmal, coming to be considered the ‘shadow’ of Ilia Topuria. And the best, he assures, is yet to come. «Ilia has not yet reached her ceiling. What we see is spectacular, I really enjoy, for example, the times he did in his last preparation against Max Holloway in eye reaction, how he lowered those milliseconds to the best level,” says Doctor Aldo in an interview on ABC, in which he takes advantage present his book ‘Optimízate’ (Kitaeru)a manual to “find the necessary tools to overcome obstacles or any adversity that appears in your life.”
To account for the development that Topuria has had in recent camps, a sample of how things were done before is worth a look. «The eye work (reflexes and reaction) that we normally talk about, I worked on by throwing balls that hit the ground. He threw balls at him that he had to dodge and stop. That was the work we did during many fights. Nowadays we work on the reaction with lights, we also have a great physiotherapist specialized in sports optometry like Josep Caballero. “This way we can assess, quantify and analyze each of the data,” says the Performance Director. “This also leads me to comment on how he has broken, combat by combat, a spectacular record, both in Volkanovski’s and especially in Holloway’s,” he recalls. We will see all this in the second documentary film that the Topuria team is already working on.
Doctor Aldo tries to explain to people the difficulty of what it means to be a fighter at the highest level of mixed martial arts. «It is very complicated, because it is a different sport and it is true that you, for example, play for Real Madrid at a high level and high demands, but you have games every weekend, even during the week, in this sport I think the complication is It lies in the fact that you are going to spend many months preparing to fight in 5, 10 or 15 minutes or if you are Ilia, a little less. It is difficult to adjust a ‘planning’ so that in a very short time you have to demonstrate all the work of months or years,” comments the technician.
«How many direct or combinations has he been able to launch over six months so that later it is 0.4% of what we are going to see in the fight. You work a lot to then compete very well. The first thing we did for Holloway was to analyze the data we had on how the belt had been obtained. I have absolutely everything recorded since he let me coordinate the entire performance. We are reviewing everything that has been done, what we can use, what not, in the face of the new rival, because each opponent always has its peculiarities that must be taken into account in the technical and tactical sense,” explains Doctor Aldo.
Anecdotally, on a mental level, Topuria also works in every moment he finds relatively free in the days before the fight. For example, Aldo says, during the plane trip to Abu Dhabi to defend his title against Holloway, “he didn’t stop playing chess with everyone on the plane for six and a half hours.” All for one goal, which was finally achieved. Now, in 2025, even bigger things will come.
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