Boxer is abstaining from sex before his mega-bout with Conor McGregor

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August 19, 2017 12:51 PM

The undefeated champ is completely focused on the August 26 showdown.

Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Conor McGregor are set to fight in Las Vegas on August 26

Boxing’s 49-0 megastar will be shut out from bedroom until he fights Conor McGregor on August 26. TMZ Sports caught up with Floyd Mayweather on Wednesday to inquire about his pre-fight sex life—when asked whether he’d abstain from sex before the match, Mayweather confidently replied, “Absolutely.”

Perhaps Mayweather is just paying homage to Mickey Goldmill, the greatest fictional boxing trainer of all time, who famously told Rocky Balboa that “women weaken legs” in Rocky.

If Mayweather has dedicated himself to a week of cold showers, he’ll be at odds with challenger McGregor, who told Conan O’Brien that he tries to “definitely have as much sex as possible” before fights.

The notion that sex ruins athletic prowess has existed since ancient Greece, when trainers of Olympic athletes would require abstinence because they thought ejaculation meant testosterone leaving the body.

Such universal abstinence has left the modern games, as the 2016 Olympic village supplied athletes with 450,000 condoms, also known as 300,000 more condoms than the 2012 games in London, also known as a ton of sex.

However, what do we actually know about sex and athletic performance? The research is sparse, but a 2016 review in Frontiers in Physiology looked at nine studies on sex and athletics and found no evidence to support the idea that pre-competition sex weakens legs, or the rest of the body.

And that’s good news for the viewers at home, because in the fray of grill-out armchair sports analysis, at least we won’t need to talk about Mayweather and McGregor’s sex lives as they’re beating the living crap out of each other.

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