Dec. 7, 2010 - The Joe Rogan Experience
01:49:47
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| My buddy from Australia gave me those and that head. | ||
| It's an Asian water buffalo. | ||
| It's an invasive species. | ||
| Are we live? | ||
| Oh, it worked. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, the UFC Performance Institute boys. | ||
| Hey, what's up? | ||
| Duncan, Forrest Griffin. | ||
| Hey, Forrest Griffin. | ||
| Good to see you. | ||
| We've already talked over each other, so we've already blown it. | ||
| No, we've got it. | ||
| We've got it nailed. | ||
| Well, I'm really glad you guys are here because I was blown away when I went to visit the, you know, you hear the Performance Institute and you go, well, what is this going to be like? | ||
| You go there like, oh my god, they thought of everything. | ||
| It's like the ultimate state-of-the-art facility for training, for recovery, for nutrition. | ||
| It's fucking amazing. | ||
| I mean, I was so happy. | ||
| We're posting a link to that shit right there. | ||
| Say it! | ||
| Dude, I mean, it's amazing. | ||
| When we went on a tour and checked that place out, I think it was Della Gratze was with me? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| We were like, holy shit! | ||
| Can you imagine? | ||
| You have access to this fucking place? | ||
| You guys have really created something special. | ||
| It's very interesting. | ||
| I don't know much about other sports, but I know this never really existed in combat sports before. | ||
| Something like this. | ||
| You guys have athletes from all sorts of different walks of life come through there. | ||
| When I was there, there were many, many top-level fighters that were training out of there. | ||
| It's really, really interesting. | ||
| Yeah, cool. | ||
| Well, we appreciate the kind words, obviously. | ||
| I mean, ultimately, yeah, the vision of the UFC was to build a performance institute that was truly a world-class high-performance center that had everything that fighters would need. | ||
| But not only are we trying to align ourselves as the leaders in mixed martial arts, but certainly leaders in human high performance. | ||
| Yeah, Duncan, too. | ||
| Tell people what you do there. | ||
| My role is the Vice President of Performance. | ||
| I essentially direct the philosophy of how we're going to interact with the fighters, how we're going to support the fighters, and obviously manage our world-class staff that are working within the performance facility. | ||
| And Clint, you came from a background in amateur wrestling. | ||
| Tell everybody what your job is over there. | ||
| I'm the director of performance nutrition. | ||
| Anything related to feeding of athletes is essentially managed by myself and our ever-expanding team. | ||
| So it can be as broad as working with athletes for their general training plan, integrating within the other performance services, as well as feeding athletes on the ground, integrating within our kitchen at the Performance Institute, supporting athletes as they prepare for fight week, weight descents, etc., and then supporting athletes on fight week and preparing even at the last moment of fight day to fuel up and to be really well fueled for their performance. | ||
| My background is, like you said, in amateur wrestling. | ||
| I wrestled and coached at Cornell University. | ||
| Was on the U.S. national team with a number of actually current fighters right now. | ||
| So Daniel Cormier and a number of other athletes, Chris Weidman and some others. | ||
| And I used to train together. | ||
| And then I went back to school and got all my credentialing to be a registered dietitian. | ||
| And so that's kind of led me through developing a program at Cornell to the UFC with a pretty unique combination of the nutrition, the dietetics, and then obviously the experience in combat sports and weight cutting. | ||
| Yeah, and in my opinion, the most grueling combat sport. | ||
| I mean, I think wrestling. | ||
| We talked about it on the last podcast. | ||
| It's a crazy way for a kid to learn hard work and to learn real competition and the actual physical struggle of getting through wrestling practice and strength and conditioning grills. | ||
| Most kids that are coming up in high school and college, they don't really work that hard in any other sport. | ||
| I mean, it's a crazy sport. | ||
| I remember in high school like walking into the wrestling room and it's a bunch of gross dudes like in a sweaty hot room and then it was like basketball was right next to it. | ||
| I walked next to the basketball there's like dudes in tent tops and some like cheerleaders. | ||
| I'm like I know what I'm doing. | ||
| I'm not idiots. | ||
| Little did I know. | ||
| Little did you know. | ||
| In my opinion still, I think it's the most important skill because you get to dictate where the fight takes place. | ||
| There's no one skill that really overpowers all except for the ability to hold the guy down. | ||
| The ability to hold someone down and control them on the ground, it's so critical. | ||
| And everything else you can learn from that. | ||
| Submissions, ground and pound. | ||
| But the difference in an elite wrestler like yourself and a person who doesn't have that skill, it's so hard to bridge that gap It's hard to learn later in life. | ||
| GSP is one of the few people that's just like, I'll just take this up and be amazing at it, because I'm GSP, and then I'll become a gymnast. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| I think that's the thing with him, though. | ||
| He had such physical abilities. | ||
| We were talking about this almost on the last podcast as well, that he used to do that karate blitz. | ||
| So he was so used to that lunging in stuff that he sort of incorporated that with a blast double. | ||
| And he's so physically strong and such a smart dude and so good at learning things that he just figured out the essential techniques that he needed to master and just got better and better at them. | ||
| Way back in the day, obviously, UFC 1 was kind of a discipline versus discipline kind of grudge match, and having been a lifelong wrestler, that's when I started tuning in, actually, and taking pride in all the wrestlers, taking names, and growing within the sport, and obviously with the evolution of the sport. | ||
| It's a different dynamic, and obviously... | ||
| Each athlete coming from their own discipline is really fun for us to work with as practitioners, having their own kind of sport culture. | ||
| But wrestling is obviously a core component to what each athlete's doing. | ||
| And when I'm working with athletes and talking through their weekly training plan and how to feed and fuel for each of these types of training sessions and hearing them bitch about how hard those wrestling practices are... | ||
| I always get a little bit of pride there. | ||
| Like, yes, it is hard. | ||
| And imagine doing it for eight months straight for a college wrestling season and grind that out. | ||
| But it's definitely been fun for me to watch wrestling as a component of MMA grow and be able to contribute to the sport on a few different levels. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I think the way I've always looked at it is pressure makes diamonds. | ||
| You know, there's no other way. | ||
| Those hard-nosed dudes, they come out of those environments. | ||
| If you think about guys with crazy determination and mental fortitude, there's a giant chunk of those you could attribute to wrestlers. | ||
| There's a lot of them in kickboxing and everything else as well, but it's such a unique sport in terms of hardening your mental toughness. | ||
| For sure. | ||
|
unidentified
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I wouldn't do it. | |
| I mean, at the Performance Institute, we always talk about mixed martial arts as the decathlon of combat sports. | ||
| And I think, you know, our philosophy is to try and understand all the respective components that makes a world-class MMA fighter. | ||
| I think, you know, if you're in the UFC, you've got some certain X factors that allow you to be world-class, and, you know, wrestling is a huge component of that. | ||
| But what we try to do is understand limitations as well. | ||
| Because in a decathlon, you're only ever as good as your weakest event, right? | ||
| So if you're a striker, if you're a grappler, or if you're a wrestler, we're trying to support each of those to understand how we can elevate the whole thing. | ||
| Now, how much input do you put into fighters, if any, into how they incorporate their skills and how they combine their skills together? | ||
| Do you guys offer coaching on technique and approaches? | ||
| Yeah, so break down the philosophy. | ||
| We don't do sports-specific coaching, so physical therapy, sports nutrition, strength and conditioning, sports science, and then Duncan oversees all those to make sure that they work. | ||
| All right, so our philosophy, anything that doesn't make you better in the octagon is pretty pointless. | ||
| So what I do is I'll just go over what your training schedule looks like with you, and then, you know, Where do we feed accordingly for this practice? | ||
| And then Roman, our sports scientist, when can you be recovered enough for this practice? | ||
| And that's the philosophy. | ||
| So it's not specific. | ||
| If you think about it, if you guys are fighting and the Performance Institute is working with both of you, we make you as big, strong, healthy, have the easiest time making weight, go into your fight as fueled as you can. | ||
| But if I start saying, hey, you know what? | ||
| He's pretty susceptible to leg kicks. | ||
| Then it becomes, you know, now we can't support every athlete. | ||
| So when you talk to people, it's just like, here's how to get the most out of your practices, right? | ||
| Here's the way to lay this out. | ||
| Just your training blocks. | ||
| I don't think a lot of people understand basic training periodization leading up to a fight. | ||
| And then, that's the other problem with the UFC. You don't always have 8 weeks, 10 weeks, 12 weeks. | ||
| Sometimes you've got 4 weeks, and it's like, alright, well, where's your weight? | ||
| Where are you at? | ||
| Where's your skill? | ||
| Where's your conditioning? | ||
| How can we put those things together in time to get you ready on, you know... | ||
| But never specific, like, instruction on how to deal with a certain fighter. | ||
| No, never, never. | ||
| That's... | ||
| It's almost like... | ||
| For a young fighter to have the access, first of all, just the access to the physical facility, just all the different modalities you guys have, and the strength and conditioning stuff, and the fact that you can... | ||
| One of the most impressive things was the camera setup around the octagon, so that you could film sparring sequences and technique sequences, and the fighter, you can back them up and rewind them and watch it, and you can see how you drop your leg here, see how your chin is up in the air, and all these different... | ||
| Different little factors. | ||
| Well, you think about the philosophy, right? | ||
| You have to get close to game speed once or twice a week. | ||
| So for 15, 25 minutes, you're going to risk injury. | ||
| You're going to take physical damage that you're not getting paid for. | ||
| Make the most out of it, right? | ||
| Like, review it. | ||
| Treat it like a fight. | ||
| Think about our athletes. | ||
| They fight two to four times a year. | ||
| So that's a very limited amount of actual footage they have. | ||
| But if you start recording your sparring sessions and treating them like it, Like a fight. | ||
| Like, oh shit, I did this wrong, I did that wrong. | ||
| Then you're going to end up with more like 80, 90, which is, you know, baseball, basketball, even football. | ||
| You've got 20 plus games to, you know, review. | ||
| Yeah, and I think it's really important for young fighters also to see themselves doing certain techniques. | ||
| Like, they might not notice. | ||
| They might think they look better than they do. | ||
| Like, it's good. | ||
| My coach is full of shit, man. | ||
| And then you, ah, the film, don't lie. | ||
| And you're like, yeah, okay, I see what I'm doing wrong there. | ||
| It's hard sometimes to mimic without actually seeing yourself. | ||
| Now, you guys, you've been Forrest Griffin, former UFC. No one can ever take that from you, sir. | ||
| How's that feel? | ||
| It's good, yeah. | ||
| Sure, yeah. | ||
| I've moved on. | ||
| I've moved on. | ||
| I'm over it. | ||
| And now I'm VP of Athlete Development at the Performance Institute, so it's much more important. | ||
| But you're still Forrest Griffin. | ||
| There's a lot of champions. | ||
| There's only one VP of Athlete Development. | ||
| We're still trying to find that job description to figure out what it actually does. | ||
| I change it daily. | ||
| Don't worry about it. | ||
| You've been involved from the beginning of this, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So it was going on about two weeks in. | ||
| I heard this was happening and I was like, oh, hey guys, I work for you. | ||
| I'm doing community outreach right now, but I've been trying to figure out the best way to train for mixed martial arts for the last 18 years. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe give me a shot at it. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| Now, when you say that, that you're trying to figure out the best way, is there a best way? | ||
| Yes, for everybody, right? | ||
| And unfortunately, it's those bullshit answers. | ||
| Everybody's different, man. | ||
| Everybody's got a different ability to work, you know, like Usman might have X amount, you know, before he physically breaks down. | ||
| Because look at him, he's a fucking Ferrari, right? | ||
| He needs more high-end work or whatever. | ||
| Everybody's a little physically different. | ||
| The key is to get some subjective feedback to know, hey, all right, I'm in the red. | ||
| I'm good. | ||
| I'm not. | ||
| Do you guys do it on heart rate variability? | ||
| When you determine whether or not someone's recovered enough to- Tell them about Omega Wave. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there's plenty of different ways to do it. | ||
| At the most basic level, it's just speaking to a guy and getting subjective feedback, right? | ||
| How you're feeling is one of the best questions that we can ask an athlete. | ||
| But, yeah, I mean, we're blessed and we're privileged with pretty high resource at the UFC Performance Institute, so we have some pretty involved technologies. | ||
| One of the ones that we use is a system called OmegaWave. | ||
| That gives us real insight and removes the subjectivity where it can get objective understanding around physiology, particularly looking at the DC potential of the brain. | ||
| DC? What is that? | ||
| The DC potential of the brain is an assessment of the autonomic nervous system. | ||
| So, if you look at the parasympathetic and sympathetic balance of your body, we're talking science now, I apologize. | ||
| Ultimately, that's one of the things that's really impacted. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Jamie pulled something up on the screen here. | ||
| You can see the windows of trainability. | ||
| This is fascinating. | ||
| And this Omega Wave, is it something you wear? | ||
| Yeah, so ultimately it's a three to five minute assessment. | ||
| You wear something that resembles a heart rate strap, lying at rest. | ||
| We also have electrodes on the third eye of your brain, essentially. | ||
| So we're picking up cardiovascular stress, and we're picking up the autonomic nervous system, and we're looking at things like heart rate variability, which you've already mentioned. | ||
| But so, this isn't for everybody. | ||
| Some people love it, and they say, hey man, this is, you know, again, these are just tools, right? | ||
| So different tools for different people. | ||
| Right, yeah, for sure. | ||
| It's a first thing in the morning measurement, too, to understand how well you recovered from the day before and those windows of trainability for the next day, that coming day. | ||
| I think it all comes back to what Forrest says. | ||
| Ultimately, what we're trying to do is understand individual responses, right? | ||
| At the end of the day, everyone's on a pathway of performance mastery to be a world champion. | ||
| And people respond to the workloads, the intensities, the volumes in very different ways. | ||
| If we take a basketball team and put them all through the same workout, you've got 15 different guys that are responding in very different ways to the same workout. | ||
| So we're privileged in that we work with an individual sport and that's our mantra is that we're looking at every single athlete as an individual and we're building our programming strategies and our information in an individual way. | ||
| So you guys have been doing this now for how many years? | ||
| We're coming up on two years on May 22nd is our second anniversary. | ||
| And do you have like a log of all the different cases you worked with so you can kind of review like what methods were more effective than others and you're constantly trying to improve this protocol or... | ||
| How do you guys write it all out? | ||
| I mean, we've obviously been involved with numerous fight camps, but we're also working with fighters that are not in camp. | ||
| Last year, we presented this journal, our first journal, which is an overview, a cross-section of all the data that we accrued in our first 12 months, and we continue to aggregate that data. | ||
| Now one of the privileges that we have at the Institute is we get the opportunity to work with just under 600 fighters on our roster, so we can create real clear cross-sectional awareness of what different weight classes look like, what the challenges are to a fighter, and then the fighters can compare and contrast themselves against their immediate peers in their weight class. | ||
| So that's one of the most powerful benchmarking tools you can create. | ||
| This Omega Wave technology, can people buy that? | ||
| Oh yeah, it's just a commercial product off the shelf. | ||
| And it looked like it worked off an app? | ||
| Like you put an app on your phone? | ||
| Yep, yep. | ||
| It does everything. | ||
| Seems like it. | ||
| Seems like that's the future. | ||
| But again, we use many different types of technologies, you know? | ||
| Things like Force Plus. | ||
| Plates can look at neuromuscular responses. | ||
| Some of our nutrition variables will change across time. | ||
| So it's not just one tool that has given us all the answers. | ||
| The Windows of Trainability concept is something that really helps us on a day-to-day basis to understand can you go into a strength or power type session today and really maximize the opportunity to create the adaptations. | ||
| Another day, it might be an endurance emphasis. | ||
| So what it allows us to do is just give kind of kudos and credence to the athlete to understand where's the best approach and where you're going to optimize your responses. | ||
| Every other sport is easier to train for than MMA. If you think about it, I was a defensive end in high school. | ||
| Every defensive end needs the same physical abilities. | ||
| You think about the combine, the NFL combine, for instance. | ||
| They've figured out over a million years what they want to test for. | ||
| And the guys, they run the same, they jump the same per position. | ||
| So quarterbacks don't need to necessarily be that fast if they can throw. | ||
| But for everybody else, the numbers are kind of the same. | ||
| For our sport, and they've collected, I don't know, I don't know how many data points at this point, but it's a lot. | ||
| So they're anonymized, normalized, so you know what average looks like. | ||
| So you can give a guy like Anthony Smith, say, hey, look, man, and I bring him up because he's mentioned it before. | ||
| He's been outspoken about working with the PI. Hey, you know what? | ||
| Your force power measurements, they're pretty average for 205. You're not a weak guy. | ||
| You could think about going up a weight class. | ||
| So it's just objective information so the athletes and hopefully their coaches can make those choices. | ||
|
unidentified
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Do you think they would benefit from more weight classes? | |
| Oh, that's a great question. | ||
| So I thought, ah, 65, you know, look at the percentages. | ||
| And then, you know, I was talking to actually Dana and Sean, and I was like, well, this guy's going to go to 65. This guy's going to go to 65. Everybody's going to go. | ||
| So is it going to help? | ||
| I mean, there needs to be a percentage difference, but I don't know. | ||
| I think people would just say, well, shit, now I have to do an extra five pounds. | ||
| But again, so from a PI standpoint, That's not really a decision we have to make. | ||
| What we need to do is collect as much data as we can on that. | ||
| For individual fighters. | ||
| And then also to provide that information to third-party commissions. | ||
| There's just so many gaps. | ||
| I'm so PR these days. | ||
| I'm so good. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| I know what you're doing. | ||
| When you go from 85 to 205, that's 20 pounds. | ||
| That is an enormous jump. | ||
| So how do you decide when a guy's a tweener? | ||
| How do you look at a guy who maybe weighs 215 and you go, damn, dude. | ||
| The numbers. | ||
| What's your power? | ||
| What's your speed? | ||
| Are you a good athlete for that weight class? | ||
| Maybe not. | ||
| What's your arm length? | ||
| How does that... | ||
| You know, how does your arm length and the way you fight, right? | ||
| So, you know, if you're a Tyson-esque guy, you can have short arms and you wrestle a guy like a Gray Maynard style, right? | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| You don't need super long arms, but, you know, if you're not a wrestler, you don't have the head movement, maybe you do. | ||
| Anyway. | ||
| We've actually had a number of athletes, I would say over the last year, come to us specifically, and sometimes it's matchmakers who are saying, hey, this guy wants to go down, come take a look, meet with the PI staff, see what you guys think. | ||
| All those things that Forrest said are really valid. | ||
| We do have a lot of battery of tests, both in the nutrition space around body composition, around metabolic health. | ||
| Function, oftentimes bad weight cuts will diminish and depress the metabolic rate, the resting metabolic rate, as well as it progresses over time through training. | ||
| And then, like we said, some of the energy systems, a lot of the strength and power diagnostics. | ||
| How does an athlete compare to the norms and the standards that are set for that division? | ||
| So first thing that I look at is how does their body fit into a division? | ||
| Everybody's body is broken into three components if you think about it in terms of bone, muscle, and fat. | ||
| And if somebody's fat-free mass, it's everything except for their fat, is bigger than 99% of the athletes in that weight division, it's not going to be a good fit. | ||
| So a big thing is benchmarking and understanding how somebody's body fits into their division compared to others. | ||
| So that's kind of step one. | ||
| Then we look through all these other different metrics to see how they compare. | ||
| And then we have a conversation. | ||
| So my job is never, especially working with independent contractors, they can use us or they cannot. | ||
| And we are a resource to consult and to have conversations with them about what makes sense on a scientific level. | ||
| Can I ask you how that works? | ||
| Say if someone like Henry Cejudo wants to do his camp at the UFC Performance Institute, how would they do? | ||
| Schedule it with you guys? | ||
| Tell you, I'm going to be here for eight weeks. | ||
| We've set up camp in Vegas. | ||
| We'd like to do it at the gym. | ||
| So it happens all the time, whether it's a week or eight weeks. | ||
| That filters into every single member of our team, especially as we're doing more and more on the ground at fight events. | ||
| But that gets filtered up to Duncan, and then Duncan handles the coordination of that. | ||
| He could literally be there with, say, if he was going to fight Marlon Marais, they literally could be in the Performance Institute at the same time. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| And that happens. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| We're a split-level facility. | ||
| They're never in the same zone at the same time, though. | ||
| So you schedule them differently. | ||
| The guy wouldn't be doing MMA in the octagon. | ||
| You schedule them first come, first serve. | ||
| Do you ever anticipate a problem with guys that are supposed to be fighting each other, like what just happened with Masvidal recently, where an actual fistfight breaks out? | ||
| Man, you find most of these guys want to get paid to fight, not pay to fight. | ||
| When the cameras aren't on, they're not so... | ||
| That fight, yeah, that's true, right? | ||
| When the cameras aren't on. | ||
| The other thing is, when you're leading into a fight, my thought was you cannot let that person think they intimidated you. | ||
| And if that means you actually have to hit them, maybe it does, but the idea is that I can't let you think that you have a mental advantage. | ||
| Right. | ||
| In any other sport, no one would ever want to see that. | ||
| Like, you've got to stop that. | ||
| But in fighting, it's like, oh, they're just doing extra fighting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| I was like, you guys are getting paid! | ||
| Yeah, like if it was a basketball player, sucker punches another basketball player in the face at some sort of a press conference like that, like Masvidal did. | ||
| I mean, you'd be like, what? | ||
| No way! | ||
| But in fighting, like, oh, they did extra fighting. | ||
|
unidentified
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But you don't get extra money or extra credit for it. | |
| But you kind of do, let's be honest. | ||
| Masvidal, for that performance, was going to get extra money. | ||
| He was a stunning knockout of Darren Till, who was one of the top guys in the welterweight division. | ||
| The way he KO'd him was crazy. | ||
| So he got it from that, and then to tee off on Leon Edwards after the fight like that, it's like another one. | ||
| Part of that is very good for him, unfortunately. | ||
| I don't want him to do that. | ||
| I don't want to encourage, but if you want to think about a fighter's Building their brand. | ||
| He's an, I don't give a fuck, I'll punch you in the face guy. | ||
| And like, well, a lot of people are. | ||
| No, he's a real, I don't give a fuck, I'll punch you in your face guy. | ||
| They're real. | ||
| They really exist. | ||
| And he's a world-class fighter. | ||
| Like, that's sellable. | ||
| That's unfortunate. | ||
| I wish guys wouldn't ever fight at press conferences. | ||
| Like, Cormier and Jon Jones, I fucking hated that. | ||
| But tell me that didn't sell more tickets. | ||
| No doubt. | ||
| That sold a shitload more tickets. | ||
| How many times did they show Connor throwing that dolly? | ||
| How many times did they show that, even in the promos? | ||
| I hated when that happened. | ||
| It was a terrible thing that Connor did that. | ||
| Goddamn, that sold some tickets. | ||
| That's a fine line, right? | ||
| That's kind of a funny thing. | ||
| Way over the line! | ||
| People that weren't even involved got cut. | ||
| They got hit with glass. | ||
| Fights got canceled. | ||
| I don't mean that. | ||
| I mean using it. | ||
| Promoting it. | ||
| Saying, well, here's the thing that happened. | ||
| Do we just try to avoid it and hide it? | ||
| Or do we let people know that this is a real thing? | ||
| They call all people involved and go, look, this is a business. | ||
| We're here to get paid. | ||
| Okay, we're gonna run it. | ||
| We're gonna run it every 15 minutes. | ||
| We're gonna show that dolly smash! | ||
| Oh, and that's Will Harris' company? | ||
| Is that the gentleman? | ||
| What is it called? | ||
| Anatomy of a Fighter? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's his YouTube show that I often thought was a UFC show. | ||
| I didn't even know that he had his own show. | ||
| There's so many good guys right now that are putting out good content. | ||
| Will Harris. | ||
| And he came in here with Kamaru Usman. | ||
| Super nice guy. | ||
| But his footage, that was his footage. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh. | |
| Of that dolly smashing into the window. | ||
| So the thing you see over and over again, thank Will. | ||
| I think the embedded guys from the UFC were on the bus as well. | ||
| So they got the inside? | ||
| Nice. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| Will got the outside. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| So the Performance Institute's awesome. | ||
| Anyway, sorry about that. | ||
| Hey, listen, man. | ||
| This is how this show works. | ||
| It goes off the rails occasionally. | ||
| What you guys have set up, though, is kind of an unprecedented thing in the combat sports world. | ||
| There's never anything like this for boxing, where boxers can go. | ||
| It's closest to the Olympic model. | ||
| So we went around benchmarking, yada, yada, 60-plus facilities. | ||
| And you notice a lot of the people that we hired worked with international Olympic sports, and that's kind of our athlete model, right? | ||
| So Olympic athletes, they might go to Colorado Springs for two weeks or for four months or for a week and do like a skills camp or something. | ||
| We have the same model. | ||
| You come in three, four days and then go home with like a program, you know, a diet, strength conditioning program, PT program, your training load goals, et cetera. | ||
| So you'd leave with that, right? | ||
| And then maybe, you know, you don't want to move your life to Vegas. | ||
| You've got family, kids back home. | ||
| So you come out three days every other month, and they can actually monitor and tell you this is how your training is going. | ||
| It's just, again, just data on whether it's working or not working, as opposed to my old boxing coach, oh, you're hitting hard today, kid. | ||
| I don't know what you ate, but it's good. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's working for you. | |
| I was like, I ate cookies last night. | ||
| Should I just eat cookies every day and punch hard? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, the scientific approach of getting those little extra percentage points of improvement is really what it's all about. | ||
| And it could really be the difference. | ||
| And it's such a crazy sport because it's so wild and unpredictable. | ||
| And, I mean, you could speak to this better than anybody. | ||
| The results may vary. | ||
| It is a wild goddamn sport. | ||
| One of the best camps I ever had was Keith Jardine. | ||
| I was fucking amazing in the gym, though. | ||
| I was like, I am so good right now. | ||
| I've beaten everybody up. | ||
| This is amazing. | ||
| But, you know, it was a 14-week camp. | ||
| I started falling apart again. | ||
| There's no other sport with as many degrees of freedom as mixed martial arts. | ||
| Right. | ||
| In terms of execution? | ||
| Well, just in terms of stylistic background, weight classes. | ||
| You don't even know when Dana's going to give you a call to the next fight. | ||
| Let's look at Usain Bolt, right? | ||
| There's a reason why Usain Bolt is a 100-meter champion and he's not the 60-meter champion. | ||
| Alright? | ||
| Our guys, if you look at mixed martial arts, that is 6 to 36 seconds of high intensity work followed by 2 to 3 times as much low intensity work repeated throughout a 5 minute round. | ||
| 77% of fights are won in those high intensity efforts, right? | ||
| So that's where the fight is won and lost. | ||
| But you don't know if that 6 seconds is going to be the first 6 seconds of the fight or the last 6 seconds of the fight. | ||
| So Usain Bolt knows that he's going 100 metres. | ||
| Our guys don't know if they need to be the best starter or the best finisher. | ||
| So you've got to prepare for everything. | ||
| So all these degrees of freedom, these external variable things that come into mixed martial arts make it the most complex sport to figure out and build a structure and a development pathway against. | ||
| It's so interesting too that so many different fighters have a completely different approach. | ||
| Like you've got... | ||
| A low-volume, high-power approach, like maybe a Tyron Woodley. | ||
| And then you've got a guy like Nick Diaz, who just smothers guys. | ||
| He just stays on you and keeps punching you and talking shit to you, and he sees you starting to lose your breath, and he keeps coming after you, and he can push a pace because of his long-term cardiovascular condition. | ||
| And you can't tell him he's doing it wrong. | ||
| He's not. | ||
| Everybody's doing it a different way. | ||
| Sometimes your physiology is going to determine the way you fight. | ||
| Like the arm length, John Jones, and the leg and arm length. | ||
| I can't fight like that because I'm not going to be at the end of everybody's punch just out of reach. | ||
| I'm going to be getting hit by everybody if I start throwing those teeps. | ||
| And also, it allows him in training to get better. | ||
| He's always got this advantage. | ||
| He's constantly getting better. | ||
| And he's also the best I've ever seen at utilizing that reach. | ||
| He's very good at keeping his opponent exactly where he needs him. | ||
| And in his range, and when they close up, he's very good at being defensive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| I mean, that's what the best fighters do, right? | ||
| They take the fight where they want it to go. | ||
| But it's just so interesting to see that everyone does have a different approach that they make work with their body structure. | ||
| It's quite unique because we've looked at a lot of our physiological assessments, and when you take the data and you compare and contrast, for example, people with grappling and wrestling backgrounds versus striking backgrounds, you can take something like power and you can differentiate between those two. | ||
| So, alright, I want to get a competitive advantage as a striker. | ||
| I might need to improve my strength work because the wrestlers are already stronger than me. | ||
| We can look at the strength characteristics. | ||
| Our data shows that the guys that come from a wrestling background are far and above stronger than the strikers, which you would expect, right? | ||
| But if you look at things like, can you differentiate our top 15 in the world versus the rest of the roster in that weight class? | ||
| It takes away any comparison. | ||
| And at the end of the day, ultimately in a complex, chaos-based sport, skill is always going to be the best determinant of performance. | ||
| So we're not saying that the physiological variables aren't important to the sport of MMA, but it's really hard to tease out where you need to push your strategy and where you need to optimise your training. | ||
| Because in a homogeneous population of world-class fighters, it kind of gets absorbed and it becomes invisible where the differences are. | ||
| That's such an important point. | ||
| We usually are a little more specific per athlete. | ||
| You just told me what not to do. | ||
| What do I do, though? | ||
| And that's where the individualization, personalization for every single athlete comes in. | ||
| We find their strengths and some of their gaps where it might be the lowest point-scoring component of their decathlon of MMA. And if it's a deficiency that maybe hasn't been taken advantage of yet, but will, that's where we fill those gaps so that they can start to fill those holes and become more complete, more comprehensive. | ||
| That might be strength, power. | ||
| It might be energy system. | ||
| It may be, it could be anything. | ||
| It could be orthopedic. | ||
| I mean, we have We're trying to assess every component of preparation that can support or limit that athlete's performance in the cage. | ||
| In terms of how all those things work together, it's really vital that if somebody's working on their strength and power, they're not feeding their body in a way that's actually limiting their ability to perform the high-intensity training. | ||
| Because then that limits the adaptation that we're looking for as a response to that training. | ||
| And that's a really critical point where nutrition really is a foundation that supports the development of all the other adaptations that are required to become that complete mixed martial artist. | ||
| So as the strength and conditioning plan is being laid out, as the physical therapy plan, as the recovery plan, all of those are coming to fruition. | ||
| The nutrition, obviously, is really near and dear to what I'm doing, is really critical at supporting the adaptation so that we're not pulling the athlete in two different directions in terms of the adaptation. | ||
| Now, in terms of when you take fighters and athletes into your performance institute, have you guys ever worked with young, junior, amateur mixed martial artists, kids that are coming up? | ||
| Do you ever do stuff like that? | ||
| Show them, give them a peek at what it's like to see the world-class fighters? | ||
| Well, we don't at the Performance Institute in Las Vegas because we're very much aligned to supporting our current roster, and it's a facility and a philosophy that's been designed to support our current roster. | ||
| What we're doing in June of this year, however, is opening up a facility in Shanghai, China, which will have a completely different business model in terms of that will be very much a developmental program for guys that aren't currently in the UFC. So obviously we're trying to improve the talent standards in China and develop that market and break that new territory, but the mechanism to doing that is going to be very much through talent development in the Performance Institute. | ||
| So over there, we will have MMA coaches and grappling coaches and striking coaches. | ||
| We don't have that in Las Vegas because we're currently working with guys that are already on the roster. | ||
| Well, it's such a unique sport in the fact that even though it is one thing when you get into the UFC, the paths to get there are so widely different. | ||
| And you really don't know what the right way is. | ||
| Is the Krokop path the right way to do it? | ||
| Or is the Daniel Cormier path the right way to do it? | ||
| No one can say. | ||
| And different fighters will win on different nights with different styles. | ||
| It's one of the only sports. | ||
| Where your pathway in, you could say that if someone is an elite kickboxer or an elite grappler, that going in with that one major advantage in that one skill set could take you very, very far versus an overall game approach that some guys have where they're really good at everything. | ||
| Right, and the true specialist, if you look at the day, the true specialist, the GSPs of this world, still hasn't necessarily risen to the top in the sport of MMA. You still see guys that are stylistically, they have a stylistic emphasis, and that's their X Factor that keeps them at the top of the game. | ||
| Yeah, and then there's execution, which is creativity, and their ability to perform under pressure, their ability to maintain their cool during camp where they never overtrain, and they stay in a good space, they stay in a good headspace, and I've When you first asked about, you know, something I've seen that I love, training partners, right? | ||
| Bring your training partners to the UFC PI. And we've had, I don't know, six, seven, eight guys that came in as training partners and are now on the UFC roster. | ||
| So that's why I'm not an asshole to anyone. | ||
| That's beautiful. | ||
| Because you never know. | ||
| It's also, you get the chance to see these. | ||
| I mean, every guy has to start somewhere. | ||
| Every girl has to start somewhere. | ||
| You get a chance to see these people that maybe never get this invitation there, and they see the holy ground. | ||
| They're like, God damn, I'm at the UFC. Well, to your point, too, about the facility. | ||
| World-class facility. | ||
| The services, we would argue, are even better than the facility. | ||
| But training partners, coaches, those that are on the Contender Series, those that came through for the Ultimate Fighter, they have all been able to use and to access the facility in short periods. | ||
| Training partners can come and access the facility, eat on campus. | ||
| Strength train with the UFC athlete, use the facility upstairs, and train in the MMA space. | ||
| And when they get the chance, when they get the shot, then they tap right into services. | ||
| And it's an opportunity for us to, you know, essentially influence the community even before we're working with them directly, which is a really huge component of our philosophy and really what we're looking to accomplish. | ||
| I think it would be massively inspirational for the fighters too, the young guys. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, our philosophy is to accelerate the evolution of the sport of mixed martial arts. | ||
| That's in our mission statement, as you've seen. | ||
| When you walk through the door, it's right there on the wall, you know? | ||
| And to do that, we're trying to shift the barometer in terms of, not the professionalism of the sport, but the expectations of fighters within the sport. | ||
| You look at someone like Brown Ortega, and listen, what we're not trying to do is take the wild out of the stallion, right? | ||
| We're not trying to just push science at fighters. | ||
| At the end of the day, these guys are world-class fighters for a reason. | ||
| But you can train and shape the stallion and it still has the wild at heart, right? | ||
| So what we're trying to do is shift the barometer so there's an expectation of what a professional athlete should really expect. | ||
| Brian Ortega has worked out in his garage most of his garage. | ||
| Sorry, it's American, right? | ||
| LAUGHTER But in terms of what's the expectation that a professional fighter should expect, the Performance Institute demonstrates that not everyone can have access to it, obviously, but that's an aspiration and it's where people should understand in the sport of mixed martial arts the standard that as a professional fighter you can expect. | ||
| And it's so important, I think, that you put all these things under one roof like that and create this environment because it seems to be trickling off into other places. | ||
| The level of training and recovery and everything is so intense and so severe that people are starting to try to mimic certain aspects of that in their own gyms, in their own different places. | ||
| The problem is you can't do things in isolation, alright? | ||
| If you just say, I'm going to really hammer the recovery piece and forget about the nutrition piece, it's a large machine, right? | ||
| There's cogs and all the cogs need to work together. | ||
| And that's what we truly feel we can offer and we can deliver is this, not necessarily a multidisciplinary service, but an interdisciplinary service where we have multiple aspects coming together to fill the whole picture of an athlete's portfolio of needs. | ||
| And that's what we can offer through the Performance Institute. | ||
| The other thing we want to do is figure out what the best practices are and disseminate them. | ||
| Like, we don't want to just know a bunch of stuff so we can keep it. | ||
| Remember, we want every other gym, like, hey, here's what we've learned. | ||
| This is how we do our recovery. | ||
| Take of it, try it, see if you recover. | ||
| See if you want a laser bed. | ||
| Maybe you do, maybe you don't. | ||
| This is what we found success in, you know? | ||
| So you want to, you know, what's the point of learning something and then hiding it away? | ||
| But for a young person, Yeah, sorry. | ||
| And everything's about assessment. | ||
| So it's not one recovery modality. | ||
| It's not one nutrition modality. | ||
| It's not one strength and conditioning. | ||
| It's assessing so then we can build that personalized approach. | ||
| And so here are the modalities. | ||
| Here's the philosophy that we've developed to help optimize athletes' needs around what we're measuring. | ||
| And we're not winning fights. | ||
| That's obvious. | ||
| That comes with the X factors, that comes from the fighters, their passion and their commitment to their sport. | ||
| But what we're trying to do, back to your original question, I think, around this 1% is so hard to measure, but what we're able to do is to help them to do it more consistently and to do it longer into their career so that they can optimize, they can maximize their ability to train, to adapt, to perform, and give themselves the best chance to be successful on fight night. | ||
| Yeah, and there must be so many fighters that come from a discipline, whether it's judo or something along those lines, and then they start fighting in MMA, so they get a boxing coach, and they have a few guys working with them with leg kicks, but they don't have a nutrition guy, and they don't have a recovery guy, they don't have someone who understands deep tissue massage. | ||
| They've got to find that guy. | ||
| They've got to find someone to organize a diet for them. | ||
| They've got to figure out how to cut weight healthy, properly. | ||
| And these things are so difficult for fighters to put, especially if you don't live in a place that has something like an American top team or some gigantic institution. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there's fighters, even top fighters on our roster might potentially hire a nutritionist for a short period of time in the fight camp, you know, for an eight-week period. | ||
| This should be a 52-week fight camp. | ||
| We should be considering our development as fighters and as professional athletes 52 weeks of the year. | ||
| You trademarked that too. | ||
| 52-week fight camp. | ||
| That's what our philosophy is, as Clint has already talked about, in terms of plugging the holes and being able to offer the services that you need as a particular athlete. | ||
| So there's large gyms out there, American Top Team, AKA, they've got their own guys. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| Jackson, they've got their own people. | ||
| But there's plenty of people on the roster that have an MMA coach and a grappling coach, and that's it. | ||
| So the Performance Institute, we feel we can help and support those guys as well. | ||
| You can bridge the gaps. | ||
| And we're not trying to displace the programs where athletes already have resources, but I don't know of another MMA gym globally that has the capacity around assessment that we do. | ||
| So yeah, we have some really great practitioners, but Bo Sandoval, our strength coach, and his team cannot write programs for 570 athletes. | ||
| It's not possible. | ||
| But what we can do is assess those athletes, provide that feedback back to their strength coaches, and have conversations about how those coaches can use that data to support the development of that athlete. | ||
| And that goes across the board for all of our performance services. | ||
| Well, it's a pretty amazing resource because if you're a young fighter and all you have is access to the people around you, if you're fighting in the UFC, you get to have access instantaneously to this gigantic group of people. | ||
| Forrest, when you were coming up, you were a real pioneer. | ||
| That was not available to a guy like you. | ||
| No, I mean, I tell the story all the time, but so I was actually a little bit ahead of my time. | ||
| I had, you know, I had an actual strength coach that had letters behind his name. | ||
| Went to college to be a strength coach, not that was like an ex-bodybuilder. | ||
| I had, you know, a relatively good nutritionist who at least had a degree in chemical biology. | ||
| I had a good physical therapist, but I didn't really have, like, I was my coach. | ||
| You know, at the end of the day, I was the head of performance. | ||
| So I'd go do jujitsu and, you know, jujitsu coach wants you to go hard and then you go kickbox, but you're going to go light, but it's kickbox, so you don't. | ||
| And then, you know, and now, you know, nobody's the strength coach and nutritionist on different pages. | ||
| So I think just understanding that everything has to work together, which I didn't really understand. | ||
| Well, what I'm saying is that you kind of had to pave a path. | ||
| Because when a guy like you was doing all that stuff with a real legitimate strength and conditioning coach, a real legitimate nutritionist, how many other people were doing that at your time? | ||
| Not that many, but I got to be around good people like Randy Couture, Chuck Liddell. | ||
| Those were kind of guys I got to hang out with and say, well, he does this, he does that. | ||
| Chuck actually wasn't into that much of this stuff, but Randy was. | ||
| I know what I'm doing, K. Alright. | ||
| Yes, sir? | ||
| Yeah, he just existed on pure savagery. | ||
| When you step back and look at your career, how amazing is it to be able to step off from there and Do something like you're doing now for the UFC Performance Institute, which is very meaningful for young fighters. | ||
| I mean, you really do get a chance to give back with your experience and your understanding of the right way and the wrong way, the mistakes that you've made. | ||
| I mean, it's huge. | ||
| I mean, that's the whole genesis kind of from my involvement in the PI. Like, look, here's the 10,000 mistakes I made. | ||
| You're going to make mistakes, too, but these are the ones you don't need to make, you know? | ||
| Again, the sport's changed, man. | ||
| It's 25 years old. | ||
| Every other sport so evolved, been around so long, our sport changes all the time. | ||
| I forget who was talking about it, but, you know, even the guys fighting 10 years ago probably couldn't compete with the guys fighting today, you know? | ||
| I mean, what I would say as well is not only for the fighters, Forrest is a huge resource for us. | ||
| The best piece of technology we have is the door handle that leads from my office to Forrest's office, right? | ||
| Because ultimately, he's a massive resource for us that are not necessarily coming from an MMA background and are trying to support the MMA community to bounce ideas off, to essentially beta test things from a thought process perspective. | ||
| And he's a huge part of the Performance Institute philosophy because we can use and call upon his expertise. | ||
| Here's another funny thing. | ||
| When we were putting together the team for the PI, I kind of shied away from people already doing MMA. I wanted combat sports. | ||
| Everybody that's done it has done judo, boxing on an Olympic level. | ||
| They've done combat sports, but I wanted a fresh set of eyes coming from a different... | ||
| Because I know really good MMA strength coaches. | ||
| I know pretty good MMA... You know good... | ||
| Get that fresh set of eyes. | ||
| You know, nutrition actually was a little different because the rest of the world does not understand a weight cut for an MMA fight. | ||
| It's not like, you know, you go to Exos, you go to any high-level facility, and you say, I'm going to lose 8% of my body weight and then compete on Saturday. | ||
| They're like, no, don't. | ||
| Just fight in the high-weight class. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, that actually isn't going to work out for me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They just won't comprehend it. | ||
| They're like, no, no, you'll perform better. | ||
| Like, no, no. | ||
| Well, some fighters do. | ||
| That's another thing about having a limited amount of weight classes. | ||
| When you jump up, you have to make a drastic change. | ||
| He's crazy, man. | ||
| Diego Sanchez. | ||
| He's like 174 and 175 on fight day. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fighting guys 190. Yeah, but with a lot of energy. | ||
| What's interesting is at his age, I think it's probably a good move. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's missed no meals. | |
| Yeah, I think it's probably a good move, though, at his age. | ||
| You know, I mean, he's back from UFC Ultimate Fighter 1. Dude, insane. | ||
| We knew, though, like on the show, that he was the one that would go forever. | ||
| We knew in the house that, I don't know, he's just crazy. | ||
| He's got so much enthusiasm, still. | ||
| Yeah, he's not going to stop. | ||
| I mean, when he beat Mickey Gall that way, I was incredibly impressed. | ||
| When I'm like, this kid might test him. | ||
| He didn't test him at all. | ||
| I mean, it was amazing. | ||
| It was a prime Diego Sanchez performance 15 years into the game. | ||
| I mean, that's just into the UFC. He had amateur fights, or professional fights rather, before the UFC. He's been in the UFC for 15 years, man. | ||
| Or at least 14, right? | ||
| 2004? | ||
| 2005 was season one. | ||
| Yeah, we shot it 2004, 2005, so yeah. | ||
| Somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 years. | ||
| Which is amazing that he's so enthusiastic about it still. | ||
| Yeah, they'll give him a vase for his top of his mantelpiece and above his fire or something. | ||
| Carriage clock or something. | ||
| Just to recognize his 15 years. | ||
| Yeah, that's a long time in a combat sport. | ||
| A long time. | ||
| So, that's the other thing, man. | ||
| That is not the norm. | ||
| That's a deviation, right? | ||
| A huge deviation. | ||
| I made it nine years in the UFC. Eight years, actually. | ||
| And, you know, I didn't have that many fights. | ||
| I broke down. | ||
| I fell apart. | ||
| It's pretty average. | ||
| You know, I was like, woe is me. | ||
| And then when you look at the data, it's like, oh, no, I'm just average. | ||
| 35. That's when you start to fall apart. | ||
| When you look back now with what you know now and all the athletes you've worked with at the UFC PI, do you think you would have done anything different in terms of the way you prepared? | ||
| I couldn't even think about it. | ||
| I knew what to think about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| It's so dumb. | ||
| Why would you spar eight rounds? | ||
| Why would you spar eight rounds? | ||
| There's no eight-round fights for us. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| You're literally just getting slower, Forrest. | ||
| You're already slow. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| It's... | ||
| Again, being a pioneer like you were, there wasn't really a whole lot of guys before you that were operating... | ||
| I had the other pioneers, like the Randys and the Chucks, and that's what they were doing. | ||
| So I figured, well, better be tough. | ||
| I better do what they do. | ||
| That's the craziest thing about MMA. They're champions. | ||
| I'm not going to question them. | ||
| Boxing had already figured out you shouldn't beat the fuck out of each other every day. | ||
| They had already kind of figured that out. | ||
| Well, and the other thing they figured out is... | ||
| We would work with people. | ||
| I would spar with Vanderlei, Chuck, Randy. | ||
| In boxing, they don't spar with people that are equals. | ||
| Past a certain point? | ||
| In camp? | ||
| Well, think about it. | ||
| You know a lot about it. | ||
| They start, like, is Floyd Mayweather sparring with, I don't know, really good people, his level? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, definitely not. | ||
| He's fighting with good boxers and he's tooling them. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| Have you heard of them though? | ||
| They're not famous and rich, so they're not the best in the world. | ||
| They're not elite. | ||
| Whereas you think about like a gym, like our gym, like I'll just use Randy's because I don't want to talk bad about anybody. | ||
| You're fighting other champions every day? | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Eh, maybe, maybe. | |
| Dangerous as fuck. | ||
| Yeah, maybe drill together, sure. | ||
| Learn from each other, roll, wrestle, like control your training. | ||
| Especially guys that are in the same weight class as you that may someday fight you. | ||
| That's awkward, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there was no guidebook. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you know guys like Keith Jardine and Rashad Evans figured it out. | ||
| They're like, alright, we already had to fight each other. | ||
| We'll train together now so we won't have to do it again. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That is a good move if it works out. | ||
| The level of guys now is so extraordinary to see. | ||
| When you see the elite champions of today, you just have this insane level of fighter. | ||
| As a person who's been involved in the sport as long as I have, I still never cease to be amazed at the level of talent of these guys coming up. | ||
| Because some of these guys coming up, they just could do everything. | ||
| And they can do everything at such a high level, and you're realizing you're seeing the results of kids that started out learning MMA when they were like five, six years old. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| I mean, you know, I have a personal gym, and I remember Ronda Rousey, they're like, man, she's going to change my bottom line. | ||
| All of a sudden, I got a mat full of young women, like, just training, like, legit fighting. | ||
| I was like, this is amazing! | ||
| Thank you, Ronda! | ||
| Yeah, she for sure changed it. | ||
| Gina Carano changed it a little bit before her. | ||
| You know, people had this idea like, oh, you could be pretty and fuck people up. | ||
| Like, oh, that's a totally different kind of girl. | ||
| That's like a superhero. | ||
| Like a real life superhero. | ||
| Now she plays it in movies, right? | ||
| Yeah, but it's just incredible, too, that the sport, when you look at women's MMA, like particularly Amanda Nunes, Chris Cyborg, that fight, I mean, that is as crazy exciting as any fight you will ever see in your fucking life. | ||
| And Amanda Nunes bombed on one of the greatest, if not the greatest, women's MMA fighter of all time and KO'd her in the first round in spectacular fashion. | ||
| Like, if you're not a fan of MMA or women's MMA after watching that... | ||
| Yeah, like, that's funny you mention that. | ||
| I just think about Holly Holm. | ||
| Like, what's she made out of? | ||
| Like, she's had a million fights. | ||
| Like, what is she doing so right? | ||
| Like, she's just, she's a, you know, GSP couture. | ||
| She's just a genetic specimen. | ||
| And I think, you know. | ||
| She just, again, she does that 52-week fight camp type deal, you know? | ||
| Yeah, you don't see her ever getting out of shape. | ||
| Never. | ||
| It's not happening. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I still think she got a raw deal in the Durandamy fight. | ||
| Ah, she did. | ||
| That's because she did. | ||
| She did. | ||
| She got clocked pretty late. | ||
| Two times hard after the buzzer. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| Two times. | ||
| And no points taken away, no nothing, and we were shocked. | ||
| We're like, that's crazy. | ||
| And then on top of that, she dropped her. | ||
| She dropped her with a head kick, and she dropped her with a straight left. | ||
| Like, in my opinion, she did the more damage in that fight, and I was shocked. | ||
| But that's... | ||
| I mean... | ||
| MMA judging. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's never gonna... | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| We cannot help you with that at the Performance Institute. | ||
| Well, at the Performance Institute... | ||
| Well, we got some data. | ||
| What I was getting at before when you were talking about little kids, when I was... | ||
| I was rather talking about kids coming up and amateur fighters. | ||
| There would probably be something that would be really beneficial of having some sort of a program like that in America where kids can understand the right way and the wrong way to do it so they don't have to repeat these problems and these mistakes that have already been kind of gone over. | ||
| That's your background in the British Olympics system, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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You do it. | |
| Set that up. | ||
| You've got nothing going on. | ||
| Would that be something that the UFC would ever think about doing in the future? | ||
| Because if they really wanted to ensure that they had a good pool of high-level talent, it would certainly add to that. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| I mean there's no clear performance pathway into the highest level of the UFC for the sport of mixed martial arts. | ||
| But there's guidelines for training that I think kids might not have the resources. | ||
| Every gym has a curriculum, and what we're trying to do is obviously add to that curriculum from a training perspective, a recovery perspective. | ||
| But ultimately, what's the best pathway? | ||
| And as you've already contested to, people are coming to this sport with so many different backgrounds. | ||
| So are you going to chop that access route to the UFC in half, or are you actually going to promote it and find many ways to get into the UFC? | ||
| I think we can look at things like the Olympic Games. | ||
| Does MMA ever enter into the Olympic Games and create a pathway? | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| And I'm sure the UFC are looking into that type of thing in the future and trying to be ambitious. | ||
| But right now it's hard to define what's the optimal way and what is the optimal route into the UFC. I'm sure it's the same for other disciplines of martial arts, but I have a lot of experience in youth wrestling development. | ||
| And when MMA came along, it was a little bit of a fear. | ||
| We're going to lose a lot of athletes to MMA. And we did originally lose a lot of athletes on the Olympic level to MMA. Johnny Hendricks is a great example. | ||
| Promising young wrestling star, went to MMA, became a UFC champ, did not become an Olympian. | ||
| But what it's really done is it's created this popularity in wrestling in no small part to, I think, some of the feedback that you've provided around wrestling being so vital to the development of mixed martial arts. | ||
| But there's been a real boon, I believe, in youth wrestling and, you know, youth and high school wrestling because people realize and recognize that this is a pathway into, you know, into becoming an elite mixed martial artist. | ||
| Of all the athletes that are in the UFC, there's a very high level of champions right now that were 2008 Olympians. | ||
| But if you look at the roster and how many people wrestled in high school, it's staggering. | ||
| And so just getting this base, not only technique and the grind mentality, but the strength that you double-legging somebody from when you're 5 until you're 18, you develop strength that you can't develop when you're 22. And this core strength and the ability to do it. | ||
| Is a way to get into it. | ||
| And I know that other disciplines are likely receiving similar windfalls, but in terms of developing that curriculum for development, that's definitely part of what we're interested in, alleviating some of the big mistakes, but there's still innumerable ways to get into it. | ||
| Think about when you were doing jiu-jitsu. | ||
| You had to struggle to find people to roll with when you started, right? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| There's like six guys you could roll with. | ||
| Now, you can go anywhere. | ||
| You can be doing a show in any... | ||
| Just look up and go drop in on a local jiu-jitsu club. | ||
| Yeah, it's packed. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| John Jock's noon class the other day had 60 people in it. | ||
| 6-0. | ||
| Like, what the fuck? | ||
| There was nowhere to move. | ||
| There's your talent development pathway to the UFC. It's those kids' classes, right? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It really is interesting, too, and it's dependent upon if a kid lives in an area that has a strong jiu-jitsu program or a strong Muay Thai program. | ||
| Oftentimes, that's what dictates what path they get into the sport from. | ||
| No doubt. | ||
| Or a good women's wrestling program. | ||
| I wrestle like a girl. | ||
| I'm on the advisory board, so I'm not only women's MMA, but women's wrestling as well. | ||
| What's really interesting working on the clinical side of what we do at the PI is every discipline has its own, not only sport culture, but physiology that goes with it. | ||
| As we talked about the strength dynamics for wrestlers, Are going to be different than the reactive strength for our strikers. | ||
| And then nutrition and just overall lifestyle type sport cultures is really interesting coming from the different disciplines that you came from. | ||
| Boxers, they do their road work. | ||
| They're doing a lot more fast and morning training. | ||
| Wrestlers have obviously a weight cut culture that they bring with them and have a little bit more experience there. | ||
| A lot of the Brazilian jiu-jitsu players, especially from Brazil, have their sport culture. | ||
| So it's so intriguing being able to We work with one sport, but with so many subcultures within that sport. | ||
| Really, really interesting to get to work with. | ||
| Obviously, working with the female athletes, like you alluded to earlier, adds a whole other layer in terms of the dynamics that we're working with in terms of the physiology with our athletes. | ||
| The female physiology and the weight cut, that's just the whole... | ||
| You really need to go to school for that. | ||
| Yeah, I would imagine. | ||
| That's a big difference. | ||
| Now, you helped them organize their weight cuts. | ||
| I know you worked with Kamaru Usman for his cut for his last fight. | ||
| So with Kamaru, we absolutely worked with him all the way through the fight. | ||
| Did you guys know he had a broken foot? | ||
| He was limping around. | ||
| No, we didn't. | ||
| And if we did, we wouldn't have mentioned it. | ||
| But no, I had no idea. | ||
| How crazy is that guy? | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| I was actually happy. | ||
| He was in the building for the whole time. | ||
| And I didn't know that. | ||
| I was happy. | ||
| I was like, yes, good. | ||
| What happens in the walls stays in these walls. | ||
| Because if there's this place like the Performance Institute and it's run by the UFC, oh, the UFC that pays me to fight people, I'm worried that that's going to get to them. | ||
|
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That was one of the biggest things when we started this. | |
| Like, I don't want to know. | ||
| Like, I'm the liaison from them to the other side of the half. | ||
| I don't want to know whose weight is what. | ||
| I don't want to know who's got a nagging injury. | ||
| That's your, you know, some of that is actually HIPAA, you know, information. | ||
| That's your private stuff, though. | ||
| Even if it's just how strong or weak you are, if you're having a bad day, I don't want that to ever get out of our walls, right? | ||
| So that's obviously. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're a conspiracy guy. | ||
| That's, you know. | ||
| What does that have to do with conspiracy? | ||
| Guys always think the UFC is out to get them. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| I always thought, like, they're going to find out that I got this or that. | ||
| They won't find out for me. | ||
| The stress of preparation for a fight. | ||
| People are always worried, especially if there's a little tweak, something going on. | ||
| Something with the hand, something with the leg, something with the knee. | ||
| It gets out. | ||
| People find out about it. | ||
| They hear about it. | ||
| They target it. | ||
| That's a thing. | ||
| It's a thing. | ||
| Kamaru in... | ||
| Every other athlete we work with comes in with sensitive injuries, and we have a private treatment suite within the Performance Institute, the PT area. | ||
| So they can come get private treatment. | ||
| And then in terms of supporting him for his weight cut, that starts 10 weeks, 12 weeks. | ||
| For Camaro, three, four months in advance. | ||
| How much are you trying to get him down to before the day of the cut? | ||
| So every athlete is going to be a little bit different based on what their background is. | ||
| What he's comfortable cutting from. | ||
| Yeah, what their historical weight cutting practices have been, how hard they've been on the body. | ||
| So we're assessing somebody like Kamaru for their metabolic rate, where they fit in terms of their body composition into that weight division, their lean tissue versus their fat tissue. | ||
| Those that have a higher degree of lean tissue are going to have, muscle has more water than does fat and bone. | ||
| So you can push the body a little bit further. | ||
| For those that have a higher lean tissue. | ||
| And so all of that planning and preparation starts many, many weeks in advance. | ||
| And having heard Kamaru on your show a couple weeks ago, a lot of what we do with an athlete that doesn't have a history of missing weight We're good to | ||
| go. | ||
| Sticking to one style of feeding, regardless of the training style that they're engaging in. | ||
| So MMA athletes, they have to do high intensity training sessions, strength and conditioning. | ||
| They have to be doing sparring. | ||
| They have to be doing pads rounds that are crazy hard. | ||
| In every athlete, each one is going to have a different intensity relative to their body type. | ||
| And so if somebody's doing pads, it's a 9 or 10 out of 10 in terms of intensity, and they're doing that fasted or they're doing that without carbohydrates available to do that work, they can't, A, hit those training intensities repeatedly, And then they can't adapt as a response to that training. | ||
| So they end up just getting slower and more beat up instead of faster and more powerful. | ||
| So if they're doing high intensity, we need to fuel the body in the specific way that supports that training effort and then the longer-term adaptation to that bout. | ||
| Additionally, if they're doing lower intensity, we can adjust our fueling strategies based on what that dictates. | ||
| If it's kind of a base aerobic training session or if they're doing skills and drills, we want to be feeding the body to adapt differently than if they're doing the high intensity sparring, strength and conditioning, or pads, or whatever that might be. | ||
| So for every athlete, we're looking at how their body uses substrate energy, the energy that they're using, the substrate between carbs and fat, At each of these intensities. | ||
| And then we also need to base our recommendations on where their body fits into the division. | ||
| If they're 20% out from their weight division four weeks out, then we're going to have a little bit of a more aggressive strategy nutritionally because weight becomes a primary factor. | ||
| If they're 10% out four weeks out, then we're going to have a little bit of a different conversation and prioritization around the fueling strategies. | ||
| And all of these conversations integrate within our strength and conditioning program so that we're working in concert and tying in the workload into our own system as well as the training load that they're engaging with with their skill-specific training. | ||
| Now when you vary the diet that you give them dependent of the workout, what is that based on? | ||
| Is that based on a hard accepted science of carbohydrate versus protein versus essential fatty acids? | ||
| How do you determine that? | ||
| We use a philosophy, a system called metabolic efficiency. | ||
| You could call it metabolic flexibility. | ||
| I've heard it called as well. | ||
| And essentially, the body will use different substrate at different intensities. | ||
| And at low intensities and at rest, the body can and likely should be adapted for our sports athletes to fat at rest. | ||
| Now, it depends on the sport type. | ||
| Again, if we're a shot putter or if we're a 100-meter sprinter, Then we're going to be much more dependent on carbohydrates and really the creatine phosphate system. | ||
| We're not even getting into the glycolytic system. | ||
| And Duncan could talk a lot more about the energy systems. | ||
| But essentially, we're reliant upon glucose and ATP for energy at those lower intensity bursts, right? | ||
| So to hit repeated max or sub max efforts, we require blood sugar. | ||
| And without it, we will deplete our initial stores. | ||
| And then we can't We can no longer hit 90 or 95% of our max. | ||
| We start hitting 80 and 70 and 60 and diminishing our ability to do these high-intensity efforts. | ||
| Now, do you guys see anybody come in and try to fight on a ketogenic diet? | ||
| Because I know quite a few guys were doing that for a while. | ||
| I know Brian Carraway did it. | ||
| Matt Brown. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| He has fought. | ||
| But he varies, and I think he does. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I talked to him. | ||
| I think he did one pretty pure. | ||
| And then he did the one where you might take N60 or 80 carbs, but then you work them off to stay ketogenic. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| Some of those guys, like Zach Bitter, he's an ultramarathon runner. | ||
| He does eat ketogenic most of the time, but then on days of big races, he'll consume a lot of sugars. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And again, I'll... | ||
| Insulin sensitivity, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So essentially, the more we can regulate blood sugar at rest and low intensities, then we can expand and to support the development of that kind of aerobic oxidative system. | ||
| And by adapting to use fat as a primary substrate, we're doing a number of things. | ||
| One, we're balancing blood sugar at rest so that we can really limit the insulin spikes and essentially adipose development. | ||
| Driving the body towards the oxidative aerobic system. | ||
| And then as we increase in what we do is we assess how the body adapts through the training intensities. | ||
| And we'll repeat that kind of on a monthly basis to see how the athlete changes. | ||
| And then as they increase in the intensity of a training effort, then we will adjust the ratio of fat to carbohydrates as a fuel substrate. | ||
| I thought it was going to come up organically, but it didn't. | ||
| The trifecta fight prep system, you guys and your team are going to 22 events this year. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
| Take it away. | ||
| All right. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| I'm shooting a promo here, Joe. | ||
| Step back. | ||
| So, essentially, we're assessing and then we're programming based on each athlete's needs. | ||
| So, like Forrest said, one of our most valuable partners at the UFC Performance Institute is this meal prep company called Trifecta Nutrition. | ||
| And they essentially have an all-organic meal line that can be developed a la carte, ordered a la carte. | ||
| And so with Kamaru as an example, we worked together for his past two fights. | ||
| And many athletes, like I said, are not fueling the type of training in a way that leads to their long-term adaptation, but can lead to overtraining earlier in camp. | ||
| And so what we really want to do is to understand how that physiology works and then program and then provide those athletes with the nutrition, whether it's on-site at the UFC Performance Institute. | ||
| At the events as well is what I was getting at, like 22 events they go to. | ||
| So you think about, like, I would... | ||
| I would literally smuggle oatmeal into Brazil. | ||
| You're stealing food. | ||
| You get the little thing that says no organic, the little pass. | ||
| They can go to those fights and actually feed you throughout the week. | ||
| That's where I was going with that. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| If you had a fight in Stockholm, they would come to Stockholm? | ||
| If it's one of the 22 events. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| But if it's one of those 22 events, they would go and you could get the UFC PI to fuel you through the entire event. | ||
| Yep, so there's a number of levels, so I'll get there in just one sec, but essentially we'll take them through the fight camp, fuel them for adaptation so they show up to the event. | ||
| We know exactly where they are. | ||
| They're fueled. | ||
| And then we could take them all the way through the fight. | ||
| So 22 events. | ||
| Most are domestic, except for the pay-per-views that are international. | ||
| So of the 22, the only international ones are the pay-per-views. | ||
| The others are the ESPN events. | ||
| And those are pretty much exclusively domestic. | ||
| But what we've done is we've outreached all of the athletes that have crossed paths with us at the Performance Institute. | ||
| So it's not roster-wide yet as we're working through a lot of the operational stuff. | ||
| As an example, we aren't able to get into the kitchen at every hotel. | ||
| So then we're working to find a community kitchen, trying to find contacts at local universities. | ||
| So, Trifecta hired a chef. | ||
| So, Trifecta, they're our partner. | ||
| They've been amazing in terms of, you know, trying to feed our athletes. | ||
| We identified this as a real need to, you know, we run a marathon with these guys, right? | ||
| Camaro has an example. | ||
| We work together for three months. | ||
| We get them to a week before the fight, and then it's like, pat them on the butt and say, good luck, right? | ||
| As we know, fueling is impactful all the way through the fight, including 30 minutes before. | ||
| And so instead of patting him on the butt and saying good luck, Trifecta hired a chef who I previously worked with. | ||
| He worked with me at Cornell University for a year. | ||
| He was an intern with me. | ||
| He worked at Exos for two years and then at a two Michelin star restaurant here in LA. And Providence is the name of it. | ||
| And he got hired. | ||
| He's their executive chef and is building out the Fight Week meals based on me and my team's programming. | ||
| So we work with every single athlete that we've connected with at the PI. It's gotten up to, on average, between 14 and 16 athletes at all the events that we're working. | ||
| and we provide comprehensive fueling. | ||
| So all of the food calories that they put in their body from the time they step on foot on Tuesday for fight or check-in all the way through 30 minutes pre-fight, including all the supplements, NSF third-party tested supplements for supplement safety to make sure they're not getting adulterated products. | ||
| We're keeping track of everything that they're consuming on the supplement side. | ||
| We don't sit in the sauna. | ||
| We're not there to be a weight-cut coach. | ||
| We are the sports dietetics team to support them on a programming and on a science evidence-based level. | ||
| So we will consult with their teams around what's the safest, what's the most effective way to support an athlete making weight. | ||
| And then we instantly, once they make weight, we have supplies that was developed Cooked, prepared by our chef that morning and the night before to support rehydration, electrolytes, to optimize the gut repopulation of gut microbiota, as well as balance the osmolality so that they're not getting gut cramping and issues that happen when you ingest a ton of sodium and glucose that causes a lot of water to rush into the gut. | ||
| And then we essentially feed them all the way through, like I said, breakfast, lunch, and then pre-fight to support their performance on fight night. | ||
| I'm an outspoken critic of cutting weight. | ||
| I don't necessarily think it's the best thing for the sport or for the athlete. | ||
| I mean, I think one of the benefits that we would get out of having more weight classes available is that fighters could get their body to the weight class where they're optimally at. | ||
| Has there ever been any discussion? | ||
| I know you guys have had discussions about PED usage and how to stop adulterated supplements from getting to fighters and making people test positive, but what about Some long-term goal of potentially eliminating weight cutting the way they've eliminated PEDs. | ||
| So, as we already talked about, I come from college wrestling. | ||
| Tragically, in 1997, three college wrestlers died. | ||
| In Florida, of course. | ||
| It's always Florida. | ||
| Was it? | ||
| No. | ||
| Two of them. | ||
| One was at the University of Michigan, and I'm not exactly sure where the other two were. | ||
| Let's pretend they were Florida. | ||
| Let's say Florida. | ||
| It feels like Florida. | ||
| Florida's just going to shake their head anyway. | ||
| They're not even going to check. | ||
| They'll accept it. | ||
| But the NCAA dramatically overhauled their weigh-in rules from the day before to the day of. | ||
| And there are a lot of similarities in terms of the types of athletes that are wrestling versus the types of athletes that are competing in MMA. But we work in and we work with professional athletes and we work for a professional fight promotion and the dynamics of a professional fight promoter is completely different than the NCAA. And the level of autonomy with our independent contractors versus the | ||
| NCAA athletes is different. | ||
| And we, as the UFC, you know, the performances too, we have the health and safety of our fighters in mind at all times. | ||
| And that's priority number one. | ||
| And I've had to literally call the ambulance on athletes that I've seen not doing well because of health considerations. | ||
| You personally, how do you feel about it? | ||
| About weight cutting? | ||
| I personally would like to make it safer. | ||
| There are less than ideal, I think, safety concerns that we've all heard of and a lot of us have seen. | ||
| And from my perspective, The closer that you can bring it to the fight, the better. | ||
| But because of the promotional nature of the UFC, it's limited. | ||
| And then we have limited ability to affect change with the UFC because the commissions really are the ones that are really making the rules. | ||
| I don't mean to sound like that asshole, but dude, pick your weight class, make the weight, or just say, you know, I'm not going to be able to do it. | ||
| I've got to move up, right? | ||
| You know, like... | ||
| It was always hard for me to make 205, but you know what? | ||
| I didn't really want to fight heavyweight. | ||
| And I made it, and towards the end of my career, I walked around like, you know, I used to get pretty big. | ||
| I was like, hey, I don't want to do that. | ||
| I want to be a professional. | ||
| Be a professional. | ||
| It comes back to the whole, I hate to keep saying it, but the 52-week fight camp. | ||
| All right? | ||
| Do you need to get 20% over your fight weight? | ||
| If you're 20% over your fight weight, that's not your fight weight. | ||
| You're making very good points. | ||
| I mean, there are weight classes, all right? | ||
| Maybe there needs to be a weight class like every... | ||
| Well, it is, like every 10%. | ||
| It should be every 10 pounds, I think. | ||
| Well, every 10%. | ||
| So I think percent's a lot more important than weight. | ||
| The other thing is... | ||
| Maybe in time it'll happen. | ||
| There's 570 athletes is not enough to fill that many weight classes. | ||
| And then, you know, you're a boxing guy. | ||
| Or, you know, then you get a weight class. | ||
| I'm just going to run around and we're going to have fights every three pounds. | ||
| And then it becomes a little... | ||
| Well, I don't know if that's necessarily the move. | ||
| Then there's like 27 belts. | ||
| How much value do they have? | ||
| My point, really clearly, is that it's an unnecessary risk. | ||
| It's an unnecessary risk. | ||
| To have a guy dehydrate themselves or a girl dehydrates themselves literally to the point of going to the fucking hospital 24 hours before a cage fight is insane. | ||
| If you could eliminate that, why wouldn't you? | ||
| That's the number one thing. | ||
| I think there's no benefit whatsoever to making people dehydrate themselves 24 hours before a cage fight. | ||
| It seems crazy. | ||
| Yeah, no, nobody's going to disagree with you, but we... | ||
| What's the best way to figure it out? | ||
| The best way to figure it out is to, first of all, you can definitely avoid a lot of struggle and tragedy by figuring it out, right? | ||
| I mean, the fights that happen where fighters in several organizations cut weight and died during that process. | ||
| That's heartbreaking, you know, if we could avoid that. | ||
| It's already a dangerous sport as it is. | ||
| We are collecting data at the Performance Institute. | ||
| We all have some opinions around what works best in terms of reducing the extreme weight cutting, creating some competitive parity in the cage, I think is a really critical point so that it de-incentivizes that weight cutting process. | ||
| If you can't be as big in the cage, well then there's not as much of a benefit. | ||
| Well, it is a very complex problem. | ||
| And the regulation in mixed martial arts is such that we're the promoter and we abide by the regulations of every single state athletic commission. | ||
| And so we're collecting data so that we can understand the issue better. | ||
| We're working to come to an understanding to then share with those that are the legislators of the system so that they can help make it safer as well. | ||
| Because it's not just a unilateral decision where we tell our employees, this is what you do. | ||
| We have 570 independent contractors. | ||
| Each of us has some strong beliefs and opinions in this space, and I value yours, and I really respect the passion you bring to it. | ||
| This is my passion as well. | ||
| This is why I came to the UFC, is to impact this culture, and hopefully on the policy side as well. | ||
| But it's a very, very complex system that we're working to infiltrate or to affect from the inside. | ||
| I truly understand that it's complex, but if you could wave a magic wand and not have weight cutting, wouldn't you do it? | ||
| Fuck yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, but nobody's disagreeing with that. | ||
| So why not? | ||
| Listen, if the UFC can do that, they can do that. | ||
| One FC's doing it. | ||
| It can be done. | ||
| You have a program where you make sure that people move up a weight class. | ||
| You have hydration tests. | ||
| You make sure that they're never really taxing out. | ||
| Like some guys, I've seen guys shuffle to the scale because they couldn't walk. | ||
| We've all seen that. | ||
| Where guys are literally on death's door 24 hours before a cage fight. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| If you could eliminate that. | ||
| I commend 1FC for trying. | ||
| There's holes in that system just like there's holes in any system. | ||
| You're always going to try and game the system. | ||
| Nah, they're trying to game the system as well. | ||
| Remember, they're peeing on a stick that you or I could go buy in Walmart. | ||
| Those aren't that easy to beat. | ||
| Those aren't hard to beat. | ||
| The hydration tests. | ||
| No, they're not. | ||
| You're 100% right. | ||
| But it's more... | ||
| It's more protected. | ||
| It's more difficult to do. | ||
| They have a far different regulatory system than we have as well. | ||
| We have 50 independent state regulators. | ||
| We have Kambache down in Brazil. | ||
| We have different regulators. | ||
| It's very complex and I think that we, obviously here at the table and at the Performances too, have that as a primary kind of area of focus. | ||
| We're working to affect the systems that can implement change. | ||
| I'll sum it up. | ||
| What Clint and his team are doing is, let's see the data. | ||
| Let's collect the data. | ||
| Let's figure out what it looks like. | ||
| What Donna's been doing for the last couple of years, collecting every fight weight. | ||
| Let's look at the data and figure it out from there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just such an unfortunate aspect of it that I get has been there from the beginning, or at least from the time the weight classes started being instituted. | ||
| But it just seems to me that, boy, if there was a way to avoid that. | ||
| UFC 6, they had it right. | ||
| It was the giant guys. | ||
| Wasn't that the one with the giant guys? | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, that was Adam and David versus Goliath. | |
| We'll go back to that. | ||
| Cage fighting is pretty hard by itself. | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| I just... | ||
| We don't call it cage fighting. | ||
| We call it octagonal struggling. | ||
| Struggle. | ||
| Gotta PC that shit up. | ||
| Yeah, when you say cage fighting, people go, what? | ||
| You say, oh, mixed martial arts. | ||
| Oh, you mean like the UFC. I love Ronda Rousey. | ||
| I'm a big fan. | ||
| Hey, it's about your messaging sometimes, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've accepted that. | ||
| Do you guys have long-term plans for expansion of the treatments and the different things you do? | ||
| Is this something that you guys are constantly working on and improving? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, absolutely. | ||
| The sports science landscape is vast, you know, and we try to keep abreast of all the latest technologies, the advantages in theory and philosophy. | ||
| So, yeah, that's at the heart of everything we do. | ||
| You know, we're trying to stay at the cutting edge of sports performance. | ||
| So, how does that, do you have to go to conferences and find out what the latest stuff guys are doing? | ||
| I mean, I did the math this week actually. | ||
| I always say the church isn't the building, the church is the people. | ||
| Our staff has got a combined experience in pro and elite sports of 106 years. | ||
| We've got 18 Olympic Games supported within our staff alone. | ||
| So our people, our staff are what is so precious to the Performance Institute, and we're very proud of our staff. | ||
| They're respective world leaders in their own individual areas. | ||
| But yeah, of course you have to go and speak to people. | ||
| Of course you've got to listen to seminars and collect and gather information. | ||
| They love their conferences, I'll tell you that. | ||
| What you've got to do is process it. | ||
| There's a lot of pseudo-science and bro-science out there. | ||
| You love that word, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's a real problem. | ||
| So, you know, the ability to process it is what makes the difference, you know? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Not everybody can be fortunate enough. | ||
| I don't even have to be smart. | ||
| I just went out and found a bunch of smart people. | ||
| Do they make you take notes when they make you sit on these conferences? | ||
| I honestly used to really, like, try to upskill myself and everything. | ||
| And then at some point, I was like, nah, this is nah. | ||
| Just... | ||
| Hey, Clint, come here. | ||
| I got a question. | ||
| Now, in terms of recovery stuff, I know you guys had a hot pool like a sauna or a jacuzzi, rather. | ||
| It was right next to a cold plunge. | ||
| How much of that stuff do you guys do? | ||
| And what equipment do you guys keep? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, again, Bo Sandoval, who's our director of strength and conditioning, puts it intimately in terms of, in the UFC, everyone's training hard. | ||
| You know, you're not training harder than the guy next to you or in the gym next to you. | ||
| What is the key is how fast you can recover and train again at the intensity that you need to the day after day after day and be robust enough to tolerate that. | ||
| So, recovery and regeneration is just as important as the training exposure. | ||
| In fact, your body obviously changes and adapts during the recovery and regeneration process. | ||
| Yeah, listen, we've got hot tubs, we've got aquatic capabilities, we've got cryotherapy, we've got compression, we've got, you know, everything that you would expect in a world-class facility. | ||
| What we're starting to do is really try to be a bit more prescriptive around that, as Clint's already talked about, you know. | ||
| It makes no sense to us to look at a high neuromuscular striking session where you're hitting mitts or hitting bags and use the same recovery strategy as a high metabolic grappling session. | ||
| These are totally different physiology challenges. | ||
| So, yeah, to be prescriptive and to be a bit more strategic in our approach. | ||
| But at the end of the day, what is core to recovery, it's such a personal thing. | ||
| You know, some people don't like getting in the cryotherapy chamber. | ||
| Some people can't swim, so they're not going to get in the water and do hot, cold plunges. | ||
| It's going to stress them out more. | ||
| So, hey, go in here and potentially drown. | ||
| It'll help you recover. | ||
| It's not that deep. | ||
| Well, it's not that deep, but some people just fear the fear of water because you can't swim. | ||
| What do they do about baths? | ||
|
unidentified
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Shower. | |
| Shower is too crazy. | ||
| You'll know when you smell them, I guess. | ||
| Do you guys have sauna on premises as well? | ||
| We do. | ||
| Steam, sauna. | ||
| Do you have guys go from the sauna to the cold plunge? | ||
| Me, personally. | ||
|
unidentified
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Do you do that? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| It's supposed to be a great benefit of that, right? | ||
| For sure. | ||
| And again, you've had Andy Galpin on, you've had all these, Brian McKenzie, all these people, the breathing experts. | ||
| I read most of both of their books. | ||
| There's a lot of information now around recovery, but it's still a massive grey area. | ||
| What about massage? | ||
| Do you have that on staff as well? | ||
| Absolutely, our therapists can provide that. | ||
| Do they do like rolfing, that kind of deep tissue stuff? | ||
| Yeah, Graston and all that stuff. | ||
| How often do you guys recommend that for athletes? | ||
| Because the Soviets, for a long period of time, it was really shocking when we found out they were massaging their athletes every day. | ||
| And there's debate as to whether or not that's good or bad. | ||
| What are your thoughts on that? | ||
| Well, I think what Heather, who's our director of PT, will tell you is that the fascia and the fighter posture and the way fighters are putting their bodies through particular challenges obviously creates a lot of muscle tone, it creates a lot of tightness in the fascia, and just methods and mechanisms to free that up, to allow the joints and the articulation of the body to work effectively is huge. | ||
| If you have greater than a, I'm trying to remember the numbers, but a A 10 to 20% imbalance in the joint within your body, you now have a 70 to 90% chance of injuring that joint, right? | ||
| So just the difference in terms of symmetry and balance within the body and its influence on injury is massive. | ||
| So why not be proactive in trying to utilize manual therapies and recovery modalities rather than working in a reactive process and waiting for the injury to happen? | ||
| And again, that's core of our philosophy is that there's been a big shift in the barometer for some of the fighters that come through the Performance Institute. | ||
| You know, the clinic and the therapy is somewhere where you go and you're injured. | ||
| Well, you know, what we do is we promote it just as much as the strength and conditioning piece. | ||
| So when you're talking about range of motion, are you including flexibility exercises? | ||
| Do you guys incorporate a lot of that stuff as well? | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| But again, fighters tend to be pretty flexible. | ||
| So again, it's on an individual level, but most strikers, most people can kick you in the head in the UFC. They're pretty flexible. | ||
| Individual orthopedic assessment, right? | ||
| So, hey, this is tight, that is tight. | ||
| All right, we need to loosen you up. | ||
| We're going to put that in your routine, right? | ||
| So everything is needs analysis driven, right? | ||
| So, you know, Brian Ortega don't need to be any more flexible. | ||
| He can put his legs – he just needs to maintain his current flexibility, right? | ||
| So it completely varies – And if you've got like a stiff wrestler, someone who's like just never really worked on it. | ||
| Yeah, and think about the combat posture, that internal rotation, that combat posture where you're constantly throwing. | ||
| I mean, just chronically doing that year after year is going to set you up for some amount of tightness in terms of fascia. | ||
| So again, I don't want to get outside of my scope of expertise, but we're very proactive in promoting fighters using modalities proactively rather than reactively. | ||
| So say if a fighter came in and they did a hard grappling workout, and after the training, what would you recommend and how much time? | ||
| Because there's some thought that the body should exist in an inflamed state post-workout. | ||
| Depends on, yeah. | ||
| Depends on the phase of training. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| And also for a certain amount of time. | ||
| And then there's more of a benefit of going into cryotherapy after like an hour or so. | ||
| So what are the benefits and the reaction? | ||
| So again, if you're off camp, what are you trying to do? | ||
| You're trying to break down your body so it can be overloaded and recover better. | ||
| You know, you're using that supercompensation to take it to a new level of therapy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In camp, when you're sharpening the knife ready for the fight, you want to remove any type of fatigue because you're getting close to the fight. | ||
| You need to optimize your training and obviously peak to the performance on fight night. | ||
| So, you know, there's got to be a strategy. | ||
| We've got to periodize your recovery as you would periodize your training loads in camp or off camp. | ||
| But yeah, there's different approaches and different modalities that you've got to utilize. | ||
| So if you look at grappling, And the metabolic demand that goes into the wrestling and the grappling, that's a lactate kind of response. | ||
| That's a circulatory issue in terms of those metabolites that are circulating around the body. | ||
| You've got to remove those. | ||
| So is that going to be something like a muscle pump type recovery strategy that will help it remove it through the liver and into the lymph system? | ||
| You mean like one of those compression pants? | ||
| Yeah, it might be a compression panel or it might be hot-cold. | ||
| If you go hot-cold, the vessels will expand in the heart and they'll contract in the cold. | ||
| You get a natural kind of muscle pump. | ||
| And how many times do you ask fighters to do that when they do a hot-cold thing? | ||
| Is there a sequence? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, we have a preferred methodology. | ||
| Right now, it's about three to four minutes, four times in each. | ||
| Just go back and forth. | ||
| Go back and forth, four minutes, finishing the call. | ||
| You look at other experts and other professionals in the field, they'll say, sit in the call bath for 20 minutes. | ||
| There's still not the science, not the data and information out there to really support some of these modalities. | ||
| How do you optimize? | ||
| How do you know whether or not it's having that much of a benefit compared to not doing that? | ||
| Ask the guy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Talk to him, make a way. | |
| Feedback. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Number one, subjective. | ||
| Do you feel better? | ||
| There might be no science around cryotherapy. | ||
| I'm not suggesting not, but there might be no data and no science on it. | ||
| But if the guy walks out three minutes later and feels like crystal mind and his body is fresh, it's kind of worked, right? | ||
| Yeah, well, the norepinephrine, the raising of the levels of it due to extreme cold exposure, I think that's been proven. | ||
| I think cytokine developed. | ||
|
unidentified
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Kills pain, right? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And the heat shock proteins as well. | ||
| Yeah, cold shock proteins and heat shock proteins. | ||
| Both of them, that's all proven stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right, for sure. | |
| In terms of measuring the actual inflammatory markers in the body, but some people don't like it. | ||
| I'm just making the point that if you like that stimulation and you like that sensation and you walk out, you can forget the physiology because now we're tapping into psychology and that's still part of the recovery process. | ||
| Yes, it's beneficial. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| What were you going to say? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| I'm sure it wasn't important. | ||
| No, I was going to say... | ||
| I will sidetrack. | ||
| Just in terms of recovery, nutrition is a core value of the recovery process as well. | ||
| So as much cryotherapy as you do, if you're not recovering, stimulating muscle, converting from catabolism to anabolism, providing nutrients for substrate regeneration, that's a critical component as well. | ||
| So that's critical. | ||
| What we aren't doing is providing tart cherry juice or high antioxidants immediately post-training as well. | ||
| We'll include that in other periods of the day. | ||
| In the evening or not immediately around a high-intensity training session for antioxidants. | ||
| What's the negative aspect of antioxidants post-training? | ||
| Similar. | ||
| It blunts the adaptive response based on the body's recovery process. | ||
| So if you blunt your immune response to micro-trauma, muscle tears that need to be rebuilt stronger and faster, well then you limit the adaptation. | ||
| So yeah, we want to provide nutrients to support recovery. | ||
| But we don't want to eliminate the adaptive response to the training session. | ||
| That's what's so fascinating about the science of it, that you can get that specific, that you know that if you consume the high levels of antioxidants post-training, it's going to blunt the recovery time. | ||
| You have to. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Curcumin, tart cherry juice, there's a number of spices that are included in a lot of different things, whether it's cooking or in our supplement protocol, that we will include, but we're going to target them away from the high-intensity training. | ||
| How far away from the high-intensity training? | ||
| A couple hours. | ||
| A couple hours. | ||
| I mean, it comes back to, you know, can a fighter, can a coach process all this information? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know, can they physically be aware of it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| Just give me the die. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Just write it down for me. | ||
| So, again, let us do some of the grunt work for you at the Performance Institute and we can give you some of that education. | ||
| Write it down for me. | ||
| I'll tell you how I feel and then we'll come back. | ||
| We'll talk about it and maybe it changes. | ||
| Coaches and gyms don't have to feel like you're trying to poach them and take them away and bring them to a new player. | ||
| That's the beautiful thing about it. | ||
| It's like it's open to everybody who fights for the UFC. Yeah, and the other Another thing which I would say is this is at no cost to the fighters. | ||
| It's also their choice. | ||
| They're independent contractors. | ||
| They can decide how much they want to engage with us, as much or as little as they want. | ||
| And again, that's the same with the trifecta program for meal prep. | ||
| It's the same with our strength and conditioning program. | ||
| So again, it's all bespoke and customized programming at no cost to the fighters. | ||
| It's so exciting for me because having seen the fights and the sport and the level of sport evolve over all these years, it's so exciting to see constant and continuing innovation. | ||
| And when you guys came along and built this thing and I had a chance to go and visit, I was so excited. | ||
| I was like, this is what, man, every sport needs something like this. | ||
| But the fact that the UFC has this. | ||
| You should do some testing. | ||
| Come by and do some testing. | ||
| They're going to find out I'm old. | ||
| We knew that. | ||
| But where are you more old than others? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Right now, my left hip, I fell down skiing. | ||
| You make a great point because what's been one of the really exciting things for us and refreshing also for the UFC Performance Institute is that sports like the NFL, the NBA, the English Premier League, we're having representatives from all of these teams, NHL, coming through and trying to understand or just be... | ||
| Trying to understand what we're doing, how we're working our sports science into the sport of mixed martial arts, and to try and capture our philosophy and our approach from a facility development perspective through to kind of our educational processes, through to the way we're interacting with fighters. | ||
| And again, we're trying to shape mixed martial arts. | ||
| We're trying to influence the UFC. That's our number one mission. | ||
| But the global awareness around the Performance Institute is really exciting as well. | ||
| Now, I know you guys, you were talking about your place in China. | ||
| Are you planning on going anywhere else? | ||
| Well, right now, you know, the expectation or our desire is to influence mixed martial arts globally. | ||
| We're truly a global sport. | ||
| So, right now, we don't know what that's going to look like, but the ambition is to obviously have performance institutes around the world that can help the development process. | ||
| I want to build one like South Africa. | ||
| Badass over there. | ||
| Get the malaria medication ready, bro. | ||
| Cipro, right? | ||
| Cipro. | ||
| I don't know what that stuff is. | ||
| He just wants a red wine, right? | ||
| It's pretty nice, too. | ||
| What is cool about us operating and athletes being independent contractors and accessing us however they see fit is we have so many different case studies and utilization. | ||
| We'll have people come out for a week at a time. | ||
| Access our team, take that back. | ||
| We'll have other people come out for part of a camp or a full camp. | ||
| Others will come. | ||
| We had Macy Barber, actually, she talked about it publicly, but she worked with us quite a bit for her last fight. | ||
| She booked a flight from Nashville to Vegas to reconnect, to get updated nutrition, strength and conditioning, whatever metrics that we could update based on her health status, as well as orthopedic support post-fight. | ||
| So we were able to get a number of days post-fight as part of essentially the completion of her fight camp to get her ready for the next phase. | ||
| So there's a lot of different ways that athletes can utilize based on just whatever their needs are, whatever they perceive their needs to be, and then whatever influence we're able to kind of make over their preparation. | ||
| And Macy Barber is a perfect example of someone getting that kind of high-level treatment very early in her career. | ||
| She's only 20 years old. | ||
| Super exciting prospect. | ||
| And for her to have access to something. | ||
| She'll be 21 in like three weeks. | ||
| She's old already. | ||
| Over the hill. | ||
| That voice is Forrest Griffin, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| No one else. | ||
| When you treat these younger fighters, how much emphasis do you put on giving them just a smart protocol to try to minimize the potential injuries, to get them to understand the relationship between range of motion and injuries, to get them to understand balance? | ||
| I know you guys have a machine that you actually can measure the muscles in the body and show the left and the right side what's weak and what's strong, right? | ||
| What is that called again? | ||
| I mean, we use force plates in certain particular... | ||
| There's something you lie down in, though, isn't there? | ||
| So we have the DEXA scan, which is essentially a low-dose x-ray that measures the mass of the tissue between bone mass, muscle mass, and fat mass. | ||
| And so we can get a balance of the musculature and the skeleton bilaterally. | ||
| When we see a big imbalance on that front, because that is a nutrition-related test, we will share that with both physical therapy and strength and conditioning. | ||
| And then physical therapy could break that into more nuance around strength imbalances around joints using the biodex. | ||
| And then strength and conditioning will do very similar kind of understanding using the bilateral force plates that Duncan was mentioning. | ||
| That stupid machine told me I had two pounds less muscle in my left leg than my right. | ||
| Your name is accurate. | ||
| Oh yeah, no, I do. | ||
| I blew my knee out a couple times, but I just didn't rehab it properly. | ||
| So when you found out, did you start doing like extra one-legged pistols on the left side? | ||
| Four, two weeks, maybe even three. | ||
| And then I was like, yeah, I got some emails to send. | ||
| Then your knees started hurting. | ||
| And now he just keeps running in circles. | ||
| Let me ask you this. | ||
| If you did see a fighter and they did have something like that and they were active, they were still competing. | ||
| It happens all the time. | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, we have a lot of fighters that have imbalances muscularly. | ||
| That's not a nutrition-related issue. | ||
| Obviously, our support is going to be important for the adaptation. | ||
| And this goes to Heather around orthopedic assessment. | ||
| What's the imbalance? | ||
| What's the injury risk, like Duncan was saying, in terms of strength imbalances? | ||
| She and her team, Heather Linden, our director of PT, would do that orthopedic screen. | ||
| See what the imbalances are and break it down and then that would lead to probably programming in her space and then also to strength and conditioning to build programs around whether it's mobility, range of motion or just around kind of hypertrophy to make up for some imbalances. | ||
| So that's where the comprehensive approach comes in. | ||
| I might assess something and then kick it over to them. | ||
| There's many cases where they would assess something whether the strength coach happened this week So-and-so is having a bad training session. | ||
| They talk about low energy. | ||
| They talk about not being able to recover or get up for the next training session. | ||
| That's an immediate referral over to my side of the fence. | ||
| So that's where the integrated care becomes really, really critical. | ||
| So, if you had someone that had a two-pound weight difference between their left leg and their right leg, how much time would you give them to gain that weight back? | ||
| Would it be dependent upon the individual? | ||
| You would probably want that to be a priority before they went into a heavy camp or something like that, right? | ||
| You can't resolve that immediately, but that would be part of the... | ||
| I mean, it comes back to the return on investment, right? | ||
| What's the return on investment and the reduction of an injury risk to try and influence that two pounds? | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| That's a conversation. | ||
| We're going to have that conversation around how effective or influential that is going to be on the outcome of the fighters. | ||
| So, as Clint says, there's fighters that walk around... | ||
| We're truly imbalanced. | ||
| But what's the risk and the time and effort it's going to take to make that change? | ||
| If it's in a fight camp, we're probably going to just leave it as it is. | ||
| If it's off camp and we've got a little bit more time to try and address it, all right, now we can be a bit more proactive about that. | ||
| But with me, they were like, you're old. | ||
| We'll take you out back and shoot you. | ||
| No, they did. | ||
| We messed around with some BFR stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| BFR? Blood flow restriction. | ||
| The occlusion bands. | ||
| The katsu type approach. | ||
| But again, in physical therapy and strength and conditioning, that's not revolutionary anymore. | ||
| That's part of just another tool that we add to it. | ||
| It's a way to augment or accelerate hypertrophy. | ||
| So if you have someone that's coming back for returning from surgery or an injury, And you're looking to get muscle mass back onto the limb without necessarily loading it through free weights or whatever it may be. | ||
| You can use blood flow restriction methods to try and increase the hypertrophy mechanism. | ||
| What are your thoughts on electrical muscular stimulation, those little pads and shocks? | ||
| Now that is called Heather. | ||
| Well, they come by a lot with different machines too. | ||
| Do you ever use it? | ||
| I have not, no. | ||
| Well, no. | ||
| Actually, no, that's not true. | ||
| I was the test dummy. | ||
| We did it on my shoulder. | ||
| I was the test dummy. | ||
| Did it help you at all? | ||
| I think with a lot of those things, there's some short-term relief, and again, you're influencing the nervous system, the long-term changes are potentially not there. | ||
| Here's what I want to ask you about. | ||
| Cupping. | ||
| Is that legit? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is it real? | ||
| Michael Phelps. | ||
| He's amazing. | ||
| If you think about massage, that's all decompression. | ||
| What cupping does is the opposite. | ||
| It lifts. | ||
| So again, when we're talking about fascia and changing fascia and releasing fascia, if all you ever do is massage and depress the tissue, You're not getting that mechanism of lifting and bringing it up into the cup. | ||
| So that's kind of the philosophy behind it. | ||
| And our therapists use it a lot. | ||
| But again, it's just a tool and they're going to use the tool for certain situations and they might leave it for others. | ||
| Is there any scientific research to back cupping? | ||
| Not that I'm aware of, but I might be completely wrong. | ||
| Do you ever do it? | ||
| I got a cup this morning. | ||
| Show him your leg. | ||
| Show him your leg. | ||
| What's going on with your leg, bro? | ||
| Forrest. | ||
| Forrest, what'd you do? | ||
| So, do you know... | ||
| Is that a compression from a... | ||
| Oh, so you had surgery. | ||
| Six weeks ago. | ||
| What'd you have done? | ||
|
unidentified
|
MCL, PCL, LCL. Jesus, man. | |
| Do you know the single leg... | ||
| When you do the scissor defense to the single leg, that scissor... | ||
| I don't. | ||
| Oh no. | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| I just fell right on his leg. | ||
| Turns out you can't do a thing, you can't not do a thing for six years and just think you can do it. | ||
| It's not riding a bike. | ||
| It's a perishable skill, as me and Clinton now know. | ||
| So how long ago did you get this? | ||
| But I have three new ligaments, so I'm good. | ||
| Oh Jesus Christ. | ||
| Six and a half weeks ago. | ||
| Six and a half weeks ago, three new ligaments from cadavers? | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| MCL was able to be repaired down on itself, PCL, cadaver, LCL, cadaver. | ||
| I'm getting world-class physical therapy on a daily basis. | ||
| Cupping today. | ||
| I got grasped in yesterday, hurt like hell. | ||
| But literally, I'm just beta testing everything. | ||
| I was the test subject for Roman for all the exercise tests. | ||
| Now I'm the test subject for all the PT rehab. | ||
| What about stem cells or exosomes or anything along those lines? | ||
| We got our flights to Panama booked. | ||
| Dr. Neil Reardon on standby. | ||
| I'm sticking with physical therapy at the moment, but I honestly don't know that much about the other components. | ||
| I'm waiting for embryonic stem cells in the U.S. Then I'll do it. | ||
| They're doing a lot of insane stuff. | ||
| I have stem cells in my Achilles. | ||
| I have Achilles surgery. | ||
| It's fantastic. | ||
| Yeah, they're doing some pretty incredible stuff. | ||
| If you're really interested, you should talk to Dr. Roddy McGee. | ||
| He's also local in Vegas. | ||
| Hello, Roddy. | ||
| Rodney was the one that did my Achilles surgery. | ||
| Yeah, he's amazing. | ||
| I did a consult with him. | ||
| You sent me. | ||
| You and DC both sent me. | ||
| And he said for my shoulder, and he was like, yeah, there's nothing there for it to attach to. | ||
| I'll take your six grand, but it probably won't work. | ||
| And I was like, oh, I appreciate the candor, Doc. | ||
| Yeah, he's very honest about the potentials. | ||
| But your shoulder's been operated on how many times? | ||
| Three. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's rough. | ||
| Now, what are the options when something like that happens? | ||
| I know they do shoulder replacements, but what does that entail? | ||
| Yeah, I'll probably do that eventually. | ||
| And what does that mean? | ||
| They just put a different socket and joint? | ||
| The ball and socket, yeah. | ||
| What do they do with all the surrounding ligaments and everything? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| That's terrifying. | ||
| I think a lot of those are still intact, so I don't think the range of motion would improve. | ||
| As long as I go mess around in RPT once or twice a week, it stays functional. | ||
| So when you say mess around, what kind of stuff are you doing? | ||
| Stuff for mobility or stuff for you doing like clubs? | ||
| I like where you're actually moving through with them pressing on the muscles and you're actually lifting the weight. | ||
| What's that called? | ||
| Where you're lifting weights or someone's manipulating your muscles? | ||
| I forget. | ||
| I'll think of it in a second. | ||
| No worries. | ||
| Physical therapy? | ||
| Let's call it physical therapy. | ||
| Did they have you do a lot of band stuff and a lot of shoulder guys get band work? | ||
| I do them as a warm-up every day. | ||
| Whenever I work out. | ||
| Except for today. | ||
| I just jumped in cold. | ||
| Let's see what happens. | ||
| Now, how much time do you spend on sort of educating fighters about having to strengthen up all the surrounding tissue around knees and shoulders and necks and things along those lines? | ||
| Things that are commonly your core, your lower back, commonly injured? | ||
| Tissue resilience is massive in our sport because, again, it's end-range resilience, right? | ||
| With the submission and the grappling exercise techniques, obviously you're taking a tissue and the tolerance of that tissue to its end range. | ||
| So by being able to train that over time in a progressive fashion, of course it's going to have an influence. | ||
| And yeah, part of our programming is going to approach that for sure. | ||
| Now, you guys have been in action now for two years. | ||
| You've had a bunch of different fighters move through and do their camps there. | ||
| We've had a roster of 570. We've had over 430 of the fighters have already been through in the first 22 months. | ||
| And we have a retention rate of about 73%. | ||
| So they're either coming back for repeat visits or they're getting remote programming from ourselves. | ||
| Now, how much has this changed over the two years? | ||
| How much have your protocols changed? | ||
| Your programs have changed? | ||
| A lot. | ||
| We're learning more about the sport. | ||
| The data is showing us more. | ||
| Again, just the opportunity to speak to more coaches, more athletes. | ||
| We're servants to the fight community. | ||
| We're sports scientists, therapists, clinicians. | ||
| At the end of the day, the IP sits with the coaches, with MA coaches and people like Forrest. | ||
| So just being able to understand how we can collect that information from a technical, tactical perspective and try and fit it into our philosophy of sports science being complementary to that, that's evolved all of our processes extensively over the last two years. | ||
| Have you guys ever thought about putting any of these sessions online? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I always say the Performance Institute's got three responsibilities. | ||
| The first responsibility is to service athletes, to service our fight community, either face-to-face or remotely. | ||
| The second thing which we're trying to do, something like this, is to aggregate more information and more insights around the sport. | ||
| Is this available? | ||
| Anybody can buy this? | ||
| No, but you can get it online through... | ||
| It was sent to every fighter on the roster. | ||
| The average person? | ||
| A fan? | ||
| You can go to our Twitter accounts and things like that and find it on there. | ||
| There's links out there on social media. | ||
| Everybody knows a UFC fighter, right? | ||
| Just go find one. | ||
| But the second thing is we need to understand the sport. | ||
| The sport of mixed martial arts is only 25 years old professionally. | ||
| So aggregating data is the second thing. | ||
| And then the third thing off the back of that data is dissemination and education across the global fight community. | ||
| So we're called the Performance Institute for a reason, not the Performance Gym, because we are truly trying to do project work, do research work, work with partners to try and aggregate that information and our awareness and our understanding so that we can push it out there. | ||
| So the plan is obviously moving forward to really ramp up our educational platforms to support the global community. | ||
| And hopefully we'll have kind of certifications coming online and those types of things as well. | ||
| So Strength and PT are filming stuff to put online to like a full, like, this is the way this exercise is properly done, these are things to look out for, for physical therapy and strength conditioning, you know? | ||
| Do you guys have a YouTube channel? | ||
| We don't. | ||
| We're working on all this stuff. | ||
| What? | ||
| Here's the thing. | ||
| We don't want to act quickly. | ||
| We're not like a YouTube thing. | ||
| We want to like, hey, when we release something, we stand behind it. | ||
| This is tried and true. | ||
| These are practice methods. | ||
| We don't need to rush it. | ||
| Also, these jerks are always busy working with athletes. | ||
| Freudian slip! | ||
| Freudian slip! | ||
| Well, I think what you guys are doing is amazing and it would be even more amazing if young fighters, people coming up really could influence a lot of folks. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| And again, it's in our ambition. | ||
| We're just two years into this thing. | ||
| Our first year was just, shit, let's just get operational. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We don't even know what this What kind of mandate did the UFC give you? | |
| What do they say? | ||
| Hey man, make a fucking awesome place. | ||
| Do their best. | ||
| Alright, this is Dana. | ||
| High five. | ||
| I'm going back to work. | ||
| How does that work? | ||
| How does it get set up? | ||
| It was like, hey, we want insights into the athletes. | ||
| We want... | ||
| It's origin was like, hey, can you guys make people stop missing weight and getting injured so much? | ||
| And more importantly, when somebody does get injured, can we get them back quicker? | ||
| Can they not work with a mom and pop car accident chiropractor to get a professional athlete? | ||
| Can we get them back quicker? | ||
| So, the goal, right, so the mission statement is to elongate careers, to help athletes make their weight class, stay within the weight class, fight great at their weight class. | ||
| So, again, specific mandates like the exact KPIs, I forget what they are. | ||
| They were some. | ||
| Just off the back of the bar, so what I would say is that we can legitimately say in the first 19 months of our existence, we've saved 22 fights. | ||
| Either through medical intervention or the work that Clint has done around someone that's behind their weight descent and we've really expedited that process. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| We're proud of that number and it's hard to build KPAs around that but that's why the Performance Institute was implemented. | ||
| KPAs? | ||
| KPIs, key performance indicators. | ||
| So we're not a fight team, right? | ||
| We work with the whole roster. | ||
| So we're not judged on wins and losses, although you would look on social media and some would think. | ||
| But our KPIs are around things like how can we support fighters make weight? | ||
| How can we get them to the door of the octagon in a healthy fashion? | ||
| And again, 22 fights, we can absolutely say, they probably wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for the work of the Performance Institute. | ||
| So there's, you can put a financial cost potentially against that, and that's kind of the philosophy behind the Performance Institute. | ||
| Alright gentlemen, any last words, Clint? | ||
| You want to say something? | ||
| I was just going to add that a lot of what we're doing and the athletes that we get to interact with are the cases that require huge interventions. | ||
| You know, people that are coming off a six-fight win streak are not looking for how to fix their metabolism or how to stop missing weight or how to improve their power because it's a deficiency or an orthopedic injury. | ||
| So we're working with Those that are really successful and those that are struggling and everything in between. | ||
| So it's around those interventions that have led to fights actually happening. | ||
| There's a huge amount of, I guess, risk for lack of a better term, that we're taking on as we're really working with the athlete's best interest at heart and doing everything we can to support that athlete to be more consistent and to be able to do it longer into their career. | ||
| So they could, you know, do the best for themselves, for their family, and for, I guess, the UFC. Beautiful. | ||
| Anything, Duncan, to add to that? | ||
| No, I mean, this is a trip, you know. | ||
| In terms of where we're at with the Performance Institute, our ambition is to really affect and support the global fight community. | ||
| That's what we're about, and hopefully, you know, moving forward here, people are going to see the value of what we're trying to do. | ||
| Well, I think they already see the value. | ||
| I certainly do. | ||
| I'm very excited that you guys are around. | ||
| I thought you thought it was going to be a waste of money. | ||
| It's definitely going to be a waste of money, but in a good way. | ||
| What does that mean though, right? | ||
| It costs money. | ||
| But I think ultimately it's great for the sport, for sure. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And it's just an amazing resource, and I'm glad you're a part of it too, man. | ||
| It really means a lot. | ||
| It means a lot to have a guy who's a former champion who's been there since Ultimate Fighter Season 1. I mean, it's creepy. | ||
| Your fight, I mean, everybody says it. | ||
| It's a fact. | ||
| Your fight... | ||
| I say it all the time. | ||
| I say it at least once a day. | ||
| That fucking fight made the sport. | ||
| What? | ||
| You were in... | ||
| He was in a fight once. | ||
| That fight made the sport, man. | ||
| It really did. | ||
| That fight was so crazy. | ||
| People were calling up their friends. | ||
| When they started doing... | ||
| Nielsen numbers are all shenanigans, right? | ||
| You get like a hundred people. | ||
| They're checking their... | ||
| They don't really know who the fuck's watching what. | ||
| But they know that something crazy happened during that fight. | ||
| They have estimates that there was as much as 6 million people changed and started tuning into that fight while it was happening. | ||
| They don't know what the real numbers are, but it was chaos. | ||
| And then afterwards, I never saw anything like it. | ||
| It was like all of a sudden, people wanted to watch the UFC. It was almost instantaneous. | ||
| The season finale of The Ultimate Fighter went on the air, and then the door opened and people started pouring through. | ||
| It was crazy, man. | ||
| And that's you. | ||
| You and Stefan Bonner. | ||
| You guys are responsible for literally the birth of this explosion that we're all seeing right now. | ||
| We're seeing with this ESPN deal. | ||
| We're seeing with these incredible fights. | ||
| No, it's cool. | ||
| And I, you know, I love that, that I got to kind of be that cornerstone. | ||
| But, you know, now the PI, the UFC itself, the stars today, it's only building. | ||
| You know, that was the beginning. | ||
| There's, you know, there's so much more to come. | ||
| There's so much more to come, but you're a bad motherfucker, Forrest. | ||
| And we're there. | ||
| Just don't ever drill jujitsu or wrestling in. | ||
| We're worse. | ||
| You fall on people. | ||
| But seriously, I mean, I'm super happy that you guys exist. | ||
| It's awesome for me. | ||
| Thanks, Joe. | ||
| It's been a treat for me as a fan. | ||
| Thanks for having us. | ||
| Dork out with you. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| And to learn all the inside stuff. | ||
| It's very exciting. | ||
| So thank you. | ||
| Much continued success, gentlemen. | ||
| Please come visit us again. | ||
| I would love to. | ||
| Welcome anytime. | ||
| I would love to. | ||
| Thank you very much. |
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