‘The Challenge’: ‘Big Brother’ Couple Bayleigh Dayton and ‘Swaggy C’ Williams Are Physically and Mentally Ready for Battle (Exclusive)

Season 35 of The Challenge, entitled Total Madness, is set to see a large influx of Big Brother alumni entering the fray in order to make their marks on the longtime MTV reality competition. Two of those alums, Big Brother 20’s Bayleigh Dayton and Chris “Swaggy C” Williams, are making their debuts on the upcoming season, which premieres Wednesday on MTV. In a new interview with PopCulture.com, the couple explained how their experience on Big Brother will affect their new journey on The Challenge.

Both Dayton and Williams, being athletes and former competitors on Big Brother, were already well prepared for the physical and mental aspects of The Challenge. However, they still put in a great deal of work in order to make sure that they were in top form for Season 35. As Williams explained to PopCulture.com, they were working their “asses out maybe two, three times a day” and “running five miles every two days.”

We were real life preparing for it as best we could,” he said. Dayton concurred, noting the specific ways she trained for the MTV competition.

“From what I know about the show, it’s a mixture of a lot of things. It’s mental, it’s physical, it’s all of that. But most of the time for me, it has to do with endurance,” she shared. “So I used to be a distance runner in high school and I’ve always liked marathon, half marathon. So I just focused on building my endurance because I knew that strength would kind of kick in with adrenaline. I just wanted to be mentally strong and ready.”

According to the couple, they even tried to incorporate some of The Challenge‘s dynamic feats in their training in a very literal way.

“And believe it or not, Bayleigh actually saw me a couple of times, but I kind of kicked in everything in my workout. So I would run two miles, and then I would stop and do a quick puzzle, and then I would to sort of memorize the last room I was in,” Williams noted, proving that he’s ready for anything The Challenge could throw at him.

While the couple trained hard in advance of their debut, there was no way possible for them to truly prepare themselves for the madness of the MTV series. And, as they went on to tell PopCulture.com, they soon learned that there were more than a few differences between their experiences on Big Brother and The Challenge.

“What we can say is on Big Brother, people were so scared to fight because they could get backdoored the next week with no chance of competing for themselves. Whereas The Challenge, nobody cared at all what they say because you have to beat them to leave,” Williams said. “So at the worst case scenario, yeah, you could throw me in tribunal or you could throw me up, you got to beat me to send me home. Whereas Big Brother people were walking on egg shells 24/7 because they feared they could go home next.”

“And the same thing with couples,” Dayton added regarding the typical target placed on couples within Big Brother. “So on Big Brother, if you’re a couple, you’re [an] immediate target. With The Challenge, it’s not so much [the case] because it’s different. So, you don’t want to upset a couple because there’s two of them. So, the rules are just a little bit different.”

“So the things that would have been weaknesses for us in Big Brother were strengths for us in The Challenge. So we were excited,” Dayton continued to explain.

Dayton and Williams were clearly prepared for whatever challenges that the MTV series had in store for them. And, as Dayton continued to explain, she wasn’t just ready to compete to win on The Challenge, but she was ready to use her time on the series as a way to grow as a person.

“For me, I’m kind of weird in a way where these things are very painful when you’re going through them, but they help you in a way that’s unimaginable because I was going through something that was kind of a healing experience while everybody else was just there for a fun game,” she said when asked whether her time on Big Brother helped prepare her for the challenges that she had to face on the MTV series.

“And that’s usually what drives me to go a little harder,” she continued. “So, a lot of the time people are like, ‘Why do you take this so seriously? Why are you taking things so personally?’ And the answer is, ‘Because it is personal for me. I’m not just here to play a game. I’m here to win this game and I’m here to prove to myself that things are not going to break me the same way that they break everybody else. I’m going through real shit. I know you guys are here just for a vacation, and that’s fine, but that’s not my experience.’”

The Challenge: Total Madness premieres Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET on MTV.