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MEXICO CITY (AP) — Since December, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez has found a way to navigate the wars in the boxing ring: Seek inner peace first.
For this purpose, the world champion has started meditation practices that help him to calm the noise on social networks before matches, such as his upcoming match against Édgar Berlanga on September 14.
The Mexican boxer will put his four super middleweight titles on display when he faces the Puerto Rican fighter.
Berlanga declared that he was more beloved by Mexicans than Alvarez himself, a provocation that did not ring true in “Canelo’s” ears.
“I haven’t heard of that, usually when I’m in camp I don’t look at social media, I focus, I try to meditate and stay calm. At the end of the day, nothing you say is going to happen,” Alvarez said in a video call with The Associated Press.
The 34-year-old Alvarez defeated compatriot Jaime Munguia in May to defend his World Boxing Council (WBC), World Boxing Association (WBA), International Boxing Federation (IBF) and World Boxing Organization (WBO) super middleweight titles.
In April, Berlanga was designated as the mandatory challenger by the WBA.
“On the one hand, it’s good that I was able to warm up by talking, and now that you tell me, maybe that can help give me that extra motivation to do things better,” Canelo added as he leaned back in a lounge chair at his prep headquarters in Lake Tahoe, Calif. “Everything was perfect by the end.”
With a little over two weeks until his next fight, Alvarez’s calmness is not surprising. After all, next year will mark 20 years since his professional debut in 2005, when social networks did not exist.
“The Internet is a double-edged sword, you have to know how to use it well because they work well for a lot of things, but they can also be bad. You have to be careful,” added the boxer from the western city of Guadalajara. “Sometimes, before a fight, I didn’t see them for four months. There was just really nothing to watch that could teach me how to learn or improve.”
Alvarez’s struggle to find things off the court that would help him improve led him to meditation, and last December, his brother Ricardo brought him closer to a world he wanted to explore further.
“I started last December and it changed my life. I heard about people meditating and I said ‘why’ but I didn’t see any point in it, but when I started meditating it was incredible,” Canelo revealed. “It calms you down, you listen to yourself, you feel calm, and you learn a lot.”
Alvarez takes meditation so seriously that he even changes the music he listens to, not only during his free time to focus, but also while training.
“Before I listened to corridos and mariachis, and I still love that music, but now I listen to more opera, more indie and quiet, loving music,” Alvarez said. “And I keep doing it because it’s a constant, daily work, rather than just doing it for a while and then giving up.”
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