April 19, 2011 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:02:27
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! | ||
| Hello, Cody. | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Good to see you, brother. | ||
| What's happening, man? | ||
| Join Austin. | ||
| Yeah, so you're coming here. | ||
|
unidentified
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Possibly. | |
| Are you letting the people know? | ||
|
unidentified
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Not yet. | |
| Did I blow the... | ||
| Not yet. | ||
| They're going to know now. | ||
| Did I let people know? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I mean, it's probably the move we spoke about earlier. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've always loved Texas, like we spoke earlier. | ||
| I got signed here to the UFC, was on it for so many years, came out here during fight camps for a week and kind of just unplugged but focused on training and had a good time out here. | ||
| It was always a pleasure. | ||
| Yeah, it's a beautiful place. | ||
| I'm enjoying the shit out of it. | ||
| Dude, first of all, congratulations on your comeback. | ||
| You know, you're a great guy. | ||
| And when there's someone I like who loses a bunch of fights in a row and you get into this skid, it's hard to watch. | ||
| I can't imagine what it was like being you, you know, to have a young child and to be dealing with all of this going on. | ||
| I mean, it's like losing your time. | ||
| But then to come back the way you did against a really fucking tough guy in a Sun Tso and get... | ||
| Arguably the KO of the year. | ||
| I mean, you gotta be feeling pretty fucking good. | ||
| I feel great, you know. | ||
| Back from the brink. | ||
| Back from the brinks. | ||
| I mean, that time in my life, that time frame period, and going through that, you know, from on top of the world, world champion, to three-fight skid, honestly, it feels like a lifetime ago. | ||
| I feel like I'm just a different person. | ||
| Where I was at from there, you know, removed. | ||
| And the thing is I'm just doing differently, thinking differently, you know, how I was able to approach the game, picking myself back up time and time again. | ||
| I mean, it's... | ||
| Internet is a horrible place to get knocked out on, you know. | ||
| The internet is... | ||
|
unidentified
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Fuck! | |
| You got the trolls, this and that, you know. | ||
| But besides that point, you know... | ||
| Just coming back to that and having a love for it. | ||
| A lot of the times I got to the fight, and not to make excuses, I was just... | ||
| I didn't feel myself. | ||
| I didn't feel like... | ||
| In the training and leading up, I felt physically I'm always ready to fight. | ||
| Like, flip the switch, I'm always physically ready to fight. | ||
| I think mentally going into those fights, I was just out of body. | ||
| I wasn't... | ||
| I felt like I was going through the motions. | ||
| You know, my passion wasn't there. | ||
| I wasn't waking up every day like, what's your reason why? | ||
| I was just trying to find that. | ||
| I think the reason why I had so many people infiltrated in how I should train or how I should live or what I should do to get back there. | ||
| And really it wasn't nothing that I needed to learn new. | ||
| I didn't have to reinvent the wheel. | ||
| It was just doing the slight edge theory, like getting out of your comfort zone. | ||
| You're doing your sauna sessions. | ||
| You're pushing yourself to go in there and just be uncomfortable. | ||
| So I had to go out there. | ||
| With that comeback, I moved to Jersey. | ||
| Did training camp out there. | ||
| Yeah, I want to talk to you about that. | ||
| I'm a big fan of Henry. | ||
| Mark Henry's a bad motherfucker. | ||
| He's great. | ||
| I enjoy him so much. | ||
| His passion for it, his love for it. | ||
| He's so interesting, too. | ||
| His crazy codes and the fact that the dude makes pizza on the side. | ||
| Dude, I was so nervous going out there because I heard of the codes. | ||
| And like, you know, I was with Lance. | ||
| Lance kind of gave me a little insight on it, on everything. | ||
| I'm like, damn, codes. | ||
| And I just fight, dude. | ||
| Like, I don't have really said things. | ||
| I kind of go off of my instincts and game plans. | ||
| And he was trying to, you know, brief me on it. | ||
| When I got to the first two weeks, holy shit, we go down to his basement and he has like pizza scrolls from the pizzeria where we have off about 50 things that we're working on before camp. | ||
| So what does he write them on? | ||
|
unidentified
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Boxes? | |
| Pizza boxes? | ||
| Pizza scrolls, like just basically white paper he rolls down and tapes it there to the wall. | ||
| You have like Cory's fight camp. | ||
| You have Frankie's and all these codes. | ||
| He's working with 14 fighters at one time. | ||
| He knows all the codes. | ||
| And all different kinds of fights too. | ||
| Like he's got Zabit there. | ||
| He's got Frankie. | ||
| It's like all these different styles. | ||
| Yeah, different styles. | ||
| And we'll kind of, you know, what I like about that is he'll try things that Zabit does. | ||
| Zabit does these crazy double jump scissor kicks and spinning. | ||
| You know, the Russians are really good at spinning shit. | ||
| So we threw that into the game. | ||
| It was nice to get that kind of stuff that Frankie's done and had success over the years. | ||
| So we meshed that together. | ||
| He got to know me really well. | ||
| We worked extensively with Ricardo Almeida up there as well. | ||
| But yeah, Coach Henry is just obsessed with winning. | ||
| But what I loved about him was the first thing that he said to me. | ||
| Was that his job is, he's competitive, he wants to win at all costs, but his job is to get us back to our family. | ||
| And I watched your podcast with Andre Ward, and he said the same thing about his trainer. | ||
| And once he said that to me, and I have a child now, my whole thought process is, Has changed, you know, and transitioned. | ||
| And they're like, I want to be able to be around for my son's life. | ||
| I want to have, you know, speak to my grandchildren. | ||
| I'm not drooling, you know. | ||
| That's what Coach Mark, I want you drooling when you're, you know, 50, 60 years old. | ||
| And I kind of, in the style of that fight, I can punch and move. | ||
| I don't have to brawl with these guys. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, and just reiterating the defensive part of the technical offensive part with him is I could go in there and hit a 6-7 punch combo. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Dude, he would care less. | ||
| He's like, what did you do after? | ||
| You moved after. | ||
| Your head was off. | ||
| Your hands was up. | ||
| He was all about defense. | ||
| I think he just helped me out a lot with saying that. | ||
| Getting me home to my family safe. | ||
| That's what I want to do. | ||
| It's such an important approach to be defensively sound. | ||
| And yet, there's so many fighters who don't think like that at all. | ||
| They just think about offense. | ||
| In Jiu-Jitsu, Hicks and Gracie I had a conversation with him once about jujitsu, and one of the things that he said is that the most important thing is defense. | ||
| He said, because I'm always safe. | ||
| This is what he said. | ||
| He goes, I'm always safe. | ||
| And he goes, in every position, I'm always safe. | ||
| Like, he lets guys on his back with a fully locked in rear naked choke, and he'll start rolling like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's always safe. | ||
| And that's interesting also, I read that about the Donaher death squad, John Donaher's guys, like Gordon Ryan and all those guys, they'll start in really bad positions all the time. | ||
| They train constantly in bad positions, so they're always defensively sound. | ||
| And that makes sense with striking as well. | ||
| So many guys are so concerned with offense, and you've had so many spectacular knockouts, like the Thomas Almeida fight, that it's just like you probably just want to blast guys. | ||
| I got to pull the reins back sometimes. | ||
| I'm like, dude, I'm so amped up just to get in there and get the fight. | ||
| Forget the walkout. | ||
| I want to get the first blow. | ||
| I want to get that exchange. | ||
| Then that's when the fight unravels. | ||
| Sometimes I think I get so amped up that... | ||
| You know, taking it back, you know, doing that, kind of having defensively sound sets up your offense. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And my uncle's training me my whole entire life, and this is what he said, your offense sets up your defense, and vice versa. | ||
| But okay, like, my offense was so good, and then you get to this point where people are breaking down your footages and your films and, you know, your speed and power. | ||
| You know, you have to have that, you have to be defensively sound if you're so offensive. | ||
| I'm a forward fighter. | ||
| I can fight going back. | ||
| A lot of fighters can't go. | ||
| I can fight positional. | ||
| Like you said about Danner's guys, Chris Holdsworth has adapted into a phenomenal coach. | ||
| You know, he's my right-hand guy from martial arts to the T, and he makes us start in horrible positions like that when we're dog-dead tired and then get up and we're shadow sparring each other and then going back to the ground, like, really fight-simulated things to where you're feeling uncomfortable in those positions. | ||
| Like, yeah, I can go in there and knee-wrestle all day during jiu-jitsu. | ||
| I didn't get tapped out. | ||
| I didn't tap anybody, but I was safe. | ||
| But I didn't put myself in those positions when the fight really happens. | ||
| You have to see how, you know, your grit. | ||
| You got to be able to fight off the hands, fight off the body, try and go fight all those bad positions so you're comfortable with whatever the fight goes. | ||
| And I feel like that's where I'm at now. | ||
| I've transitioned into that fighter. | ||
| I was so green when I got to alpha male and a lot of my speed and power... | ||
| Catapulted me to the top where I have to kind of draw back a little bit and do the correctional errors. | ||
| Not reinvent things, not do things, but the defensive part of things. | ||
| I was up in training in Jersey and I knew I had the good head slips and movements, but some of the slips coach was watching me, I would get caught on the At the first or second, I usually would get hit with a fourth punch. | ||
| It's a combo puncher. | ||
| I would slip, slip, and then I would slip down this way, and I would get hit with the jab. | ||
| Every time, I was like, dude, just bring your hand up a little bit when you're slipping to the right. | ||
| You're moving to the right. | ||
| He's like, how do you feel after swar? | ||
| I'm like, dude, I feel great. | ||
| I don't have a headache. | ||
| I'm not getting my ass kicked. | ||
| I'm not getting hit, really. | ||
| My defense has gotten so solid working with them constantly, and Chris is the same way. | ||
| My coaches out in Alpha Male are the same. | ||
| With hands up, hands up, hands up. | ||
| At that point in my life, I was just so aggressive and angry. | ||
| We had so much success attacking that way too. | ||
| At doing that. | ||
| But this last fight, I was honestly, Joe, when I was doing those feints on the Sun Sound, Coach Henry said, hey, don't feel like these feints aren't going to work. | ||
| He's defensively sound. | ||
| He's a great fighter at that respect. | ||
| Keep doing these feints. | ||
| They will work. | ||
| I'm fainting this guy, dude. | ||
| I'm fainting. | ||
| I'm fainting. | ||
| He's not really biting. | ||
| He's not really coming in. | ||
| But I kept on the feints, and I started catching him with some shots that I saw, and his eyes were hurting him. | ||
| And then feinted, did the Tyson 2 overhand right, dropped him. | ||
| And I knew once I had that range and the power and speed and his timing that he would come in with something. | ||
| The KO, the way you did it where you dropped your hands and looked to the side and waited for him to move. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| That was like one of the best walk-off KOs ever. | ||
| I felt great because the first round, I kind of had myself to the cage. | ||
| And Coach, man, he... | ||
| He'd probably kick my ass being on the cage. | ||
| Like, get off the cage. | ||
| Get to the, you know, movement more. | ||
| We're movement fighters. | ||
| You know, he made me. | ||
| And I know my back was in his cage, but I saw, and the round was ending, but I saw a sunset. | ||
| I was like, oh, here's my opening. | ||
| I saw that in the first round. | ||
| And the second round, I was staying off. | ||
| I was moving. | ||
| I was switching, you know, stances. | ||
| But towards the end, I heard the clapper. | ||
| So I'm like, I'm back in the wall. | ||
| Let him come in. | ||
| I kind of leaned towards, and he kind of like faded on it. | ||
| And then he chased me down. | ||
| When I level changed, I kept my eye on him. | ||
| And he threw the hook because he was going southpaw. | ||
| And I knew, like, I had my hand on the cage and know where my distance was. | ||
| If he was coming with a kick after, I could lean back. | ||
| I just had my range and my timing. | ||
| And once I threw it, man, I knew when I felt it from the hip, it was over. | ||
| And that guy is so fucking durable. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| I mean, this guy is so tough and so durable. | ||
| For you to catch him and KO him like this... | ||
| That had to feel so good. | ||
| That was good. | ||
| Back against the wall. | ||
| That was a pivotal point in my life. | ||
| But I knew leading up to that... | ||
| I needed to get an octagon. | ||
| I kept, like, hey, Sean, Dana, and then, obviously, in the beginning of the year, I had a kidney infection that landed me in the hospital. | ||
| I had to remove myself from the fight. | ||
| What happened there? | ||
| Dude, I had, I guess, a staph or cellulitis that I didn't know. | ||
| My shin was so sore for weeks. | ||
| I would tape it with a knee pad, put a knee pad, tape it, and spar, and grapple. | ||
| But there was no, like, infection, no cut. | ||
| So you just thought it was a bruise? | ||
| I kicked... | ||
| Kicked this dude hella hard and I just thought that my leg was just bruised that bad. | ||
| Like, you know, sometimes you hit your shins and, you know, kind of elbow, maybe a knee. | ||
| And I was transitioning back. | ||
| I was in Jersey for a month and I was back here in California for two weeks and I was going back to Jersey and just training hard, you know, and... | ||
| It's where my body just started shutting down. | ||
| I remember telling Coach Mark after training one day, I'm just feeling horrible. | ||
| And then by that night, I kind of just started feeling really bad and started urinating blood. | ||
| So I went to the hospital and they checked everything out. | ||
| I'm like, oh, you're good. | ||
| The doctor came in and was like, here's the surgeon's number. | ||
| You're going to have to get your lymph nodes removed because my lymph nodes were swollen so much in my groin. | ||
| I couldn't even walk. | ||
| I was crawling in there. | ||
| And I'm like, everything checked out. | ||
| They did all these tests. | ||
| I was there for the majority of the day. | ||
| Why would they just remove them? | ||
| That's what he said. | ||
| I'm like, alright. | ||
| So I was like, drove home. | ||
| I drove there the first time and then drove home. | ||
| Chris is actually flying out for the week to help me train. | ||
| I was like, Chris, bro, I don't feel good. | ||
| There's something going on. | ||
| But I just had everything checked out. | ||
| I was like, I'm not going to be pussing and go back to the hospital. | ||
| But progressively during the night, it just became like two hours of straight blood. | ||
| I was urinating. | ||
| So I was like, this is not good. | ||
| I couldn't eat. | ||
| I had the cold chills. | ||
| Went back, Ubered back to the hospital, and they admitted me. | ||
| And I had a really bad kidney infection from... | ||
| Like a cellulitis that was in my leg. | ||
| So how do they find out that you have a really bad kidney infection? | ||
| Do they do it for a blood test? | ||
| I did blood cultures. | ||
| I was doing... | ||
| I did probably 26 labs. | ||
| I was in the hospital for... | ||
| They didn't know why I was... | ||
| What was caused from it. | ||
| I had a team full... | ||
| A team of doctors, surgeons, you know... | ||
| Infected disease doctors like all these like trying to do these tests and like we didn't know what was going on and then they gave me antibiotic I was hooked up the penicillin for six days and IV the whole time like it was the first few days in the hospital I couldn't eat I couldn't even urinate myself the lady had to hold the bucket to where I was just I was just dying I think I was training myself you know it wasn't a diet thing I was eating right correct taking supplements like just training hard and then I guess I just trained my body to Well, | ||
| that's the thing about people that get sick while they're training. | ||
| If you're in a fight camp, you're constantly breaking yourself down. | ||
| That's why guys get sick all the time in training. | ||
| Because you're so tired. | ||
| You train so hard. | ||
| If you get sick bad while that's happening, you can get really fucked up. | ||
| And there are so many guys out there running around with staph infections that don't know they have them. | ||
| I've seen guys at the gym, and they have this little thing on their arm, and then someone's got to say, hey, dude, have you got that checked out? | ||
| That thing looks like a big boil. | ||
| You got staph, bro. | ||
| And they're like, is that staph? | ||
| People don't know. | ||
| But that shit gets systemic. | ||
| And then you could die! | ||
| Yeah, I had to go to a kidney specialist. | ||
| They went to Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, did all these tests. | ||
| They wanted to do a biopsy. | ||
| Staff is fucking scary, man. | ||
| So I texted Dana, like, man, I had to pull out my fight. | ||
| And then he was saying that he was going to have the fights. | ||
| I'm like, well, I need to fight. | ||
| My soul needs to get in there. | ||
| I need to turn this around. | ||
| I'm on three-fight skid. | ||
| I was excited. | ||
| I was fighting in Columbus, Ohio, my hometown. | ||
| I was going to start to come back there and then march on. | ||
| I was back to my visualization, focusing on fighting. | ||
| I was so far removed from that. | ||
| Not because I was losing. | ||
| Even when I won the title, I was just so far away. | ||
| You weren't visualizing then? | ||
| I wasn't. | ||
| I mean, I ended up injuring myself in the fight with Cruz with my knee, and then I ended up having the back procedure in Germany leading up to the TJ fight. | ||
| It took me out a whole year. | ||
| Did you get that Regenikine stuff? | ||
| Yep, I did. | ||
| And it worked, and there's shelf lives of it. | ||
| You know, I still feel... | ||
| I learned a lot, like, doing obviously yoga, PT. You know, as much as I'm training, I'm still doing five days a week of PT, you know, and mobility work. | ||
| For your back? | ||
| Just overall mobility. | ||
| What was the exact extent of the injury? | ||
| It was an annual tear. | ||
| Of the disc? | ||
| Of the disc, yeah. | ||
| So it kind of just protruded and it was just hitting that sciatic nerve and just locking up. | ||
| They're doing stem cells in discs now and they're having great results from that. | ||
| I know a dude who had severe sciatic pain in a dropped foot. | ||
| His foot was going numb and he got it completely fixed with stem cells. | ||
| Wow, that's great. | ||
| Regenerative medicine is the future, man. | ||
| It's really fascinating stuff. | ||
| Part of it's pulling from your own self to heal you and mix with some other things. | ||
| Yeah, some of it and some of it they're doing from umbilical cords when a young woman gives birth. | ||
| They take the umbilical cord and they make stem cells out of the umbilical cord. | ||
| Yeah, that's great. | ||
| I'm all for it. | ||
| Dude, it's incredible stuff. | ||
| Talk to me about the visualization stuff. | ||
| So this was something that you had concentrated on earlier in your career. | ||
| Really, my whole entire life, without knowing what law of attraction was and having these people teach me this kind of stuff, I remember writing on my planner in grade school and junior high and high school like I was going to be a state champion. | ||
| That's what I wanted to be. | ||
| Our mom always gave us Christmas presents at the Jerome Schottenstein Center to go watch the state wrestling tournament in Ohio. | ||
| And everybody knows the Ohio State tournament is, you know, you've been a state champion in Ohio, you're You're elite in the nation. | ||
| It's a tough state. | ||
| So that's what we were, you know, our first sport we fell in love with was wrestling. | ||
| We traveled all over once our mom, you know, put us in it and traveled us around the country, packed in our minivans, driving all kinds of, you know, Iowa, Maryland, Florida. | ||
| Just that's what we did every weekend. | ||
| You know, that's what we enjoyed to do. | ||
| So I started visualization there with, you know, I saw the announcer's name, you know, hearing that. | ||
| So this was just in your, like, you were almost like just daydreaming. | ||
| Just daydreaming, yeah. | ||
| Just thinking about what you want. | ||
| Yeah, not paying attention in school. | ||
| But not like a, not like a form, like, like a formula, not like a formal style. | ||
| I didn't really know a formula. | ||
| Yeah, just, I would write down my weight class, my name, what high school I was representing, and I would just read that when I was in school and read it over and over again. | ||
| I would hear the The guy, the announcer's name at the Jerome Shantz, he had a distinguished voice. | ||
| And, you know, freshman, you know, Cody Garber from Uriksville, Claymont, you know, to Matt 2, like, you run out. | ||
| Like, it's going to wrestle in front of 22,000 people. | ||
| Think about it in your head. | ||
| Just, yeah, manifest. | ||
| So I was like, I'm going to be a state champion my freshman year. | ||
| And I did it. | ||
| And I think I feel like anything that I visualize like that and really put myself in those kind of uncomfortable positions now, like, I want to be a world champion now. | ||
| And to be a world champion, you have to put yourself through some misery, some straight pain to get, you know, your goals to be the top because everyone's going to, everyone's fast, everyone's tough, everyone's strong. | ||
| It's like that slight edge theory. | ||
| Like, what are you going to do that they're not going to do? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And I think going back to the three-fight skid, going to Jersey, I needed to get out of my comfort zone. | ||
| I've never been away from my son more than a week. | ||
| I had to go and reward myself with coming back to my family, coming back to my son after being away and dedicating myself to this life that I chose to do. | ||
| But, you know, rewarding myself with the wind, coming back, enjoying my son. | ||
| So every time I was away from him, I'm like, this is my deposit. | ||
| This is my deposit to get back to my son, to have these good times, make a great future for him, things that I didn't have. | ||
| You know, I'm fighting for him, you know, and things for his future, good schooling, you know. | ||
| Things like that. | ||
| So getting out of that comfort zone, going to Jersey, and then did a winner from California. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| New training partners. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Dude, I feel like once you're a champion, you have that X on your back. | ||
| Everyone wants your best, and everyone's going to give you their best. | ||
| And I'm all for that. | ||
| I'm... | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| And so having those new guys on you, trying to just earn your respect... | ||
| I had to go out there and have them earn my respect to be, this kid is the real deal. | ||
| This guy is the real deal. | ||
| He's a world champion. | ||
| He's making himself come back. | ||
| And going out there, like Frankie Edgar, those guys are great. | ||
| Eddie Alvarez, Ricardo Almeida, Coach Henry. | ||
| The whole top guys in Jersey are kind of... | ||
| We laugh and joke, like, they're the Team Alpha Male East Coast, basically. | ||
| You know, we're such similar styles, wrestlers that are turning into strikers, and just the mentality of the, you know, hard work, kind of, everyone, it's a co-op. | ||
| Everyone's helping everyone out, like, oh, I'm going to hold some pads with you. | ||
| Like, Frankie was great. | ||
| He came in and helped me out when there was only four or five people in the gym. | ||
| He would give me my sparring rounds, and just a great dude, great camp to be with, and I needed that. | ||
| I think I... I don't need cheerleaders, you know what I mean? | ||
| But I need people that I respect that's going to push me the extra round to the next, you know... | ||
| How did you choose Mark Henry? | ||
| Did you guys have a conversation? | ||
| I talked to Coach Henry years before this, and anyone that knows Mark is not... | ||
| He doesn't give out compliments. | ||
| Like, you've got to earn his respect. | ||
| And I remember him telling me, you know, he's like, dude, we really love you and enjoy you. | ||
| I feel like you're going to be a world champion in a few years. | ||
| And I was like 1 or 2-0 in the UFC. And I was like, that's a high praise from a guy that's worked with Frankie and built him up and all these other fighters he's worked with. | ||
| I was like, I appreciate it. | ||
| And we kept in contact, you know, mutual respect, you know, at the fights and seeing him. | ||
| But Ali, my manager, was like, hey, like, I'm not, you know, he's giving me some of my best life advice. | ||
| I know people have this perception of him. | ||
| But he's honestly helped me out so much and my family. | ||
| But he was the one that was like, look, I don't want to tell you what to do, but I truly believe that Mark is something that you need in your life. | ||
| He's a great mentor. | ||
| He's just a great guy to be around. | ||
| Happy-go-lucky. | ||
| He wants to win. | ||
| He shows you a good life. | ||
| You know, just things that he's been through in his life. | ||
| So he's like, I think you should go with Coach Mark. | ||
| And I'm like, for me, change. | ||
| I was always... | ||
| I didn't like change, but some change is growth. | ||
| You know, I looked at it differently. | ||
| You know, going out there and battling myself to, you know, get up and... | ||
| Be out of your comfort zone going out with Coach Mark. | ||
| So Ollie's kind of one that kind of set the staple to go out there. | ||
| I reach out to Coach Mark and Frankie. | ||
| I'm like, hey, I just want to let you guys know. | ||
| I want to come check you guys out. | ||
| We'd love to work with you. | ||
| I'm still going to be here with Team Alpha and my guys that has brought me up. | ||
| But I just need a head coach, a guy like Coach Henry that showed me a lot about breaking fights down, watching... | ||
| More fight tapes. | ||
| My guys, Chris, and my coach out there, they do the same thing. | ||
| But coach is just more hands-on on that way, breaking it down and repeating it. | ||
| Here's what we're doing. | ||
| We're working 10 rounds today, 10 five-minute rounds. | ||
| We have 50 combos that we're going over. | ||
| And then that's outside of camp. | ||
| And inside of camp, we're kind of limited to 30. So that's what we're working on for the whole camp of, you know, getting ready for your adversary, what he's doing and what you need to work with him. | ||
| So breaking that down and just constantly working was just... | ||
| He's got a mind that's like no other. | ||
| I mean, I've never met a coach quite like him, that thinks like him. | ||
| You know, there's people that are on his level for sure. | ||
| I feel like Chris is right there on a full spectrum of martial arts with the grappling. | ||
| I mean, Chris, he's a bad motherfucker. | ||
| I mean, we do one-on-one private sessions, and it's like... | ||
| No, Chris is a beast. | ||
| They're horrible. | ||
| They're horrible. | ||
| That dude's like a wet blanket on you, especially when you go from pads to takedowns. | ||
| Now you're grappling. | ||
| He's putting you in those bad positions. | ||
| You've got to fight out of this guy. | ||
| It's bad. | ||
| So let me ask you, what was Mark's initial approach? | ||
| Was it concentrating on defense? | ||
| Was it feints? | ||
| What did he want you to do different? | ||
| Obviously, you're a tremendous offensive fighter, and that's always been the key to your success. | ||
| But what did he look at? | ||
| He said, this is what you're lacking, or this is what we can improve upon. | ||
| Just, obviously, the feints, the defense, you know, timing them. | ||
| Sometimes my speed is a blessing and a curse. | ||
| Sometimes I'll feint, feint twice, and they're still, you know, off the first feint, and then I'm hitting the combo, so it's like I have to kind of dub it down a little bit. | ||
| Read more feints, do more eye feints, just feints with the feet, movement-wise, because the speed is just unreal. | ||
| For Mark, he was like, you're fast. | ||
| You're probably the fastest guy I've ever seen in the octagon. | ||
| No bullshit. | ||
| Your hands? | ||
| Oh, I try to be in there. | ||
| When you hit a sunset, that's one of the things I said. | ||
| I said, I don't think there's a faster person in the sport. | ||
| You have crazy fast hand speed. | ||
| But that is true, right? | ||
| Power and speed are sometimes people just rely on them so much. | ||
| I always go back to Roy Jones Jr. The Roy Jones Jr. in his prime was the fastest fucking human being that ever lived. | ||
| He was so fast. | ||
| But because of his incredible athleticism and ability, he developed this style that was just so unorthodox that it wasn't fundamentally sound to the point of the way Bernard Hopkins fights or the way some other fighters fight where they didn't have to be as fast. | ||
| Because Roy's thing relied so much on his speed. | ||
| Speed and precision, you know, and setting up, being in the right, hitting the quick shots and getting out and then coming with other stuff. | ||
| So I feel like what Coach helped out a lot, if you look at a lot of my losses, I would load up and put my head first. | ||
| Why am I going to give you my height? | ||
| Get back to the TJ fight, right? | ||
| The two fights. | ||
| You were more emotionally invested in those fights than any fight you've ever had, right? | ||
| Definitely, and that's not me. | ||
| I don't have to. | ||
| Joe, I love to fight. | ||
| I can fight in your studio right now. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I'll kick Jamie's ass. | ||
| You know, I'll make fun of his pants. | ||
| Making fun of his pants earlier, you know? | ||
| But, uh... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wait. | |
| Same team. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Same team. | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| So, I never... | ||
| Like, for me to go in there and kind of have that, you know, just an example of... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I don't need to do that. | ||
| Yeah, you know? | ||
| And, you know, it was great. | ||
| I was a world champion. | ||
| Felt like I had to defend it. | ||
| A lot of other stuff, you know, the backstory of it and the injury coming off the year. | ||
| I was just so... | ||
| Like I said, not mentally ready to go in there and fight. | ||
| That I physically was like overcompensated for it. | ||
| The emotions that go into a fight with someone you don't like, it's always extremely difficult. | ||
| But for you to go into a fight with someone you don't like, who you used to be tight with and used to train with, that's got to be like doubly difficult. | ||
| It's not like saying I didn't like TJ. I didn't agree with a lot of things that happened. | ||
| But that's so far in the past, you know, past that. | ||
| But Yeah, definitely taking that in there, my mental state was not what it should have been to go in against a guy like TJ. And we can fast forward to where he got popped and this and that. | ||
| TJ can be on that stuff. | ||
| He can be on that stuff and he still can't beat me. | ||
| When I'm focused and I'm mentally there and I'm in there and I'm excited. | ||
| I'm glad that he's coming back. | ||
| He's got to prove to himself. | ||
| And that's a big fight for me to come back to in the future. | ||
| That's going to happen. | ||
| I feel like TJ caught me at a time where mentally I was not in the best state of mind to go in there and be a champion. | ||
| And that's why I was taken from me. | ||
| You know, I wasn't doing the right things, you know, the slight edge things. | ||
| I wasn't doing those. | ||
| And, you know, he capitalized and I look back on it and I kept going back in those fights and a little bit of insanity. | ||
| You know, you got to be insane to repeat the same thing, thinking a different outcome. | ||
| And that's what I was doing in there. | ||
| I was always trained hard, always prepared, ready, but what was, what was, it wasn't nothing due that I needed to do. | ||
| It was just the slight, slight edge things. | ||
| Little work this, work that, like, and looking back on it, it's hindsight's 20-20, always in the fight. | ||
| But I'm thankful for that. | ||
| I have to feel like if I would have went off and defended the title, I probably wouldn't have been as hungry and motivated as I am today. | ||
| And that's going to help me out for the next five years of my career, however long I want to fight for. | ||
| You know, I always kind of break my life down into five-year increments. | ||
| But I'm excited for it. | ||
| I'm more hungry than ever because I know what it takes to get back to the top. | ||
| So when you said that you stopped visualizing for a long time and now you're doing it again, are you doing it now in, do you have like a rigid format? | ||
| Do you have like a disciplined format of visualization? | ||
| Or do you just spend time alone thinking about things? | ||
| Like how do you do it? | ||
| Yeah, I do a format, write things out. | ||
| I write out goals, three months, six months, year, five years, what I want to accomplish, whether it's financial, whether it's athletic, whether it's personal growth, spiritual growth, family growth, things like that. | ||
| So I try to prioritize what I'm lacking or what's the lower grade that I give myself and try to focus more on that so it's all balanced. | ||
| I feel like I'm trying to balance my life more as far as being... | ||
| I grew up in chaos. | ||
| I feel like I do well in that, but... | ||
| I'm at a different place in my life and what I want from my son and my future. | ||
| I want to have that balance of you're not so 100% in this and lacking this. | ||
| I want to make sure it's balanced across my goals. | ||
| But I feel like going back to talking about getting out of your comfort zone, doing things that absolutely suck and you've got to mentally put yourself in that position. | ||
| Were you in your comfort zone when you were a champion? | ||
| When you say getting out of your comfort zone, I know you trained hard. | ||
| What is different? | ||
| I think that I removed myself after winning the world title. | ||
| I didn't feel like it was everything that I thought I was going to be. | ||
| In what way? | ||
| Just the whole prolific, you're a world champion, you're the best in the world. | ||
| I never expected a lot of things that would happen. | ||
| What did you think it was going to be like? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't think I had any expectations when I feel like a lot of things change around. | ||
| Like, oh man, how does it feel? | ||
| I'm still the same person. | ||
| I'm just the number one person in the world. | ||
| What I do. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It just didn't... | ||
| Did you think that in achieving such a great goal that you would feel satisfied? | ||
| That you would feel like you made it? | ||
| I wasn't satisfied. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Maybe because that's what... | ||
| At the light of the tunnel, since I was 12 years old and I was... | ||
| Man, just through the journey of getting to where I was at, looking back on it, I was like, man, like... | ||
| You know what's next? | ||
| I didn't have the what's next Isn't it interesting like this is the thing that gets brought up all the time about fighting is that so much of it is mental Especially at the elite level like at your level so much of it is how you are approaching all aspects of your life How your relationship is going how your friendships are going like what how you what's your relationship with your family and You know, there's so much of how a fighter... | ||
| And then, what is your focus on? | ||
| Is your focus on adulation? | ||
| Is your focus on doing interviews and letting everybody tell you you're the shit? | ||
| Or is your focus on continual improvement? | ||
| And then recognize, like, yeah, you might be a world champion, but there's a bunch of hungry lions climbing up that hill to try to get to the king. | ||
| Yeah, you see it. | ||
| I have Chris Holdsworth, my coach, my trainer, my good friend. | ||
| He travels with me. | ||
| We put through hard workouts. | ||
| This morning, we're going to go after your podcast. | ||
| That's the thing, doing those, balancing that. | ||
| Okay, I might have come on your show, absolute honor. | ||
| I've got to train. | ||
| I can't take this week off. | ||
| We're here looking at homes and doing other things with PNP and my other business partners. | ||
| Just prioritizing what's important. | ||
| What's your goals? | ||
| How are you reaching those goals? | ||
| What are you working towards? | ||
| Are you reading help books, self-help books? | ||
| Are you reading books to help your mental fortitude to strengthen that? | ||
| Are you doing yoga? | ||
| There's so much resources. | ||
| And staying enthusiastic. | ||
| And staying enthusiastic. | ||
| I think that's the main thing. | ||
| I wasn't enthusiastic. | ||
| I felt like I was just going through the motions. | ||
| And there's a lot of other things. | ||
| There's a lot of things that can transpire. | ||
| But I'm solely putting the blame on myself. | ||
| Because that's all I can control. | ||
| What I do. | ||
| How I react to things. | ||
| And I wasn't the person that I am during those kinds of You know, tribulations or trials in my life. | ||
| And I've grown from that. | ||
| I was 24, 25 years old. | ||
| I'm 29 years old now. | ||
| You know, I look at the game just differently. | ||
| You know, I'm still a savage. | ||
| I'm still going to go in there and try to kill you. | ||
| Dana's gonna give us some extra money for a knockout bonus. | ||
| Sign me the fuck up. | ||
| Do you like the extra money, the bonus thing? | ||
| I don't even like win bonuses. | ||
| It drives me crazy. | ||
| I feel like a fighter should get paid. | ||
| I don't think you are trying to win anymore if you get a bonus. | ||
| You're a professional cage fighter. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense to me. | ||
| There's only one time in my professional career that I didn't get my second check. | ||
| And that shit sucked. | ||
| I was, man, I was... | ||
| Because you're banking on it. | ||
| We make our money through our fights. | ||
| And luckily we have some good sponsors if you're able to be sponsored by that. | ||
| But we fight. | ||
| That's how we make our money. | ||
| And then there's bad decisions, which is even crazy. | ||
| So it's not just that a bad decision gives you a loss, but it could cost you half of your paycheck. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| And we don't get to run it back next week. | ||
| We gotta recover. | ||
| We might be banged up. | ||
| Dude, that was my first time after the SunSouth fight since the KMizagaki fight that I didn't get injured. | ||
| I tore tendons and ligaments and stem cells out for eight weeks. | ||
| So I was like, man, I was back in the gym Monday, hungry to go, and then fucking COVID. Get COVID. Get the title shot. | ||
| I'm like, I'm about to fight Figgy at 25. You got COVID bad, right? | ||
| Did you get COVID? Were you in the middle of training when you got it? | ||
| Were you worn out? | ||
| Dude, dead. | ||
| I was doing one training session, and actually I started the WHOOP. And I was like, man, my recovery score is 1% in the morning. | ||
| My HRV was like 13. It was 1% for like a week. | ||
| And I would only do one workout, and then I'd have to cancel on Chris and Malai. | ||
| 1% is dead. | ||
| Dude, that's crazy. | ||
| But then I was like, you know, I'm just going to go ride the bike. | ||
| I was getting on those bikes doing 50 to 100 mile rides and just suffering because I had vertigo really bad, so I couldn't get in those uncompromised positions. | ||
| When did you start experiencing vertigo? | ||
| Vertigo was my first symptom of COVID, not knowing. | ||
| Did you think it was head injury related? | ||
| My doctor I went and saw, he's like, that's a concussion. | ||
| I'm like, dude, I didn't get hit hard in sparring, my fights. | ||
| I've worked on defense a lot. | ||
| I would know if it was a concussive blow that gave me vertigo. | ||
| Did you experience it after training? | ||
| Did you experience it? | ||
| Honestly, it was during grappling. | ||
| I was, like, grappling. | ||
| You didn't, like, collide heads or anything? | ||
|
unidentified
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Nope. | |
| Nope. | ||
| Just went into the scramble, and next thing you know, I was just, like, fighting the hands off, and the whole room was spinning. | ||
| And I was actually training with Uriah, and I was like, man, he's like, you all right? | ||
| I'm like, what's going on? | ||
| I was, like, kind of, like, didn't want to end the round, so I just kind of, like, closed my eyes and, like, held onto his hands so he wouldn't choke me, you know? | ||
| He was taking my back, so I was... | ||
| Finished around and I was like, man, I just don't feel good. | ||
| And I was nauseated for a few days. | ||
| So I went to my doctor. | ||
| He was giving me like anti-nausea medicine that was making me so much more tired than I was because I was fatigued from training. | ||
| I was just trying to train through it. | ||
| I was like, I have a world title coming up in eight weeks. | ||
| Like I have to get down to 25. And my weight was good. | ||
| I wasn't restricting any calories or nothing. | ||
| But you felt something was off with your body besides the vertigo? | ||
| My body felt like I just was for a three-week period when I was training and I didn't feel like myself at all. | ||
| Just mental clarity was... | ||
| So do you think during that time you had COVID the whole time? | ||
| I think so, you know. | ||
| That is crazy. | ||
| And that makes sense that it hit you so hard because you never gave your body a break and you were beating yourself up while you were fighting off COVID. Well, I think what happened was the kidney infection in the beginning of 2020. I was on all those antibiotics. | ||
| I was on five different antibiotics. | ||
| People don't even know this. | ||
| Two weeks before the fight with the Sun Tso, the infection came back. | ||
| So I had to go to another infectious disease doctor that my doctor Hill found in Sacramento. | ||
| This lady was amazing. | ||
| Did two blood cultures. | ||
| Found out. | ||
| Got all the reports from the hospital in Jersey. | ||
| The reports from the specialists in Cleveland. | ||
| Studied those all in a day. | ||
| Got a blood culture. | ||
| I was on the wrong antibiotics. | ||
| I didn't kill the infection. | ||
| Just basically put a band-aid over it. | ||
| So I had to go 10 days to an IV fusion center to get antibiotic drip for 10 days while I'm training. | ||
| Two weeks before the fight. | ||
| I didn't let any of the UFC or anybody know. | ||
| I told Ali what was going on. | ||
| I just needed to get in that octagon. | ||
| I was like, dude, just put me in that octagon. | ||
| I know that it'll happen. | ||
| Get me there healthy and I'll be good. | ||
| But that fucks with your endurance in a big way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The IV antibiotics are ruthless. | ||
| It was tough, man. | ||
| And my strength and conditioning coach, we were having the hardest time. | ||
| I was hovering around. | ||
| I was getting my heart rate up 187, and then I couldn't get it below. | ||
| It was like hover at 150, which I'm fine at staying at 150 and going up and being in that 150 to 180 zone that I can be there for a while. | ||
| But we're working on the aerobic system to drop it. | ||
| I just couldn't drop it. | ||
| It took... | ||
| About the last week of training before I flew out to the fight week to finally get my heart rate in like 35s like after a hard like a minute 30 push and then drop it down. | ||
| So I noticed something like that was it but mentally I was like it's good. | ||
| So two weeks out you did you had to do a 10 day cycle of IV antibiotics? | ||
| And then a 10 day of oral. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yeah, I was on antibiotics for literally five months almost from Jersey. | ||
| I was on five different antibiotics from the hospital. | ||
| So from the Assuntau fight, how many days did you have where you weren't on antibiotics before the fight? | ||
| I mean, I declared that I was on antibiotics all the way up to the fight. | ||
| Jesus Christ! | ||
| So you were taking probiotics to counteract the effects of antibiotics in your gut? | ||
| A lot of probiotics, yeah. | ||
| What were you taking? | ||
| Frankie Edgar's wife sent me... | ||
| They took care of me when I was in Jersey, hooked it up. | ||
| Coach brought me pizza in the hospital. | ||
| It was during COVID when it happened. | ||
|
unidentified
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Pizza? | |
| But don't you have to cut weight? | ||
| I don't cut weight to 35. Really? | ||
| I'm like, right now, I'm probably... | ||
| 144 oh wow like i don't and i stay you know strong and fast and this is what i feel good at to fight 35 yeah i'd have to just diet a little bit like everyone else does for 25 that's why everyone's making this a big deal going to 25 it's not that was a very interesting fight you you going down to 25 was very interesting i'm so excited for especially watching the moreno and figgy fight last fight um great fight you know awesome it was entertaining but a lot of holes are A lot of holes. | ||
| A lot of things that I can, you know, take away from both fights. | ||
| Whoever wins this next one. | ||
| But I'm not going to sit idle. | ||
| Are they fighting again? | ||
| Yeah, they're rematching each other. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| That's why I'm not going to wait. | ||
| It'd be eight months until I get a title shot. | ||
| So that's why I'm, you know... | ||
| Didn't Moreno fuck up his shoulder in that fight? | ||
| Ah, he did something. | ||
| Yeah, I knew he had to do some... | ||
| What a fight, though. | ||
| What a fight. | ||
| Yeah, great fight. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I thought Moreno did great. | ||
| I think that if he had more pop to his punches, Figgy would have been in some trouble. | ||
| You know, the takedowns looked great. | ||
| You know, I think... | ||
| Matching that, getting Figgy worn out. | ||
| I felt like in that fight, Davison really put himself on the line in terms of like... | ||
| He threw himself into the fire. | ||
| He didn't fight like he was worried at all about Moreno's firepower. | ||
| He was just trying to smash. | ||
| And Moreno is a tough motherfucker. | ||
| He's tough. | ||
| He's that dude that's been in the gym for so long getting his ass kicked. | ||
| Now it's finally like, I'm starting to... | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I know what you mean, yeah. | ||
| He's just one of those dudes that just... | ||
| He's like a Darren Elkins. | ||
| That guy gets his ass kicked and he'll kick ass too. | ||
| But when it comes down to the fight, this dude, he's all in. | ||
| Like the Mursad Bektik fight. | ||
| Perfect example. | ||
| That was one of the greatest comebacks I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| Yes, definitely. | ||
| Because Mursad Bektik is so technical, so fast, so precise. | ||
| The kid looks like a world champion for the beginning of the fight. | ||
| To hold Elkins down and do that, ground and pound to him. | ||
| Elkins is the number one fighter in the featherweight division with the most top game percentage per fight. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And Massat, you know, was on top of him. | ||
| I've grappled with, you know, Elkins is not, you know, easy to hold on. | ||
| He's an Indiana wrestler that's just like gritty and just like, let's go, dude, you know. | ||
| Isn't that amazing about the sport, though? | ||
| You've got to know how much gas you've got. | ||
| You've got to know when you've got to hit the gas and when you've got to back off a little, when you've got to pace yourself. | ||
| And if you try to empty out, and a guy like Elkins, who's so fucking tough, if he's still there, you've got a real problem. | ||
| Dude, when you crack someone with some of your best shots and they're just covered in blood coming forward, you're like, fuck. | ||
| Give me a baseball bat. | ||
| Let me hit this guy. | ||
| He's such a savage. | ||
| Such a savage. | ||
| Yeah, he's a great guy. | ||
| I mean, he leads by example. | ||
| He's not, you know, brash and outlandish talking. | ||
| He just gets in. | ||
| Blue-collar guy. | ||
| He's a pipefitter, you know, comes in. | ||
| and when he first moved out here he had to go back he was still UFC fighting and then part time he'd have to go back and get his union hours in and then stay for six months and come back and fight wow and so that until he finally retired from pipefitting and moved his whole family out. | ||
| Just a great guy, great family, tough as hell. | ||
| But, yeah, that is the kind of guy Marino is. | ||
| That just blood and guts, gritty guy. | ||
| And I think Figueredo... | ||
| I mean, Figueredo's so good. | ||
| I think he probably thought he was going to get him out of there. | ||
| He did. | ||
| I mean, especially with his... | ||
| Went over Alex Perez that quick. | ||
| And Benavidez. | ||
| Two knockouts of Benavidez, which is gigantic. | ||
| He's flying high. | ||
| It's good eyes on 125, but... | ||
| Motherfuck. | ||
| The Bantamweight division. | ||
| I can't leave that one yet. | ||
| There's so much going on in both divisions, though. | ||
| I'm staying here. | ||
| I'll cut the weight if you want me to fight this, but... | ||
| God, that division is stacked at 35. So you basically beat your immune system up while you had COVID and then because of that you got COVID really bad. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So tell me what it was like. | ||
| It was horrible. | ||
| Vertigo was the first symptom. | ||
| When did they test you for COVID? I didn't get tested until I went down to Mike Tyson's ranch. | ||
| We were working with the Smart Cups company. | ||
| We're all sponsored by them doing digital videos. | ||
| It was our first kind of getting athletes together because they started doing fighters, boxers, and some rest. | ||
| WWE Kurt Angle was there. | ||
| So I had to do a rapid test like we just did here. | ||
| I waited, waited a while, and they're like, hey, we want you to do another one. | ||
| I'm like, all right, cool. | ||
| We just didn't see some things we liked. | ||
| I was like, all right. | ||
| I'm waiting for an hour, do another one. | ||
| I'm like, what did you guys see? | ||
| Another test or something. | ||
| Yeah, what did you guys see? | ||
| I'm like, oh, you failed the first one. | ||
| I'm like, well, that's a subtle way of telling it. | ||
| I want to stay away from everybody. | ||
| Everyone's coming up to me. | ||
| So I tested there in August. | ||
| And then I went, you know, quarantined, went home, did the whole... | ||
| Did you do any medication? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What did you do? | |
| I did a Z-Pak. | ||
| I got on an inhaler because I had pneumonia. | ||
| I got pneumonia. | ||
| Vertigo. | ||
| And then I did like a 21-day because I had it so bad. | ||
| I kept getting tested like every three weeks. | ||
| And you kept having it. | ||
| Kept having it. | ||
| I did molecular tests, which was like some of the best ones to do. | ||
| Is that the PCR test? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And just kept negative, negative. | ||
| My doctor was like, hey, we're going to quit testing you. | ||
| You mean positive. | ||
| You kept testing positive. | ||
| Positive for it. | ||
| And I'm like, dang, this is crazy. | ||
| And I had started to have the symptoms going away. | ||
| Like, pneumonia was fine. | ||
| My lungs were good. | ||
| Like, I felt it. | ||
| That's when I started cycling a lot. | ||
| So I was out there just pushing the lungs. | ||
| That's what my doctor said was the best thing to do is... | ||
| Riding that bike that much is getting those lungs to keep working because you have pneumonia really bad. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I felt horrible. | ||
| I thought cycling was one of the hardest to do. | ||
| Isn't it funny because you would think, like most people would think that a guy who's a world championship caliber fighter is the type of guy who would get COVID and it would just burn right through his system. | ||
| But because you were training while you had it and beating yourself up, it just got deep into you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Deep. | |
| I mean, it took over my body, but I think, honestly, from the kidney infection being on the antibiotic, my immune system was so weak. | ||
| How much time was there between the kidney infection, the antibiotics, and then getting COVID? Dude, I literally got out of the hospital and I texted Dana like, hey, I heard you did a press conference about having a fight. | ||
| My kidney levels are good. | ||
| I'm waiting for maybe have to do a biopsy, but I want to fight. | ||
| He's like, all right, work on it. | ||
| I was like begging Sean. | ||
| So you got COVID right away? | ||
| So after the fight, I had June to August. | ||
| So it was from the kidney infection, the fight, two fight camps basically. | ||
| One didn't happen. | ||
| Building myself back up from where I was at, getting ready to fight a Sun Tau the first time in March. | ||
| Dude, I literally had to start walking on a treadmill for a couple weeks to get my... | ||
| I was in rough shape. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And I started training at my business partner's house. | ||
| He had a home gym because everything was closed. | ||
| Uriah's gym wasn't open. | ||
| He said, dude, I got a treadmill. | ||
| I got weights, kettlebells, you know, on a kettlebells. | ||
| And so I went over there and just started to train and I'm like, I'm getting myself ready. | ||
| And it was brutal, brutal, brutal training getting back in there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And this is pre-COVID? This is pre-COVID. This is kidney infection. | |
| Kidney infection. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| So your body was obviously already compromised. | ||
| Oh yeah, I was very compromised. | ||
| Still on antibiotics. | ||
| They still had me on antibiotics to clean out the infection. | ||
| I was on it for like a 30-day antibiotic from the hospital. | ||
| So August you get COVID. How long before it clears your system? | ||
| How long before you start feeling good? | ||
| Months like I literally I went to Miami and work with this company called amino wells and they did that kind of injections where we talked about I kind of stem cell injections throughout my body arms And I kind of started feeling a lot better at like the week after then I did a month on the injections with the three milliliters a Week and I felt really good body felt good Clarity went away. | ||
| I actually had to go to Arizona, the Mayo Clinic. | ||
| Dana thought I had Meniere's disease, so I went and saw his doctor that did his surgery. | ||
| They gave him a shot in his ears. | ||
| Did all these testings, hearing tests. | ||
| Did you have ringing in your ears? | ||
| I had ringing bad in my left ear. | ||
| I have a loss of hearing in this ear, and they don't know why. | ||
| I think maybe because I'm... | ||
| This is my lead. | ||
| And you get hit in the left ear a lot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I get hit. | |
| That's all I can say. | ||
| I'm like, I don't know. | ||
| I haven't shot a gun without, you know, anything like that. | ||
| You know, trying to just figure out why it's ringing. | ||
| It makes like this popping noise. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| And I was just getting so like dizzy. | ||
| I couldn't even do anything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So that probably contributed to the vertigo for sure, right? | |
| Usually it's ear things. | ||
| Yeah, they said crystals. | ||
| I had vertigo before. | ||
| I worked with UPMC. I was out for a whole year. | ||
| My pro debut broke my hand. | ||
| I had vertigo from crystals being out of the air. | ||
| I went to the UPMC. Crystals? | ||
| Crystals, yeah. | ||
| It was an irregular tube that was throwing my equilibrium off, which basically is positional vertigo. | ||
| That's the most common one. | ||
| A lot of people just can sneeze wrong or do something, sleep wrong on their neck, and they have vertigo. | ||
| And there's a maneuver you do to put it back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It wasn't positional vertigo. | ||
| It was just literally COVID had me so messed up. | ||
| So your body was so compromised from the antibiotics, the kidney infection, a second kidney infection. | ||
| So you were just basically getting your health back. | ||
| Which is crazy that you beat a Sun Tso in that state. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because you had to be clearly compromised. | ||
| There's no way you could have been 100% if you went through that much antibiotics before that fight. | ||
| But I think that goes back to my mental state where I was at. | ||
| I knew that I needed to get in that octagon and change this around. | ||
| I was not living a life like this. | ||
| I was tired of living on a three-fight skid. | ||
| I was ready to just get back in there. | ||
| And when you know, like for me, like we talked about earlier with the TJS fights, I don't have to go in there and be angry and upset and want to rip this head or hate this guy. | ||
| I have hatred for this guy. | ||
| It's a flip to switch. | ||
| Like when you know, you have it in you or you don't. | ||
| And that's been bred in me. | ||
| I've had it. | ||
| So I just needed to get in there. | ||
| I was like not taking no for an answer. | ||
| I mean my coaches and stuff like oh I don't know if you're gonna make it you know and coach Mark I'd call him because we basically did I would film my pad work and my sparring rounds and send it to a coach on whatsapp and then he would break everything down do more of this do less of that looking good looking fast on the you know your left toe counter off things like that so we did virtually you know Camp through there so then when he came out I kept working the codes to you know keep working your codes keep working you know and make sure you're doing under nine things like that and | ||
| then when we came to fight week it was just So, talk me through, you got COVID tested in August at the Tyson Show. | ||
| You knew that you had it. | ||
| When are you free of it? | ||
| This is the first test that I've passed since... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Today? | ||
| My doctor quit testing me. | ||
| February? | ||
| February, yeah. | ||
| Jesus! | ||
| See how excited I was? | ||
| I was like, dude, I'm free. | ||
| I'm free of it. | ||
| It was literally a couple months of having it, testing it, to where my doctor was like, I'm not going to send out any more tests because there were 72-hour return ones and... | ||
| Every time you did it, you had it? | ||
| Every time I did it. | ||
| And this is for months? | ||
| Tested my son. | ||
| He didn't have it. | ||
| I mean, we were... | ||
| I was... | ||
| Your wife didn't get it? | ||
| She ended up getting it. | ||
| But it wasn't as severe. | ||
| It was a couple months ago that she got it. | ||
| Two months ago, her and her twin got it. | ||
| And it was kind of, you know, they were sick, but not like what I had. | ||
| Like, I was just... | ||
| Yeah, well, you're a perfect example of, you know, obviously you're a super healthy guy and an elite athlete, but when you put yourself through training camp, there's only one way to get in shape. | ||
| You've got to beat yourself up. | ||
| There's no other way around it. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| And when you are so tough that you push through, even though you had COVID, and you let that shit get deep into your system, there's a lesson in there for people. | ||
| You know, because there's tough... | ||
| Tough's important. | ||
| You don't get where you get without being tough. | ||
| But there's also, you got to be able to take a step back and go, it's not wise to push sometimes. | ||
| And I think, honestly, if I got tested before having COVID, then, I mean, before I first had the first, like, I've had this before. | ||
| You probably never got it. | ||
| You probably would have had it for a couple of weeks or whatever. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It wouldn't be as... | ||
| Took over my body. | ||
| Then I came back and I hit pads the first time. | ||
| I'm like, dude, I'm in great shape because I was cycling 100 miles. | ||
| We had a hard pace. | ||
| We were riding four or five times a week, building the legs up. | ||
| So I started hitting pads again. | ||
| I was excited. | ||
| I'm back in the gym. | ||
| I can be around people. | ||
| Because on the bike, I was just on the bike trail on the road, just suffering on the bike. | ||
| Came back, hit pads the first time. | ||
| Man, my bicep was so sore that I remember going to sleep that night and waking up in excruciating pain. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And my bicep was just filled up with blood like this. | ||
| I thought I tore my bicep. | ||
| So I went to my doctor and he ultrasounded it and he thought it was a distinal bicep tear. | ||
| You know, DM did it. | ||
| I'm like, fuck, I gotta call Dana and tell him, like, hey, I'm just tore my bicep and then get the MRI. Get the MRI. Nothing's torn. | ||
| It was a guy that I had to go get an urgent ultrasound. | ||
| I tore my vein in half. | ||
| And it ripped in half. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| And then I had three blood clots. | ||
| So immediately they started injecting me with blood thinners. | ||
| I've been on blood thinners since three months. | ||
| This is because of COVID as well. | ||
| That's another thing that happens with people that have severe cases of COVID. They get blood clots. | ||
| And my business partner, Jeremy... | ||
| So Perkins, he owns PNP Medical, which they work with COVID, or they work with blood clots. | ||
| They have, you know, the devices they sell to doctors and hospitals. | ||
| And the whole time he's like, dude, I think you have a blood clot. | ||
| I'm like, there's no way I have a blood clot. | ||
| That's the number one silent killer in the nation is blood clots because people don't know they have it. | ||
| I had three of them in my arm. | ||
| Didn't even know. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| I just had, like, my arm was sore for a while. | ||
| So you were on blood thinners now? | ||
| I just finished up my last. | ||
| I was on blood thinners for almost three months. | ||
| So how do they know when to get you off them? | ||
| How do they know that you're okay? | ||
| So I was going every month after I did a month of blood thinners. | ||
| I was getting ultrasounds. | ||
| Re-altrasound me. | ||
| They were literally going from... | ||
| Because I literally had my... | ||
| My vein was like an electric cord, hard, like a rope. | ||
| I couldn't even set my arm down. | ||
| It was so sore, like driving the console. | ||
| And this only manifested itself when you started hitting pads? | ||
| After I hit pads, like my arm... | ||
| You didn't feel that before that? | ||
| No, like it blew the vein. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| It ripped the vein in half. | ||
| So your body must have been... | ||
| See, that's the thing too, right? | ||
| Like, I'm sure when you came back, you tried to rip... | ||
| Oh, dude, I was horny. | ||
| I was so horny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You wanted to smash those pads. | |
| I was feeling good. | ||
| I was in great shape. | ||
| My conditioning was on another level. | ||
| World of class always is. | ||
| All that cycling. | ||
| Yeah, and I was not getting tired. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| And usually my biceps hurt after I hit strikes. | ||
| I'm just hooking and just... | ||
| For the first few times if I don't hit pads in a while. | ||
| But this was another pain. | ||
| I woke up and my brother just moved in with me. | ||
| And I woke up in the middle of the night and it was at 6 and I had Chris's class. | ||
| And I literally hit my arm on the side. | ||
| I was like, I don't think I can go do jiu-jitsu. | ||
| I'm like, I got hill sprints. | ||
| I'll go do hill sprints in the afternoon. | ||
| Text my doctor, I'm like, hey, can you check my arm out? | ||
| And he was like, holy shit, man, this is not good. | ||
| So how long were you on the blood thinners for? | ||
| It was almost three months. | ||
| I just got off. | ||
| When I go back from here, I go to the hospital and get an ultrasound to see if the... | ||
| Because the one blood clot reabsorbed, but I still had one blood clot since the last one. | ||
| It has a superficial vein. | ||
| I learned a lot about health this year from the kidney infection, the blood clots. | ||
| And now I just did a blood panel. | ||
| So every camp before, I'm going to get a blood panel of things, checking what I'm low on. | ||
| Maybe a vitamin or supplement can help me out and not break my body down. | ||
| Dude, we're training two, three times a day. | ||
| You understand it. | ||
| A lot of people don't. | ||
| Just to get to the fight is amazing. | ||
| But to be able to peak on that night... | ||
| It's an art form. | ||
| It's an art form. | ||
| Yeah, it's scientific. | ||
| You have to really know your body and I usually do. | ||
| When you train with Mark Henry, does he have any different approach to strength and conditioning? | ||
| Does he leave that to other people? | ||
| Does he advise you in that or is he just technique oriented? | ||
| You know what he harps on and brags about and it's so funny from a boxer. | ||
| All boxers talk shit about wrestlers. | ||
| Like, oh, you're in those singlets. | ||
| He's like, get your wrestling. | ||
| Because he's fucking smart. | ||
| Dude, he knows. | ||
| He understands. | ||
| I mean, Rutgers is right there, so we have the Rutgers in the New Jersey Training Center. | ||
| So we go to train with those young, hungry college kids who are trying to fuck you up. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| All Americans, or you have the international wrestlers that are on the training center. | ||
| And it's just a dogfight, man. | ||
| You get those kids. | ||
| You're hand fighting for 10 minutes with these dudes and live wrestling. | ||
| And we all have wrestling backgrounds. | ||
| And it's funny, when we get into MMA, we kind of dip away from wrestling so much because we're focused on striking and jiu-jitsu. | ||
| And what got us there was those grinding wrestling matches when you're just, ah, man, it's miserable. | ||
| And so he always says, hey, every time I get off the phone with him, we're about to hang up. | ||
| He's like, hey, get your wrestling in. | ||
| I'm like, all right, cool. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's great. | ||
| So he harps on that. | ||
| Obviously strength and conditioning is big as well. | ||
| But don't... | ||
| See what I do? | ||
| I do strength and conditioning outside of camp. | ||
| That's when I rebuild my body, back, everything that I need to do that's going to get torn down in fights. | ||
| So I build this armor in camp and then I push the first four weeks outside of camp. | ||
| And when I get in camp... | ||
| The first four weeks are brutal. | ||
| You're sore. | ||
| You're hurt. | ||
| And then the last four weeks, you kind of modify your workouts to where you're... | ||
| So you don't do much actual strength and conditioning while you're in camp? | ||
| I do. | ||
| I touch the weight. | ||
| I touch the weight. | ||
| It's more for aerobic skill work. | ||
| I have my coach, Amadeo Novello, has worked with Danny and TJ and Joe. | ||
| So these guys see new methods that we're doing, and Danny always walks in and is like... | ||
| Wish I had this when I was a guinea pig, you know, overtrained. | ||
| He's learned so much and has us peeking at, you know, a strength weight and aerobic and just using all your different systems to formulate an MMA because, you know, like anybody, MMA training is so much different. | ||
| When you go in an MMA fight, you have to be a conditioned boxer. | ||
| You throw kicks in with boxing now, you're taking about a whole different cardio. | ||
| Then you've got to wait for... | ||
| You've got a guy like Khabib trying to fucking just take you down and be a wet blanket on you. | ||
| And then you have to get back on your feet and fight him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The cardio and the conditioning, I think, it scares me. | ||
| I get scared before my workouts. | ||
| I go there an hour before and everyone's like, oh, you're here early. | ||
| I'm like, well, I have to mentally prepare myself to put my body through that. | ||
| And I think that, going back to the slight edge there, I see a lot of my teammates, they're walking in, they're late, they have no urgency. | ||
| I'm like, I just couldn't do it. | ||
| I have to mentally put myself in there, what I'm going to do. | ||
| I might pass out. | ||
| I'm probably going to throw up. | ||
| I'm going to push my limits to where I'm going to feel like I'm going to pass out or I'm going to be sick after. | ||
| I feel like that's a slight edge theory you have to do and just getting to that point because, dude, how embarrassing would it be that I'm better than this fighter but my conditioning was worse and that's why he beat me. | ||
| Dude, being exhausted, having fatigue will make you a coward in any circumstance. | ||
| Vince Lombardi, right? | ||
| Fatigue makes cowards of us all. | ||
| Yeah, that's my favorite quote. | ||
| We had that in our wrestling room and I didn't even know what fatigue was. | ||
| As a kid, I'd always see this in our high school wrestling room. | ||
| We grew up in it. | ||
| We're homegrown from... | ||
| I had kids tying shoes on the first time on the mat to, you know, wherever you go to college after, like the same wrestling room. | ||
| The same coach was there for 30-some years, Eric Tokenan, and he was just old school, old school, and had quotes, and I'm like, fatigue makes cowards. | ||
| That one stuck in me, and then I figured out what fatigue was. | ||
| I'm like, well, I'm not going to be a coward. | ||
| I knew what a coward was. | ||
| I didn't know what a fatigue was, but... | ||
| And I'm not going to be tired. | ||
| I'm not going to be a coward. | ||
| Talk to me about the cycling, because I think that's really interesting that you developed all this endurance from cycling. | ||
| I mean, I go back to when Nick Diaz was in his prime, and one of the things that separated Nick from everybody was his elite cardio. | ||
| Nick has swam from Alcatraz five times. | ||
| Maybe more since then, because I remember I said twice once, and he corrected me. | ||
| He goes, five times! | ||
| I wouldn't do it one time. | ||
| That's shark infested waters! | ||
| Dude, I go to the beach and I'm all for it. | ||
| My son loves the beach, always wants to go. | ||
| I got to see my feet in the water. | ||
| I can't be out too far. | ||
| I got to see my feet. | ||
| The wife, she's out there. | ||
| She's Thai, so she's like, oh, I'm out in the deep end. | ||
| But yeah, that world-class cardio, that's what I think separates it. | ||
| Like... | ||
| Yeah, there's something about that, right? | ||
| The running, the swimming, the riding. | ||
| And I think because you're so alone in yourself, you're swimming, you're swimming. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| You're on the bike, you're in your thoughts, you're running, you're in your thoughts, you're pushing yourself. | ||
| And then you get into that, well, I've done defeated myself, I've done pushed myself past this limits where I want to give in. | ||
| Now I have another human that might have some will, that might give... | ||
| A little eye or body language that he doesn't want to be in here, now you start getting that confidence. | ||
| And I feel like for me, going into a fight is my confidence comes through my hard work, knowing that I left no stone unturned. | ||
| And I feel like that just, but you have to be smart with it. | ||
| Are you going to do that in all your future camps now or leading up to it? | ||
| It's because it seems like it was very effective for you. | ||
| Yeah, I feel like I just did my VO2 testing, you know, as high as it's ever been. | ||
| I feel like I have world class cardio, especially when the rounds get deeper. | ||
| I feel like I get better in the fight. | ||
| As I get tired, I get sharper, I feel, when I'm, you know, putting the work in great shape, of course. | ||
| So definitely, I think I have to tailor my cycling. | ||
| I'm not going to be, because I have back problems, you know, I've had some back issues. | ||
| Being in that bike for 7 hours riding 100 and some miles in that crouch over position, it locks you up. | ||
| Have you ever talked to Volkanovski? | ||
| I haven't, no. | ||
| He had a pretty severe back injury, and his back would blow out during every camp. | ||
| But then he got a really good strength and conditioning coach and worked with him on strengthening his back, and he's never had a problem since. | ||
| Because a lot of what happens with people that have back issues, where sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad, is the muscles around the back aren't conditioned to maintain posture, maintain the training camp, and then they give out. | ||
| And when the muscles give out, then you hurt your back again. | ||
| Then the big muscles lock up, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| So my strength and conditioning coach, Dale Novella, my PT, Russ, down here from Kind Performance, they've worked with a lot of baseball players who throw a lot like fighters. | ||
| So I don't do a lot of front-loaded squats, back-loaded squats. | ||
| I do split stance. | ||
| Single leg, a lot of single arms, single leg. | ||
| Lunges, that kind of thing. | ||
| Just to get the weight evenly distributed so it's not heavy load on one side. | ||
| I feel like that's been a huge advantage as far as strength where I'm not getting my back locked up. | ||
| I can still do these deadlifts. | ||
| I can still touch this heavyweight because you need to build your body in those backs. | ||
| Have you ever seen that harness system that Louie Simmons from Westside Barbell created? | ||
| He's in Columbus. | ||
| Yeah, Marcus Marinelli, a steep base coach, has one we used to train on. | ||
| That thing is amazing. | ||
| I got one in my old gym in... | ||
| What do they call that? | ||
| It drops down? | ||
| Belt squat? | ||
| Belt squat, yeah. | ||
| We have one at the old gym in California, and now I have one in my house from Sorenix, but it puts all the weight on your hips, so your back doesn't take that load. | ||
| Yeah, we have one at the gym. | ||
| It's called a pit shark. | ||
| And it's, yeah, the same thing. | ||
| Just puts it on the hips and you can just rip it. | ||
| So, yeah, we utilize that a lot. | ||
| Obviously, the machine that you gave me or told me to get reverse hyper. | ||
| That's another Louis Simmons. | ||
| That guy's a fucking wizard. | ||
| And then the machine that you just kind of like lay there and it kind of elongates the other... | ||
| Oh, yeah, that's the Dex from the company. | ||
| Dex 2. Yeah, Dex 2 from... | ||
| Goddammit. | ||
| It's one of the sponsors. | ||
| Teeter. | ||
| Yeah, Teeter. | ||
| They're the folks that have that... | ||
| Well, first of all, they have those boots that you can hang from those gravity boots, which are phenomenal. | ||
| And then that thing is the shit. | ||
| That Dex... | ||
| Is that a different one? | ||
| It looks a little different. | ||
| It's just a different color, I think. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| That thing is the shit. | ||
| That is my all-time favorite back. | ||
| You could do those back hyper extensions. | ||
| But in terms of loosening up your back and having your back decompressed, what I like about that over even the regular teeter is that this one, you're hinging from the hips. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| So you're not supporting yourself at all with your ankles or anything else. | ||
| Your body weight, in terms of your lower body, is all supported by your thighs so you can completely relax your back. | ||
| And the decompression is just phenomenal. | ||
| I love that thing. | ||
| Yeah, I'm thankful you gave me that or helped me get that. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Because my back, you know, that was when I was on the show three years ago when I had the back problems. | ||
| I literally get on there and my back starts getting tight from training or riding. | ||
| I'll lay in there, you know, five minutes at a time, you know, just kind of decompress. | ||
| The reverse hyper to strengthen it and also active decompression from the reverse hyper and then that thing. | ||
| Those two together are fucking phenomenal. | ||
| Yeah, and I feel great. | ||
| I mean, I'm going to knock on this wood, but... | ||
| That's good. | ||
| Do you do any yoga or anything as well? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I do. | |
| I mean, we spoke about that on a podcast years ago about doing hot yoga. | ||
| And I started getting into that. | ||
| But like I said, I do five days a week of PT. I do manual work with cupping and blading and grasping. | ||
| I've never had cupping done. | ||
| How is that? | ||
| What does that do for you? | ||
| It makes you have weird circles all over your body. | ||
| I feel like the only problem with that leading up to a fight is when guys see it. | ||
| Like the Adesanya fight with Paulo Costa. | ||
| He had them all around his calves. | ||
| I was just like, that ain't good. | ||
| If Izzy sees that shit, he's gonna know. | ||
| Yeah, and I was getting a lot of work done, too, during one of my fights with TJ, the first one in Madison Square. | ||
| I had Heather from the UFC come in, and I was just pretty banged up my neck and just stiff in my hand. | ||
| I've found use with cupping as far as my hips, getting hips getting kind of bound up. | ||
| So what does it feel like? | ||
| It loosens you up? | ||
| I feel like when you have a physical trainer and you're in these hips and you're hugging your other knee and these open up your whole exterior line, it just helps get the blood flow reacted there. | ||
| Traumatize it and then alright, the body's like, oh shit, something's happening here. | ||
| We gotta hurry up and he'll get the blood flowing there. | ||
| I think that's what happens a lot. | ||
| But I started doing dry needling too. | ||
| And a lot of athletes, like fast twitch athletes, it depletes them. | ||
| Like it just, and your muscles are just so fatigued and fried. | ||
| From dry needling? | ||
| From dry needling. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Just hits that nerve and it just spazzes it out and the muscles is like... | ||
| I don't know what it does. | ||
| My trainer, he did on some OBJ. Odell Beckham, he said that when he would do it, he would be kind of on rest for two days because his body's so fast twitched. | ||
| But I feel like when I'm that bound up, I need to do something like that. | ||
| But going to the PT, doing mobile strength and conditioning together, and just stretching. | ||
| Honestly, stretching and drinking a ton of water. | ||
| Like, staying hydrated was a huge thing. | ||
| Stretching is a funny thing because it's so important for fighters, but so few fighters really stretch. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They train, they maybe do a little bit of stretching, and then at the end they're done. | ||
| But it doesn't suck any more than strength and conditioning work, but for whatever reason, people don't like stretching. | ||
| I think it's the... | ||
| The middle, like, oh man, I gotta go stretch. | ||
| It's hard, but it's like, I can go and kill a two hour workout or an hour workout with pads or grappling. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Cause you express aggression. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Express aggression. | ||
| Like you're like, this ain't doing, but it's actually going to help you out in the long run. | ||
| The one that sucks the most is when you're, um, sitting your legs straight out and you touch your toes and you bring your body down cause you can't breathe. | ||
| So you're holding on your feet and you stretch it and it's like your hamstrings and your body's like, just stop, just stop doing this. | ||
| You can't breathe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Come on. | |
| You want to quit? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| You want to quit. | ||
| That is, to me, the most annoying stretch. | ||
| I've done so with my Pedro fight. | ||
| I tore all my carpius radius flexor tendon in my wrist. | ||
| How'd you do that? | ||
| Just fucking wide open slanging shit. | ||
| Slinging it from my belt waist. | ||
| Are you sparring hard or are you sparring technically? | ||
| Nah, I don't really spar. | ||
| I mean, I'll go in and spar. | ||
| I don't need to, Joe. | ||
| I feel like I know how to fight. | ||
| I feel like you do need to go in and get some shit thrown at you, but more technical sparring. | ||
| You just need to have someone throwing fast shit at you, like Chris. | ||
| He'll be throwing kicks and combos and our pad work, and he'll be moving around. | ||
| But I'm not taking those hard shots. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's very wise. | |
| I'm getting comfortable with getting stuff thrown at me and retaliating. | ||
| When did you shift? | ||
| I started shifting it probably prior to, you know, right after the Pedro fight, I would say. | ||
| I started doing that more and more. | ||
| Did you decide that you were getting beat up too much in training? | ||
| Honestly, I wasn't. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| Like, I felt like I was... | ||
| What made you make the shift? | ||
| I just wanted to train smart. | ||
| I didn't know if I was overtraining, over sparring. | ||
| Because I would get to the fights, Joe, and I would just be like, fuck, I gotta fight. | ||
| I felt like I was overtrained. | ||
| Is that also why you started getting the whoop strapped? | ||
| Yeah, the whoop was huge. | ||
| I kind of wanted to show you where your recovery is. | ||
| There's some days like you're not going to go over this strain, but it's sparring day. | ||
| You know you're going to go over that strain, but it's going to have... | ||
| Okay, after that sparring day, you're going to maybe take the night off instead of doing a pad session. | ||
| You're going to let yourself... | ||
| So I'm pretty much in tune with my body prior to having this. | ||
| It's just a tool to help me know... | ||
| Sleep, you know, HRV. I think that's a heart rate variable is great. | ||
| What your resting heart rate's at. | ||
| And then obviously, you know, the sleep's the huge thing. | ||
| Recovery for us is how much can you recover and go the next day? | ||
| I love the fact that it gives you real data so you don't have to guess. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You don't have to say, oh, I feel pretty good. | ||
| You can actually look at the Whoop app and it'll show you exactly where your body's at based on just real, pure feedback. | ||
| Not intuition, not guesswork. | ||
| Right, and you wear it for a while, what, 30 or 40 days, and it acclimates to your body, so it has that grace period of, like, get to know your body. | ||
| Training-wise, you know, like, I'll be done with a training session, and they'll already know that it was a kickboxing workout. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because of my heart rate. | ||
| Are you putting it on with one of those impact straps? | ||
| I have the impact straps when I grapple, but sometimes when I spar, I think I have it positioned right on my wrist that I wrap it with my hand wrap and then tape it, and it doesn't mess my wrist up. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So the strap's cool. | ||
| The strap was good, actually. | ||
| And I think closer to your heart, obviously, is going to get a better reading. | ||
| Is that real? | ||
| It sounded awesome. | ||
| It sounded great. | ||
| I don't know if that's the case. | ||
| You should just wear a chest strap. | ||
| Yeah, because I feel like when I wear the chest strap, but then you have it right in your sternum. | ||
| When you're sparring, you get front kicked or knee to the sternum. | ||
| I mean, I got hit there before with that thing. | ||
| That does not feel good. | ||
| It's not fun. | ||
| I'm like, shit. | ||
| No. | ||
| It goes flying everywhere. | ||
| You're trying to catch it in between sparring. | ||
| But this is nice. | ||
| It keeps it right in there with that sleeve. | ||
| And then with this covered up, it doesn't really bother me too much. | ||
| But I do do the strap when I do cardio and where I can check my phone. | ||
| Like when I'm doing the strength and conditioning. | ||
| But grappling, I want to make sure... | ||
| I want to know what my heart rate's at. | ||
| The UFC's have started doing punch dialysis. | ||
| They put the meters in your glove. | ||
| They cut it out and put this thing in your gloves. | ||
| Have you done that? | ||
| So just showing the volume of punches or the impact? | ||
| Impact. | ||
| I don't know what's in there. | ||
| I don't know what they're checking. | ||
| They're just like, oh, we're taking our gloves and, you know, you pick your gloves and then they give you the fight day. | ||
| During the fight, there's a little thing in your gloves. | ||
| Yeah, they literally cut your glove where the UFC logo was at and slide this thing in. | ||
| They take it out after each fight and put it in. | ||
| So he has your data. | ||
| I want to find out what it says with Francis. | ||
| Yeah, I was smart. | ||
| I'd always have a pair of gloves. | ||
| Dude, you get those gloves fight week, they're stiff as hell. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, oh, we're going to wrap them up and put it in this bag. | ||
| They're going to be in this little bag. | ||
| You get out, they're going to be at work. | ||
| So I used to always bring a pair of gloves that I would use the last two weeks of training camp so they'd already be broken into my hands. | ||
| I would just switch it out, and I got so nervous when they were like, oh shit, they got stuff in the gloves, like, we can't use our old gloves now. | ||
| Do you feel it any different? | ||
| No, not really. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No? | |
| I just, slight edge thing, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Slight edge thing, so, uh, but yeah, they tore us out, so I was like, I chickened out last fight. | ||
| I'm like, oh no, we gotta use these ones. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| So I would always bring in a pair of gloves that I had, and I would just have them in my bag, and I'm like, these are broken in, not these ones that are fresh and stiff as hell. | ||
| But do they make you wear those stiff, fresh ones? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's what they give you. | ||
| But you couldn't use the ones that you had? | ||
| They wouldn't let you? | ||
| I don't think they would let you. | ||
| I just always did. | ||
| You just always would do it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The gloves are not the best. | ||
| It's tough. | ||
| Eye poking, my thumbs. | ||
| Trevor Whitman has a phenomenal design. | ||
| His Onyx gloves, his MMA gloves, first of all, his boxing gloves, all of his gear is top of the food chain. | ||
| Shout out to Trevor. | ||
| He's the fucking man. | ||
| How many times have you been to a gym and you're like, Fuck, I forget my hand wraps. | ||
| And you can't hit with it. | ||
| Well, if you heat molded your gloves, you don't really need a hand wrap for that thing. | ||
| They're just so good. | ||
| They're just so much better designed. | ||
| What about his headgear? | ||
| Everything's great. | ||
| Everything he makes is great. | ||
| Shin pads, everything he makes is great. | ||
| But the thing, to me, is his gloves, his MMA gloves, they're superior. | ||
| They're a better design. | ||
| And I don't know what the deal is, why they can't make a deal with the UFC to use those Onyx gloves. | ||
| They should... | ||
| Fucking figure out a way to make it happen. | ||
| They are the best gloves. | ||
| They're so much better. | ||
| The hand positioning is better, first of all. | ||
| It forces your hand into this position. | ||
| Instead of like this, with MMA gloves, with UFC gloves, your hands want to extend. | ||
| It wants to open your hand up, and you have to force it closed. | ||
| Trevor's gloves want your hand closed. | ||
| They curve at the end. | ||
| It puts you in a natural curved position. | ||
| To be able to strike. | ||
| And they're better in terms of the protection they offer your hands. | ||
| Knuckles? | ||
| I'm all for that. | ||
| I mean, my hand's busted up. | ||
| Dude, as hard as you hit. | ||
| Busted. | ||
| I broke the hand. | ||
| I always have, you know, I wrap it, tape it. | ||
| See if you can get a photo of his Onyx glove. | ||
| What do you love about that? | ||
| Literally one year ago today is when Rashad was on the podcast to premiere them. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Was it? | ||
| Those gloves, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Officially, I guess. | |
| He measured me and shit and 3D scanned me and he's supposed to send me a bunch of shit. | ||
| But those are pride gloves, those on the right hand side. | ||
| Those are boxing gloves. | ||
| Yeah, those are the boxing gloves. | ||
| Is those his MMA gloves right there? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Where you were just at? | ||
| Where you're cursing? | ||
| Right there. | ||
| Click on that. | ||
| Nope, those are boxing gloves as well. | ||
| He's got... | ||
| Oh, it's right there, the white ones. | ||
| That's them. | ||
| That's them. | ||
| Those are the shit. | ||
| They are the shit. | ||
| They are so much better than any... | ||
| I've fucked with the Pride gloves. | ||
| I've touched a lot of different people's gloves and put them on different... | ||
| And a lot of good ones. | ||
| But those, head and shoulders above everybody else's. | ||
| They are phenomenal. | ||
| And they have the best protection for your hands, too. | ||
| Trevor Whitman, please change the gloves. | ||
| It's a new year, come on. | ||
| I know they were working on some sort of a deal, but for some reason they couldn't come to some agreement for whatever reason. | ||
| How many people get poked an eye in a fight? | ||
| A lot, man. | ||
| And it was less in pride. | ||
| Did you notice? | ||
| Less people got poked in pride. | ||
| The gloves were more curved in pride. | ||
| I'm all for it. | ||
| Let's start it. | ||
| Yeah, something needs to change because the eye pokes are... | ||
| I mean, Nick Lentz, I don't know if it was a poke or what, but he lost 40% of his vision in one of his eyes. | ||
| And he just retired from that. | ||
| He just retired, yeah. | ||
| He said his last fight he was seeing double. | ||
| I mean, look at... | ||
| Well, Bisping, I believe, was a kick that fucked his eye up. | ||
| And then subsequent surgeries and, you know... | ||
| It's happened to me before I got kicked in the eye in sparring and the toenail raised my eye and cut my eye and... | ||
| Luckily, I didn't have anything detached or anything bad. | ||
| That's how Mike Winklejohn lost his eye. | ||
| Holding pads for somebody. | ||
| Guy got him with his fucking toenail. | ||
| That whole camp, I couldn't spar. | ||
| My eye was bloodshot for like two months. | ||
| I guess I was just there. | ||
| I had to fight. | ||
| The things that people don't know about what fighters go through. | ||
| The headaches were crazy, man. | ||
| From that? | ||
| Intense. | ||
| From the eye pain? | ||
| From the eye pain, yeah. | ||
| I had to get drops in my eyes for two weeks. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Damn, dude. | ||
| It's been a journey though, man. | ||
| It's been fun. | ||
| I mean, I would love to do it all over again. | ||
| Now, where are you at now? | ||
| Do they have anything lined up for you? | ||
| Obviously, you're clear of COVID now. | ||
| Clear of COVID. I let Dana and Sean, UFC brass know. | ||
| When did you start feeling like you felt 100%? | ||
| I mean, today was the first day you tested negative. | ||
| But when did you start feeling 100%? | ||
| I'd say about a month ago. | ||
| Jesus Christ! | ||
| About a month ago. | ||
| A month ago, folks, is January. | ||
| We're in February now. | ||
| We're talking about a disease that you caught in August. | ||
| That is crazy. | ||
| To where I could feel like I could go and push myself and then the next day be able to, or that night, be able to recover. | ||
| So you were a good four plus months just wrecked. | ||
| Horrible, yeah. | ||
| Trying to just work through it. | ||
| I still work through it. | ||
| Third of a year! | ||
| Still riding the bike, still doing my strength and conditioning individually when I had the COVID. Or you still have the symptoms. | ||
| You know, they have all kinds of studies that say you're only, you know, contagious the first 48 hours, this and that. | ||
| What? | ||
| 48 hours? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I've read up and done so much studies on what it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| I don't think that's true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't think that they... | ||
| Maybe they just changed their... | ||
| In the beginning, they had all these thoughts in the beginning that they thought, you know... | ||
| Double mask! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, now they're triple-mouthed. | ||
| Triple-mouthed is safe. | ||
| Even better. | ||
| Dude, we flew out here. | ||
| I saw a lady with a double mask, a shield, and goggles, and gloves. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I've seen this. | |
| My friend Reggie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sorry. | |
| My friend Reggie Watts turned me on to this. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| Come on, son. | ||
| Am I upside down? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Is this the right way? | ||
| Yeah, there's a pad up for the forehead. | ||
| Come on, son. | ||
| How about this? | ||
| Dude, I need one. | ||
| Where's Reggie at? | ||
| Let me fly home. | ||
| I don't want to experience COVID again. | ||
| I don't think you're going to catch it again, right? | ||
| You must have mad antibodies. | ||
| Maynard Keenan from Tool, he got COVID a second time. | ||
| Bad. | ||
| He had it bad once and he got it a second time. | ||
| Yeah, I started cycling, so I started following some of the athletes that were top in the world. | ||
| The cyclist athlete, he got it twice, you know, back-to-back. | ||
| That's one of those things where I wonder if it's because they're training so hard. | ||
| Because when people train so hard, your immune system gets crushed. | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| Everyone said that to me. | ||
| Like, oh, you're a world-lead athlete. | ||
| You should be able to get this. | ||
| And I thought that, too. | ||
| Because I remember, what, Pedro Munoz, when he was fighting Frankie, tested positive, had to push it back. | ||
| Like, he's getting ready to fight. | ||
| Like, he had no symptoms. | ||
| Like, he was good. | ||
| Like, he was asymptomatic, maybe. | ||
| But then he pushes it back, you know, a month or so, and he's still fighting. | ||
| Gilbert Burns, same thing. | ||
| Yeah, I guess everyone's different. | ||
| Somehow, you know, it attacks you differently. | ||
| But I truly believe that mine stemmed from, you know, the kidney infection breaking my body down with the damp antibiotics. | ||
| But what was I supposed to do? | ||
| Did other guys in the gym get it? | ||
| There's a few. | ||
| Not like a huge outbreak, you know, outspread of anything. | ||
| A handful here and there where we closed down for, you know, a week. | ||
| And how did most guys, what was their cases like? | ||
| Not what I had. | ||
| Mild? | ||
| Mild? | ||
| Mild. | ||
| I honestly don't know. | ||
| I mean, I could probably just stem to that, you know, being on the antibiotic and When you're on antibiotics, it's not good. | ||
| It's not good for you. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's terrible for you. | ||
| I had to do, though. | ||
| The recovery from that is rough, too, because your body just does not want all that stuff in the system. | ||
| All those antibiotics, they kill the good bacteria, too. | ||
| I was feeling horrible. | ||
| I wasn't even drinking coffee. | ||
| My stomach was so upset. | ||
| I couldn't even drink coffee. | ||
| I love coffee, you know? | ||
| Dude, I had staph once. | ||
| The first time I got staph, I had it and they put me on some heavy antibiotics. | ||
| And boy, did that give me so much respect for people that have fought on antibiotics. | ||
| Because I never realize how bad it wrecks you. | ||
| Luke Rockhold won the title. | ||
| He beat Chris Weidman on antibiotics, which is fucking insane. | ||
| When you do antibiotics, I felt like my head was filled with cotton. | ||
| I was like, ugh. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, it was horrible. | |
| I hope my body was weak. | ||
| Every punch I got hit in training and just little things, I was like, ah, that shit hurt way more than it should have. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It was all fragile. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Terrible. | |
| I was like, man, just give me a tampon. | ||
| I'm getting the fuck out of here. | ||
| I'm being a bitch right now. | ||
| So, now you're clear. | ||
| And now, what is, like, do you contact the UFC and say, hey, I need three months? | ||
| I need, you know, what do you say? | ||
| I told Dana that I'm healthy, Sean, Ali. | ||
| I'm keeping good communication with them. | ||
| I got a relationship with them outside of, you know... | ||
| Business and friendship, but when it comes to business, let Ali go in there and do that. | ||
| So I told him, hey, I'm ready. | ||
| I'd like to fight Jose Aldo. | ||
| They told me I had a title shot. | ||
| I'm not going to wait until eight months and see what the flyweight division is going to do. | ||
| I'm healthy. | ||
| I want to get in there and fight. | ||
| I want to fight two or three times this year. | ||
| Jose Aldo is a phenomenal legend. | ||
| A lot of respect for him coming off a big win. | ||
| He was right there fighting for the title of the fight before. | ||
| I think that's a great fight stylistically for me. | ||
| And it gets me up. | ||
| It gets me hungry, motivated. | ||
| I'm going to fight a legend. | ||
| He's at my weight. | ||
| I get to fight Jose Aldo. | ||
| I get to stay at 35. Is that the proposed fight? | ||
| Or is that what you're wanting? | ||
| That's what I'm wanting. | ||
| Ali told me that everyone's for it. | ||
| Dana just has to make the fight. | ||
| So, how many months would you need now, knowing that you're over the illnesses? | ||
| I've been saying April. | ||
| I've been saying April, and Ollie talked to me yesterday and said, you know, maybe May. | ||
| I said, if it doesn't happen April, May, we've got to move different opponents, and I'm ready to fight. | ||
| But you want him because he's a big name? | ||
| Big name, firmware champion. | ||
| There's a lot at stake. | ||
| I like the stylistically fight. | ||
| This is looking not past him. | ||
| But if I'm going to fight Aldo and I still have the title shot at 25, which they've told me, but obviously a rematch. | ||
| I'm for it. | ||
| I want to fight for it. | ||
| I want to earn my spot like I did in the beginning to be a champion. | ||
| What would you prefer? | ||
| What if Marino gets injured and they say Figueiredo wants to fight you? | ||
| Would you prefer that or would you prefer the Aldo fight? | ||
| Either fight. | ||
| I just want to fight. | ||
| You just want to fight. | ||
| Any fight, to be honest. | ||
| Any fight that makes sense to me, makes sense to my career, where I'm going. | ||
| And if I'm having the title fight after, you know, whoever is declared winner, and say, Moreno's a striker, you know, Figge's a striker, Aldo's a striker. | ||
| It's not that I have to get ready for a different camp. | ||
| I don't have to get ready for this jiu-jitsu savant. | ||
| Well, Figge Reno's a jiu-jitsu savant, too, man. | ||
| That motherfucker's got a guillotine in the house. | ||
| 100% takedown defense. | ||
| I would love for him to try to take me down. | ||
| I'm going to box that fool up. | ||
| Honestly, I'm so... | ||
| You know, I'm confident. | ||
| I'm confident in that. | ||
| You sound very confident. | ||
| After watching that fight, I'm telling you what, if I hit him as many times as Moreno hits him, he's going to be face down ass up. | ||
| He fought almost like Moreno had no business in there with him. | ||
| And Moreno does... | ||
| Moreno's tough. | ||
| He's tough as fuck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's tough. | |
| He's a gritty dude like we talked about earlier. | ||
| He's going to keep coming. | ||
| You're going to have to knock that dude out and stop him. | ||
| But what a fight that was. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| Because of the way he fought and, you know, Moreno's style. | ||
| I think he exploited a lot of weaknesses, the takedowns, the punches on the brakes, the kicks, was really what stood out with me. | ||
| He was blitzing with the hands and, you know, Figgy goes down with his hands and those kicks were coming. | ||
| He was catching me caught with the kicks. | ||
| He got hit with a lot of stuff that's, I feel like I'm better, faster, stronger than, And vice versa, Viggy, if I'm fighting Moreno, he's... | ||
| Well, it'd be interesting to see you at 25 because you'd be really big. | ||
| You'd be really big for that weight class. | ||
| I feel that Figuereda has been at our gym. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's a big dude. | |
| He's done two or three camps at our gym, Team Alpha Male, with the Brazilian connections that we have. | ||
| That fool's bigger than me. | ||
| Yeah, he's big. | ||
| He walks around bigger than I do. | ||
| Well, he is fucking shredded when he gets down to 25. And he's missed it before, you know what I mean? | ||
| He missed it for the title when he fought Joe Benavidez the first time. | ||
| I mean, that just shows you where you're at. | ||
| You're cutting all that much weight. | ||
| He's just honestly fighting out of his weight class. | ||
| He cuts out much weight. | ||
| And that's why I like 35 because I'm not that person. | ||
| But if I have opportunity to go and help a division and bring awareness and bring attention to it, I'm all for that. | ||
| That's what we spoke about with Sean and the UFC and Dana and Mick. | ||
| Yeah, I would love to be able to bounce back and forth, not just win these titles and be like, oh, I'm going to retire. | ||
| What did you think about TJ trying to get down to 25? | ||
| I thought that was the scariest I ever saw a fighter look, like, leading up to a weigh-in. | ||
| I knew he was going to get knocked out. | ||
| Did you? | ||
| I knew, uh... | ||
| Because he was just so depleted. | ||
| I think Monster sent a video of him doing this. | ||
| I'm just like, ah, his neck was just too frail. | ||
|
unidentified
|
His face. | |
| His face, neck. | ||
| He had no fat. | ||
| Yeah, no fat at all. | ||
| And he was clearly, like, eating his muscle tissue. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Like, that was not healthy. | ||
| And TJ walks around bigger than I do. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| About 10 pounds. | ||
| TJ's probably, you know, 55s, you know? | ||
| And was cutting down to that... | ||
| To 35 and then made it all the way down to 25. Exactly. | ||
| That training lab that he works out with, that... | ||
| Cavio? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm fascinated by that guy. | ||
| It's really interesting because they've got it down to a science, like everything from your nutrition to... | ||
| The cardio, all the different types of workouts that they do. | ||
| And the guy does everything out of his fucking garage. | ||
| Out of his garage, that's awesome. | ||
| It's pretty wild. | ||
| Yeah, it seems like it's work. | ||
| I know my buddy Lance Palmer, he trains with Coach Cavia and speaks highly of him. | ||
| He works out. | ||
| It's structured for him. | ||
| He has his program. | ||
| He's in Jersey. | ||
| He can do the training at home. | ||
| He can do it at his house. | ||
| He's in Ohio. | ||
| So that's great. | ||
| Lance is one of those guys. | ||
| He's a workhorse. | ||
| You tell him, here's what's on the agenda, you're going to do it. | ||
| Is he with the PFL now? | ||
| He's with PFL. Back-to-back champ. | ||
| The first ever in their organization. | ||
| He's getting ready, I think, April. | ||
| The featherweight tournament starts again. | ||
| So he's getting ready to ship out to camp to Coach Henry as well. | ||
| PFL is interesting now, right? | ||
| Because now they just took on Rory McDonald and they got Showtime Pettis. | ||
| So they're juicing up their roster. | ||
| They got some new heat. | ||
| It's nice for a lot of the fighters to have options. | ||
| Fuck yeah, dude. | ||
| It's nice to see Rumble and Yoel Romero at Bellator. | ||
| Holy fuck, they're fighting each other. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| I'm excited for that. | ||
| It's a big fight. | ||
| For both of them, I mean. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow, that's going to be a fight. | ||
| Look, Bellator's put on some great fucking fights recently. | ||
| Mousasi versus Douglas Lima was a great fight. | ||
| They've got a lot of heat there now. | ||
| They've got that Russian champ that just beat Bader. | ||
| I mean, that dude's solid. | ||
| He's a beast. | ||
| Yeah, oh man, he's huge. | ||
| They've got great fighters. | ||
| They've got great fighters. | ||
| I'm excited for that fight. | ||
| Yeah, I just don't like the name Bellator. | ||
| I think it's a dumb name. | ||
| Bellator, yeah. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| What's a Bellator? | ||
| Yeah, just call it MMA. I mean... | ||
| Let's go fight in that steel cage. | ||
| People want a champion. | ||
| You have an organization. | ||
| You've got to have a name for your organization. | ||
| But I felt like with boxing, whether it was the WBO or the WBC or the IBF, here's the lightweight champion of the world. | ||
| Here's the welterweight champion of the world. | ||
| This is the WBC welterweight champion. | ||
| They need something like that. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Because a Bellator is like, what is a Bellator? | ||
| Unification. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It means warrior in Latin. | |
| That's not the worst name. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| Who's speaking Latin? | ||
| It's a dead language. | ||
| Who knew that? | ||
| I did. | ||
| I knew it. | ||
| We looked it up before. | ||
| But it's goofy. | ||
| Yeah, UFC is nice. | ||
| It's catchy. | ||
| It's short and syllable. | ||
| UFC. It's like Q-tips. | ||
| They got it locked up. | ||
| Do you train UFC? I train UFC. Everybody does. | ||
| Nobody wants cotton swabs. | ||
| You got any Q-tips? | ||
| It's a fucking Q-tip. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| No one asks for cotton swabs. | ||
| Do you ask for a tissue or do you ask for a Kleenex? | ||
| He asked for a fucking Kleenex. | ||
| Ah, tissue. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| My argument did fall apart, you're right. | ||
| No, that was great, yeah. | ||
| I was doing good for a little while. | ||
| Fucking tissue. | ||
| Kleenex. | ||
| Do you ask for petroleum jelly or do you ask for Vaseline? | ||
| Vaseline. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| It's just the name UFC means so much. | ||
| You know, it's like, I don't care how big the XFL gets. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The NFL is the NFL. UFC, NFL. NBA. You grew up watching that shit. | ||
| It's like UFC, you know. | ||
| You have yourself there and everybody that's... | ||
| Liddell's, Latito's, they branded that. | ||
| This weekend, I'm flying to Vegas for the fights and I'm fucking pumped. | ||
| Kamaru Usman versus Gilbert Burns. | ||
| That is a wild fight. | ||
| I'm pulling in that fight. | ||
| I'm really pulled at it. | ||
| I like both dudes. | ||
| I think both are great assets. | ||
| I just feel... | ||
| And then it wavers because now you have Usman working with Trevor fucking Whitman. | ||
| How great is that? | ||
| I know when I went to Coach Henry for that time, shorter time, how much I leveled up. | ||
| Maybe that could have been a difference in Usman striking and opening up his game more, working with a coach at that much knowledge and to give into the game. | ||
| I mean, look, Gilbert's working with Henry Hoof, too. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And there's no weakness there. | ||
| Look, Gilbert is a monster. | ||
| He's a terrifying guy, because Gilbert is a guy that was torturing himself to get to 155, moves up to 170, and he's just smashing people. | ||
| And the way he beat Tyron Woodley, boy, did that open up a lot of fucking people's eyes. | ||
| That first combination that he threw at him, I was like, holy fuck. | ||
| when he dropped him you're like oh jesus christ and on top of that world champion in jujitsu i mean gilbert's a phenom on the ground and like what camaro's good at is wrestling you know what i mean like camaro is also good at just mental toughness his mind is as strong as any man that fights in the octagon he's rock solid i mean you're talking about a guy who's never been taken down never been dropped I mean, he's a fucking monster, man. | ||
| Kamaru is a monster. | ||
| And then fought in his fight with Masvidal with a broken nose. | ||
| He shattered his nose before that fight. | ||
| After the fight, they're testing. | ||
| They go, you got a broken nose? | ||
| He's like, yeah, I had that already. | ||
| I've had that, thanks. | ||
| I had that coming into the fight. | ||
| Can we get it fixed now? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, literally had a shattered nose coming into one of the most high-profile fights of his life. | ||
| And that shit that, you know... | ||
| The general public don't understand what you go through to get to the fight. | ||
| He didn't even talk about it until recently. | ||
| No one even knew about it until recently. | ||
| He knew what he was going to do was win at all costs. | ||
| I'm a big fan of both of those guys. | ||
| I think that's a wild fight. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| And they train together. | ||
| Yeah, and they train together. | ||
| I trained with TJ going into those fights. | ||
| I knew what I did in training, and training is training, though. | ||
| But you also know tendencies, you know where you have an advantage. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Training is training, but... | ||
| Especially fighting, because you're going against TJ, he's not your fucking friend on the mat. | ||
| That motherfucker wants to win at all costs. | ||
| So do I. We're competitive. | ||
| You get us in a room of... | ||
| Sharks, you want to be the top shark. | ||
| You want to be the cream rises to the top. | ||
| I think everyone on our team is so good and we just level up with each other because if you're a guy in the room pushing the pace and you want to be that guy that's the man, the other guys are going to, the room elevates. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you ever run into him since then? | |
| TJ, no I haven't actually. | ||
| How do you think you guys would talk? | ||
| Do you think you would or do you have any animosity? | ||
| No, I don't, man. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like I said, I feel like it was a lifetime ago and I was just a different person with the approach of everything. | ||
| I feel like we've both probably hopefully grown from there. | ||
| I know he's had his... | ||
| Stuff to come over, you know, with the testing positive for the EPO. Two-year ban. | ||
| Two-year ban, you know. | ||
| And all eyes are on him now. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| You can't fuck up now. | ||
| And then if he falls off, like if his performance is off, or if people think that he's not the same fighter, then they're going to call into question his legacy. | ||
| Well, same here. | ||
| Same here. | ||
| I was the undefeated world champion. | ||
| Right, but you didn't cheat. | ||
| I didn't cheat, but I fell off. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I started losing fights. | ||
| But there's a difference. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's a difference. | ||
| What I'm saying is, like, the real problem with someone getting caught for performance-enhancing drugs is now the public is looking at your next performance and... | ||
| Look, if a guy takes two years off and comes back, you're assuming there's going to be a certain amount of octagon rust. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Some guys don't have it, some guys do. | ||
| But if a guy comes back after a two-year ban, and he was banned because of performance-enhancing drugs, and then there's a drop-off, then people are going to be pointing a finger at you. | ||
| that'll just be a case rested with knowing that he was on that the whole time you know and just now got tested for you know you saw it as great you know all for testing but we're pissing in a cup yeah you know how hard is a test for EPO like come on I don't know how hard it is because I don't They normally test for it. | ||
| Yeah, they don't. | ||
| They don't normally test for it. | ||
| It's extensive testing. | ||
| It's expensive testing to do. | ||
| So why are we getting tested? | ||
| I remember when USADA first came in, we used to get random drug tests, quarterly whereabouts, we're addressed at 365. They would come in the morning, they would come in Sundays, afternoons, just sporadic to try to catch people, which I'm all for. | ||
| They used to bring a phlebotomist who would take blood. | ||
| I was like, oh, this is awesome. | ||
| You know, we're doing urine and blood. | ||
| And then it stopped with the phlebotomist coming and giving the blood. | ||
| It was just urine. | ||
| I'm like, how easy is this to just... | ||
| Is it? | ||
| Because they keep catching people. | ||
| You got to think, man. | ||
| If you have a... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| This is my theory. | ||
| If you have a doctor you're good friends with and you give them like, here's $100,000 to help me get this test and, you know, and check my levels and know that I got a peek at this or I have to be off at this time. | ||
| You don't think a doctor's out there in the world that's going to help? | ||
| Well, listen, there's a guy on YouTube. | ||
| His name's Derek, and he's got a YouTube channel called More Plates, More Dates. | ||
| And he's a chemist and is, like, involved in bodybuilding. | ||
| But he talks openly about the benefits of performance-enhancing drugs, whether or not people are natural or not, how people are getting caught. | ||
| And he has this thing on Paulo Costa, what he thinks Paulo Costa's on. | ||
| He gets into that, and he also gets into John Jones. | ||
| And what he thinks was happening and why he thinks that there's giant flaws in the USADA testing protocol. | ||
| But this guy is super informed. | ||
| Check him out. | ||
| Very, very intelligent. | ||
| Like I sent it to Shob. | ||
| I go, dude, watch this video. | ||
| This is fucking crazy. | ||
| Because he details all the stuff that you can do to skirt the USADA protocols. | ||
| I bet. | ||
| And it's pretty weird. | ||
| Like, I thought it was locked up. | ||
| I thought, like, there's no way to cheat now. | ||
| And he's like, no, you fucking 100% for sure can still cheat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And USADA didn't even catch TJ. It was the New York Athletic Commission. | ||
| Really? | ||
| That popped him. | ||
| Was it? | ||
| Yes, it was the New York Athletic Commission. | ||
| So they tested him for EPO. They tested him for EPO. No kidding. | ||
| Blood test. | ||
| I didn't even get tested in my last fight. | ||
| At all? | ||
| Dude, they said, USADA's coming. | ||
| We're going to test you the fight of the week. | ||
| Never, never once. | ||
| I got tested from the Athletic Commission. | ||
| I'm pretty sure I did blood after and a urine, but I didn't test it from USADA. So why do we have to do these whereabouts where we're like, man, sometimes if I didn't log in and say I'm out here and give an address where I'm staying at, they show up to my house, that's a failed, you fail. | ||
| You get three of those and you're out for three years. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, then how are some... | ||
| Chad, you know, and these guys get these sentences that are three years. | ||
| TJ took EPO and only got two years. | ||
| Well, what did Chad get caught? | ||
| It was like a peptide for his... | ||
| Peptide and something... | ||
| He has... | ||
| What the fuck is it called? | ||
| The skin... | ||
| A psoriasis. | ||
| Psoriasis. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Wasn't it for psoriasis? | ||
| Something tied like that, I'm pretty sure. | ||
| I didn't really... | ||
| I felt like that was what he said. | ||
| He used a peptide cream. | ||
| But if that was the case, why did he get three years? | ||
| TJ willingly knew that he was doing EPO. The only way to do EPO is inject it into yourself. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And he got a two-year sentence. | ||
| Chad was kind of thinking about moving on anyway, right? | ||
| Right, so he was probably just like, ah, fuck it. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he's got that guide service, fins and feathers. | ||
| He's doing great. | ||
| He's got his meals. | ||
| What is the name of his company again? | ||
| Find out with Chad Mendez's meal company. | ||
| Got some jerky, too. | ||
| Because he sent me some of it, and it's really fucking good. | ||
| And it's real healthy. | ||
| Like, a lot of those backpacking meals, they're not that good. | ||
| They don't taste that good, and they're not designed for athletes. | ||
| Candy army food from years ago. | ||
| You fart like crazy, dude. | ||
| Well, thanks, Chad. | ||
| Thanks for sending me some. | ||
| Not his stuff. | ||
| His stuff is really good, but I've had some of the other stuff, and your body's like, what is this? | ||
| Get this out of me, yeah. | ||
| You're out there hunting and blasting horrible farts. | ||
| There's no oaks or deer coming like that. | ||
| Adam was like, no, no, no, son. | ||
| They're downwind of that. | ||
| They're going to know something's wrong. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Joe's back. | |
| Joe's trying to store his refrigerator. | ||
| Oh, he had that fettuccine from that bag. | ||
| Because, you know, you take those things and they're freeze-dried and then, you know, you add water to them and they're dehydrated. | ||
| Yes, that's it. | ||
| Peak refuel. | ||
| Elk ragu pasta. | ||
| His stuff is phenomenal. | ||
| Chad, I've never seen this. | ||
| Chad Mendes, that's his shit. | ||
| Yeah, and he's always working on it. | ||
| He posts it on his Instagram. | ||
| That's, in my opinion, that's the best out of those backpacking, camping, hunting meals. | ||
| Is he freeze-dried? | ||
| Is that what he does? | ||
| See what it says, whether it's dehydrated or freeze-dried. | ||
| It says freeze-dried. | ||
| Yeah, it says there. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| It's phenomenal. | ||
| Phenomenal stuff. | ||
| Yeah, that'd be great. | ||
| Yeah, because he's an athlete. | ||
| He knows the right foods to put in your body. | ||
| He eats really clean. | ||
| I think he fought Conor. | ||
| He was in New Zealand for a 16-day exploration with his father, hunting and hiking. | ||
| They're like, oh, I'm going to fight Conor. | ||
| He comes back. | ||
| Chad's one of those guys that's been an athlete his whole entire life. | ||
| Just a fucking animal. | ||
| This dude would come out of being out of the gym for two months and just look insane on the mid sparring wrestling He would be give me some of my hardest rounds because he's just so explosive Fast technical and just built like a fucking turtle dude again I'm like if we get started those bad positions, you know He just did with a he did a submission grassling tournament with Jeff Glover. | ||
| Yeah, I choked him out which is crazy Look at him. | ||
| Just an animal. | ||
| Great guy, too. | ||
| Yeah, no, he's awesome. | ||
| I love that guy. | ||
| I actually just spoke to him prior to coming out here. | ||
| He hit me up about doing some kind of podcast with his buddy. | ||
| He's like, man, I miss you. | ||
| I miss you, too, man. | ||
| He goes, I just don't miss getting hit by you. | ||
| I'm like, me neither. | ||
| I don't miss having to go around with you, brother. | ||
| I'm like, thank you. | ||
| But I did miss training with him. | ||
| Is he still in that area, the Sacramento area? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I think he's in the Auburn area. | ||
| Because he travels so much for his guide service. | ||
| He likes to be out. | ||
| He likes to be in the country. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, he's always taking people. | ||
| I've seen him on his Instagram taking people tuna fishing. | ||
| He's taking people bird hunting. | ||
| He's always running these guys. | ||
| I actually ran into him at one of those outdoor expos. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| I was there with my buddy Cam Haynes, and we're walking, and I just run. | ||
| I go, Chad, what are you doing here? | ||
| And he's like, oh, I've got my guide service, and I'm signing people up for it. | ||
| I'm like, that is fucking cool. | ||
| And this was why his career was in full bloom. | ||
| Yeah, he started doing that. | ||
| Yeah, it was great, you know, looking for... | ||
| And he always said, like, he made fighting fun, you know what I mean? | ||
| He would come and do a six-week camp and go on there and give it a mall and train his ass off. | ||
| He'd always say that he fights to fund his hunting. | ||
| That was his goal. | ||
| He was happy with what he was able to do. | ||
| And he's selling out like crazy too. | ||
| His camps or all of his different hunting camps he's got, they're selling out like crazy. | ||
| It's awesome. | ||
| Clay Guida's doing the thrills with gills, the fishing. | ||
| He's always like, dude, let's go fishing, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thrills with gills? | |
| Yeah, I think that's what it's called. | ||
| How fucking good did Clay look? | ||
| Beats Michael Johnson. | ||
| Scared me. | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| I watched it with Chris and my brother. | ||
| I'm like, man, I'm nervous. | ||
| I get nervous for my boys to fight. | ||
| You see him in the gym. | ||
| He's just a fucking gamer. | ||
| Oh, forever. | ||
| He had Michael Johnson hurt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm like, wow. | |
| You did really well in that fight. | ||
| Johnson's a slick southpaw. | ||
| Johnson knocked out Dustin Poirier with one punch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| Johnson's a beast. | ||
| Yeah, and he's had over 20 fights in the UFC. That guy's not an easy win. | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| But Klay's there still hammering. | ||
| And then even while he's getting his hand raised, he's bouncing around like he can't stop moving. | ||
| Yeah, I see him in the morning. | ||
| I usually get there in the morning too early and he's like, oh, I'm just running. | ||
| I'm like, oh, cool. | ||
| He's like, yeah, I usually just run probably five miles a day before practice. | ||
| And he's just always going. | ||
| He's in phenomenal shape. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's absolutely crazy. | ||
| And the guy's still around. | ||
| I mean, go back to his fight with Diego Sanchez, which was like one of the craziest fucking wars I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| Some people can take damage and not... | ||
| It's his mind. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, just like, you can take damage, and like, some people get, you know, knocked out, and they're fucked up forever on it, or they're, you know, slurring their words, or they're punch drunk, like, this guy, you know, he's articulate, he speaks well, you know, got the good hair, I mean, that hair is holding on, it's holding on, dude, it's there, but it's like... | ||
| He's got a man-button shit. | ||
| Yeah, exactly, he's man-button, he's trying to, you know... | ||
| Throw some shit over here. | ||
| He's a wild dude. | ||
| Yeah, he's great. | ||
| He's a great guy. | ||
| Good energy is out there. | ||
| Does he have like a fishing service? | ||
| Is that what he's doing? | ||
| Yeah, he's always asked me to go and do it. | ||
| I'm just like, I don't know if I want to be out in the cold ocean fishing. | ||
| Last time I did that, I went open sea fishing. | ||
| Danny is really big into fishing. | ||
| Is he? | ||
| My wife, and she loves fishing. | ||
| And I went out the first time open sea at Dana Point, and we caught a black sea bass fish. | ||
| Dude, I was so sick on that. | ||
| I took Dramamine before. | ||
| I just can't do it. | ||
| Oh, you get seasick? | ||
| I was like, let's go back. | ||
| You know, Clay took a job working in Alaska on one of those crab boats. | ||
| Like, you see the world's deadliest catch? | ||
| He did that shit. | ||
| Don't surprise me. | ||
| He did it for the adventure. | ||
| Oh yeah, I remember him speaking about that because we had a couple friends come from Alaska. | ||
| My buddy's actually stationed up there. | ||
| Deadliest Catch is a crazy show because they lose people on that show. | ||
| People die on that show. | ||
| All the time, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that is a... | ||
| I mean, crab's delicious. | ||
| But it ain't that delicious. | ||
| It's not worth, yeah. | ||
| It's a mess to open that damn thing up. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Those cages and everything. | ||
| You're constantly wet. | ||
| But they make a fuckload of money. | ||
| They go out there for a few months and they make a shit ton of money. | ||
| Yeah, it's true. | ||
| I mean, Clay to go out there and just do that for fun, that just speaks of the kind of character he is. | ||
| He's always looking for those kind of thrills. | ||
| He's the guy, when he comes to camp, I love it because... | ||
| He's got a good playlist. | ||
| He puts the phone jack in. | ||
| What has he got? | ||
| Classic rock? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Honestly, when you don't hear that for a while, we're all listening to rap. | ||
| When Clay comes in, DJ Clay, it's like, this is some shit, man. | ||
| This is taking me back. | ||
| Some Red Hot Chili Peppers in there. | ||
| Some Nick's Grateful Dead. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| It's great to have him in there. | ||
| Learn from him. | ||
| He's been all over. | ||
| He's been with us for quite some time now, and to see him adapt and evolve himself later on in his career. | ||
| We just have good energies, like I said, at Alpha Male. | ||
| It seemed like it was a great fit for him coming to you guys. | ||
| Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| You know, them guys, you know, fought each other, Chad and Clay, and they're so much alike. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, I remember Chad saying, like, ah, man, I'm going to have to fight Clay. | ||
| You know, we look up to him, you know, like, things like that. | ||
| So there are fights that you can go into and just be like, all right, you know, a lot of guys join the gyms now. | ||
| Does he still live in the tour bus? | ||
| I think we just spoke about that because I was talking about doing like a spreader van. | ||
| Me and Chris want to go and start doing seminars at gyms and around just kind of, you know, showing our martial arts and sharing with people and helping them out. | ||
| And obviously going to see in the world once, you know, COVID opens up. | ||
| And he was talking about how he had that big RV and he used to drive everywhere. | ||
| And he's like, well, I had to, you know, I think I'm going to sell it, man. | ||
| And downsize to something like that because it was... | ||
| Because you fall asleep at the wheel, you just pull over, things like that. | ||
| So he said, it's just safer. | ||
| What's best about that, you just pull it over and you start getting tired. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, he was living out of that thing and going from camp to camp, and he would drive it to his fights. | ||
| Florida, yeah. | ||
| His family, his father and his mother live in Florida, so he's always road tripping and fishing. | ||
| He's living life, man. | ||
| I learned a lot from that. | ||
| I was so just like, oh, I can't do this, I can't do that, I'm just stuck to this training. | ||
| You have to break it up. | ||
| You have to break it up. | ||
| You have to enjoy. | ||
| I think that you enjoy your wins. | ||
| You enjoy that time in between camps because the window shuts all the time. | ||
| There's only a certain amount of time and fights that we have left in our career. | ||
| Why be so stressed out? | ||
| Fighting is anxious. | ||
| Once you get that fight signed, you kind of walk on eggshells like, I don't want to get sick. | ||
| I don't want to get hurt. | ||
| The worst thing to do is pull out of a fight. | ||
| You're motivated. | ||
| You're hungry. | ||
| You're training hard. | ||
| You're going to make some money. | ||
| You're going to hopefully level up in your life and your career. | ||
| That's what the opportunity is that is given each fight. | ||
| Do you have hobbies outside of fighting? | ||
| Oh man, hobbies. | ||
| Obviously not. | ||
| Because it would be like right there. | ||
| Dude, I just like to train, man. | ||
| I like to train. | ||
| Do you think you'll be a coach when you're done? | ||
| I think more and more that I'm... | ||
| I'm in the gym and I kind of go and just watch the classes. | ||
| I like to help out some of the younger guys. | ||
| I don't know if I have the patience. | ||
| Not every great fighter is a great trainer. | ||
| I don't think I can. | ||
| My uncle is a great trainer, but he's a horrible coach. | ||
| He's a horrible coach, but he'll train the shit out of you. | ||
| He'll have you hitting the tire and doing little things. | ||
| Why is he a bad coach? | ||
| I don't think he has a... | ||
| He's like, if you suck, he's like, I don't know how to fucking work with you. | ||
| Well, he'd be a great trainer for people who don't suck. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So he wants to come and work with, you know, like, you know, we're in a small town, so he's trying to... | ||
| I'm like, you gotta build, you gotta groom these fighters. | ||
| How many times have we used to work... | ||
| I used to get so frustrated with him as a kid, 14, 13, 14 years old. | ||
| He used to make me just work on my jab. | ||
| He'd tape my fucking hand in my head and just work on my jab. | ||
| And I got a really good jab, a stiff jab. | ||
| I have different angles off it. | ||
| And we'll just get worked through the frustration. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| But I was like, dude, we got to this point because we worked through that. | ||
| Like, you got to do the same thing. | ||
| And some people just don't have the grit or the tenacity or the, you know, to go in and work through that. | ||
| So he's just like, if you're not good, like, I just don't want to work with you. | ||
| I don't want to waste my time. | ||
| It's so interesting how many different approaches there are to training and how many different trainers have different philosophies and different styles. | ||
| And you see it sort of accent. | ||
| You see the different styles in the camps because you see how different groups of people have sort of... | ||
| You remember like the old shoot-the-box camp? | ||
| They were just fucking berserkers, just wild people. | ||
| Come at you like a comic book. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| It was like... | ||
| That camp was known for being savages. | ||
| It would fucking kill you. | ||
| And alpha male, right? | ||
| Alpha male is known for being a wild camp. | ||
| I mean, you guys are some of the best lighter weight fighters in the world. | ||
| Some of the best guillotines in the fucking sport. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's interesting how camps and different groups of people sort of take on a persona. | ||
| And they have a style that comes out of these places. | ||
| You have the Jersey guys, you know, with the... | ||
| Spinning shit. | ||
| Jersey guys are weird. | ||
| What Mark Henry's done is really interesting because he's worked with so many different kinds of guys. | ||
| He's got a fantastic group for sure, but he's worked with so many different kinds of fighters. | ||
| Usman's been up there. | ||
| Rashad was the first person. | ||
| Rashad pulled me aside and he said, man, the guy's a genius. | ||
| He said he had all these notes, pages and pages of notes, and they would change with every camp. | ||
| He knows what I'm doing before. | ||
| I would even throw it or do it. | ||
| It was crazy, and I was just new on it. | ||
| I think he would just study my fights and the way I moved. | ||
| It's funny, I was sparring with Frankie a lot. | ||
| I feel like me and Frankie are similar. | ||
| I think Frankie's a little bit more of a combo striker. | ||
| But we had a lot of the same code, so we're sparring each other. | ||
| Me and Frankie are just fainting each other, fainting each other. | ||
| I'm like, is that my code or is that Frankie's code? | ||
| Because the coach is calling it out. | ||
| I'm like, You know, and sometimes, you know, coaches... | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Are you going to go with him for your next camp? | ||
| Oh, sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, we talked about it. | ||
| I just was, like, waiting to go out there. | ||
| Frankie had a big fight coming up, you know, this previous weekend and some of the... | ||
| to more. | ||
| Was that hard for you to watch, that one? | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, my God. | |
| I was heartbroken. | ||
| Sanhagen is a motherfucker, man. | ||
| Yeah, he's good. | ||
| I remember Sanhagen coming out to Alpha Male when TJ fought Burrell the first time. | ||
| And I was like, yeah, this kid's tough, you know? | ||
| He brought him in as a training partner with Dwayne and Sean McFadden and those guys, the Colorado connection. | ||
| So yeah, I knew that that kid was, you know, tough. | ||
| I saw a different... | ||
| I saw, I think, what he went through with the auto fight kind of lit a fire out of him. | ||
| Like, fuck this, I'm not going to let that happen again. | ||
| Same thing with me. | ||
| It just took me a little bit longer to... | ||
| Get it turned around. | ||
| Well, Al Jermaine is a monster on the ground. | ||
| He's a monster. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| He's Matt Serratrain, Henzo Gracie, Black Belt, that group of people. | ||
| The grappling level out of that team, out of New York and that area, all those Donaher, Henzo Gracie guys, fuck that level so high. | ||
| Yeah, it's great. | ||
| Those guys are so goddamn good on the ground. | ||
| There's so many good guys on the ground. | ||
| And you saw it with Aljamain. | ||
| When Aljo got him on the ground, man, he just wrapped him up and strangled him quick. | ||
| I don't think Corey is ready. | ||
| Ready for that. | ||
| Not for that. | ||
| No, not for just his body. | ||
| You can watch him be a potential fight. | ||
| I like the kid a lot. | ||
| He'll be a potential fight. | ||
| So I'm just watching him backstage. | ||
| I just don't think that he was ready for that kind of prime spot. | ||
| Like, holy shit, I win this fight, I can be fighting for the title. | ||
| And it's... | ||
| You know, I think they just made a mistake. | ||
| Aljamain capitalized on it. | ||
| But if I feel like, stylistically, that's a bad fight for Aljamain if it doesn't get to the ground. | ||
| You know, Corey, you know, throws long kicks. | ||
| He stays rangy. | ||
| And Aljamain kicks a lot. | ||
| And kicks lots and goes back. | ||
| And that's the last thing you want to do. | ||
| Look what happened with Marais. | ||
| You know, like... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he got caught. | ||
| He's leveled. | ||
| He got caught. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He leveled up. | |
| He leveled a lot. | ||
| Excited for the Jan-Aljamain fight. | ||
| Yeah, that's a really interesting fight. | ||
| That's a really interesting fight. | ||
| Because Jan is so solid. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| We'll see how good his wrestling is. | ||
| I think Funkmaster is going to try to utilize that as you should. | ||
| That's something that was not shown in Peter's fights where he does have wrestling. | ||
| Just like when I fought Cruz. | ||
| Could I go five rounds? | ||
| There's these unanswered, unknown questions, unanswered questions that will get solved in the fight. | ||
| That's a great thing about fighting. | ||
| We're going to figure it out. | ||
| Well, that division is so hot right now. | ||
| That 135-pound division is on fucking fire. | ||
| It is. | ||
| And you're right in the heat with this Sun Tau knockout. | ||
| I mean, you're right there. | ||
| Back top three. | ||
| Next win or so puts you right back at a title shot. | ||
| So Jose Aldo is what you would like next. | ||
| I would like next. | ||
| But you're open to any of these possibilities. | ||
| I'm ready to fight. | ||
| You know, Joe, when you're feeling it and you have this dry back and... | ||
| I don't even say motivation because motivation comes and goes. | ||
| Sometimes you're motivated, sometimes you're not. | ||
| Just the drive, being driven, a driven person. | ||
| So that drives back. | ||
| I'm excited. | ||
| I'm excited to see what I can do. | ||
| I have my camp. | ||
| I have my coach. | ||
| I have a lot of shit going on in my career that I've worked for and used opportunities and able to travel and be away from the family. | ||
| I know my son's getting taken care of when I'm away. | ||
| So that's a huge mind over matter thing. | ||
| He's good. | ||
| Go focus on what you need to do. | ||
| Come back and reorchestrate camp. | ||
| So I just feel like everything's ready to go. | ||
| I'm ready to flip the switch, get into that fight camp. | ||
| I want to be sharp. | ||
| Outside training camp is great. | ||
| You work on a lot of things that you might not work in camp, but in camp is where you get sharp, your skill level rises, you train smarter, obviously, because you can overtrain outside of camp. | ||
| You're like, oh, I'm just going to take this tomorrow off or do a recovery day. | ||
| Inside of training camp, I love what it means. | ||
| It's blinders. | ||
| You're just focused. | ||
| Focus, focus, focus. | ||
| That's what I want to be at right now in my life. | ||
| The sport is so fascinating to me in that it's constantly evolving, different approaches. | ||
| And one of the big things now, I mean, probably one of the biggest techniques ever is the low calf kick. | ||
| It is fucking bananas. | ||
| Yeah, I utilize it a lot. | ||
| I do a lot of like, I kind of modified it with the sand chai. | ||
| Sand chai goes down and kind of kicks up. | ||
| I do a kind of hand plant 360 sweep with the leg. | ||
| I feel like it gets me out of range. | ||
| I'm not countered a lot with that kick and it's quick. | ||
| I feel like I'm really quick in the transitions in case they were trying to come, trying to take me down. | ||
| And I've utilized that a lot. | ||
| I think what happened in a lot of the fight, the first fight, I came out and kicked a Sun South right in the leg super hard. | ||
| It was in the beginning when you guys were talking. | ||
| And I noticed that hurt him. | ||
| Like, I noticed that his body language and his movement... | ||
| If you get kicked and you don't move right away, like, alright, that, you know... | ||
| Feel the... | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And just the eyes, a lot of things I hit him with, I could tell. | ||
| But that calf kick is... | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| There's no bone there. | ||
| There's nothing to help. | ||
| You can't really check it. | ||
| Isn't it crazy how long it took for that to be a factor? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, all of a sudden... | ||
| I mean, I credit Benson Henderson. | ||
| I think Benson Henderson was the first guy to start implementing it in fights in the UFC. But he didn't have the same effectiveness. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, I don't think we really saw how effective it was until... | ||
| I wonder who was who started using it where they really started making it I don't know I'd have to go and watch some tape right figure out who the guy was but now Jesus Christ I mean it's Justin Gaethje is the master of it you know Dustin Poirier and him had that crazy war and That would a lot of that was low leg kicks and now Dustin fucking Connor up with those low leg kicks. | ||
| I mean Connor was done. | ||
| Yeah In that second round, you could see him with that wide stance, heavy on that front leg, and because they're both southpaw to southpaw, that front leg was exposed, and Dustin was just smashing it. | ||
| It took all his power away, all his motion away, and after a while, he just couldn't take it. | ||
| And that's what me and Chris were talking about earlier. | ||
| Throughout the training, he's kind of taken over my kickboxing and flow into the takedowns as well. | ||
| Working from both stances. | ||
| Your leg might get chopped up or you're going to have to fight southpaw. | ||
| And I feel like I'm adapting very well. | ||
| Speed, kicks, combos with both sides. | ||
| That's so important. | ||
| So important. | ||
| I think that's where the fighting is going. | ||
| You're going to have to fight both styles because there's going to be some calf kicks. | ||
| You're a boxing fan. | ||
| Terrence Crawford is the best in the world at that shit. | ||
| You get used to him facing you in an orthodox stance and all of a sudden, boop, he's a southpaw. | ||
| Everything's backwards and he's lighting you up. | ||
| He wakes up and he's like, that's my title fight. | ||
| He's like, I'm going to flip a coin. | ||
| I'm going to fight Southpaw today. | ||
| That was Marvin Hagler, too. | ||
| When Marvin Hagler was in his prime, he could fight from any stance. | ||
| That was one of the beautiful things about his style. | ||
| He could do whatever the fuck he wanted to. | ||
| And that's such an advantage. | ||
| Especially switch stance when you're on an attack and you have an angle so far deep that they have to really... | ||
| And that's what's great about MMA. It's boxing. | ||
| It's kickboxing angle. | ||
| It's takedowns. | ||
| So you get those angles. | ||
| You get those people running from those certain ones. | ||
| You switch stance. | ||
| You come with the same side kick. | ||
| They're out of position. | ||
| It's binding. | ||
| Also, one of the things that they've shown in studies when they've done athletic skill is that practicing with your non-dominant hand makes your dominant hand better. | ||
| Because you're more aware of what's off about that side. | ||
| And as you're drilling and you're really focusing... | ||
| It's almost like Body mechanics, right? | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure you see that with Holdsworth or with anybody who teaches. | ||
| When people teach, there's something about teaching. | ||
| Your level's higher. | ||
| Yeah, guys who I would train with these guys and then they would quit their job and start teaching. | ||
| They got better. | ||
| And they would be way better. | ||
| All of a sudden they were fucking me up. | ||
| I was like, what are you doing? | ||
| Smallest things. | ||
| Constantly focused on it. | ||
| The finer details. | ||
| Yeah, constantly. | ||
| So you're kind of doing that when you switch stances. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| Because when you switch stances and you're throwing a straight left, you're like, oh, okay, this feels weird. | ||
|
unidentified
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Weird. | |
| Like, this is just automatic, but this is like... | ||
| Head off, you're making sure, and then now you go to the right head, or your head's off. | ||
| Yeah, and you go to the right-hand side, and now all of a sudden it's just locked in. | ||
| Dang it. | ||
| So they say that with everything. | ||
| When you practice with your non-dominant hand, it makes your dominant skill better. | ||
| I should honestly probably be a southpaw fighter. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I wrestle with my right foot forward, but I fight with my left foot. | ||
| So all my shots come from my right side. | ||
| I remember Matt Hughes did that a lot. | ||
| Because he was a right-handed forward. | ||
| Which is great. | ||
| Sometimes if I'm... | ||
| I love my right hand. | ||
| I trust in it. | ||
| I believe in it. | ||
| If I'm throwing a right hand that's a little out of range, I get overcompensated, my feet aren't under me, I can roll right into southpaw, boom, takedown. | ||
| That's what happened with Cruz. | ||
| I backed up, backed up. | ||
| I was like, oh shit, I'm southpaw with the right, boom, double leg, open. | ||
| He's hard to takedown. | ||
| Dustin Poirier is right-handed as well. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And Dustin will fight with his right hand forward most of the time. | ||
| But Daniel Cormier has a great series he does on ESPN called Detail. | ||
| And in that, he broke down. | ||
| In this most recent episode, he broke down Dustin knocking out Conor. | ||
| It's a phenomenal breakdown. | ||
| Yeah, check that out. | ||
| And he discusses how you can see when he's got a fight or hurt, what's the hand he switches. | ||
| And he switched to orthodox and blasts him with the right hand. | ||
| Orthodox inside shot. | ||
| And that's another thing going back to Coach Mark. | ||
| He watched all my footage of my fights. | ||
| He goes, all your knockouts were inside shots. | ||
| You don't have to wind up. | ||
| You don't have to. | ||
| It was inside shots. | ||
| Catching here inside. | ||
| Inside hook, rolling it on Almeida. | ||
| And by the time I ruled off my right hand, it was inside hook, right inside hook. | ||
| I ruled out. | ||
| He was already falling to the ground, falling up. | ||
| It was over with. | ||
| Well, the Almeida fight was so impressive because Almeida was on a tear. | ||
| And you guys were both. | ||
| It was like a meeting, a collision course. | ||
| You know, Almeida was this guy. | ||
| He was this guy that was fucking people up, man. | ||
| He had a really bright future. | ||
| Get knockout bonuses. | ||
| I'm sitting there broke as hell trying to get a fight. | ||
| I'm like, man, 50 bucks going into that fight week. | ||
| And I was like, man, I know I win this fight. | ||
| It's going to change my life. | ||
| And sure as shit as it did, you know what I mean? | ||
| Obviously, you know, fights, fights, fights. | ||
| But every fight's your biggest fight. | ||
| You know, that's the most money I won. | ||
| I want a knockout bonus. | ||
| Gotta go see Dana and Lorenzo and the headquarters. | ||
| Like, hey, what do you guys want? | ||
| We want to help you out. | ||
| What's your next fight? | ||
| I just want to stay busy, stay active. | ||
| You know what's interesting to me is how fucking good Max Holloway is and how Max Holloway is training on Hawaii. | ||
| The thought has always been, you have to go to this big camp, you have to go somewhere else, and that's how you get better. | ||
| But meanwhile, Max Holloway puts in one of the performances of the decade against Calvin Cater. | ||
| Calvin's a fucking gangster. | ||
| He's a gangster. | ||
| I was so excited for that fight because Calvin and the Boston and Massachusetts and what they got going over there. | ||
| Striking is phenomenal. | ||
| He's got some of the best boxing in the sport. | ||
| For sure, 100%. | ||
| The Ricardo Lamas fight is a perfect example of that. | ||
| Dude, he was popping, hitting his shots, getting out of range, coming back with combos. | ||
| Like, man, that's hard to hit. | ||
| And then for what happened, what Max was able to do to him, and I think what happened that first round, he put so much damage on him. | ||
| Sometimes it's one shot, and you can be on autopilot. | ||
| You get hit hard, you can be... | ||
| But you're just not firing right. | ||
| You're taking that damage to the brain. | ||
| Well, that was another fight where Max didn't spar at all. | ||
| And he said after the second Volkanovski fight, he didn't do any sparring in camp. | ||
| All of his training is just movement and training for endurance and training for... | ||
| He's doing drills and he's hitting pads, but he's like, I don't need to take any big shots. | ||
| Similar to what I am doing. | ||
| It's not realistic. | ||
| We're going to get boxing gloves on, shin pads. | ||
| You're going to throw a kick. | ||
| I'm going to be able to block it with these big-ass gloves. | ||
| We have small gloves that are coming over the top, hitting you in the head. | ||
| That little placement saves you. | ||
| Well, my friend Kevin Ross had an Instagram post recently about the importance of technical light sparring for Thai boxing. | ||
| And one of the things that he said is, like, with the Thais, they do a lot of this, like, sort of light tap sparring. | ||
| And that's where you work on things, because you're not worried that someone's going to take your head off, and that's how you get better skills. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, no impact, or no shin pads, no knuckle pads. | ||
| So you get a more realistic understanding of placement, of where you're going to be. | ||
| Yeah, and it's like being able to play until you develop that timing. | ||
| So many guys think you just have to go to war all the time, and that every time you spar you go to war, but that's not wise. | ||
| There is time to do that. | ||
| I think, you know, but smart doing that. | ||
| You're not going to go in there and just working. | ||
| What did you get out of sparring? | ||
| Like, oh, I just went and fought. | ||
| Like, what did you take away from sparring? | ||
| Yeah, you might have won, but what did you work on? | ||
| You went in there and brawled. | ||
| Like, that's what we did for so long. | ||
| Like, a technical approach. | ||
| I think a lot of these young fighters that are coming from wrestling or not a boxing background or striking background, they need to get in there to know what a fist fight feels like. | ||
| Some of these wrestlers, I'm so surprised. | ||
| I'm like, they've never been in a fist fight in their life. | ||
| Some of these fighters... | ||
| I talked to Lance, my buddy Lance, since I was a kid. | ||
| And he never really punched someone in the face until he was a professional fighter. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| His first professional fight. | ||
| I'm like, you never grew up and wanted to fight your brother or got in a fight with your brother? | ||
| He's like, oh no, never. | ||
| I mean, never in a wrestling room. | ||
| Well, it didn't hold him back. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| He's a bad motherfucker. | ||
| But he has that work ethic since he was a kid. | ||
| And he got in there and thrown to the wolves of sparring. | ||
| And now it's technical. | ||
| I think there's people that you do that with. | ||
| So you have that urgency. | ||
| Like, dude, I'm getting my ass kicked. | ||
| I better formulate something and work on something when I need to. | ||
| And Lance is great. | ||
| He uses wrestling to take it where he can dominate. | ||
| And that's where his strong point is. | ||
| He's got great cardio. | ||
| He's strong as an ox. | ||
| He's a beast. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you look at your career, you were saying that you were thinking about life in five-year increments. | ||
| Do you think at five years you'll be 34? | ||
| Is that when you're thinking, like, you'll assess where you're at in your career, whether or not you want to keep going or retire? | ||
| Hopefully you'll be the champ then. | ||
| All these variables, but yes. | ||
| Do you have these goals set in your head or what you'd like to accomplish? | ||
| I do. | ||
| I feel like my next three fights are kind of lined up. | ||
| Obviously, that's kind of out of my control, but in my control with the UFC, you know, works on it like Aldo, then either Peter Yan or whoever wins it. | ||
| It's kind of optional because I can fight Aldo. | ||
| Right there I have a claim on two fight, you know, I knock him out. | ||
| Two fight, win, knockout, streak. | ||
| I can be next in the line for the title shot. | ||
| I know Corey's up there. | ||
| If Corey wants to, you know, get in there for the championship, it's not going to fight until July. | ||
| Who knows, you know. | ||
| We can fight in the meantime. | ||
| I want to stay busy. | ||
| You know, as long as I'm healthy, I want to stay busy. | ||
| I fought four times in one year. | ||
| I went from unranked to world champion. | ||
| I feel like I can do that better now because I've known what to do, how to pull back, how to train, how to recover. | ||
| COVID was just a fluke thing that just took over my body that had me sidelined. | ||
| If I didn't have COVID, I would... | ||
| Who knows what would happen? | ||
| It's the past, but we're focused on this. | ||
| Well, you know, it makes you appreciate your health now, though. | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| I literally thank all the first responders and the nurses and the people that work through my stuff in Jersey, and they're just so helpful. | ||
| And then all my doctors are like, okay, I got this. | ||
| I'm just making sure that I'm healthy because I know what I'm going to do in camp. | ||
| I want to... | ||
| Tear my body down. | ||
| I want to give myself every opportunity to go in there and fight and level up and better my life better my family's life And I know how to do that and that's through hard work, but working smart. | ||
| Do you know when you're gonna retire? | ||
| Do you have it in your head? | ||
| Dude, I've honestly not even thought about that. | ||
| You know, I kind of take one flight at a time, but obviously you have your next. | ||
| I've learned throughout my life, like, when I won a state title, I didn't... | ||
| I got there and I was like, man, what's my next goal? | ||
| I won the world championship, what's my next goal? | ||
| So to have these high goals, but then also have things that you can bounce to next. | ||
| So... | ||
| I haven't really thought about retirement. | ||
| I still feel like I'm just learning in this sport. | ||
| I feel like I haven't even hit my prime. | ||
| I feel like I'm just getting my style of fighting together, my coaches and my team. | ||
| I feel like the next five years are going to be some of my best performances, mentally, physically, emotionally, inside the octagon, growing outside of the octagon. | ||
| I'm excited for this ride. | ||
| I'm very, very excited to get back in there. | ||
| Both divisions are great, so I have options. | ||
| That's a good thing I'm right. | ||
| I'm sitting in a good spot. | ||
| You're sitting in a great spot. | ||
| I'm excited to watch, brother. | ||
| I can't wait to call your fights again. | ||
| All right, me either. | ||
| Well, thank you very much for being here. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| Welcome. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And I can't wait to see you again, brother. | ||
| Thank you very much, man. | ||
| Always a pleasure. | ||
| Always a pleasure. |
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