Tatiana Suarez is ready to rumble again after injuring her knee in December—to add insult to injury, it happened on her birthday! Suarez, 33, shared a picture of herself wearing shorts and a black t-shirt, jumping during an intense group training session. “Good to be back 🙏🏽🙌🏽 Let’s go! #champ #hardwork #mma #ufc #wmma,” she captioned the post. “Can’t wait for the title run!!” Suarez is becoming legendary for getting injured and getting back up again, time after time. Here’s what Suarez’s diet and training looks like.
Suarez trains seven days a week, doing a combination of cardio and strength training. “I’m a great wrestler, I know I’m great at jiu-jitsu, I’m great at kicking,” she told Women’s Health. “So right now, I’ve been focusing a lot on boxing because I know that it’s probably my weakest thing. It’s also given me a newfound respect for boxers. I can’t wrestle yet. I drill it, but I can’t bend my knee all the way. When I’m in [training] camp, there’s not so much emphasis on cardio just because I do cardio throughout my workouts.”
Suarez avoids processed foods and sugar. “I ate a lot of high-protein foods and healthy fats like olive oil on salad, chicken, steak, eggs, and avocado,” she told Women’s Health. “I also incorporated fish oil, creatine for when I spar, and Thorne’s Curcumin Phytosome, which helps a lot with my inflammation.”
Suarez is proud of how many women are entering the fighting world. “I think women in combative sports has drawn a new way of how women are viewed,” she told Forbes. “It was once taboo for women to be in combative sports. Now, people believe every woman should be able to defend themselves. What was once viewed as ‘manly’ is now viewed as strong and beautiful.”
Suarez injured her neck in 2011, after which doctors found a cancerous growth on her thyroid. Then in 2021 she had to take a step back after the ACL, LCL and MCL injuries. Recovery was not easy. “I had to keep my diet a certain way, and I had to do certain exercises for my neck every day, and they were so tedious and boring,” she told Women’s Health. “Not only that, but I couldn’t do what I love, which is to go live and do my sport. At that point, I was like, ‘I thought that patience was the lesson that I was supposed to be learning when I was going through my neck injury. And then I hurt my knee, and thought, ‘Well, I don’t get it. What more could I have done?'”
Suarez was careful not to push herself too hard after her knee injury. “The good thing is that there’s nothing actually anatomically wrong with my knee,” she said on The MMA Hour. “So that’s a good thing. But I just didn’t want to go ahead and try to push through something that wasn’t doing what it [was supposed to], because my knee was really inflamed and I didn’t want to try to grapple through something and then actually hurt my knee badly. Because it is the knee that I had surgery on, so I just didn’t want to go ahead and mess with that, especially because my actual injury was so severe. I mean, I tore every ligament in my knee.”