Alex Menendez/Getty Images
Larry Wade works with world champions. The seasoned strength and conditioning coach started his career in boxing with two-time welterweight world champion Shawn Porter, before forcing the likes of Badou Jack, Caleb Plant and Rolando Romero to invest in larger trophy cabinets.
For the last two years he has worked with Jake Paul, although Wade admits he was initially hesitant about the partnership. It was only during their first in-person meeting that Paul made three declarations to convince Wade he could become a world champion.
“I was one of the commentators on the night when Jake Paul fought Tommy Fury in Saudi Arabia,” Wade tells me. “After he lost that fight, I got a phone call a few weeks later asking if I would be interested in working with Jake. At the time I wasn’t quite sure. I trained legitimate world champion professional athletes who’ve done this from the age of five, six or seven years old until they’re way into their 40s. In 2023 I won six world titles; that’s what I knew and what I was used to.”
This scepticism coloured Wade’s thinking. “I do this for a living; this is what I do as a profession; I take it very seriously, and I didn’t know if he was taking it seriously at that time.”
However, he agreed to meet with Paul, and it was during this visit that the social media star turned athlete dispelled Wade’s concerns. These are the three things he said.
I’m not afraid to work
“Jake said three things to me,” Wade says. “One: He said, ‘I’m not afraid to work, so work me. I can do it. Don’t back off – push me’.”
Given Paul’s social media background, cameras are rarely far away, and the wealth of training footage available online suggests he has been true to his word.
Wade runs me through Jake Paul’s typical training week[1] , which involves five double training days split between the track, gym and ring. He adds that Paul has invested millions of dollars in a warehouse boxing gym in Puerto Rico, where he lives, as well as buying high-tech recovery devices such as a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. In other words: he is all in.
Don’t lie to me
“The second thing he said was: ‘Don’t lie to me’,” Wade reveals. “In the Tommy Fury fight, he felt as if he was being told he was ready, and then he wasn’t ready. After the event was over, the same people told him, ‘Hey, we didn’t think you were ready anyway’.
Paul, says Wade, was in disbelief at such a turn of events. “He was like, ‘What? This is not my arena – I trust you guys to tell me the truth’. So he didn’t want anybody to lie to him. Hearing Paul say this, and telling me he wasn’t afraid to work, was huge for me as a coach.”
Wade says he treats Paul like any other fighter – there is no special treatment, just hard work. And he has seen significant changes in his athlete during the time they have been working together.
“I’ve had the opportunity to watch him grow,” Wade says. “When you’re developing a guy – and this is how another trainer explained it to me – you’ve got to look at it as, ‘This is your son, or your child, that you’re building up’. There are going to be some good days, there are going to be some bad days, but whether they’re good or bad you can’t turn your back on it. You have to lock and load into it.”
The way to do this, Wade says, is to constantly remind everyone in the camp what the end goal is – in this case, seeing Paul’s arm raised on 28 June when he faces arguably his sternest test yet in Julio César Chávez Jr.
“No matter what the situation is, no matter what is going on physically and mentally, we need to get to that location where we’re able to do what we need to do on fight night,” he explains.
Wade uses Paul’s preparations for his Mike Tyson fight, and the significant curveballs he faced, as a prime example of this.
“People don’t know the journey he had to go through,” Wade says. “He was sick, he tore the ligament in his ankle, and he was still coming to fight. That’s where you start to really value not only the person, but also the fighter that’s in front of you.”
I want to be world champion
“The last thing Jake said, and this is the one that got me, was: ‘I want to be a world champion’,” says Wade. “When he said it initially I looked at it, took a couple of steps back, and smiled internally. And then I said, ‘Why not? Why can’t he be?’. I’ve worked with guys who looked like they didn’t have a chance of getting there, and they made it.”
Wade offers his former athlete Rolando ‘Rolly’ Romero as a case study for this. He had a limited amateur career and was offered a world title fight after just 13 professional bouts. He has since held titles across multiple weight classes which, in Wade’s words, proves that ‘anything is possible’.
So, when Paul told him he wanted to be a world champion, Wade was convinced.
“I was like, ‘Hell yeah, I want to be down with this – I want to be part of it’,” he says. “That’s what really made me jump on board. And from a personal standpoint, I’ve trained a lot of individuals who make it, but if I can take a guy who didn’t have that type of history and I can help him become a world champion, I think that makes my argument for being, and my journey to becoming, inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame that much stronger.”
Original Source:
Harry Bullmore
