Glover Teixeira has had a recent career resurgence and his coach attributes a big part of his success to his improved cardio.

Former UFC light heavyweight title challenger Teixeira (31-7 MMA, 14-5 UFC) has won four in a row, with three of those wins coming inside the distance.

His most recent victory came over former title challenger Anthony Smith last week at UFC on ESPN+ 29, where he recovered from a difficult start to put a prolonged beating on Smith in a fight that was eventually stopped late in Round 5.

It’s not the first time Teixeira has had to rally his way back into fights, and he showed those same qualities when he turned the tables on Moldovan powerhouse Ion Cutelaba in April 2019, when he was wobbled early, but came back to submit him in the second round.

Teixeira’s coach John Hackleman says part of his recent success is how he’s been able to combine two training regimens, with one given by Hackleman and the other provided by the UFC Performance Institute.

“He has so many natural attributes and he has such a hard work ethic,” Hackleman told MMA Junkie. “So in conditioning – he has our ‘Pit’ conditioning program and that’s kinda well known, Joe Rogan’s talked about it, a lot of people talk about it. But with that said, some guys seem to take it to an extreme like Court McGee. Sometimes they train a little too hard that when it comes to fight time, that training has been left in the gym or they don’t have as much for the cage.

“Now, Glover trains as hard, he does the old ‘Pit’ training, but now he’s also doing some of that, I think it’s called PI, the UFC guys do so. They send him workouts to combine with ours, it seems to work like a charm because he tends to push a little too hard. But now with these PI guys, they’ve kind of kept him in check and give him different workouts for his other days and they’re shorter and more efficient than mine.”

Teixeira’s stoppage win over Smith was a hot topic last week, with many left upset by both referee Jason Herzog and Smith’s corner for not stopping the fight earlier. However, the veteran Teixeira remained calm and didn’t get overzealous when trying to chase the finish. Ultimately, his cardio ended up paying dividends as he kept his nerve and maintained his pace to score the late finish.

“He’s a genius when it comes to working out and training,” Hackleman said. “So he’s taken those two and, on his own, created his own hybrid system of training. He’s taken the ‘Pit’ old school training, this PI training, put them together and you saw the results. That was the result of his conditioning.”