June 15, 2010 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:02:10
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Four. | ||
| Three. | ||
| Two. | ||
| Boom. | ||
| And we're live. | ||
| How are you, brother? | ||
| I'm great, man. | ||
|
unidentified
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Living the dream. | |
| Great to have you in here, man. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Great to be here. | ||
| Yeah, I've been wanting to have you on for a long time, man. | ||
| I've been following your career forever, and I've been a big fan forever, so... | ||
| It's nice to be able to sit down with you. | ||
| I know, man. | ||
| This is awesome. | ||
| I've been a big fan of yours, obviously, and the podcast for a long time. | ||
| So to be in here, get the tour, check out your awesome man warehouse. | ||
| I think every man's dream. | ||
| This is an elaborate plot to convince me to get you to join the UFC. That's all this is. | ||
| Right away? | ||
| We want to go straight to it? | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| All of this could be yours. | ||
| I appreciate Rory McDonald going over there. | ||
| I know he did what he had to do, but even that one bums me out. | ||
| I want to see you fight the best guys in the world, and I think right now, over in Bellator, you have very good competition, but I don't think you have the best guys, and I think you're one of the best guys. | ||
| I think I wake up every morning and think I'm the best guy in the world, too. | ||
| I think that's the way to think if you want to be the best guy in the world. | ||
| That's the way I've been thinking for a while. | ||
| Not always in my career. | ||
| I mean, I've had some losses where I've, you know, had temporary lapses of confidence and whatnot, whether it be my training or my abilities in myself or my thoughts and my abilities in myself. | ||
| But, I mean, where I'm at right now, firing on all cylinders, I feel like everything's working. | ||
| Do you feel like those moments where you haven't been at your best, where you've had lapses, and then you felt those dark moments, do those motivate you to never let that happen again? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think I actually went through, for those of the people that don't know, I went through three losses in a row. | ||
| I mean, that's rough. | ||
| I mean, the first loss to Eddie Alvarez was a tough split decision. | ||
| A lot of people thought I won. | ||
| So you kind of get this, you know, oh, woe is me attitude, which I never had really had before. | ||
| And all of a sudden it's like, why did this happen to me? | ||
| Then had a back injury and then fought Will Brooks when I shouldn't have on one week, basically one week of training, which led to another loss, which led to another lack of confidence and then another loss. | ||
| So I went through that tough, dark time, you know, and I think there were certain aspects of it that it was me taking the sport for granted. | ||
| It was me taking my abilities for granted. | ||
| And also just not taking extreme ownership of my mental state. | ||
| Like realizing that I might be the hardest worker in the gym. | ||
| I am the hardest worker in the gym. | ||
| At every gym I go to I'm the hardest worker. | ||
| I live life right. | ||
| I do the right things. | ||
| But if you're not constantly taking extreme ownership of your mental state, of your confidence, your self-image, I think a healthy self-image is the most important component of being successful in life. | ||
| And I just, I wasn't taking care of that aspect of my life. | ||
| So you were doing all the right things physically, but you weren't doing what you needed to do mentally? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I think I had never visualized until after that. | ||
| I mean, honestly, I come from a hard-working My mom and dad both worked two jobs. | ||
| My dad was a union carpenter, woke up at five in the morning, every single morning pulled himself up by his bootstraps. | ||
| Mom the same way, working two, three jobs, both of them to make sure that me and my brothers had every single advantage in life, whether it be wrestling camps, football camps, this, that, the other thing. | ||
| But we weren't exactly taught that, hey, You can go out in the world and do great things. | ||
| You can go out and you can be not just good but great and be a champion. | ||
| And I think I went into college wrestling and I might have told the coaches I wanted to be a national champion. | ||
| I might have told the reporters, all the people that I was supposed to, that I wanted to be a national champion. | ||
| But in my heart of hearts, I didn't truly believe it. | ||
| And I was. | ||
| You asked Tyron, you asked Ben. | ||
| Those guys took me under their wing because I was the hardest worker in the room. | ||
| And they said, man, this guy could be good. | ||
| But I didn't exactly believe in myself. | ||
| And now it's taken me almost until I'm 30 years old to really truly believe that I was put on this earth. | ||
| To do some amazing things. | ||
| And that there is no limits on myself. | ||
| And that there is no limits to my capabilities and my abilities. | ||
| So, I mean, I think we underestimate how important and how mental life is. | ||
| And not just in athletics. | ||
| Not just in fighting. | ||
| Not just in sports. | ||
| But I mean, in anything. | ||
| In business. | ||
| And just being a good person. | ||
| Just believing in yourself and having a healthy self-image. | ||
| Yeah, I couldn't agree more. | ||
| I think that's one of the most important things to life, but it's also really difficult to cultivate. | ||
| Oh, it is. | ||
| Well, I think, too, I mean, I'm very hard on myself, you know? | ||
| I mean, I think anybody who's successful is at least relatively hard on themselves, and I think I got to the point where I just started calling myself lazy. | ||
| You know, I wake up every morning And I think, Michael, you're being lazy if you don't do something today. | ||
| Listen to this podcast or watch this YouTube video or read this book or spend 10 minutes, 5 minutes, 30 minutes visualizing yourself. | ||
| In a cage or on a podium or having loads of wealth or having loads of influence, having loads of impact, having ridiculous amounts of success because until you actually see it in your mind's eye, you can't actually achieve it. | ||
| Or you're going to get to the point right on the cusp of about to be achieving it and you're going to have that cognitive dissonance where something pops up where you have the opportunity to break that barrier but you're going to find a way to sabotage yourself Because you don't truly believe that you deserve it. | ||
| And I did that numerous times in college. | ||
| There was times where I was beating top-ranked guys in the country and would somehow find a way to lose. | ||
| Because winning to me, being crazy successful to me, wasn't exactly... | ||
| It didn't exactly mesh with how I truly saw myself, you know? | ||
| And I think it's... | ||
| And I think I can look back on that, not with regret, but with that kind of... | ||
| I just educate myself. | ||
| And I look back and I can put myself at... | ||
| National duels against CP Slater, us versus Minnesota. | ||
| My team needed me to win. | ||
| He was ranked top five in the country. | ||
| I wasn't supposed to beat him. | ||
| I was up by two takedowns and somehow in the third period I lose the match. | ||
| And I can go back and see that in my mind and realize, okay, that was a time. | ||
| Let's respect that for what it is and let's use that as fuel for the future. | ||
| I mean, my loss to Eddie Alvarez was a lot of technical disappointment. | ||
| Things I did wrong technically. | ||
| Losses to Will Rooks were things I did wrong technically. | ||
| But mentally I wasn't there as well. | ||
| And then I came back with a vengeance and then won. | ||
| And now I've won six in my last seven. | ||
| The only loss was a crazy freak injury. | ||
| And now we can continue to move forward and just kind of look at it as an adult instead of take the emotion out of it and look at it A plus B equals C. So it's really kind of helped me. | ||
| I think for a lot of people who don't test themselves in such an extreme manner, I mean, I think MMA is probably one of the most extreme things you could do for a job other than being a soldier or a fireman or a police officer or something like that. | ||
| But it's this idea that you sabotage yourself because you can't imagine yourself winning. | ||
| Chael Sonnen talked about that quite a bit, about His fight with Anderson Silva, how he was dominating him, not kind of, but was dominating him, was very close to being the UFC middleweight champion, found a way to fall into a triangle. | ||
| And he had done that with Paulo Filho when he fought him, and there was this thing that he would do where he would find a way to fuck it up. | ||
| Even though you're there doing it, the pressure of possibly pulling it off was too overwhelming. | ||
| You didn't believe it? | ||
| In some ways. | ||
| You didn't believe it. | ||
| And it's not even... | ||
| I mean, we're all... | ||
| I think we're all victim to our subconscious sometimes, too. | ||
| I mean, like we said, we're in there fighting. | ||
| You think, okay, that's a man in there fighting. | ||
| He has control of his body. | ||
| But you do, but you don't. | ||
| I mean, like, when Chael was getting caught... | ||
| I mean, I know exactly what you're talking about. | ||
| Everybody knows, remembers that fight. | ||
| Because we were all sitting there watching, thinking, holy cow, I can't believe Chael is... | ||
| He was a couple minutes away from being the world champ. | ||
| Beating the tar out of him, you know? | ||
| And all of a sudden, I think we all saw the triangle coming, too, you know? | ||
| Anderson, it seemed like he pushed the arm down real slow, and then all of a sudden he threw the leg over and we're all like, what are you doing? | ||
| And then, you know, then 30 seconds later, he's, you know, or 10 seconds later, the fight's over. | ||
| And I think it's your views or your beliefs not matching up with the reality. | ||
| And all of a sudden, there's that fine line between breaking that barrier and And unless you have been there before, unless, like I said, visualizing yourself extremely successful, extremely wealthy, someone to be looked at, someone to be admired, someone to follow, unless you see that, you're going to get to the point where you tell everybody you want the success, but you're not going to get it unless you 100% truly believe in it. | ||
| And it took me 30 years to figure it out, so anybody who's done that before, you know, it's okay. | ||
| It'll come with time, but you really have to, like I said, take extreme ownership Of inside your brain, between your ears is the most important part of life, as we've already said. | ||
| And you can continue to work hard. | ||
| And I go back to talking about being lazy. | ||
| I literally call myself lazy and shame myself. | ||
| Like, Michael, why didn't you do this today? | ||
| Why didn't you work on your mental health today, your self-image today? | ||
| Why didn't you visualize? | ||
| Why didn't you do that? | ||
| Because that's just like flexing a muscle in the gym, just like throwing a thousand repetitions, whether it be on the punching bag or drilling a wrestling move or a Or I take down, it's all the same stuff. | ||
| And arguably more important on the mental side of things than it is on the physical side of things. | ||
| When you keep saying extreme ownership, did you read Jocko's book? | ||
| I have it. | ||
| It's one of those ones where I have it and I haven't read it yet. | ||
| But I love that word, extreme ownership. | ||
| Yeah, it's an awesome word. | ||
| It's an awesome book, too. | ||
| And it's from a guy who's actually lived it. | ||
| There's a lot of wisdom in his life experiences that you can get something out of. | ||
| I ask because you obviously are a guy who seeks out knowledge, right? | ||
| You work on your mind. | ||
| What was it? | ||
| Was it a book or a series of books? | ||
| What got you thinking differently? | ||
| Well, honestly, for me, what got me thinking differently was honestly just going through the most trying time of my life. | ||
| I mean, I had just gotten married. | ||
| Now it's time to be a man. | ||
| Now it's time to step up. | ||
| Now it's time to provide. | ||
| All of a sudden, I go through this loss streak where after my third loss, I went home to San Diego with my wife. | ||
| We sat on the couch and we sit there and we just cried. | ||
| Who was the third loss? | ||
| Third loss was Will Brooks the second time. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| So I lost to him twice, Eddie once, and then now the Madison Square Garden one. | ||
| But we went home, we sat there, and it was almost like, what do we do now? | ||
| Is Bellator going to cut me? | ||
| Did I work this hard to now, you know, Be where I'm at now. | ||
| I was two years or a year and a half removed from being one of the top three guys in the world. | ||
| I had just beaten Eddie and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| And now here I was, three fights in a row, lost. | ||
| But it was that time where I realized Right. | ||
| I was actually starting to change my kind of mental training and stuff. | ||
| I was starting my mental training as I was going into that third fight or that third loss, that second fight with Will Brooks. | ||
| But I just hadn't been there yet. | ||
| And honestly, that one was more just like I got caught, you know. | ||
| But that was really what kind of set the trigger. | ||
| And I think I just started to realize, Michael, why? | ||
| You know, you sit there and you tell people you want to be the best. | ||
| Your actions speak louder than your words. | ||
| You work harder than everybody else. | ||
| You show it first. | ||
| You're the last one to leave. | ||
| You take care of your body. | ||
| You do all the right things. | ||
| At the end of the day, somebody has to be the best. | ||
| Why shouldn't it be you? | ||
| And I kept asking myself that question. | ||
| And the only answer I could come up with was I deserve to be the best. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| And I can say that with humility to say I really do deserve to be the best guy in the entire world at Lightweight. | ||
| Nobody works harder than I do. | ||
| Nobody takes care of themselves better than I do. | ||
| Nobody has made the sacrifices that I have and nobody lives the clean lifestyle like I do and has a calling on their life like I do. | ||
| Yet, when it came down to it, it has taken years and years and decades to almost erase the small-mindedness that I've had in my past. | ||
| And we're all just a constant work in progress. | ||
| And I think I just, I came up with work hard, good things might happen, but most likely you'll be mediocre. | ||
| You know, that's kind of, that was kind of my mindset. | ||
| What did you do different? | ||
| What did you change? | ||
| For me, yeah, reading books. | ||
| Like what specifically? | ||
| Do you remember? | ||
| What triggered it? | ||
| What helped you? | ||
| There was a book called Mind Gym. | ||
| You ever heard of it? | ||
| No. | ||
| Mind Gym. | ||
| And he talks about making a mental highlight reel. | ||
| And since that day, I've made mental highlight reels every couple months. | ||
| And even right now, to this day, on my mental highlight reel right now is beating Kyler Sanderson. | ||
| At Mizzou on senior night when him and I were ranked at the same. | ||
| We were ranked like fourth and fifth in the country, you know? | ||
| And not that I wasn't supposed to beat him, but the manner in which I beat him, I almost majored him. | ||
| And it was one of those breakthrough moments where I gave myself permission in front of everybody. | ||
| To just go out there and beat a guy handedly. | ||
| It was a wrestling match. | ||
| And it was a wrestling match, you know? | ||
| So, when you say make a mental highlight reel, this is of your past accomplishments? | ||
| Past accomplishments. | ||
| And I think the biggest detriment to the people that work hard and expect a lot of themselves is when you have achievements, you don't take time to smell the roses. | ||
| You don't take time to pat yourself on the back. | ||
| You think that, okay, well, if I stop and I say, you know what, I am good. | ||
| Oh my gosh, I did do a great job. | ||
| Holy cow, I was dominant. | ||
| You're not supposed to do that because that's prideful and that's conceited and that's narcissistic. | ||
| But really, if you're not your biggest fan, who's going to be? | ||
| And I think that's what I always did. | ||
| I would accomplish something and I'd say, okay, well, I'm supposed to accomplish that. | ||
| I won this tournament while I was supposed to. | ||
| But there's a balance, right? | ||
| There's a balance between patting yourself on the back too much and kissing your own ass and believing your own bullshit. | ||
| And we see what happens with those guys. | ||
| That's almost worse. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And I think we've all seen those cases, too. | ||
| We've all seen those cases where... | ||
| You see one guy, pride comes before the fall, and then all of a sudden the fall happens, you say, okay, well, I don't want to do that. | ||
| But there is that fine line, that middle ground where it's like, it's okay to love yourself. | ||
| It's okay to look at yourself in the mirror and say, that man right there standing in front of me in the mirror is a badass, and you deserve to be extremely successful. | ||
| But then when you go out in the world, you don't walk around like you're better than people. | ||
| You don't walk around like, you know. | ||
| So, I mean, there is no, you know, Finite A plus B equals C type of way to live. | ||
| But there is that middle ground between being your biggest fan, taking time to stop and pat yourself on the back and realize your accomplishments, which the mental highlight reel thing is something great because you can go through 10 things in your past and just continue to remember those times where you were in your flow state, where you absolutely performed at a ridiculous level. | ||
| That you didn't, that you kind of surprised yourself almost. | ||
| And I think that continues to happen step by step and brick by boring brick. | ||
| You make these little bitty accomplishments and as long as you continue to remember them, you can continue to increase that confident capacity that you should have and start to go from, man, I didn't know I was capable of this, to now the confident expectancy of Okay, I said I deserve it, but now I really am starting to believe that I deserve it. | ||
| And then once you actually believe, then you get in those scenarios where it's you versus him and someone's got to win. | ||
| So it's you most of the time now. | ||
| So this flow state thing. | ||
| So like when you're in a state where you feel like everything is just clicking. | ||
| How do you try to recreate that in your mind to remember that state? | ||
| I think it is writing things down after a practice. | ||
| Or honestly, sometimes what I like to do is... | ||
| Do you do that? | ||
| You have a journal? | ||
| A training journal? | ||
| Yeah, try to write things down. | ||
| And that's things too that can be added to a mental highlight reel. | ||
| Like having a really great sparring day. | ||
| And then remembering what you had for breakfast. | ||
| Remembering how your day started. | ||
| Remember whether you did or did not watch TV before practice. | ||
| Or, you know... | ||
| Those little things and then and then I always talk about working extremely hard and surround yourself with the best people possible and that's why I've you know I moved out to Las Vegas right when I started fighting and then moved to San Diego and then move and then move my training camp to Arizona and then now Florida and now you know so I've moved all over the country to find the best guys I possibly can so when you have a great day like that Sit down with the coach and say, | ||
| hey coach, you know, talking to Henry or Evan or Kami or one of these guys that is coaching me right now and talk about it, like almost overly talk about it, which those guys are always annoying to me or they always used to be like, hey, I did this right and I did this right and I did this right because I always thought, well, you should just work. | ||
| You shouldn't talk, just work. | ||
| But I've started to realize that. | ||
| Those things need to be vocalized or they get swept under the rug and you forget that you had a great day. | ||
| So now we sit down and we talk and we say, hey man, that 3-2 was really working great off the faint. | ||
| We worked that yesterday as we were hitting mitts. | ||
| And now you're continuing to show yourself that this thing really actually does work. | ||
| You're not just working to work, you're working smart. | ||
| And then you see that working smart actually turns into results. | ||
| And then you're like a lab rat in the gym. | ||
| Working on these little experiments that you're that you're making and you're actually Collecting the data and seeing the results now when you're talking about doing a mental highlight reel thing is this sort of a rebuilding exercise a rebuilding confidence exercise or is this just a? | ||
| solidifying skill set and understanding your potential Because you've already done things before. | ||
| Because you were in a bad spot when you started doing this. | ||
| Is this when you started constructing this highlight reel thing? | ||
| I actually read the book in college and then found it on my shelf one day. | ||
| Do you know who wrote it? | ||
| Mind Jim? | ||
| You find it, Jimmy? | ||
| Gary Mack. | ||
| Powerful Gary Mack. | ||
| Yeah, and then there was just a bunch of... | ||
| And there was another book. | ||
| Don't remind me. | ||
| It's called How Champions Think. | ||
| And it was just a bunch of instances where they were talking about Tiger Woods. | ||
| They were talking about this guy or that guy. | ||
| And then one of the chapters was doing a mental highlight reel. | ||
| And I think it can be used for both. | ||
| I mean, you should do one today. | ||
| We should all do one today. | ||
| Whether you're in a great place, whether you just closed the biggest business deal you ever possibly could, or you just are down in the dumps because you feel like the biggest loser on earth. | ||
| You do a mental highlight reel. | ||
| It's just like going to the gym. | ||
| And then it changes. | ||
| Maybe this month, It's different than next month. | ||
| Maybe you wipe off an old one and you put on a brand new one that you just remembered. | ||
| Because sometimes we forget successes that we have. | ||
| It takes me going to my Wikipedia page or me going on some old interviews or somebody telling me on Twitter, hey, remember that time you did this? | ||
| For me to actually remember the successes that I've had because I've been conditioned To pull myself up by my bootstraps every single day and forget about all my accomplishments in my past because those don't matter. | ||
| Those are stumbling blocks because what got you here isn't going to get you where you want to go. | ||
| And we have that mentality, but you have to take the time to remember Almost look at yourself the way other people see you because we all are all our biggest critics You know the way my fans see me the way you watch me fight is and and the the way you see my abilities Is probably even better than I have seen myself a lot in my past from an outside perspective It's so much easier to look at someone outside perspective because our own inner monologue our own and our own self-image Dummies | ||
| down Who we are and how much we want to accomplish. | ||
| Not all of us. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of people out there who are cocky, narcissistic people who think they are the... | ||
| Those people have the hardest time coming back from losses, though. | ||
|
unidentified
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Big time. | |
| It seems like when they get head kicked or something and then they realize they're human, it's like, whoa. | ||
| You see it with a lot of those guys where they don't... | ||
| Instead of facing their demons, what they've done is create this delusional self-image. | ||
| And when that delusional self-image gets shattered and it's An undeniable reality that there's people that are better than them. | ||
| It's very, very difficult for them to bounce back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, and I mean, I think I am by no means the poster child for that. | ||
| I mean, it took me a loss that carried me into another loss and another loss. | ||
| I went 688 days without a win. | ||
| But when I write a book some days, it's going to be called 688 days. | ||
| And that's how long it took me to go from loss to win. | ||
| And that's a long time. | ||
| That's a long fucking time. | ||
| It's a long time to question yourself every single day. | ||
| To wake up in the morning Wondering if you were going to have a paycheck. | ||
| Wondering if you were going to get a phone call from your manager. | ||
| Wondering if you really wanted to open up your phone and see all the negative comments that I told you Michael Chandler wasn't as good as we all thought he was. | ||
| Oh, you don't read that shit, do you? | ||
| You can't read that, dude! | ||
| But I mean, not even just the fans. | ||
| The media wrote me off and everybody. | ||
| You get written off and it's... | ||
| It shapes the reality when really the reality was, man, I was put on this earth to do some great things, but it just took me... | ||
| I look at it now and I think, you know, if bad things happen to you but a good thing comes from it, was it really a bad thing? | ||
| And I look at it and I say, everybody's got losses. | ||
| It's not a big deal. | ||
| You know, I remember the sting. | ||
| I remember the pain. | ||
| I remember the embarrassment. | ||
| I mean, what we also got to remember, too, is this is embarrassing. | ||
| You lose a fight, that's embarrassing. | ||
| You know, it's a hard pill to swallow. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So it's tough. | ||
| Especially when you were a former champion and then you're going these 600 plus days without a win. | ||
| And it really highlights the difficult nature of fighting as opposed to any other sport where there's times where it's entirely likely that you're going to go a long time without competing again. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You could go six months without competing again. | ||
| You can go eight months. | ||
| Guys go a year if you get injured. | ||
| That's a long fucking time. | ||
| Any other sport, if you lose a baseball game, you drop a ball, you're back at it the next day. | ||
| Same thing with wrestling. | ||
| Wrestling was great because you lost a match on Saturday. | ||
| You were able to come back in the duel on Wednesday or even the next Saturday. | ||
| Seven days you had to go. | ||
| I mean, a lot of times, yeah, I mean, barring injuries or whatnot, I mean, it could be a year before you get to step back in the cage again, and then every single day you spend questioning. | ||
| And every single day, you also just end up putting so much pressure on yourself. | ||
| I mean, the biggest thing that I did wrong was I came into this sport, and literally 18 months after starting the sport, I was in a cage with Eddie Alvarez, top five guy in the world, beat Eddie Alvarez. | ||
| Then it was like, okay, now you have to perform. | ||
| That was that soon after starting the sport? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| August of 2009, I had my first fight, and then I fought him in 2011. That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you finished him? | ||
| And finished him. | ||
| But then, now the real game starts. | ||
| Now it's like, okay, hey, you're there. | ||
| You're ranked in the top three, top five. | ||
| You know, your whole future depends on every single fight. | ||
| And then, instead of thinking about every single fight, you think about every single practice. | ||
| And instead of thinking about every single practice, you think about every single round in practice. | ||
| And not just every round, But every minute in practice. | ||
| So you hit me with a 1-2, immediately that's a loss in my mind. | ||
| So now I have to come back and get it. | ||
| So instead of just focusing on success, I was focusing on perfection. | ||
| So every single day I was trying to be perfect. | ||
| And you can't be perfect. | ||
| The greatest athletes in the world will tell you... | ||
| They are not perfect. | ||
| You know, they fail time and time and time again. | ||
| But I put all this pressure on myself to where I put myself in this prison of, Michael, you suck because you just lost to this guy who's not even signed to any organization at all, and you just lost to him in this sparring round. | ||
| And my view of what the loss was was different than my coach who watched it. | ||
| He said, no, you did all right. | ||
| You didn't lose horribly, but in my mind I lost horribly. | ||
| I would have got finished, blah, blah, blah, all the kind of like crazy stuff, you know? | ||
| So that's the thing too is I started focusing on success and not perfection. | ||
| You know, stop putting so much pressure on yourself to be perfect. | ||
| Just focus on being successful. | ||
| Now I'm focusing on the big picture of being successful instead of these little bitty instances where I'm trying to be perfect. | ||
| Now when you look at yourself and you look at your overall MMA skill set, do you try to look at it almost like as if you're managing yourself? | ||
| Not managing yourself like a fight manager, but like a project. | ||
| Like looking at it like, okay, this is what we need to work on. | ||
| This is how I need to tighten this up. | ||
| Do you look at it as like an overall long-term project? | ||
| Like how do you visualize it? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, and I get that question a lot, too. | ||
| It's like, well, hey, how do you prepare for an opponent? | ||
| And honestly, I'd say almost 90% of my training is focusing on myself. | ||
| I mean, because if I put the right systems in place, if I get the right skill sets as sharp as they can be for fight night, there's not a guy in the lightweight division in the entire world that I think can beat me. | ||
| That last 10%, 90% focus on myself, the last 10% focus on the little intricacies, the little habits, the little tendencies that my opponents might have. | ||
| I mean, Eddie did a great job with it in the second round. | ||
| They knew if they ran for me... | ||
| The second fight? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They ran for me and they circled and circled and circled. | ||
| Crazy maniac robot, come forward like a reckless abandon. | ||
| Michael Chandler's going to come and he's going to eat a thousand jabs. | ||
| And you can... | ||
| Keep them off you long enough to hopefully maybe win a decision. | ||
| They did a good job at that. | ||
| I wasn't cutting off the cage. | ||
| I wasn't using my feints. | ||
| I was trying to throw big shots because why? | ||
| We had that epic battle in 2011. I wasn't 100% confident in my training. | ||
| So that led me to just fight like a barbarian rather than a skillful veteran that has the skills and the abilities to be able to go out there and beat any lightweight in the world. | ||
| You're still relatively new with your fighting experience too, right? | ||
| Well, that was the second fight. | ||
| But I was still very young, and I had changed... | ||
| I had moved to a training camp where I wasn't getting... | ||
| We all need to look at ourselves, too. | ||
| I'm not telling people how to live their lives or train, but I needed to focus on a certain path to victory. | ||
| Find the easiest path to victory. | ||
| Bruce Lee, water. | ||
| Be like water. | ||
| Adapt, but also just say, okay, I'm not a long guy, not a tall guy. | ||
| I'm a shorter, powerful wrestler who can take anybody down, who's not going to get taken down, who has an overhand right that can knock anybody out in the entire world, and a gas tank that can come... | ||
| That will surpass any 25 minutes that I need to fight. | ||
| So I needed to focus on these certain five elements to be successful and not a thousand stuff. | ||
| I mean, training with Dominick Cruz and working on footwork and doing this and doing that and rollouts and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| It wasn't the right path to victory for me. | ||
| Therefore, I found myself almost out training myself. | ||
| I was training so much. | ||
| If I really just would have trained basics and good cardio, good strength and conditioning, good boxing, good wrestling, good grappling, That's easy to say after the fact, right? | ||
| You get stuck in that, yeah. | ||
| Where were you training at the time? | ||
| Were you training at Alliance? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And so you felt like you were trying to mimic Dominic's crazy movement? | ||
| I think it's just... | ||
| I mean, the good thing about that training camp is they have opened themselves up to a lot of different techniques. | ||
| You know, I mean, I... I feel like I'm pretty athletic. | ||
| I feel like I catch on pretty quickly. | ||
| But really, to be successful, like if I was going to step into the cage with Khabib tomorrow, I'm going to focus on the basics that win. | ||
| I mean, you can win a whole fight with a one-two and good takedown defense, some takedown offense, and some good grappling, you know? | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| That's all you need. | ||
| And in my mind, the more I try to make this an intricate sport and a complicated sport, The more you're gonna find yourself having incremental Defeats, you know, like when I'm when I'm sparring outside of my element all of a sudden I find okay I tried this this round and I got beat up like you know, I got beat up which Messes up your confidence and all that stuff. | ||
| Do you feel like This is something that I struggle with, too, when trying to analyze fighters' performances and their future and what you can and can't do. | ||
| Do you feel like you go into MMA with a certain skill set? | ||
| You started out as a wrestler, and you're not going to be a karate expert. | ||
| You're not going to be a wonder boy. | ||
| You're not going to be a jujitsu expert, which you are as a powerful wrestler with great striking. | ||
| That's your skill set. | ||
| You're strong and you've got great cardio. | ||
| If you try to add a bunch of stuff to that and expand your skill level, do you feel like there's enough time in a career to really achieve the type of proficiency with, say, like... | ||
| Kickboxing or something like that that a real world-class kickboxer has. | ||
| You almost are better off not doing that. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think I am the how-to manual for that, you know? | ||
| What did you try to do different? | ||
| I mean, just... | ||
| Too many angles, too many different combinations, too many calls. | ||
| A coach can out-coach too. | ||
| A coach can out-coach and tell you seven different combinations in one minute when really it should have just been focus on cutting them off, focus on feints, focus on touching a leg, which is going to set up the punches, and focus on the punches that are going to set up the takedown. | ||
| I also would say now... | ||
| My coach, Henry Hooft. | ||
| Awesome kickboxing coach, has amazing techniques, but it's very, very, very basic. | ||
| We focus on being very, very proficient and very violent with the basics. | ||
| You're not going to see us throwing a bunch of crazy combinations or a bunch of crazy stuff. | ||
| So that works very well for me. | ||
| I started out with Gil Martinez in Vegas, just wrestling, just boxing. | ||
| And then I went to Alliance, and then now down in Florida with Henry. | ||
| Do you live in Florida now? | ||
| No, I live in Nashville. | ||
| But my last three camps I've done down in Florida, I'm opening up my own gym in Nashville, so I'll be doing training at both places. | ||
| But I mean, the killers that I get to spar with and train with down in Florida can't be matched, and those coaches are amazing down there. | ||
| Yeah, I'm a big fan of Henry Hooft. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I like him as a person and I really like his coaching style. | ||
| He's an animal. | ||
| He is. | ||
| And the funny thing is he coached against me in that second Eddie Alvarez fight. | ||
| So we talk about that. | ||
| And that's why I will always... | ||
| I want to fight Eddie again so bad. | ||
| I want to have that trilogy. | ||
| Well, there's only one way to do that, fella. | ||
| I want to fight Eddie so bad. | ||
| But I have so much respect for him because not only did I spend 50 minutes inside the cage with the guy. | ||
| We both have our face bloodied and battered and stitches. | ||
| I mean, I got stitches in my lip. | ||
| We both have stitches in our lip and our eyes and eyebrows from each other. | ||
| But it's funny because when I sit there and I talk to people that I train in, I basically train in his training camp that he used to train in, and everybody always said, there's only one guy I can compare your work ethic to, your dedication to, your love for your family, your love for the sport, this, that, and the other thing, and that's Eddie. | ||
| So, I mean, me and Eddie have spoken a couple times. | ||
| I went up and trained with Frankie Edgar for two weeks a couple years ago, and he was out there training. | ||
| So we like, it's always just funny between me and him because we You know have fought and you know but it's funny but it's not like we have so much respect we don't hate each other. | ||
| Do you guys hang out and go to dinner or anything like that? | ||
| No we've never done that but I mean we saw each other practice and I asked him to spar and he's like no man I don't want to get knocked out but but we were at the same we were at the same thing and uh same practices and stuff and it's kind of but you also get it's cool to get compared to a guy that you have fought because that immediately gives you that a much more respect for somebody because Because I know how hard I train, I know I show up early, and I'm always doing the little bit of extra, and everybody knows what I'm fighting for. | ||
| And I think him and I are very similar in that respect, so it's kind of cool. | ||
| Yeah, I would imagine no one knows each other better than you guys do after something like that. | ||
| It's pretty nuts, yeah. | ||
| I mean, man, they were both knock-down drag-out wars. | ||
| They were crazy fights. | ||
| I would still say I won the second fight. | ||
| Well, it's a very close fight, right? | ||
| Yeah, it was very close. | ||
| I will say, but like I said, I ran into too many punches. | ||
| It was kind of crazy too, I think. | ||
| I actually spoke to one of the refs, one of the refs who called the fight for Eddie, or not one of the refs, one of the judges, like a couple months after I was at some event. | ||
| And he's like, oh yeah, well he rocked you in the second round. | ||
| And I was like, he didn't rock me in the second round, I tripped. | ||
| I basically tripped and it looked like I got rocked. | ||
| So it's just funny, that kind of stuff too, this sport is left up to... | ||
| People who don't necessarily know what they're doing. | ||
| Yeah, that's a real problem with me. | ||
| I go crazy. | ||
| I remember you talking about a couple fights ago. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, me and DC. Yeah, you're like, we're not going to say that name. | |
| Leave that lady alone. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She's a nice lady. | ||
| But look, man, it's just a disgrace that you have people that really don't know anything about martial arts, and they're judging martial arts competitions. | ||
| I mean, could you imagine if you had an Ultimate Fighting Championship eight-man tournament with all the judges? | ||
| And have them fight each other? | ||
| You'd be like, what in the fuck is going on here? | ||
| You guys don't even train? | ||
| You don't know anything about fighting at all? | ||
| What do they take a test? | ||
| A written test? | ||
| A lot of them in certain commissions come from boxing. | ||
| So they're boxing judges. | ||
| But even then, were they boxers? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| A lot of them, no. | ||
| But I don't know if Harold Letterman can box. | ||
| He does a great job of judging, though. | ||
| I agree with a lot of his assessments, but I think boxing is more straightforward. | ||
| It's two hands. | ||
| There's no elbows, knees, takedowns. | ||
| You don't have to understand jiu-jitsu. | ||
| You don't have to understand wrestling. | ||
| You don't have to understand when a guy's in trouble versus a guy's not in trouble in a certain position. | ||
| How close was that submission? | ||
| How many leg kicks has that guy eaten? | ||
| Why did he switch his stance? | ||
| Did he switch his stance because he does that all the time? | ||
| Or is his left leg chewed up? | ||
| They don't know. | ||
| No. | ||
| They really don't know. | ||
| The stuff that you're saying that people who have seen the sport are thinking, but the judges may or may not have any idea what's going on. | ||
| A lot of them don't have an idea. | ||
| It's a disgrace. | ||
| It really is a disgrace. | ||
| Well, it's crazy to think that the sport's been around for 20 years now, 25 years now, and we're still having this conversation. | ||
| Boxing has questionable judgments. | ||
| There's some questionable calls. | ||
| But nothing like MMA. I think MMA is... | ||
| Crazy ones. | ||
| It's disgraceful. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| What's the worst one? | ||
| Do you know the worst one in your opinion? | ||
| I wouldn't want to say a worst one. | ||
| Because there's been so many fucking terrible ones. | ||
| Sometimes it's like a split decision. | ||
| You'll hear one you agree with, one you agree with, and one you're like, what the fuck? | ||
| And we'll look at each other. | ||
| I'll look at Anik, and I'll look at DC, and we'll be like, Jesus Christ! | ||
| How the fuck did someone think that person won that fight? | ||
| It's just bad, man. | ||
| It's just really, really, really bad. | ||
| And for a guy like you, who, you know, you have a win bonus and a show bonus in the UFC. So if you're in there and you do everything right and you get robbed, you just get robbed of a decision and on your record it goes to the loss. | ||
| And you could... | ||
| You know, you could protest it till the cows come home. | ||
| Nobody ever gets anything reversed. | ||
| When was the last time anybody got a decision reversed? | ||
| I can't even remember. | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, I don't really think it happens. | ||
| They've robbed you of your win bonus. | ||
| I mean, it could cost you tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. | ||
| It's a fucking terrible, terrible disgrace. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, and also, too, I've never really even thought about the financials of it. | ||
| I never really thought... | ||
| It was always, to me, it was like a wrestling match. | ||
| It was a loss. | ||
| It was a loss on my record. | ||
| And then now... | ||
| I look back and I think, dang, man, if I would have fought just a little bit different here or that judge would have saw this a little bit different and we're talking a lot of money that I could have in my pocket or would have won. | ||
| We've discussed this many times and I think, first of all, the idea of three judges is ridiculous. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Why only three? | ||
| Are they expensive? | ||
| You could get some of the best martial arts... | ||
| Practitioners in the world to judge fights and have ten of them. | ||
| And I bet you would have a correct outcome way more often than you would with three. | ||
| And I just think we need to overhaul that. | ||
| And for whatever reason, they're reluctant to do so. | ||
| We talked about before this podcast started, we talked about weight classes. | ||
| I think that's another giant issue. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think every 10 pounds is a legitimate compromise. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think what we have now, like, the 185 to 205 pound gap is just bananas. | ||
| You have 20 pounds in between world championship weight classes. | ||
| Huge. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just nuts. | ||
| You're dealing with two different size humans. | ||
| It's just so different. | ||
| Completely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, and, yeah, I mean, obviously, closer to home for me would be that 165-ish, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, and there's so many competitors or so many just the average human being is between, you know, 150 and 190. There's the big guys, there's the small guys, but we're kind of in that mid-range. | ||
| And I think a 165 weight class for a lot of us at 155, I mean, I would always probably stay at 155. I would love some cool matchups at 165 and be able to try to go for different belts and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| Obviously, that would be great. | ||
| But 155 is great for me, but there's definitely, I know some guys who are missing weights. | ||
| You saw Kevin Lee two weeks ago miss weight. | ||
| Khabib has obviously missed weight numerous times. | ||
| Well, Khabib is, you know, he's a big guy. | ||
| When he gets down to 155, that is quite a cut. | ||
| And since he's been, I believe he's with George Lockhart, right? | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| Wasn't him and Tony, weren't him and Tony both with Lockhart? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Right before Tony got hurt? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I thought that was a thing. | ||
| I think that's the case. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of great experts. | ||
| Mike Dolce, of course. | ||
| There's a lot of great experts in getting you down to the proper weight, but... | ||
| The bottom line is, when you're coming down from 200 pounds and you're getting down to 155, that's a fucking struggle. | ||
| It is a lot, yeah. | ||
| And like we talked about, too, it depends on... | ||
| That's always the question I get from all kinds of people. | ||
| Hey, what weight do you walk around at? | ||
| And it's not really the weight, it's the body composition. | ||
| How much body fat are you holding? | ||
| I get a DEXA scan every couple months when I'm down in Florida or whatnot. | ||
| We always try to start... | ||
| What's a DEXA scan? | ||
| How does that work? | ||
| So basically, it's the one where you lay down... | ||
| That's the one they have at the Performance Institute... | ||
| In the UFC? Probably. | ||
| It's just the thing that goes over time for five seconds. | ||
| And it does everything from water to bone density, to muscles, to tendons, to ligaments, to organs, like all that kind of stuff. | ||
| And the cool thing is my bone density has continued to go up like over the last couple of years, you know? | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Like how much? | ||
| I mean, it's.01% or whatever, but I mean, that's a lot when you're talking about bone density. | ||
| And is that from strength training? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I mean, I put out a post a couple months ago where I really think, you know, I've been extremely blessed to have, throughout college wrestling, I mean, I've seen so many talented guys' careers ended because of injuries. | ||
| I had none. | ||
| You know, I had a couple sprains here and there. | ||
| I had a meniscus tear and whatnot. | ||
| Those are like six-week injuries. | ||
| No big deal. | ||
| Same thing in mixed martial arts. | ||
| I haven't really had any really bad injuries. | ||
| And I really do think it's because I keep my body in great shape and I do a lot of strength training. | ||
| My body is constantly overcompensating for the weights that I'm throwing around, the med balls I'm throwing around, the comfort zone, getting my body outside of my comfort zone day in and day out that my body has just kind of bulletproofed itself to a lot of serious injuries. | ||
| Obviously, it's fights. | ||
| I mean, it's a fighting and you're jacking up little limbs and hands and feet and all that kind of stuff here and there all the time, but nothing serious. | ||
| Cam Haynes went and worked out with you in one of your strength and conditioning workouts. | ||
| Who was your strength coach for that? | ||
| That was Todd Durkin in San Diego, Fitness Quest 10. He went skydiving that morning. | ||
| Yeah, with Andy Stump. | ||
| He wanted to come in for a workout. | ||
| A lot of my stuff is not crazy heavy, but it's just a lot of reps, a lot of cardio, a lot of moving stuff around, a lot of functional movements. | ||
| What kind of stuff are you doing? | ||
| I love med ball stuff. | ||
| I love med ball slams, med ball rotations. | ||
| I love anything... | ||
| What I always focus on is strength plus speed equals power. | ||
| So we'll do one strength movement, whether it's a deadlift, whether it's a trap bar deadlift or a squat, straight into a speed movement, which would be like just a plyometric squat jump. | ||
| So you got the strength plus the speed, and that's how you continue to gain power. | ||
| In supersets. | ||
| So then maybe we're doing a bench press. | ||
| Bench press isn't the greatest workout, but it's focusing on the punching power. | ||
| Just three reps of something a little bit heavy. | ||
| You're doing dumbbells or barbells? | ||
| Barbells and dumbbells. | ||
| Right to a plyometric push-up. | ||
| So now you've got another strength plus a speed equals power. | ||
| So plyometric push-up meaning you explode up? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And are you clapping at the top? | ||
| Yeah, you could. | ||
| You don't have to. | ||
| I mean, a lot of times it's just exploding as hard as you can and catching yourself, exploding as hard as you can. | ||
| And we do a lot of that kind of stuff, whether it's squats to hurdle jumps or deadlifts to med ball slam to jump. | ||
| And that also... | ||
| It gets your heart rate up. | ||
| It's also just getting your body moving like crazy. | ||
| So, I mean, a lot of the stuff we're doing at my new gym, a lot of that programming is very similar to that where we have like a ripped class where it's resistance, interval, power, plyometric, and endurance. | ||
| And we're focusing on all those things. | ||
| Everybody likes to do that. | ||
| They like to make it an acronym. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| People love doing that. | ||
| That was my boy PJ. That was my boy PJ at Trainee Camp. | ||
| And I loved it though. | ||
| I was like, ripped? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| And then I was like, wow, R-I-P-P-E-D. I love it. | ||
| So, I was pumped about that. | ||
| Yeah, people like that because you can remember it, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, when you are going into a camp, who organizes your training? | ||
| How do you decide when you're doing strength and conditioning, when you're doing skill work, when you're sparring, when you're recuperating? | ||
| It's always a little bit different. | ||
| The last couple camps down in Florida, we've had pretty much the same kind of schedule. | ||
| Monday morning is always a drill. | ||
| Tuesday is sparring. | ||
| Wednesday was wrestling. | ||
| Thursday was grappling. | ||
| Friday was sparring. | ||
| And then at night we go more individual, whether it's individual with one of the kickboxing coaches, one of the mid coaches with either Henry or Evan, or maybe it's a one-on-one with Kami Barzini, or maybe it's a one-on-one with Greg Jones, or it's a one-on-one with A grappling coach or it's your strength and conditioning. | ||
| A lot of times I couple them where I'll do an hour of strength work with 30 or 45 minutes of pads as well. | ||
| It all depends on the recovery. | ||
| If I feel myself getting overworked, I will cut one of those out and focus on which one's more important for that particular fight. | ||
| If I was fighting Goeti Yamauchi, who's a big-time grappler, big-time submission artist, so I focused a lot more on escapes, Defense, submission defense, and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| I was still focusing on strength and conditioning and striking, but I really threw in an extra couple grappling sessions there. | ||
| So who's managing all this, though? | ||
| Do you have a head coach that decides when you're going to do what, and they look at you and say, you know, today we're going to take it easier today, we're going to do this? | ||
| I think, I mean, it's that kind of loose schedule that we always have, but Henry said that. | ||
| Henry and Kami Barzini has come in and really helped Helped manage some of that stuff. | ||
| We made a couple of different changes. | ||
| But I mean, yeah, they come in and they say, here's what we're going to do. | ||
| But then every now and then it's like, hey, tonight instead of an hour long, we're going to do 30 with me and then 30 with Kami. | ||
| Or Henry would do 30 minutes with pads, 30 minutes with Kami. | ||
| So it ebbs and flows. | ||
| And I think one of the biggest things about... | ||
| Mixed martial arts is an individual sport. | ||
| We're all grown men. | ||
| We all have our coaches that we're supposed to listen to, but I don't have to. | ||
| I don't have to do what any of these guys tell me to. | ||
| But I think that's why wrestlers are so successful, because they show up, they shut up, and you tell me what to do, and you ask me how high to jump, and I just jump. | ||
| Yeah, I've always said that I think there's two aspects of wrestling that make it the most important. | ||
| Skill set to have an MMA and one of them is the ability to take a fight to the ground or Stand back up like just to have that to have the ability to dictate where the fight takes place is gigantic But twos might maybe just as important is the mental strength wrestlers are always dehydrated. | ||
| They're always exhausted They're always pushing and they're they take pride in being the most miserable person. | ||
| Yeah, you know, there's something about that like having The ability to push through discomfort, which is just something that you cultivate in an amateur wrestling career. | ||
| I think you just get so comfortable being uncomfortable. | ||
| Your life sucks for five years straight, especially Division I college wrestling. | ||
| It's an emotional rollercoaster. | ||
| With that mental toughness that you're talking about, you don't just get mentally tough from working hard. | ||
| You get mentally tough from working hard and losing and then winning and then losing. | ||
| Having coach riding your butt because of this, and then you got a final, and you got a test, and you got this, and you got all this whole life that you're trying to manage and figure out while you're still trying to become a national champion. | ||
| So you're getting thrown into the hardest sport in the entire world physically, the hardest sport mentally, plus trying to have a college career, actually get your degree the whole reason you went to college. | ||
| And then really just being coachable and understanding delayed gratification. | ||
| I think so many people can come into an MMA gym and they have a great boxing coach and it's like they expect after the first mid-session that they're going to look like Roy Jones Jr. Whereas when I showed up to MMA, I realized, okay, I went to Vegas and I was training with Gray Maynard and Mike Pyle and Jay Huron and Tyson Griffin and Evan Dunham and all these great guys. | ||
| I knew I was going to take my licks for a long time. | ||
| It might have been a year before I won a round. | ||
| I was okay with that. | ||
| You have to be okay with the delayed gratification of life. | ||
| And now even as a 32-year-old, I understand that any aspect of life that I'm going into that's new, it's okay if I'm the guppy. | ||
| It's okay if I'm the lowest guy on the totem pole. | ||
| Even though I've accomplished so many great things and I've done some great things in life, I'm still a guppy in a lot of aspects of life. | ||
| That's a hard pill for a lot of people to swallow. | ||
| It is, but it's just ego. | ||
| That's why a lot of kickboxers never learn jujitsu. | ||
| They hate getting tapped. | ||
| I love getting tapped. | ||
| It's never happened, actually, but no. | ||
| But you know what I mean? | ||
| I mean, you've seen it. | ||
| I mean, we've all seen it. | ||
| Guys who are fantastic kickboxers, that for whatever reason, they just try to concentrate only on defense. | ||
| That's all they want to do. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I'm not one of those guys that I get tapped and I'm like, oh man, good job, man. | ||
| I'm freaking ticked. | ||
| I'm pissed, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to show up the next day. | ||
| That doesn't mean I'm going to skip. | ||
| I mean, the funniest thing is you go to any gym around the country, if they have, I bet, you asked DC this at AKA, he's running the wrestling practice. | ||
| I bet the amount of guys that show up for sparring day and grappling day is different than the guys who show up on wrestling day. | ||
| Same thing at our gym. | ||
| We have 28 guys, 30 guys sparring on Tuesday. | ||
| All of a sudden, Wednesday rolls around and we're doing a wrestling practice and there's like seven guys that show up. | ||
| It's fucking hard. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| It's fucking hard. | ||
| But you have to embrace the suck. | ||
| You have to understand that you don't get anything in life without... | ||
| Getting yourself outside of your comfort zone. | ||
| Every single thing that you want to accomplish is waiting for you right outside of your comfort zone. | ||
| And that's what I've really started to realize. | ||
| And you just take ownership, extreme ownership of it and say, stop being a sissy and just go push yourself to your puke. | ||
| Have you ever puked? | ||
| Have you ever passed out? | ||
| No, you haven't. | ||
| You know, or you haven't passed out. | ||
| You know, I rarely puke. | ||
| So I want to just continue to try to get myself there. | ||
| And if I can, I'm doing something right. | ||
| Now, when you say visualization, you say you visualize, how do you do it and do you schedule a time like, hey, at 8 p.m. | ||
| tonight after training, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to visualize for an hour? | ||
| Yeah, there needs to be a time. | ||
| I mean, first of all, you always want to try to set a time. | ||
| You can never say, I'll definitely do it tomorrow. | ||
| You need to say, okay, well, I have practice here, I have practice here, I need to eat here, I have an interview here, I have this here, that there. | ||
| It doesn't need to be a crazy amount of time. | ||
| I mean, you know, five minutes is long enough. | ||
| That's a long time to be—I mean, that's a round. | ||
| Do you ever grapple around and two minutes goes by, you look at the clock and there's three minutes left? | ||
| You can't believe it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Holy cow. | |
| Like, you know, five minutes is a long time because you can get a lot done mentally because visualization knows no time. | ||
| There's not a clock. | ||
| Ticking. | ||
| There's things happening. | ||
| So you close your eyes when you do this? | ||
| Where are you sitting? | ||
| Are you sitting in a dark room? | ||
| How do you do this? | ||
| The hard part with me is I'm a very good sleeper. | ||
| I've tried to be like, I'm going to wake up in the morning and I'm going to keep laying in bed and visualize and I fall asleep. | ||
| So you've got to know yourself. | ||
| That's good though. | ||
| At least you're getting sleep. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| You've got to have the self-awareness to know where you're on, where you're off. | ||
| So for me, I mean... | ||
| A lot of times it's sitting up, sitting on the couch, sitting on a chair. | ||
| But I think the biggest thing is seeing the lights. | ||
| I mean, the other day, for instance, we were just talking about Fuji and putting in the mats. | ||
| And so we just installed a bag rack system in my gym. | ||
| And something there, I don't know if it was the rubber, the cage panels or what it was, and it smelled exactly like the Bellator cage. | ||
| And I started to get, I got like, I literally, my heart rate started going up and I got goosebumps because of a smell. | ||
| You got triggered. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And I know exactly what that smell is. | ||
| It's weird how smells do that. | ||
| Oh, 100%. | ||
| And I've actually asked Bellator, hey, can I have a piece of that cage? | ||
| I want to cut off an 8-inch piece of that cage, the canvas, or whatever it is, to bring and just... | ||
| Just suck it in. | ||
| You're going to huff cage, bro. | ||
| Just huff cage. | ||
| But you've got to get yourself to there, you know? | ||
| And be in the space, in the arena. | ||
| I can see the cage. | ||
| And after I started doing it, I mean, it was the Petricky Pitbull fight, the knockout. | ||
| Where that was the first time that I had really, really gotten—I had really hit that breakthrough where I walked into the cage. | ||
| I mean, Joe, I hated fighting. | ||
| I didn't really like it that much because I wasn't myself. | ||
| I wasn't present. | ||
| I was literally a caged animal, and I hated the way I felt. | ||
| I was peeing blood after fights because I was just going so crazy, and I was just—and obviously I gained a lot of fans because people loved the way I fight, but they didn't exactly care about my well-being that much. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it wasn't until that fight where I got into the cage and I just started smiling because I thought, Michael, this is your home. | ||
| Like, this is your home. | ||
| Because I had visualized it so much. | ||
| Because the problem with what we talked about earlier is you only get to compete every six months, every eight months. | ||
| You don't know what that actually feels like. | ||
| And you can show up to the venue early and you can walk around. | ||
| You can smell the smells. | ||
| But there's nothing like competing in the cage. | ||
| You can't recreate it in sparring. | ||
| You can't recreate it in the gym. | ||
| The only really place you can recreate it is in your mind. | ||
| If you... | ||
| Just continue to remember. | ||
| I can remember my last fight like it was yesterday because I've actually gotten better at the skill of visualization because I think that's one thing that happens too is you sit down and maybe you're listening to this podcast and you're like, okay, I'm going to smell the smells of this. | ||
| I don't want to see the sides of this. | ||
| And then you have a really not great visualization session and you're like, man, that was stupid. | ||
| That guy's an idiot, you know? | ||
| But it really does take... | ||
| It really does take a second. | ||
| It does take actual practice to see and smell and hear and feel. | ||
| You need to see yourself getting put in compromising situations and then see yourself getting out of it. | ||
| You need to see yourself... | ||
| Performing at a ridiculously high level and how that's going to feel and how your brain is 100% bulletproof and how your heart rate is where it needs to be and how you are somehow confidently composed during those fights. | ||
| Because it used to be the bell would ring and I would go a thousand miles an hour and the times that you've seen me exhausted in fights, I mean I passed out, literally passed out in a fight before. | ||
| Right at the end of the round, thank God it was at the end of the round, Henry Hoof came and picked me up. | ||
| My feet were like pigeon-toed. | ||
| He was like dragging me back to my corner. | ||
| I sat down in the cage because I watched the video and all of a sudden my coach out here woke me up. | ||
| I heard his voice and I turned around. | ||
| Which fight was that? | ||
| It was the Benson Henderson fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| I literally thought the fight was over. | ||
| And I asked him, I said, did I just get finished? | ||
| Is this fight over? | ||
| And he said, no, man, you gotta go. | ||
| Do you know what happened? | ||
| Did you get hit? | ||
| No, it was in... | ||
| The Benson-Henderson fight going into the fifth round, we were in that weird... | ||
| I have this thing where I actually like to get... | ||
| You know that one move where you're basically like this and they catch your arm with the leg and then... | ||
| Crucifix? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Mounted? | ||
| That one where, remember the old school where that guy just got elbowed and elbowed him? | ||
| But I do a backflip over top. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| And I always land on top, and it's something that I set up, and I probably shouldn't put myself in a bad situation, but a lot of times I get it, so I like to go there. | ||
| So you mean like a crucifix where the guy's behind you? | ||
| Yeah, like he's on his back. | ||
| And you're on top of him? | ||
| Yeah, no, he's on his back like this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Right. | ||
| And then I did a backflip and I crunched myself up. | ||
| So I think I kind of crunched myself. | ||
| Oh, you might have put yourself to sleep. | ||
| Yeah, almost. | ||
| And he had kind of a halfway choke, but I wasn't really in a compromise. | ||
| Oh, here it is right here. | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| Come on now. | ||
| Powerful young Jamie. | ||
| Yeah, how do you do that? | ||
| He knows what he's doing. | ||
| This was Benson's first fight in the UFC after Koreshkov, right? | ||
| Excuse me, in the Bellator. | ||
| So he fought Koreshkov at 70, which is crazy. | ||
| He did not belong in that weight class. | ||
| So right to this position, and I do this backflip, I always end up on top. | ||
| So he's got kind of a choke, and then I crunch myself. | ||
| Boom. | ||
| And then hopefully... | ||
| Oh, so you got on top here. | ||
| And hopefully this shows my dead eyes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| That's so crazy because you look tired. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm tired, but... | |
| Like you were brawling. | ||
| There's another one that you can find on the internet that you can just look into my eyes. | ||
| Look. | ||
| Look. | ||
| Look dead. | ||
| Glazed over eyes. | ||
| And I looked down at my feet. | ||
| I looked down at my feet. | ||
| My feet aren't moving. | ||
| My feet were like dragging my feet. | ||
| What happened in the fight where you lost the title where your leg gave out? | ||
| I stepped back, rolled the ankle, pinched that nerve, and then my foot just went straight. | ||
| So from rolling the ankle, that's what did it? | ||
| That's what pinched the nerve? | ||
| You see where I stepped back? | ||
| I thought something had broken, like a ligament had given out or something like that. | ||
| I had no idea. | ||
| I wish I would have had the hindsight to just not chase. | ||
| I mean, I have this thing where I love to hit people and run at them and go in for the kill, which has worked very well for me in my career. | ||
| But in that instance, if I would have either, number one, switched to southpaw because I could push off of it, I just couldn't lift it. | ||
| So I wish I would have switched to southpaw, or I would have just planted myself in the middle of the cage and waited for him to keep throwing kicks, and I would have kept handling it. | ||
| I mean, only one punch really got landed in that entire fight, and that was me dropping him. | ||
| Now, when that happened, how long did it take before your legs started working again? | ||
| Oh, man, it was scary, man. | ||
| I mean, two weeks later, or seven days later, I ran five miles. | ||
| So... | ||
| Seven days later. | ||
| Seven days later, but for about three days, I looked down at my foot and my brain was telling me to lift my foot and nothing was happening, man. | ||
| I thought it was, it was a scary time. | ||
| I mean, I got... | ||
| So you were wondering whether or not you had permanent nerve damage in your foot. | ||
| Yeah, and I had, and I got a great... | ||
| A great staff around me. | ||
| I mean, my manager has hooked all of us up with Sanford Medical up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. | ||
| Dr. Reeves, orthopedic surgeon. | ||
| Dr. Troy Gust, neurosurgeon. | ||
| And what did they say when they looked at it? | ||
| He just said you just have a pinched nerve whenever you did that. | ||
| That is crazy. | ||
| I've never seen that before. | ||
| Unfortunate. | ||
| It was horrible, you know, but it was just one of those things. | ||
| And that was my, yeah, I'm on a six out of seven, and that was my one loss. | ||
| Yeah, that was a weird one, too, because it was a fight where it was kind of just getting going. | ||
| And when your foot started doing that, I remember watching it going, whoa, is his ankle broke? | ||
| What's going on here? | ||
| This is weird. | ||
| I mean, it's one of those things, too, where I've talked to Big John about it. | ||
| I've talked to Herb Dean about it. | ||
| I've talked to all these guys. | ||
| I'm like, man, would you have stopped that fight? | ||
| And then they're both like, man, it looked really bad. | ||
| It looked bad. | ||
| But you're still up and you're conscious. | ||
| I'm still up and conscious, and I wasn't taking damage. | ||
| I could imagine, like, you know, I mean, what's his name? | ||
| O'Malley hurt his foot and he was like, he couldn't even walk and he was falling down and he was about to start getting beat up. | ||
| Like, I was still on my feet. | ||
| I was still fighting. | ||
| Did it look really bad? | ||
| Did it look like a wounded deer out in the middle of the field? | ||
| You know, like, of course. | ||
| But... | ||
| I always say if this was back in the Viking days and you chop one of my legs off and it's me versus him to the battle of the death, I'm still winning that fight 10 times out of 10. So you wish the fight kept going? | ||
| 100%. | ||
| It's a weird way to stop a fight too when a guy's not taking damage. | ||
| He's just got a leg that's not working properly. | ||
| Well, and the problem was too, he basically called timeout and asked for the doctors to come in. | ||
| Once you've done that, the fight's over. | ||
| I think the ref literally thought... | ||
| He should have just called the fight, right? | ||
| Did he think your leg was broken or something? | ||
| What was his thought process? | ||
| I guess. | ||
| And then the doctors came in, and they started feeling around, and they're like, right here, I think his tibia is fractured. | ||
| I can feel the bone, and I'm like, Doc, I promise you, just get out of here. | ||
| Let me fight. | ||
| I got a calf cramp or something. | ||
| I was just lying to him. | ||
| Just get out of here. | ||
| Let me go. | ||
| I promise. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| I don't feel a thing. | ||
| It's not hurt. | ||
| I'm good. | ||
| And then they stopped the fight. | ||
| Then they pulled the stool. | ||
| They pulled the stool from me, too, so... | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| Oh yeah, that's right. | ||
| What was that about? | ||
| That was my commissioner. | ||
| That was New York Athletic Commission at its best. | ||
| Pulling the stool and I fell. | ||
| And then a bunch of people were like, hey man, did they call the fight because they thought you couldn't stand? | ||
| And I said, no, I hope not because that would have been very unfortunate because I fell. | ||
| On national TV, got Charlie Brown. | ||
| All three stooges, Moe Lairley, Curly, thanks for nothing, Doc. | ||
| Yeah, why did they pull a stool? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Was it just a mistake? | ||
| I think I stood up. | ||
| I was like, hey, maybe if I get the crowd into it, maybe these guys will get out of here and let the fight go. | ||
| So I stood up and I was like, let's go! | ||
| And I was sitting on the stool and I freaking looked at him and I was like, you better hope they don't let me off this stool, boy, because I'm going to come break your face. | ||
| And then I stand up and then the guy pulls the stool and then a second later I'm on my butt. | ||
| Now, why didn't the rematch take place? | ||
| Man, I asked for it in October. | ||
| I asked for it in November. | ||
| I asked for it in December. | ||
| And then finally I'm like, man, this is stupid. | ||
| I'm going to go ahead and take a fight against the scariest guy in the lightweight division, Yamauchi. | ||
| And then he got injured. | ||
| So then I fought Brandon Gertz. | ||
| So it's like... | ||
| I've never once pulled out of a fight. | ||
| I've went into many fights injured. | ||
| I've never once not answered the call. | ||
| I've always stepped up and I've always been the most exciting guy in Bellator. | ||
| Will forever be the most exciting guy in Bellator. | ||
| So it's unfortunate that these things happen to me, but it's just part of it, man. | ||
| It's a long time though to go without a rematch. | ||
| You know, I mean to be clamored for it and he hasn't defended the title, correct? | ||
| No, he's a part-time fighter. | ||
| Part-time? | ||
| Part-time. | ||
| What does he do full-time? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think he teaches kids Jiu-Jitsu or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I don't know what he does. | ||
| I mean, honestly, it's baffling. | ||
| Well, does Bellator even have a heavyweight champ? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| How the fuck do you not know? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It would take me a second to think about all the champs in the sport. | ||
| They've got a stacked welterweight division. | ||
| Their welterweight division right now with Rory McDonald and Lima and Paul Daly and Lorenz Larkin. | ||
| It's a fucking stacked division. | ||
| Yeah, it's tough. | ||
| Korshkov. | ||
| I was asking for the Paul Daly fight. | ||
| I was trying to get that fight. | ||
| Were you? | ||
| Really? | ||
| I want to get some big fights. | ||
| He's terrifying. | ||
| That motherfucker can hit. | ||
| He can. | ||
| Yeah, for about a minute and a half, and then you just break his will. | ||
| Well, his grappling has always been his Achilles heel, but goddamn that left hand is a missile. | ||
| Yeah, that Lorenz Larkin fight where he knocked him out on his feet, and he was just kind of like... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There, but not really there. | ||
| Paul Dilley can do that to anybody. | ||
| That left hand he has. | ||
| That, to me, was one of the most frustrating ones when he fought Josh Koscheck and threw that punch afterwards, and he got kicked out of the UFC basically forever. | ||
| And now you see, like, Connor throwing dollies through windows and all this shit. | ||
| I'm like, well, what about Paul Daly? | ||
| Paul Daly's got to be going, what the fuck, man? | ||
| I got kicked out forever for this? | ||
| I didn't even throw a punch that landed. | ||
| Yeah, he's like, I wish I was in it when it was the entertainment business, you know? | ||
| Guys like him, though, are very interesting where he's such a specialist, you know? | ||
| He's such a striking specialist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I watched him kickbox, actually, because, you know, Bellator does those kickboxing in MMA, and he kickboxed... | ||
| Fernando Gonzalez, I believe. | ||
| He's good. | ||
| He's a beast. | ||
| Especially in that kickboxing range when he knows there's no takedowns, when he knows there's no threat, and there's a different distance there, and he's really good at that kickboxing range. | ||
| Unless you're there to be able to really threaten with the takedown, he's going to be on his game. | ||
| One of my favorite fights of his forever will be that fight with Nick Diaz, which was just fantastic. | ||
| Fucking one round of chaos! | ||
| Just chaos! | ||
| Until Nick Diaz overwhelmed him. | ||
| But Nick just puts that crazy triathlon pace on you where you just can't keep up with him. | ||
| I know. | ||
| He just doesn't give you any break. | ||
| I know. | ||
| And those guys, both Nick and Nate, have done a very good job of not being afraid to take some damage, let guys really swarm him. | ||
| And they do have that cardio, but I think they just have that stocked in just Confidence. | ||
| And almost just like that. | ||
| I've actually, the funny thing is like me and Michael Johnson sparred numerous times where we're kind of like talking to each other because that's against my, that was against my nature. | ||
| Like that, that cocky braggadocious talking during the fight type of deal. | ||
| I mean, once again, that's practice of, of almost an alter ego, almost a little bit different. | ||
| In my last couple of fights, you've seen me be more present, talking a little bit, almost kind of egging, egging them on, like not being afraid. | ||
| It used to just be like business, business, business, gotta fight. | ||
| Now it's like, hey man, I'm in here. | ||
| You're fighting somebody who's cognitively here. | ||
| My two feet are planted firmly on this ground. | ||
| Right, you're not overwhelmed by the moment. | ||
| I'm 100% present. | ||
| You're in the zone. | ||
| 100% present and in the zone, like in the zone, ready to die in there, not afraid to, but also willing to fight a very smart fight, smart, sharp, composed. | ||
| Missing shots, taking shots or taking takedowns when I want to and need to, and not being afraid to just fight like an extremely talented veteran rather than just a vessel of violence, you know? | ||
| Yeah, a vessel of violence. | ||
| That's an interesting way to put it. | ||
| To think of yourself as a professional, like doing your best to execute your skill set in such an extreme circumstance. | ||
| And how many fights have you had now? | ||
| 22. How many fights do you think it took before you felt that comfortable? | ||
| 17? | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| I'm not joking. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| Now I know why so many people just have a short MMA career and then they're done. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| And that's with my career going really well. | ||
| I've signed some good contracts and been able to do some really good stuff and had some big fights and had some good success. | ||
| And I can imagine these people going through the grind and then all of a sudden you get injured or all of a sudden your manager screws you over and all of a sudden this and that. | ||
| And I've had a really relatively, not easy road, but I've had a really good path. | ||
| But I can see how people are like, man, I'm done with this. | ||
| And I think going back to your point too, where you talk about fighting like a veteran, I think it's all based on the confidence too. | ||
| And I see it time and time again. | ||
| Guys only have one option, and that's to fight like a crazy madman because they don't have 100% confidence in their skills. | ||
| And I think that's why you saw early in my career I fought like a madman because I wasn't 100% confident in my skills. | ||
| I was 100% confident in my cardio, my heart, my willingness to just take damage, my willingness to die inside the cage. | ||
| I was confident in that. | ||
| I stood against Eddie Alvarez. | ||
| I was 16, 18 months removed from a college wrestling room and said, I'm going to beat that guy. | ||
| I'm not supposed to beat him on paper. | ||
| I'm not supposed to beat him record wise. | ||
| I'm not supposed to beat him in any other universe besides right here in my mind. | ||
| I said, I'm going to beat that guy. | ||
| And I did it just by sheer toughness. | ||
| So I believe in my toughness and my cardio and my heart and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| But I didn't 100% believe in my skills. | ||
| So then all of a sudden you start to mature a little bit and you start to realize that you have these skills, you have these bag of tools to use, and you can use them not just effectively, but you can use them efficiently and smart. | ||
| Under pressure. | ||
| Under pressure, yeah. | ||
| And there's still times where you've got to... | ||
| You've got to gut check. | ||
| And that's a good thing that I know I have in my back pocket is I get in a fight with one of these guys and he's outmatching me. | ||
| He's outclassing me. | ||
| He has better technique than me. | ||
| He's on that night and I'm off. | ||
| He's technique-wise. | ||
| He's not tougher than I am. | ||
| He doesn't have better cardio than I do. | ||
| He's not willing to literally take as much damage as I am and keep coming forward. | ||
| He's not willing to do that. | ||
| And that's what I've always had the confidence in. | ||
| But now I have the confidence in my skill sets as well. | ||
| When you see a guy like, he's one of my favorite examples, Justin Gaethje, who's just a fucking savage, but you see him go undefeated in World Series of Fighting, what do they call it now? | ||
| Professional Fighting League? | ||
| Is that what they call it? | ||
| Professional Fight League, yeah. | ||
| Is that it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So he goes undefeated in World Series of Fighting. | ||
| One of the most interesting and intriguing contenders to enter into the UFC has a spectacular debut against Michael Johnson in a fucking war. | ||
| I mean just a fucking war. | ||
| And then... | ||
| Loses to Eddie Alvarez in spectacular fashion, and then loses to Dustin Poirier in spectacular fashion. | ||
| But just in those three fights has taken so much damage. | ||
| It's just crazy to watch his style when you know that he's a very good wrestler. | ||
| He's a smart guy. | ||
| And, I mean, Trevor Whitman, his coach, his striking coach, this is the same coach that... | ||
| Coach Thug Rose, and you look at her footwork and movement. | ||
| She's turning into a technique machine. | ||
| A technique machine! | ||
| Sliding away from things, entering in, constantly moving, presenting angles and different looks. | ||
| And Justin is just hands up high, moving in on you, and just leg kicks from close distance and brawling. | ||
| That guy can't do that very long. | ||
| Crazy that he admitted that. | ||
| That interview just came out there. | ||
| He said, I only have five fights left in me. | ||
| I want them to be good ones. | ||
| Is that what he said? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure he had an interview that said, I only have five fights left in me. | ||
| And it's crazy to see that because when you're already... | ||
| I mean, he's younger than I am. | ||
| He's like 29, isn't he? | ||
| 28? | ||
| I think he's something like that. | ||
| I don't even know if he's 30, you know? | ||
| I don't think he is. | ||
| And this might be a guy... | ||
| Didn't he start late? | ||
| Didn't he wrestle in college? | ||
| Yeah, I don't think he started even striking until he was 21. Yeah, so he's only been fighting for eight years, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And... | |
| And I think it goes back to, when I look at him, you know, it's not a knock on him or whatever. | ||
| I just don't think he has the confidence in his abilities. | ||
| I think... | ||
| But there's a fine line between having confidence in your abilities, confidence in your striking techniques, your ability to win any other way than a brawl. | ||
| Because I've had these thoughts too. | ||
| Man, I've sat... | ||
| And I've thought and the thought of me just outclassing somebody and piecing them up and the whole world watching and hearing the announcer saying, oh my God, Michael Chandler striking is on another level. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| And how he strings together his punches with his kicks and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| That felt foreign and it felt uncomfortable to me because I didn't 100% truly believe in that stuff until recently. | ||
| And I think he only has the capacity to believe in himself as a brawler. | ||
| Therefore, that's the only way he knows how to win. | ||
| Therefore, in his sparring rounds, he's not... | ||
| I bet you and I could go watch him and he's the same Justin Gaethje in those sparring rounds as he is in the cage. | ||
| But is that because... | ||
| Here's no regrets. | ||
| Five fights left. | ||
| That's a tough spot to be in, you know? | ||
| But... | ||
| That's just his mentality, though. | ||
| I wonder if you're right about that, because I think he likes that kind of fighting. | ||
| Well, that's the thing, too. | ||
| I think that's what he enjoys. | ||
| He likes breaking people. | ||
| Like when he broke Michael Johnson, he just broke him. | ||
| Hey, man, the fans love it. | ||
| You want some fans? | ||
| You want some fans? | ||
| You have a couple of those. | ||
| He's got a great following now after, like you said, just a couple of fights. | ||
| People believe in him. | ||
| People still right now... | ||
| They see this cyborg robot step into the cage. | ||
| That's what they think. | ||
| They don't even look at him as a man. | ||
| They don't look at him like he has a heart and a spirit in his brain. | ||
| They just look at a guy who goes out there and he's going to just freaking try to break somebody just through sheer, not beautiful technique, but just pressure and punch count and leg kicks and that kind of stuff. | ||
| And he's going to step in the cage against whoever he steps in the cage against, even though he lost his last two fights. | ||
| And he's still going to be... | ||
| The favorite, I believe. | ||
| Well, he's one of the best leg kickers in the sport. | ||
| Just crazy that he started striking so late. | ||
| Everybody gets their legs fucked up with that guy. | ||
| And he leg kicks the shit out of people from close range, too. | ||
| Which is weird. | ||
| Like, literally be in the clinch, and he's whipping down on your legs. | ||
| I just think he loves chaos. | ||
| I just think he loves it. | ||
| He embraces it. | ||
| When shit gets crazy, that's when he's at his most comfortable. | ||
| Maybe that's me speaking from experience. | ||
| I see a lot of my early career very similar to that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just... | |
| brawling, you know, like that's, that's what I did. | ||
| And then I, then I decided I have these physical gifts and the speed and the power and the ability, the, the mental capacity to, to pick things up. | ||
| I mean, I, I, I have been blessed with very, the ability to pick things up very, very quickly and, and two practices. | ||
| I'm like, holy cow, this stuff's working just after a couple of mid sessions, you know, But Justin's shown no indication that he even enjoys doing any other kind of fighting. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Like, you use a lot of footwork and movement. | ||
| You slide in and out. | ||
| Like, the Patricky Pitbull fight was a great example of that. | ||
| You slid in and dropped that right hand on him. | ||
| It was a perfect closure of distance, and you launched a missile on him. | ||
| Gagey's just, here it comes, bitch. | ||
| Here it comes. | ||
| It's coming. | ||
| It's coming. | ||
| And that's scary, man. | ||
| Anybody in the lightweight division is lying when they're not a little bit shaken. | ||
| Like, dang, I've got to freaking fight that dude. | ||
| He's that guy in the bracket. | ||
| Wrestling, there's the guy who's not really ranked. | ||
| He's seeded No. | ||
| 8, or he's not even seeded, but you know he's a goer. | ||
| You know he's tough. | ||
| You know he's strong. | ||
| You know he's not that good, but he's going to be in your face for seven minutes, and you could lose to him because he's that good. | ||
| He's not the guy you want to draw first round. | ||
| If I was Gagey, I would say take some time off and really reconsider your approach because that chaos is always going to be there. | ||
| The chaos is always going to be there. | ||
| He's always going to be able to do that. | ||
| He's always going to love that. | ||
| He's always going to have some of the best leg kicks in the sport. | ||
| Just use a little more footwork. | ||
| Use a little more movement. | ||
| How about some feints? | ||
| How about every now and then a little bit of this? | ||
| How about every now and then? | ||
| Just a little bit of that. | ||
| Switch up stances. | ||
| A little bit of takedowns. | ||
| How about throwing a takedown? | ||
| Or even touching a leg. | ||
| Just touch a leg. | ||
| Make him think. | ||
| He's a fucking good wrestler. | ||
| Kid's a good wrestler. | ||
| In Northern Colorado. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then the other part of me says, shut the fuck up, Rogan. | ||
| Let him fight like that because it's awesome. | ||
| I mean, that's his thing. | ||
| That Poirier fight was fucking amazing. | ||
| And the Michael Johnson fight was fucking amazing. | ||
| Even the Eddie Alvarez fight. | ||
| It was chaos. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was. | |
| Up until the moment Eddie landed that knee and Eddie's leg was in trouble. | ||
| Bad. | ||
| He was in trouble. | ||
| I was waiting for Eddie to go down. | ||
| Eddie's got that boxing stance, and he gets low, and he puts a lot of weight on his legs, and he's got a lot of confidence in his hands, but Donald took advantage of that in his first fight in the UFC. When you saw Eddie beat Rafael dos Anjos and win the title, what was that feeling for you, knowing that you shared all those rounds with him, those two crazy wars? | ||
| Was that feeling like, fuck, that could be me? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the... | ||
| When I watched it, I was in Salt Lake City, actually. | ||
| No, Park City, Utah. | ||
| I was at a wedding, and so we were all just hanging out, and I was like, the fight's on, and I was watching it. | ||
| I couldn't hear it, but I was watching it, and he was just throwing that flurry, and everybody I was with was like, holy cow, you beat that guy twice. | ||
| Once? | ||
| Twice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Once? | |
| Once the judges disagree with you. | ||
| No, I'm just joking. | ||
| That's the sport, and I love it. | ||
| But fought that guy twice to very close fights. | ||
| It's kind of one of those things where I was like, man. | ||
| But I knew it. | ||
| I knew he was going to go over there and he was going to do extremely well. | ||
| I didn't know he was going to come in. | ||
| He lost to Donald Cerrone. | ||
| Beat Gilbert. | ||
| Beat Gilbert. | ||
| He beat Pettis. | ||
| He beat... | ||
| Another guy, I believe. | ||
| I think it was just those two. | ||
| I think it was just those two and then he got the title fight. | ||
| I think. | ||
| I might be wrong. | ||
| He would pull up his record. | ||
| But either way, what I admire about Eddie is the same thing that I admire about you, is that he does thrive on those wild fights. | ||
| You know, I mean, he's just... | ||
| Just an unbelievably tough guy. | ||
| And the Gagey fight was a perfect example of that. | ||
| I mean, he got fucking hurt in that fight, man. | ||
| His leg was chewed up. | ||
| I don't know what was going on with his face. | ||
| You guys were calling it out. | ||
| We were trying to figure out what it was. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Gilbert, Pettis, and then Dos Anjos. | ||
| Yeah, it was just those two. | ||
| And then the loss to Donald. | ||
| But those two fights where Pettis was a champion at lightweight and was, at that time, still thought to be in the mix. | ||
| Had beaten Gilbert. | ||
| Submitted Gilbert. | ||
| And Gilbert, of course, from the Strikeforce fights, mad respect for Gilbert. | ||
| He's one of the best in the fucking world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's just, when you really stop and think about how fucking tightly matched that lightweight division is, and how many killers are in that division, that is a fucking crazy division. | ||
| And in the UFC right now, you got Khabib, you got Tony Ferguson, you might have Max Holloway. | ||
| I mean, it's crazy that Max Holloway got pulled from the New York car because he was having trouble making weight. | ||
| And he's the 145-pound champion, which is just... | ||
| He's a tall boy. | ||
| He's a big fella. | ||
| He's a tall boy. | ||
| He's a tough motherfucker, too. | ||
| Holy shit, is he tough. | ||
| He's just got this incredible wealth of talent in this one division, you know? | ||
| And then Kevin Lee, how fucking good did he look against Barboza? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He did look really good. | |
| Holy shit! | ||
| He did look really good. | ||
| Fucking stud. | ||
| So you've got so many good fighters in this one division. | ||
| And this is why we gotta bring you into the UFC. Come on, man. | ||
| Is that why we gotta do it? | ||
| What kind of fucking contract do you have in Bellator? | ||
| We gotta talk, Michael Chandler. | ||
| Can we talk about it? | ||
| 32, man. | ||
| You're gonna be 33, then you'll be 35, then you'll be 40. And then it'll be over. | ||
| Yeah, I'm 50. Trust me. | ||
| It happens. | ||
| It just happens. | ||
| I hope I look like you when I'm 50. It just comes. | ||
| If you will, you won't pass any drug test. | ||
| I'll tell you right now. | ||
| But we gotta get you in here, man. | ||
| There's just no other way to do it. | ||
| Well, we're trying to figure everything out right now. | ||
| Disrespect Bellator. | ||
| How about some cross promosh? | ||
| How about move some people around? | ||
| How cool would that be, huh? | ||
| I would love that. | ||
| I really would. | ||
| I said when Rory went over to fight in Bellator, I said he very well might be, shout out to powerful Rory McDonald, very well might be the best 170 pound fighter in the world. | ||
| It's very possible. | ||
| It's very possible he is. | ||
| I mean, if he's not... | ||
| He's certainly in the mix. | ||
| And he might be on any given day. | ||
| This is the thing. | ||
| You just really don't know. | ||
| But if you look at his fight with Tyron Woodley, he essentially shut Woodley's main offense down and used a brilliant strategy to beat him by decision. | ||
| If you look at his fight with Maia, he got in the worst possible position with Maia. | ||
| Maia mounted on him in the first round when they're not even that sweaty yet. | ||
| And he was able to survive that and then pick Maia apart. | ||
| He's one of the best in the world. | ||
| He beats Lima, who I think is extremely underrated. | ||
| I think Lima is one of the very best fighters on the planet Earth. | ||
| And just people don't know because... | ||
| For whatever reason, Bellator just has not been able to capture the public's imagination the same way the UFC has. | ||
| They've definitely grown big time. | ||
| The last fight card was fucking incredible. | ||
| It's cool because I've been there for the maturation of the whole thing. | ||
| My first fight was on ESPN Deportes that finally aired at 2 in the morning after a couple girls' high school softball games. | ||
| That was our slot. | ||
| And then it moved to MTV2 and then Spike and now Paramount Network. | ||
| And now it's simulcasted now on CMT and Paramount Network. | ||
| So it's cool to see the growth. | ||
| It's cool to see... | ||
| I mean, it's growing. | ||
| And it's been cool to be a part of the growth. | ||
| I mean, I will forever probably be in the biggest fights or the most exciting fights in Bellator history. | ||
| So it's... | ||
| Yeah, I'm not a Bellator hater by any stretch of the imagination. | ||
| And even though, obviously, I've been working for the UFC for a long time, I'm a fan of fights. | ||
| And I like high-level fights. | ||
| I mean, obviously I'm loyal to the UFC, but I don't want Bellator to fail. | ||
| I want them to succeed. | ||
| I like the fact that they have Rory McDonald. | ||
| So there's an argument. | ||
| Like, you look at it, you go, hey, this might be the best 170-pound fighter in the world, and he's not in the UFC. Like, this is all good. | ||
| I felt it the same way when Fedor was fighting in Pride. | ||
| I was like, look, that might be the best fucking heavyweight on the planet Earth, and he's not here. | ||
| And I tried very hard to try to figure out a way to get him over there, but... | ||
| They were super unreasonable back then. | ||
| Not the UFC, Fedor's management. | ||
| They were crazy unreasonable. | ||
| They wanted co-promotion. | ||
| They wanted a 50-50 split. | ||
| The UFC was like, get the fuck out of here. | ||
| They were like, this ain't happening, man. | ||
| And they were also saying, look, this guy is one loss away. | ||
| From losing all of his value. | ||
| You have to understand this. | ||
| And then when Fabricio Verdum caught him with that triangle, the UFC was like, we fucking told you. | ||
| We told you. | ||
| And then Bigfoot Silva smashed him. | ||
| And then Dan Henderson KO'd him. | ||
| And the UFC was like, look, we fucking told you. | ||
| You had an opportunity to bring him over here. | ||
| And that was a different time. | ||
| It was when Fedor was in his prime. | ||
| It was when Fedor was smashing people in pride. | ||
| It was just a different human being than what you're seeing today at 41. But I'm a fan of the best fighters in the world getting together. | ||
| And whatever we have to do to facilitate that, that's what I want to see happen. | ||
| I just think that there's got to be a way to make this happen. | ||
| There's got to be a way. | ||
| What are you talking about here? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You! | |
| I'm going day by day. | ||
| I'm enjoying the process. | ||
| We're in talks right now. | ||
| Things are going smoothly. | ||
| Things are moving forward. | ||
| We'll see what happens. | ||
| I know you have to say all this. | ||
| That is true. | ||
| But you want to fight the best guys in the world. | ||
| I know you do. | ||
| Oh, there's not a day that goes by that I don't get... | ||
| I mean, shoot, you posted that thing this morning, and there was 287 comments in five minutes, and it was all like, finally, hey, when are you going to come? | ||
| And I get that every single day, so there's not a day that goes by that... | ||
| It doesn't get talked about or thought about. | ||
| Especially after Eddie went over there and became the champion. | ||
| Everybody knows about it. | ||
| It's one of the things that I talked about when Eddie first came over to the UFC. I was telling people, go watch the wars that he had with Michael Chandler. | ||
| And then I've said that also, too, when I've seen you coaching people or being in someone's corner. | ||
| That right there is one of the best lightweights on the planet. | ||
| And I just really would love to see you... | ||
| I mean, I don't want to undercut Bellator. | ||
| I don't want Bellator to... | ||
| At the end of the day, it's a competition between the two organizations. | ||
| There's guys in both organizations that are great. | ||
| Like you said, Lima and all these guys. | ||
| And Koreshkoff. | ||
| And the Pitbull brothers or whatever. | ||
| There's some great talent in both. | ||
| And you saw it back in the day with Strikeforce. | ||
| And now all of a sudden... | ||
| A lot of these Strikeforce guys are UFC champions as well. | ||
| Well, it's just weird the way fighting is today as opposed to the way boxing is. | ||
| A perfect example is the Gennady Golovkin fight this weekend. | ||
| We went to see him and you're basically going to see one of the best boxers on the planet. | ||
| You're not going to see him because he's You know, the fucking WBC guy or the IBF guy or the WBO guy. | ||
| People don't really give a shit about that. | ||
| He's a world champion. | ||
| But it's versus Bellator versus the UFC. It's a big difference. | ||
| In the way people look at it, like the average public. | ||
| The people don't give a shit if you're the WBA champion in boxing or the WBC champion. | ||
| They don't give a shit. | ||
| They just want to know who's a bad motherfucker. | ||
| Is it Deontay Wilder? | ||
| Is it Anthony Joshua? | ||
| These are heavyweight champions. | ||
| Let's see them fight. | ||
| They don't look at it that way when it comes to Bellator and the UFC. I don't know why. | ||
| My speculation is, first of all, because UFC's been around forever and it's like the NFL. It has that name value. | ||
| Like Q-tips and Kleenex. | ||
| They've done a good job of building the name value as well. | ||
| It's also a really good name. | ||
| UFC's a great name. | ||
| Bellator is a shitty name. | ||
| It just is. | ||
| It's just, you know, you go to the average person, like, oh, I'm gonna watch Bellator tonight. | ||
| They're like, what the fuck is a Bellator? | ||
| They don't know what a Bellator is, but ultimate fighting championship makes sense. | ||
| Makes sense, yeah. | ||
| Why don't they just call it Paramount MMA? I think there was all kinds of new branding going on with the whole new Paramount stuff and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| If there was ever a time, it would have been now. | ||
| But I think they're stuck to it. | ||
| They like it. | ||
| It's kind of one of them things. | ||
| They should get their money back from Spike Lee. | ||
| Remember when they had to pay Spike Lee? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did they? | |
| Yeah, they paid him off. | ||
| He sued them. | ||
| No, he sued them. | ||
| He said that you stole the name from me. | ||
| And they were like, what the fuck? | ||
| It's basically just one of those frivolous lawsuits that you have to settle. | ||
| Spike wanted some cash. | ||
| I wonder how much they gave him. | ||
| How much do you think they gave him? | ||
| Let's take a guess. | ||
| How much do you think they gave Spike Lee? | ||
| 3.2 million. | ||
| Really that much? | ||
| No, I don't know. | ||
| I made that up. | ||
| A million? | ||
| You think they gave him a million? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe, yeah. | |
| I bet they gave him a million. | ||
| I bet you're right. | ||
| I'm gonna go with 1.2. | ||
| I'm gonna be in the middle. | ||
| I'm gonna be the middle guy. | ||
| Let's see how much they got. | ||
| Spike Lee. | ||
| Do you think they disclosed it? | ||
| Did he actually trademark Spike TV? Someday he might actually have his own TV channel. | ||
| I think his thought was, what about Spike Jones? | ||
| Is he like, where's my fucking money? | ||
| I think he just felt like the name Spike was synonymous with him. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Spike was a dog, right? | ||
| Wasn't that like the logo? | ||
| Oh yeah, because the UFC, the Ultimate Fighter was on Spike TV, right? | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Fuck yeah, 2005. Stephen Bonner, Forrest Griffin. | ||
| Forever in debt to those guys. | ||
| They made the sport, that one crazy fight literally was like probably one of the big pushes to make this fight. | ||
| Undisclosed. | ||
| Undisclosed. | ||
| Holler at me, Spike. | ||
| Tell me what you got. | ||
| Let us know. | ||
| Let us know, Spike. | ||
| Joint public statement that they settled their differences. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Via Greenback. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of people were mad at Spike for that. | ||
| Spike Lee. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And when he tripped that referee. | ||
| I actually don't know if he did. | ||
| He tripped the referee? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I was in the Jay-Z song. | ||
| Remember that one? | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| I never even saw it. | ||
| Spike Lee tripped a referee? | ||
| Yeah, he's known at being in the NBA, like a lot of Knicks games. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| He tripped a referee? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Supposedly. | |
| Well, that's what Jay-Z said. | ||
| He said, I'm spiked out. | ||
| I could trip a referee. | ||
| And I'm like, oh, Spike Lee must have tripped a referee one time. | ||
| Because he is always courtside at the Knicks. | ||
| Is there video of this? | ||
| I think he's saying it because he sits courtside. | ||
| I don't think it actually happened. | ||
| Oh, one of those things. | ||
| One of those things. | ||
| I could trip a referee. | ||
| Yeah, isn't that weird? | ||
| Basketball, you can get right up to the action. | ||
| Oh, so close. | ||
| You could literally get... | ||
| You could trip a referee. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whereas football, you're pretty far back. | ||
| 20 feet, 50 feet. | ||
| I mean, I've talked about this so many times people get angry at me, but what would you think about the idea of fighting in a big open area without a cage? | ||
| Like a big open area, like a basketball arena, like a basketball court, like that size. | ||
| If you had like wrestling hats where you have boundary lines. | ||
| Could you actually go out of those boundary lines and they'll stop the action? | ||
| Well, they'd have to bring you back in. | ||
| There'd have to be some reason. | ||
| So it would be like the Coliseum. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Because it would be so big that there almost are no barriers. | ||
| Well, yeah, because I think that there's something about a cage that presents an artificial boundary, and that artificial boundary can be used both to contain someone and to get out, to get up. | ||
| Like, you could obviously wall walk and get up out. | ||
| I just think... | ||
| It makes takedowns much more difficult when there's not a cage, because you're not going to press someone against a cage and just scoop their legs out from under them. | ||
| You have to get a legitimate takedown, like an open area takedown. | ||
| And it makes getting up much more difficult. | ||
| When someone does take you down, you can't just scoot your back up to the wall and get back up. | ||
| You're going to have to figure out a way to actually get up. | ||
| Well, that was one of the things, too. | ||
| Going back to being a wrestler, wrestlers coming in should not just expect that they're going to be able to take guys down and not get taken down. | ||
| I used to get taken down all the time off the cage, and I'm like, man, I'm a Division I wrestler. | ||
| Why am I getting taken down? | ||
| But it is completely different. | ||
| I mean, obviously, I know a lot about maneuvering the body and scrambling out and all that kind of stuff, but adding the cage wall is a lot different, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you first started training, did you immediately start training in a cage? | ||
| I think at Xtreme Couture, yeah, there was a cage. | ||
| So we would spar in a cage. | ||
| But now I don't. | ||
| I don't really spar in a cage anymore. | ||
| You don't? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| How come? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I mean, down in Florida, we don't have one, and we just spar in the open. | ||
| There's cage walls. | ||
| There's cage walls that, like if you're in training camp, if you've got a fight coming up soon, you'll spar in this certain area where they might put some tie pads on the floor, like don't go past this, and then there's your other barrier type of deal. | ||
| My gym, we don't have a cage. | ||
| We just have a cage wall and then a padded wall, too. | ||
| So the cage wall, just to work on wall walks and things like that, you get chewed up on those fucking things too. | ||
| That's why I like to use the padded wall. | ||
| I mean, the only difference is there's a little bit of a give to the cage wall. | ||
| There's not on the padded wall. | ||
| But man, yeah, if you're not wearing gloves, if you're an elbow, I mean, I've busted a bursa sack in my elbow before and it just takes a week to heal. | ||
| Or you look at your back in the mirror and it just looks like a bunch of hickeys all over your back. | ||
| Your head can get ripped apart. | ||
| Your ears. | ||
| People get cut I've actually gotten cut open, nicked just a little bitty one in a fight. | ||
| By just hitting the cage. | ||
| Because it's metal. | ||
| Yeah, it's one of those things that I think is a legacy idea. | ||
| It's hard to see, too, when you're in the audience and you're looking at it. | ||
| And those pillars get in the way. | ||
| It'd be cool if there was just a single cage that didn't have to be bolted together. | ||
| Therefore, there was no... | ||
| No posts. | ||
| No posts. | ||
| But then again... | ||
| Right. | ||
| You'd have to have a top post, right? | ||
| You'd have to have a top post and a bottom post and then the... | ||
| The cage would have to be so rigid that it held everything together. | ||
| Yeah, how the fuck would you do that? | ||
| It would be almost impossible because it's... | ||
| Or maybe it's two pieces. | ||
| Maybe you lower them in. | ||
| Or maybe it's two pieces. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| The guys just stand there and then they just get locked in and then big... | ||
| Yeah, there's no doors. | ||
| Spartans just lock this thing down. | ||
| Yeah, there's like elevators. | ||
| That was like the big UFC, you know, back in the day. | ||
| What was the guy, Art Davey? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When they started talking about all the ideas where they were talking about putting a moat around the cage and sharks and alligators and like, we're really going to do this thing big. | ||
| Everyone's going to love it. | ||
| Well, Art Davey's the same guy that brought us ex-arm wrestling or whatever the fuck it was. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
| You know what it is? | ||
| They tied your arms together and you beat the shit out of each other. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Like the Michael Jackson bad video? | ||
| No, they had an MMA arm wrestling event. | ||
| Oh, it was actually MMA? Yeah, where you literally tied the guy's arm together. | ||
| So you were in an arm wrestling situation, and they taped your arms together, and then you were punching each other and kicking each other, and guys were throwing arm bars. | ||
| Yeah, with the arm wrestling podium in front of you. | ||
| Here it is, X-Arm. | ||
| I have no idea how you find these things so quickly. | ||
| Because we made fun of this like a week ago. | ||
| It was so fucking stupid. | ||
| Look, they taped their arms together. | ||
| And these guys, first of all, don't ever throw that kick again. | ||
| But look at this. | ||
| This guy's got an arm bar. | ||
| Oh my goodness. | ||
| I mean, which is crazy because your arm can get fucking snapped. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you have a table that you're doing an arm bar over. | ||
| You don't even have time to tap. | ||
| And they can't separate you once you do tap. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Head kick. | |
| Oh no. | ||
| Oh no. | ||
| Look at how crazy that is. | ||
| They're stopping the fight. | ||
| But even if they stop the fight... | ||
| Pin his arm. | ||
| Pin his arm. | ||
| So you can win by getting an arm or knock him out. | ||
| It's so stupid. | ||
| This is one of the dumbest ideas that humans have ever come up with. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| But it's entertaining. | ||
| I would watch it. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| I would watch it. | ||
| It's a horrible idea. | ||
| I'm watching it right now, so I'm talking shit. | ||
| I would watch it. | ||
| If that was on tonight, I'm watching it, 100%. | ||
| But the arms are taped together, which is just crazy. | ||
| I love how the ref comes out and does the tape job, too, while everyone's watching. | ||
| Oh, that guy's out. | ||
| Out cold, hanging off the edge. | ||
| And then you're connected to him. | ||
| You should just run and start dragging him around. | ||
| Well, it's so dangerous, too. | ||
| It's such a dumb, dumb idea. | ||
| But see it! | ||
| What was that like? | ||
| Was that online? | ||
| Was that pay-per-view? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What was that? | |
| How was that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's one of those things that just... | ||
| It just existed for a while. | ||
| It happened for a second. | ||
| Yeah, it happened for a little bit. | ||
| And the dudes got knocked out and they're like, okay. | ||
| Was there a commission? | ||
| Do you have to have a commission for this? | ||
| Nah, they probably did that on some fucking island somewhere. | ||
| Exactly, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I guess that was good. | ||
| International waters on a boat or something like that. | ||
| I have no idea how they got away with that thing. | ||
| It's just so stupid. | ||
| That was Art Davey, huh? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I believe so. | ||
| Didn't he just get inducted to the Hall of Fame? | ||
| Yes, I did. | ||
| Yes, he did, rather. | ||
| Wasn't there... | ||
| Frank Shamrock had a good idea where they were doing one in like... | ||
| It was like a pit. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Sort of a thing. | ||
| Which would be cool because you couldn't really climb out. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And I know they have something similar to that now with this karate thing that Boss Root is involved with. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think I saw that. | |
| Is that in Florida? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes, in Miami. | ||
| Because Luke Rockhold has gone to a couple of live events, I think. | ||
| Yeah, they're doing that now where they take real high-level karate guys and they wear MMA gloves and I think they're allowed... | ||
| And there's padded walls type of deal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's like a slanted area where you know you hit the barrier. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| You can punch a little bit on the ground. | ||
| It's very strange. | ||
| Boss had it in. | ||
| You're allowed to punch on the ground for five seconds. | ||
| You can take a guy down and you can punch him on the ground for five seconds and then stop. | ||
| Yeah, which is like, oh, okay. | ||
| It's like, man, let him beat his face in. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| Well, it's like this idea needs a little bit of work. | ||
| So you think it's going to make it? | ||
| The boss rooting thing? | ||
| I mean, hopefully. | ||
| Look, I think the more stuff we can have, the better. | ||
| But I just think they need to iron out the rules. | ||
| Like, I love glory. | ||
| I love kickboxing. | ||
| I loved Lion Fight when it was on, but I think now it's only online or something like that. | ||
| It's hard to find good, high-level Muay Thai, good, high-level striking that's not just boxing. | ||
| It's really hard to find. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That's why you've seen all these organizations come and go or these kind of crazy ideas. | ||
| Nothing is sticking in a lot of instances. | ||
| That's why it's cool to see the growth of MMA. It's a cool time to be a part of this generation of MMA as MMA grows. | ||
| Like you talked about, Asking about myself, I mean, you're seeing all kinds of guys having success with karate style and kind of on your toes bouncing kickboxing style, point kickboxing style. | ||
| And you're seeing a lot of people come in because it's cool, it's flashy, the fans love it, the promoters love it. | ||
| Michael Page. | ||
| Michael Page, exactly. | ||
| I mean, he's a perfect example of a guy who was a real high-level point karate fighter who's now... | ||
| A real tough puzzle to solve in MMA. Yeah. | ||
| Who is he fighting next? | ||
| He's fighting 170, right? | ||
| He's fighting 170. I don't think he has a Bellator... | ||
| I don't think he has an MMA fight schedule. | ||
| I know he had a fight in October, but that was... | ||
| He had a boxing match. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That was October. | ||
| And he won by KO. Months ago, yeah. | ||
| It was a long time ago. | ||
| May. | ||
| And I know they were trying to set up a fight with him and Paul Daly, which would be fucking chaos. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But Paul Daly was just saying something. | ||
| I read an article. | ||
| I just read the headline. | ||
| It said, Bellator thinks I'm a fool and I ain't one. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| Paul Daly was not very happy for a second. | ||
| That's why I was very interested or I was surprised to see him. | ||
| He just signed to fight. | ||
| Who is he fighting? | ||
| I don't know because I read this headline. | ||
| He's fighting someone in London. | ||
| I believe it was yesterday. | ||
| Find out who it says Paul Daly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
John Fitch. | |
| Oh, John Fitch. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| John Fitch is coming back. | ||
| That's a terrible fight for him, though. | ||
| John Fitch is all wrestler. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Have they fought yet? | |
| Ready to fight John Fitch? | ||
| I don't think they did. | ||
| They never fought in Strikeforce days? | ||
| No, I don't believe they did. | ||
| Coming off impressive second-round knockout of fellow UFC veteran Lorenz Larkin. | ||
| So he's been out for a while, too, because that fight with Lorenz, I want to say, was six months ago plus, right? | ||
| That was on my card in September. | ||
| September? | ||
| Yeah, September. | ||
| But yeah, I know he came out. | ||
| He wasn't very happy about some stuff. | ||
| So that was eight months since his last fight. | ||
| So is that what he's upset about, that he hasn't gotten a fight in a long time? | ||
| I mean, I think it's like you said. | ||
| Bellator thinks I'm a fool, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| He basically said he was walking. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Yeah, Bellator's playing me for an idiot, and I ain't an idiot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You ain't an idiot? | |
| I ain't an idiot. | ||
| When you say that with his British accent, it's even better. | ||
| Bellator. | ||
| Bellator. | ||
| Yeah, but that's a... | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| I ain't happy with what you guys are doing. | ||
| Finally a fight that makes sense. | ||
| Hold on, scroll back up. | ||
| What is he saying? | ||
| Bellator wanted him to fight John Fitch at Bellator 199 this Saturday. | ||
| One thing went through his mind. | ||
| I thought, finally a fight that makes sense. | ||
| Daly said, in case you couldn't tell. | ||
| I've had great times at Bellator. | ||
| Okay, so just... | ||
| They're just taking a quote out of context and making it the title, which is what they always do, right? | ||
| They're playing me for nitty-nitty-nitty. | ||
| Just be done with all the bullshit. | ||
| Let me fight. | ||
| I love how they bull expletive. | ||
| Just write bullshit, you fucking pussies. | ||
| Let me fight. | ||
| Let me go. | ||
| Or you treat me like you want me to be here. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's a good fight, though. | ||
| The John Fitch fight's a good fight because striking-wise, obviously, he has a giant advantage. | ||
| But Fitch has been around a long time. | ||
| He knows his shit, and he's a fucking brutal wrestler. | ||
| And this is Fitch's first fight in Bellator. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Just came over from Pro Fight League? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm, yeah. | |
| Or is that where it was last? | ||
| Well, were they calling it World Series of Fighting then? | ||
| Oh, it was probably World Series back then, yeah. | ||
| And Fitch fought Paul Jarez, and that was when Paul Jarez got disqualified, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It was a heel hook that he held onto? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was bad for a couple fights in a row. | ||
| Paul Harris will do that, man. | ||
| Paul Harris? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I love when people call him Paul Harris. | ||
| I'm like, who's Paul Harris? | ||
| I didn't know he was good. | ||
| I'm like, okay. | ||
| Yeah, he holds on to shit. | ||
| Yeah, bad. | ||
| But the ref's like ripping him off. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is actually awesome. | ||
| It's kind of crazy. | ||
| It's terrible if it's your knee. | ||
| Yeah, it's terrible if it's your knee, but it's like awesome for fans, but then the fans are like, half of them were ticked off, half of them were pumped. | ||
| Well, you're seeing the leg locks now. | ||
| You know, you're really seeing them in MMA. You're seeing them. | ||
| A shitload of them in jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Professional submission matches. | ||
| You're seeing the leg lock game because of the Donaher death squad. | ||
| A lot of those guys just seeing it dominate competition. | ||
| I almost got my leg ripped off. | ||
| A lot of things would be a lot different if I would have tapped in that fight. | ||
| That first fight against Marcian Held. | ||
| First round of another tournament. | ||
| Phenomenal jiu-jitsu guy. | ||
| He had it so deep, man. | ||
| I sprained my hamstring a little bit, like pulled it, popped it, and then I had to fight three or four weeks later again. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But, man, almost ripped my knee in half. | ||
| Do you train a lot of leg lock submissions? | ||
| Do you train defense? | ||
| Not a lot. | ||
| How do you know what to do in a situation like that? | ||
| I mean, I think there's a couple... | ||
| Basics, you know, if you get in a heel hook, roll with it, or if you get caught in a knee bar, pop the legs open, pop the knee open. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But do you work with, like, high-level leg lock guys? | ||
| No. | ||
| To really understand the whole chain of events that happens? | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, it's hard to find good leg lock guys. | ||
| I mean, it's almost like throwing elbows and knees in practice. | ||
| Guys don't throw them or practice them as much because it's hard to practice them without putting people in really bad danger. | ||
| You know, you accidentally hit someone with an elbow, Because you were simulating it, you catch an eyebrow and it's over. | ||
| I got 12 stitches. | ||
| Same thing with leg locks. | ||
| I mean, people will get it. | ||
| I actually got caught in a leg lock by Mario Sperry this last training camp, now that I think about it. | ||
| Mario Sperry is still rolling. | ||
| Oh, he's still rolling, man. | ||
| He's like, you, Chela, come here. | ||
| How old is he now? | ||
| Mario's got to be 50. Yeah, he's the man, man. | ||
| He's awesome. | ||
| Really, really nice guy. | ||
| Real veteran, man, and a real pioneer of jujitsu and MMA. Yeah, it was a wrestling day. | ||
| It was a wrestling day, and we went to the ground, and we just kept going. | ||
| I had wrestling shoes on, and he caught me in it. | ||
| I was like, whoop! | ||
| Give the old tap real quick because I'm like, man, you get wrestling with wrestling shoes on, it's no joke. | ||
| You ain't getting out of nothing. | ||
| No. | ||
| So it's like, yep, got me. | ||
| Thanks, coach. | ||
| Let's go again. | ||
| Yeah, the whole leg lock game has evolved. | ||
| It's scary, man. | ||
| Especially like heel, not a heel hook, but when they take the ankle, just bend it. | ||
| Right, what Dylan Dennis did this weekend. | ||
| So that's what happened to me. | ||
| Toe hold. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| I got caught in a knee bar, got out of the knee bar, and then he switched to the toe hold, felt my ankle pop, pop, pop, and then just... | ||
| What inspired you to talk a bunch of shit about Dylan Dennis after his performance? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't think he looked very good. | ||
| You don't think his jiu-jitsu looked good? | ||
| Oh, he was all right. | ||
| I mean, he was... | ||
| You know, he went there in a nice little transition, grabbed the leg. | ||
| But, I mean, he looked like a fish out of water on the feet, of which, of course, he should, I guess. | ||
| First MMA fight. | ||
| First MMA fight. | ||
| But I think it's, I mean, do I respect what, you know, the win? | ||
| Do I respect what he's done in him and maybe BJJ? That's cool, but it's not mixed martial arts. | ||
| And it's just, it's funny how much he's getting called out for being literally just a, you know... | ||
| I want to be Connor with all the same, saying the exact same exact stuff. | ||
| Well, he realizes how he realizes good it gets you paid. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| You know, he's doing a good job with it. | ||
| But he also said he's he's the highest paid fighter in Bellator. | ||
| I mean, there's all kinds of like silly stuff, you know, it's just like, dude. | ||
| Is that what he said? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh yeah. | |
| So he's Chael Sonnen in a little bit. | ||
| Oh yeah, he's a dork, man. | ||
| Just huge dork. | ||
| So it's just like one of those things where it's like... | ||
| But when a guy's making his debut and you are a world champion or a former world champion at this point, what inspires you to call a guy like that out? | ||
| Just because, I mean... | ||
| Doesn't it help him? | ||
| Yeah, I guess it does. | ||
| But it also, I mean, I also woke up to 150 mentions on Twitter, so it's like, well, at least people are talking. | ||
| You know, at least people are talking. | ||
| I mean, that's the other thing, too, is always navigating the narrative and talking about... | ||
| Getting people to talk. | ||
| Getting people to talk about, I mean, over the last couple months, the amount of times, as soon as Khabib fought, the amount of people that were just talking like, hey, you're the only guy that can match Khabib's wrestling. | ||
| You're the only guy that can nullify his wrestling. | ||
| I mean, to get yourself in the conversation, that's what it all is. | ||
| It's all... | ||
| Well, Styles definitely make fights, and that was what became very interesting after the Al Iaquinta fight, where people were looking at, okay, what about high-level wrestlers who have more refined striking? | ||
| And how do they line up? | ||
| And Kevin Lee was a big one that people kept talking about, but you were a big one that people kept talking about, too. | ||
| Because you were saying that you think you could beat him. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| And him having that fight with Iaquinta, who... | ||
| He was a prohibited favorite over, but it went the full five rounds. | ||
| And, you know, Iaquinta, although never won a round, showed some chinks in the armor. | ||
| So chinks in the armor showed what happens when Khabib can't take you down. | ||
| I mean, it's tough whenever the one thing that you've always been used to dominating with isn't working, and then you're stuck throwing punches and you're in, you know... | ||
| He's a little bit behind in the striking aspect. | ||
| Dude, I've got a ton of respect for the guy. | ||
| He's a mauler. | ||
| I mean, at certain times he looks unbeatable. | ||
| He has looked unbeatable where I've looked at it and other people have looked at it and people that have fought him that I've talked to. | ||
| Like the Barboza fight. | ||
| He just fucking mauled Barboza. | ||
| And it's just a battle of wills, man. | ||
| You're inside of a cage. | ||
| And it's just like we talked about. | ||
| I knew I could outpace people. | ||
| I knew I could out-cardio them. | ||
| I could out-tough them. | ||
| Certain people get to that breaking point and they break and they concede and they go into their shell and they say, I did a good job, but this one's on him. | ||
| Well, guys who don't have that deep, deep wrestling background and they face a guy who does, there's moments in the fight where you see that, where you saw that thousand-yard stare in Barboza's eyes where he's like, fuck. | ||
| I can't keep doing this. | ||
| He goes into defensive survival mode. | ||
| And when a guy does have a deep background in wrestling and also can strike, that's what makes it interesting. | ||
| And this is why MMA is such a complex sport because there's so many variables. | ||
| There's so many techniques you can use. | ||
| There's so many situations where you might have an advantage or your opponent might have an advantage. | ||
| And it's just... | ||
| We live for these matchups, these stylistic matchups. | ||
| So when something like that happens and a guy like Khabib has a fight where all these questions get presented, that's where a guy like Michael Chandler comes into the mix. | ||
| Yeah, well, and I love, like, after that fight, too, because I said something. | ||
| I posted a video. | ||
| Do you see the video of me scrambling with Kamaru? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| He's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| That was awesome. | ||
| And I said, if all he has is wrestling, how do you beat a man who can't be taken down? | ||
| I got so many messages from Russian guys that just said, Khabib time, Khabib time. | ||
| Of course! | ||
| It's one of those things, man. | ||
| That fight with Eddie, that fight with Khabib, it's exciting. | ||
| Kamaru Usman has got to be going fucking crazy right now seeing Colby Covington getting a shot at the interim title. | ||
| He's like, you motherfuckers! | ||
| Nobody wants to fight that dude. | ||
| No, I wouldn't. | ||
| I mean, that dude is... | ||
| I mean, he's a specimen. | ||
| He's got wrestling. | ||
| He's got striking. | ||
| I mean, you watch him spar or you watch him hit mitts or you watch his composure and his confidence while he's sparring and doing all that kind of stuff. | ||
| You'd think he's been striking since he was 11 years old. | ||
| He just started after college. | ||
| Well, he had a tough fight with... | ||
| Meek Mill? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Emile Meek or whatever? | ||
| Emile Meek. | ||
| But I think that Emile Meek is extremely underrated. | ||
| Extremely underrated. | ||
| I mean, he's a fucking tough guy. | ||
| Very physically strong. | ||
| Very, very strong. | ||
| I was Emile Meek a couple times. | ||
| I was like trying to mimic him. | ||
| Oh, were you in training camp? | ||
| Yeah, we were there at the same time. | ||
| And he's done that. | ||
| Him and I train a ton together. | ||
| And it works out well for me because he's a bigger guy. | ||
| I like to go with a little bit bigger guys so I can just continue to get stronger and manipulate bodies that are bigger than mine, you know? | ||
| Yeah, and a lot of people were criticizing him for not being able to finish Meek, but I'm like, you're crazy. | ||
| That guy is a fucking animal. | ||
| It's nuts the amount of people, you know, armchair quarterbacks that are literally out there saying, you should have finished this guy. | ||
| We are all professional fighters training day in and day out. | ||
| It's not easy to finish a guy sometimes. | ||
| Well, that's why I was saying you've got to stay the fuck away from your... | ||
| Twitter mentions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's like, man, it just blows me. | ||
| Oh my goodness. | ||
| Especially for a guy like you, if you do have something like an ankle injury, like that one fight, and then you've got to stay offline for a few weeks. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| I mean, I still get it to this day. | ||
| Are you training? | ||
| Are you working on your rubber ankles? | ||
| Oh, these motherfuckers, they know where your soft spot is. | ||
| They start poking you. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| I looked out at my ankle and said, man, that is a well-enabled ankle. | ||
| I'm ready to kick somebody in the head with it. | ||
| So you didn't suffer any ill effects of it once the nerves came back? | ||
| No, once they came back. | ||
| I mean, I've done a lot of rehab. | ||
| And I think my legs or my feet in general, it's something that I've continued to work on. | ||
| I mean, you've got to look at each... | ||
| Each individual joint from hands to wrists to elbows to knees to ankles. | ||
| I mean, in all of my strength and conditioning work, a lot of it is very, very hard, very, very tough, very, very violent. | ||
| And then some of my stuff is stability stuff, core stability stuff, hip flexibility, hip strengthening stuff, because that's where all your power and all that kind of stuff comes from. | ||
| Do you do any yoga at all? | ||
| I do yoga. | ||
| I've done hot yoga in the past, and we just opened up. | ||
| My gym in Nashville has a 900-square-foot yoga studio that actually opened up this morning at 6 a.m., Oh, there you go. | ||
| What a great way to launch it. | ||
| Yeah, so I'm going to show up and just show up and work on that core stability and flexibility. | ||
| Is that a hot yoga place or regular yoga? | ||
| Just regular yoga. | ||
| What temperature do you keep the room? | ||
| It'll be right around that 80-ish. | ||
| That's fine, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Some people don't like that hot stuff. | ||
| Yeah, we had training the other day and we had about 12 people in there. | ||
| We were shooting some content and had some training and we had to bring towels back there because people were coming out and they're like, hey, you got any towels? | ||
| Because people were sweating their butt off. | ||
| And I think we're going to get some cool infrared panels to hang on the ceiling that can kind of add a little bit of heat to where it's not hot yoga, but it's definitely warm enough when you're going through your flows. | ||
| You're definitely opening up the muscles and you're getting that sweat out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How often do you work on your flexibility? | ||
| Do you work on stretching? | ||
| I'm on my roller every day. | ||
| I believe in roller, lacrosse ball. | ||
| I just found this really cool. | ||
| Lacrosse balls are awesome. | ||
| Lacrosse ball, yeah. | ||
| Do we have one in here, Jamie? | ||
| No, those mobility wads from Rogue. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| I need to get one of those. | ||
| What are they called? | ||
| It's called a wad, I think. | ||
| The blue ones? | ||
| What does he call it? | ||
| Star? | ||
| Something star. | ||
| What the fuck does he call it? | ||
| I thought it was a wad. | ||
| The blue ones? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, wad is a workout of the day. | ||
| Supernova. | ||
| Supernova. | ||
| Yeah, WOD Supernova. | ||
| That's what he calls it. | ||
| Is it flat at the bottom? | ||
| No. | ||
| We got one out there. | ||
| I'll show it to you after the thing. | ||
| But it's about a little bit bigger than a softball. | ||
| But it's got all these little knobs on it. | ||
| It's hard as fuck. | ||
| There it is right there. | ||
| I love that goddamn thing. | ||
| That's the Supernova 2.0. | ||
| That seems like the smaller one, right? | ||
| He has two of them. | ||
| He has Kelly Starr. | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| So you have a small one and a larger one. | ||
| For whatever reason, I think I prefer the larger one. | ||
| My soft tissue guy down in Florida has one of those. | ||
| Those things are the shit, man. | ||
| I just got this thing called a so-rite. | ||
| Look up the so-rite. | ||
| P-S-O-R-I-T-E. You know what the so-as is? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Here. | ||
| I mean, that's always been one of my big things. | ||
| You literally lay on that thing, and if you know what it feels like to get your so-as worked on, you just kind of wobble and wiggle until it hits it, and then you can lift your legs. | ||
| This guy does all kinds of videos. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He's hitting the psoas, he hits the glutes, he hits the quads, he hits literally everything, and he's got the psoas mini. | ||
| So I've been playing on that the last couple months. | ||
| David Goggins was saying that the tightness in his psoas muscles was like crippling his running. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's literally the... | |
| Like, you ever see people with the wrestler back where their butt's out and it takes you a second to stand up? | ||
| That's all psoas, pulling everything down, being bent over, or throwing kicks. | ||
| I mean, for whatever reason, I've had horrible, horrible problems with my psoas. | ||
| And every single kind of chink in my armor has gone back to the psoas muscles. | ||
| The psoas, which is connected to the spine, down to the iliac crest, I believe. | ||
| And then there's something called the iliopsoas, where the iliacus and the psoas are connected. | ||
| Play that, Jamie? | ||
| This is a pec thing that he does with it too. | ||
| So it's not just the psoas muscle. | ||
| He uses it to loosen up your pecs. | ||
| Man, it's incredible how much that relieves. | ||
| Sometimes I get some hip tightness and I'll get that Supernova out, and I'll roll on that fucker all over my hips and my IT bands. | ||
| Or else it just compounds every single day and gets worse and worse and worse. | ||
| And also, too, just lengthening everything. | ||
| Your diaphragm, all of that just continues to get crunched and crunched and crunched and you can't breathe. | ||
| Oh, look at him. | ||
| He's having a good time over there. | ||
| Put it up against the wall. | ||
| He's got a... | ||
| I mean, he'll hit his whole body with it. | ||
| He actually has the exact same thing in a mini. | ||
| It's literally only three inches long. | ||
| This is feels underscore pso underscore good lol. | ||
| That's on Instagram. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what is your diet like? | ||
| Diet, man, embrace the monotony. | ||
| That's what mine is, man. | ||
| Chicken and broccoli. | ||
| I got mega fit meals. | ||
| And that's what I make my own meals throughout all training camp. | ||
| When it's chicken and broccoli, or it's beef and broccoli, or it's chicken. | ||
| Always broccoli. | ||
| I love broccoli. | ||
| I mean, I don't love broccoli, actually. | ||
| I do not love broccoli, but I love the fact that a couple weeks after I look in the mirror, I say, dang, man, I'm getting down. | ||
| Fans are starting to pop out. | ||
| And that's one of the biggest problems with people's fitness journeys. | ||
| They focus on the weight on the scale, or they focus. | ||
| They're not seeing the results that they want to see. | ||
| But you just got to... | ||
| The problem is the... | ||
| The work that you put in this week and next week, you're not going to see for two or three weeks, you know, that delayed gratification. | ||
| But, I mean, I get my meals, it's six ounces of chicken, a cup of broccoli, two or three times a day, or I go beef and broccoli or... | ||
| Now, do you supplement with essential fatty acids or flaxseed oil or fish oils in the morning? | ||
| And then, yeah, I mean, when it comes to supplementation, I do protein and aminos every single day. | ||
| That's been my biggest thing. | ||
| Do you do branch-changed aminos after exercise? | ||
| Yeah, diametized BCAAs, 50-50 blend. | ||
| They have the... | ||
| It's like a 2-1-1, two of the leucine, one of the valine, one of the isoleucine. | ||
| How long do you take that right after training? | ||
| I usually drink one blender bottle, one serving of it as I'm going into practice, and then I'll have another one going into the next practice, and I'll have a protein shake after. | ||
| Maybe that's why you're throwing up. | ||
| No, I don't throw up. | ||
| I try to get myself to throw up, but I don't. | ||
| And I drink the diametized ISO 100 protein, which is the cleanest and almost lightest protein. | ||
| What is it based on? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| A whey protein? | ||
| Whey protein, yeah. | ||
| But it's a whey protein isolate. | ||
| So something in the way it breaks down or I don't know exactly all the specifics of it. | ||
| But when it comes to bodybuilding, a lot of those bodybuilders use that because of the fact that it's isolate. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And what about multivitamins, things along those lines? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, we go, I do like an athletic nutrients, which is basically just like a An extended version of a multivitamin. | ||
| I have this daily detox one that I take that has fish oils and a little bit of taurine, a little bit of other stuff in it. | ||
| Multivitamin, turmeric, honestly. | ||
| I mean, with the amount of inflammation I have, I try to do a lot of turmeric throughout training camps. | ||
| I try to stay away from The Aleves and the Tylenols and that kind of stuff unless I'm in pain. | ||
| That's terrible for you. | ||
| I want to try to get turmeric and drinking juices and that kind of stuff. | ||
| Turmeric, ginger, shots, cayenne pepper. | ||
| And you do that every day? | ||
| Yeah, I try to. | ||
| It's one of those things where it's like every day, but every day loosely. | ||
| That stuff's phenomenal for inflammation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And what about, do you do cryo or do you get massages or sauna or anything like that? | ||
|
unidentified
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I do. | |
| I do soft. | ||
| I try to do a soft tissue massage or a sports massage, kind of rolfing ART almost every week. | ||
| I mean, like I was saying, I'm on my roller every single day before practice. | ||
| And that's when I really see, you know, like these times after a fight when I'm kind of Not working out as much or I'm not, you know, not everything is on because you can't be on all the time. | ||
| You know, everybody acts like they're on 365 or 365 days a year, but they're really not. | ||
| You know, after a fight, I kind of go less robot mode, you know, break my diet a little bit, enjoy staying up late, enjoy just doing whatever. | ||
| And then... | ||
| That's when I really realize, holy cow, I've been on my roller in four days, and that's why my back is hunched over and stuff. | ||
| Right, you just get too busy, and you just don't have the time to get it in there. | ||
| So I'm hitting my roller, and then I like to get a massage every single week. | ||
| Chiropractic, often. | ||
| Yeah, I saw something on Russian wrestlers where they were getting massage every day after training. | ||
| And I was like, wow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, I do the roller every day, so I imagine some sort of soft tissue work could be very... | ||
| I mean, man, we beat the crap out of our bodies, you know? | ||
| It's nothing like it. | ||
| I mean, other than football, I guess, in terms of the amount of abuse your body takes. | ||
| I mean, you're basically in a sport where your desire is to break someone's body. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And just the little things, man. | ||
| I was sparring with Nick Lentz two training camps ago. | ||
| And I threw a leg kick as he lifted his opposite leg up and literally just dead-legged me. | ||
| Like, Charlie horsed me with his knee. | ||
| It wasn't even supposed to happen. | ||
| He didn't mean to do it. | ||
| I didn't... | ||
| I was trying to throw the leg kick. | ||
| And I got the worst deep muscle, like, bone contusion in the middle of my, like... | ||
| Where your quads meet, right between the muscles. | ||
| And I could not walk. | ||
| I fell right to the ground. | ||
| Practice was over. | ||
| This was like three weeks before the fight, and I had to go see my guy CK in Florida, and he just had to work the heck out of it, man. | ||
| And I think that's one of the biggest things. | ||
| And I just talked to one of the guys at Mark Pro about, when we talk about injuries, we used to think rice, you know, rest, ice, compression, elevation, and that kind of stuff is, there's some conflicting kind of knowledge on all that kind of stuff, whereas instead of resting it, get in there right away and start moving it and mobilizing it with certain things. | ||
| Obviously, you've got a broken leg and you need to get it set and get it rested, but... | ||
| Do you do cryotherapy at all? | ||
| I don't. | ||
| I mean, I've done it a couple times. | ||
| I've done that a couple times. | ||
| I haven't done ice baths. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| I mean, a lot of times it's just, you almost got to pick and choose. | ||
| There's only so many hours in the day, too, you know? | ||
| So it's like, you know, you're waking up and you've got only so much time before you go to practice. | ||
| And then you only have so much time to recover before the next practice. | ||
| And it's one of those things where I'm always getting a massage. | ||
| I'm always working on, you know, maybe I'm Doing massage and chiropractic during one camp, you know, it's almost like you got to pick and choose your battles. | ||
| If you have an awesome man warehouse like this where everything's in one spot, I would do it all every day. | ||
| But if you're down in Florida and this is, you know, cryo is 45 minutes away and your massage is 20 minutes the other direction and you're fighting Florida traffic, you really got to pick and choose your Your recovery methods, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now, your gym in Nashville, this is your gym, and I was following you on social media where you're putting up pictures, you're putting everything together. | ||
| How satisfying has that been? | ||
| It's awesome, man. | ||
| I think the It's satisfying now that it's open. | ||
| I mean, obviously there's a lot of work that goes involved. | ||
| Tell people how they can find out about it. | ||
| Where can you go? | ||
| We're at trainingcampnashville.com and follow us on Instagram at trainingcampnashville. | ||
| Now that we're open, I mean, my big thing is, you know, I'm very active on social media. | ||
| We want to start doing a ton of videos, a ton of kind of cool, similar workouts like I do and pump out a bunch of information out there. | ||
| I mean, my My biggest thing is I wouldn't be where I am today without surrounding myself with great people, great coaches, and be important, too. | ||
| And I just wanted to... | ||
| I had this vision 17 years ago. | ||
| And I was like... | ||
| I told my dad, I said, Dad, I want to open up a gym. | ||
| And he said, Well, if you're going to open up a gym, I'm going to build it with my bare hands. | ||
| And my dad now just finished my gym with his bare hands. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| So, you know... | ||
| That's fucking cool. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| I mean, every screw, every nail in that place was put in by my father. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So it's cool. | ||
| And it was when I was 15 years old or whatever, very similar to my wife's vision of adopting a child. | ||
| And that came to fruition same exact year. | ||
| A lot of changes. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of changes. | ||
| But I mean, it's cool. | ||
| I wanted four walls and a roof where people can walk in and say, They're looking for a change or they're looking to, whether it's get stronger, get faster, lose that weight that they finally have been putting off. | ||
| I wanted a place where people can say, because of that guy or those people or that coach, I was able to enrich my life. | ||
| I was able to become a better person. | ||
| I was able to increase my self-confidence or just enrich life. | ||
| Classes for like just general fitness classes for martial arts beginners classes Do you have like the full range and then also professional? | ||
| Yeah, so I mean we we have a lot of a lot of stuff going on I I've almost been fighting a decade now. | ||
| I've been Started out in Missouri went to the West Coast now I'm training on the East Coast and I've been to Canada been to numerous training camps in between and And the gym is called training camp. | ||
| And the reason is because my life always revolves around training camp, you know? | ||
| And there's a difference between, like we just talked about, in training camp and out of training camp. | ||
| How'd you settle in Nashville? | ||
| My wife and I just love the city. | ||
| Fucking great city, isn't it? | ||
| Great city, yeah. | ||
| We're both from Missouri, so it's closer to home where we grew up. | ||
| We were living in San Diego together and wanted to just move back closer to the Midwest. | ||
| We love the city. | ||
| We have a bunch of friends in the music industry, so we, you know, Had some friends there already and visited and went to a couple award shows and said, man, this place is cool. | ||
| I was just there a couple weeks ago, like four or five weeks ago, whatever it was. | ||
| I love it there, man. | ||
| It's a cool city. | ||
| It's an amazing city. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| From top to bottom, too. | ||
| And we met so many people, and you kind of prod and ask questions, and they just said, man, it's a great place to raise a family. | ||
| It's a great school system. | ||
| The weather is better than Missouri, but it's... | ||
| You know, you get all four seasons. | ||
| It's a great place to raise a family. | ||
| And that's kind of what we knew. | ||
| We were about to start a family, so we wanted to do that. | ||
| And love the city. | ||
| And I saw an untapped MMA market there, too. | ||
| You know, I mean, there was a couple of MMA gyms there, but there was no legitimate pro fighters that were there. | ||
| I mean, Luke Sanders is from there in the UFC. He went out to California. | ||
| Dustin Ortiz was there. | ||
| Both of those guys were born and raised there. | ||
| They both went other places. | ||
| I said, you know what? | ||
| I want to go to Nashville, and I'm going to make it the premier place. | ||
| My gym is going to be the premier place to do mixed martial arts training in Nashville, and we're going to put Nashville on the map. | ||
| Now, you're going to have wrestling classes, kickboxing classes, the whole... | ||
| All of it. | ||
| So back to that, we have a lot of stuff going on. | ||
| We have 3,000 square foot of just fitness area where it's rolled rubber, flooring, turf, plate-loaded machines, squat racks, dumbbells, group fitness area. | ||
| Right next to that, we have 3,000 square foot of mat space where we're going to have a youth wrestling club that has a half wall around it. | ||
| We started a youth wrestling club this week, coupled with another 3,000 square foot of mats. | ||
| 1,500 there, 1,500 of the Fuji Tatami mats for boxing, kickboxing, BJJ, MMA, all that kind of stuff. | ||
| And then that 900 square foot yoga studio, plus... | ||
| We have our recovery area that we have a guy named Scott Dunnaway at ChiroStrengths. | ||
| He's a chiropractor, ART, and corrective exercise guy. | ||
| Plus, we're trying to bring in another massage therapist that's going to be there three days a week. | ||
| And then I'm also going to talk to a cryo guy as well who has an extra tank that I'm going to try to set something up with, I think. | ||
| That's awesome, man. | ||
| So then when everything's under one roof, then we're like... | ||
| Hey, Joe, I've been doing cryo, man. | ||
| Because I wasn't 45 minutes away, you know? | ||
| Yeah, well, that is the thing, right? | ||
| It's time management when you're training how many times a day when you're in camp? | ||
| Twice, usually. | ||
| But then there's always something, too. | ||
| Media obligations. | ||
| Media obligations. | ||
| Even with your nutrition stuff, it's like, oh, man, I've got to go Got to go make a Whole Foods run to get my almond milk and my avocados because I make my own breakfast but the rest of my stuff is in MegaFit Meals containers. | ||
| So there's always a grocery store to go to or there's always a media obligation or there's always something and it's all time management. | ||
| It was always interesting when I heard people like, yeah, I train 10 hours a day and I'm like... | ||
| Really? | ||
| How do you train 10 hours a day without your body falling apart, you know? | ||
| Yeah, people exaggerate a little bit. | ||
| And I'm like, I train two hours in the morning, balls to the wall, and I train two hours in that, and at night, balls to the wall. | ||
| And then in between. | ||
| Then I'm like, okay, pass out, wake up, do it all over again, Groundhog's Day, embrace the monotony, chicken, broccoli, eggs, avocado, let's do it for eight weeks, and... | ||
| Make weight. | ||
| Well, listen, Michael, I'm glad we finally got a chance to get together and have this conversation and let people know what you're all about, man. | ||
| And I'm a big fan and I really appreciate you coming in here and I hope one day I can commentate one of your fights and it won't be in Bellator. | ||
| That would be great, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, brother. | |
| I really, really appreciate it, man. | ||
| Thank you. |
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