Tyson Fury is known for his off the wall antics during his press conferences. By his own standards, this week’s event in Las Vegas ahead of his fight with Deontay Wilder wasn’t the most explosive of his career.
However, you can almost always rely on Tyson to give us something to talk about, be that technical, tactical or just farcical. This time he gave us some insight into a major new training strategy which he hopes will give him the edge in the big fight come February 22nd.
“If it’s gonna give me an edge, I’m willing to try it” Fury told the press. All the usual areas were covered, nutrition – “I’m eating five or six meals a day” hydration - “drinking eight litres of water” but the eye-catching line came when he said, “I’m masturbating seven times a day, (to) keep my testosterone pumping”.
Testosterone and other anabolic agents are associated with benefiting athletic performance in terms of increased muscle mass, decreased body fat (ACSM, 2006) and interestingly for boxers could also act within the brain to increase aggression and motivation for competition (Gleason et al, 2009).
A quick look through the sport science literature unsurprisingly yielded no directly comparable research upon which to base Tyson’s ‘testosterone pumping’ theory. Just imagine what cycling’s code of omerta would have been like if we had credible evidence of a performance benefit linked to solo sexual activity.
A review study of sexual activity before sports performance, published in 2016 by Stefani et al, highlighted the difficulty in drawing any major findings regarding direct benefits or otherwise of sexual activity and performance. They state that conclusions are often based on anecdotal reports from individual experiences.
Where studies have been conducted regarding sex and performance, effects seem to be linked to the interval of time between sex and the competition. Anything shorter than two hours and perhaps training could begin to suffer. Most of the research suggests that any negative effects are associated with concurrent negative behaviour, such as drinking, drugs and staying out late rather than the sex directly. So as long as Tyson incorporates his seven into a daily training plan with plenty of recovery, he should be fine.
None of the studies we found were able to point to positive performance benefits associated with sexual behaviour due to an increase in testosterone or any other sex hormones. However, come the evening of the 22nd of February in Las Vegas, if Tyson Fury catches Deontay Wilder with a heavy right hand and sends him to the canvas, Wilder and the rest of us will know that he has been hit by one of the best-trained rights in boxing history…