The heavyweight needed to “seriously evaluate” his performance following a 2022 defeat at the hands of Joe Joyce and after bringing in Andy Lee and George Lockhart onto his coaching team, he’s stopped “overtraining” and worked hard to overhaul his diet.

He told Boxing News magazine: “I had to seriously evaluate what I was doing. I’d left my family in New Zealand to train in England but wasn’t getting any better. So, Ihad to ask myself, ‘Why am I not progressing?’

“Then after asking all these questions, I knew I needed to start making some changes, so I [paired with] George Lockhart for one of my fights in Australia.

“That’s been the biggest change – the nutrition aspect, the strength and conditioning, resting between sessions.

“In the past I’d overtrained my body to the point I was getting tired in fights.

“I’d been doing all of this good work only to then get tired after three or four rounds on fight night, whereas now, I’ve found the best balance between training and everything else.

“I had no diet before. But now, there’s a structure, a process and a science to it all.

“I just leave it all to him and say, ‘Give me what I need to eat, and we’ll be golden.’ “

Joe doesn’t think he’d have lost against Anthony Joshua and Dillian Whyte if he had been working with his current coaching team at the time.

He said: “Those fights would have looked way different if I would have had George and Andy involved, but you need to go through hard times in order to appreciate the great times.

“Now that I have George and Andy, I never want to lose them and never want to take them for granted.

“I just want to put in way more work and be way more disciplined.”