Mike Dolce joins Joe Rogan to expose MMA’s dangerous weight-cutting tactics, like Nick Lentz’s 175-to-145 dehydration or Anthony "Rumble" Johnson’s extreme 230-to-170 drops causing fight-day collapse. He debunks myths (e.g., BJ Penn’s restricted diet) and contrasts Vitor Belfort’s steroid-driven decline with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s longevity, advocating nutrient-dense, organic diets over supplements. Dolce’s 52-week periodization—used by Ronda Rousey and Tiago Alves—prioritizes health over short-term performance, warning that reckless cuts and PEDs (like Vitor’s TRT) risk long-term damage. The episode reveals how MMA’s obsession with weight and PEDs may be sacrificing fighters’ futures for flashy results. [Automatically generated summary]
Squarespace is the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website.
And I really do mean professional.
They make fucking amazing websites.
If you go to devsquad.tv and check out the website that Brian has created, along with the online store that he's created, he did it in about fucking ten minutes.
It's incredible how easy it is.
Drag-and-drop interface.
24-7 support.
And it works great on everything.
On Android, iPhone, Unix, Linux.
Work on whatever you want.
Windows, Mac, PC. Very easy to use.
Plan start at $8 a month.
That includes a free domain name if you sign up for a year.
Responsive design.
And your design will look awesome on any device.
Online commerce.
Very easy to set up.
Easy as peasy.
I don't even think that's a real thing to say.
Easy peasy?
It's awesome.
That's what I'm trying to tell you.
Every site comes with an online store.
Really, really easy to do.
Squarespace has a logo creator.
We can create a clean, simple design for yourself in minutes.
And every design automatically includes a unique mobile experience that matches the overall style of your website.
So your content will look great on everything all the time.
For a free trial and 10% off your first purchase, go to squarespace.com and enter the code word Joe.
Squarespace, a better web, starts with your website.
We're also brought to you by Naturebox, the official snack provider for the podcast, the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
That's this one.
It's the one you're listening to.
Naturebox, I'm eating some of that shit right now.
If you hear me going, that's because I have Santa Fe corn stick stuck in my teeth.
I'm a fan.
I'm a fan of all this shit.
Nature Box is a way where you can get healthy snacks.
But I want to talk to you about a lot of people who don't understand mixed martial arts or maybe they're casual fans.
They don't know that there's a lot going on in MMA. And one of the things that's going on besides the fact that it's a very dangerous, very...
It's a highly charged sport with a lot on the line for the competitors.
But one of the things that's on the line that a lot of people aren't aware of is a thing that we call weight cutting.
And so I can fill people in that may just not know much about MMA. If a fighter is going to fight at, say, 145 pounds.
That's one of our weight classes.
They probably don't really weigh 145 pounds.
It's very rare that you get a guy like Frankie Edgar, who was the lightweight champion, who lightweight in the UFC is 155 pounds.
That's what he actually used to weigh.
He was really fit, and he walked around at 155. He didn't cut any weight to weigh in for the weight class, and he was always smaller than almost anyone in his division.
He still won and beat some of the best guys in the planet just because he's really tough and very highly skilled, but that's the rarity.
The only division where that doesn't take place is in the heavyweight division, which guys don't have to cut any weight at all, generally speaking.
There was a few exceptions, like Tim Sylvia in his heyday used to be a little bit bigger, or Brock Lesnar might have cut a little, or...
Alistair Overeem, when he first fought in the UFC, cut a little.
But for the most part, those guys get to eat whatever the fuck they want.
For everybody else, essentially there's two different events going on.
There's the event where there's a fight, where you're training to compete against the best mixed martial arts fighters in the world, but then there's also the weigh-in.
And the weigh-in is an event in and of itself.
It is a huge thing, because you get guys like, a perfect example of extreme examples is Gleason Tebow, which I don't think Gleason's missed weight.
And we want to touch down at 45 and be there for really under an hour.
I want my athletes still kind of dripping that last sweat when they step on the scale so they can just graze the contract weight and immediately we hydrate them right back up again.
So when I back up, when I talk to an athlete or when I talk about weight cutting, I say, number one, it's not the best case scenario.
Weight cutting is something that unfortunately has to be done by a lot of athletes in order to minimize advantage as opposed to gaining an advantage.
But the weight cut should start 52 weeks before competition, which means this should be a lifestyle.
These athletes, and this is what they need to understand, and hopefully we can spread this message, is they need to be training and living and eating and breathing like professional athletes 365 days out of the year so they can minimize the downside of the weight cutting practice.
They need to be eating the proper foods.
Training intelligently, resting completely, so their body is able to endure the grueling practice of cutting weight.
So with Nick Lentz, he's fresh in the mind right now.
I was just with him in Connecticut last week.
He made weight 146, Charles Oliveira, his opponent.
He missed weight by four pounds, which was absolutely ridiculous, unprofessional.
But there's a saying that the first fight is with the scale.
So the athletes, when they get to the fight week or when they get to the location, they're focused on the scale.
They don't even think about the fight for the most part.
In that case, maybe every fighter should have just a really fucking crazy girlfriend that demands all their time and only hook up with her the week of the fight so that she just demands all your, you know, all you fucking care about is what you eat!
You don't even care about me!
I'm not even the most important thing to you!
And just have like the most crazy, narcissistic, psychotic relationship.
Is this a weird maturing process, isn't it, for some fighters where they got into fighting because they were so wild and reckless and somewhere along the line, they have to be cautious and calculated.
They have to really think of themselves as pro athletes.
And I say that not just about their training and diet, but also about their approach to fighting itself.
I'm a huge Forrest Griffin fan.
I love Forrest, just as a person, and I'm a huge fan of his as a fighter.
But I think that one of the best and worst things that ever happened to him was that fight with...
that that like i would say it's one of the greatest most important fights in mma but the fight with stefan bonner in the finals of the ultimate fight of the first season which was such a crazy fight people don't realize how bananas this situation was spike tv was a new network it was like some fucking country music channel or something before that right wasn't it the country station or some shit it became spike which was like a the the guys channel
and then they put on this thing the ultimate fighter and then you know people watched it it was a good show but in the finals stefan bonner and forrest griffin went on it won at it so hard that the ratings went through the They can monitor the ratings while the fight's going on.
And it went from a million people watching it when it first started to 10 million people at its peak, which is insane.
Absolutely.
Which they can track is directly related to people calling each other up and going, dude, you gotta fucking see this.
Turn on channel 248. These motherfuckers are throwing down.
And then people started calling each other and then they see through the fight.
It was a wild fight.
It was because you got two guys who knew each other super well, trained together for the six weeks they were in the house, and then went to war.
And they were so evenly matched that there was no winner in that fight.
At the end, Forrest Griffin won.
He got the decision, but it was so close that we actually talked about it inside the cage.
I said, why don't you give both these guys a fucking contract?
And they talked about it, and Lorenzo and Daniel were like, let's give both these guys a fucking contract.
And then, boom, they both got this big six-figure contract with the UFC. But...
That kind of style was so rewarded that it became how Stefan Bonner fought.
And I think he still kind of fights like that.
But Forrest Griffin, I think that it turned out to be his downfall in a lot of ways.
Like this face-forward, charging, aggressive style.
And that's how he lost to Keith Jardine.
I believe the more strategic Forrest Griffin was the one who beat Shogun.
He made some calculations.
He made some adjustments in his career.
But that style, he learned how to be this wild, reckless motherfucker because that was so rewarding.
And it's hard for an athlete sometimes to change their natural instinct.
I think.
And you see that in the gym where an athlete, either they're very tentative and calculating when they first get into the gym and they kind of have to bring out that monster a little bit and learn to be a finisher.
And they tend to look a little bit boring and maybe like an underachiever.
Or you get a guy like Forrest or Lieben that goes out there and they just go balls to the wall throwing big shots and sometimes they get knocked out and sometimes they get their hand raised.
And you have to walk that fine line.
And, you know, unfortunately they're playing with their brains.
You know, they're putting all, they're going all in, you know, every, every fight they're going all in and they don't know how they're going to walk out of it.
Um, so it's really interesting.
It's interesting to see how far the sports evolved.
I mean, every couple of years, the sport evolves to a brand new level.
You see these young kids coming in now that are, you know, better equipped and better skilled than the champions of 10 years ago.
Because if you look at boxing, the majority of the instances of men suffering in-fight brain damage, Gerald McClellan, Duck Ku Kim, like there's a lot of these cases and almost all of them involve someone weight cutting.
And because of that, boxing and now MMA has adjusted its schedule where the fighters weigh in the day before, where they used to weigh in the day of the match.
Old school boxing matches, you would see them weigh in the day of the match, and they would still cut weight, and then they would try to rehydrate, and they didn't know what the fuck they were doing back then.
And guys had dry brains.
I mean, literally.
And because of that, it made them more susceptible to cerebral hemorrhages and brain damage and all sorts of different things.
Very few heavyweight fighters suffered from brain damage in an actual fight.
It was usually years and years of repeated head trauma that got them, but not like one event like a Gerald McClellan event.
And he was one of the guys who was eventually going to fight Roy Jones Jr., fought Nigel Benn in an epic contest, had Benn really badly hurt.
They collided heads and he was all fucked up and he went back to his corner and he took a knee and wound up bowing out of the fight and then immediately went into a coma and had some horrible brain injuries because of that.
And that was a fight that changed a lot of people's ideas about weight cutting and about the dangers of head trauma because before that fight, Gerald McClellan was thought to be like an invincible destroyer.
I mean, people had seen him.
He was just knocking everybody out.
He was one of the Kronk stars.
Kronk boxing being Emanuel Stewart's team that produced Tommy Hearns.
You know, so many great, great fighters came out of that gym and they all were just assassins and he was one of the best.
Gerald McClellan was a fucking vicious, vicious killer.
It's just another layer of insulation when you're constantly grinding on guys and being wrenched against the wall and picked up and slammed 50 times because you're drilling whatever move.
You need that little bit of insulation.
The leaner you get, the drier your joints get, the more susceptible to injury you become.
I don't think I can speak intelligently enough to break down the true science of it, but it's something that certainly remains.
I know when I was a power lifter, we would increase our body fat in order to increase the leverage points within our joints.
When I was a power lifter, I would intentionally increase my body fat to 15-18%.
And my numbers would absolutely go through the roof.
I would get less joint pain, less injuries.
So call it, you know, bro science if some people like to throw that term around there.
But you just feel better, feel stronger.
And the leaner you get, specifically when you start heading into the peaking phase, which is now mild dehydration as we get closer to fight week sets in, the entire body becomes drier.
Like, you could call someone a bro and you limit their...
Anything that they have to say, anything they have to say about culture, anything they have to say about society, any opinions, any thoughts, any philosophies they might have, you're a bro.
I know everything about the athlete, the time they wake up, the time they have that bowel movement all the way through the day.
I know the intensity of the training.
I know the volume of the training.
I know the amount of rounds that they put in.
I know their caloric breakdown.
I know their lean mass ratios.
Oftentimes, I know what their blood work looks like.
We have a lot of data, and based upon this data is how we come up with our methodology and how we continue to evolve.
Because every time, I mean, it's like every week, you see me at the UFC quite often...
I'm not throwing shit at the wall.
I'm taking what I did on Friday, Saturday of that week, and on Sunday, I'm looking at the numbers and I'm retooling it because Monday I'm going to another fight week somewhere, and we're continuing to evolve this process as we move forward.
It's evidence-based scientific principles.
That's also battle-tested and proven viable with experience.
Because there's a lot of science out there that, you know, the guys in the suits and the lab coats, they're going to point to and say, that's the way to do it.
But they've never actually done it in the human element.
They've never actually seen it work.
They just sit in the classroom and they talk about it and they pontificate on it.
But it's never truly been proven in the real world.
Do you think, and this is a really touchy subject, but I think it's an important one to bring up.
Do you think that a lot of our ideas about what's physically possible when it comes to training and when it comes to fighting are distorted because of performance-enhancing drugs?
Golf, NASCAR. Anywhere you look that there's money on the line, where you get rewarded...
For performance, there's some sort of ancillary good or commodity being used or purchased or consumed to improve your performance.
It's very evident in the world of mixed martial arts because these guys and girls are getting punched and kicked in the head and they're losing consciousness and they're breaking bones and getting limbs torn off.
So now you have these advanced superhumans Out there able to, you know, rip joints and punch brains and do all these other things.
So it does, I think the odds are much greater, you know, for the risk is certainly much greater for anybody who competes.
Yeah, that's where I took exception to a lot of people saying, like, who cares if someone juices, you know, I don't give a fuck, I'm gonna kick their ass anyway.
You know, like Chris Weidman said that about Vitor Belfort, and I appreciate the fact that he thinks that way, because he's a champion, and that's how a champion feels.
But, the reality is, there are punches that can be landed when you are on EPO and test and jacked to the fucking gills and whatever the fuck else you're doing, that you wouldn't have the energy to land in a normal scenario.
It's very rare that a guy can do like what TJ Dillashaw does and go balls to the walls for five fucking rounds.
TJ can do it as a natural athlete because he's got a fucking tireless work ethic, he's unbelievably dedicated and focused, and he's 145 pounds.
That's another big factor.
The difference between that and a guy like Overeem, who Alistair Overeem came into the UFC against Brock Lesnar, he was 265, shredded to the tits, looked like a fucking superhero out of a comic book, pissed hot, and has never been the same guy again.
And the reality is now he's being tested, he's shrunk, he lost body mass.
It just seems to affect a guy's chin as well.
The thing about taking performance-enhancing drugs is that it doesn't just seem to affect your cardio, but it seems to also affect your ability to take a shot.
We saw that in Mark Hunt vs.
Bigfoot.
Bigfoot, Silva, and Mark Hunt had one of the greatest heavyweight fights ever.
As far as like from a fan's perspective, like watching an entertaining fight, what a fucking war.
These guys went to war and Bigfoot absorbed everything that Mark Hunt hit him with.
One of the greatest knockout artists in the history of kickboxing and in MMA. Mark Hunt's awesome.
He's a monster.
Bigfoot absorbed it.
They tested him after the fight and He had apparently, he tested before the fight, thought that was it.
I don't have to worry about this anymore.
And they jacked him with a fucking giant hit.
Like they took a fucking big gulp full of tests and just shoved it right in his ass.
And he was just fucking, just completely juiced up when he fought.
His levels were through the roof after the fight.
And because of that, he was able to absorb.
I mean, I'm speculating as to why he was able to absorb those shots.
But I've got to think that it has something to do with it.
It brings out that killer instinct and maybe an athlete in that state, they can walk through punches more because they have more of that primal urge and instinct and those elevated hormones pumping through their body because that's really what testosterone does and God knows what else is out there.
I mean, I don't even think we're aware In this room of all the drugs and performance enhancers that are truly out there and these, you know, evil geniuses around the world are creating and sticking into the athletes and putting them back out there to see what the effect is.
No, and Bigfoot got popped on a simple urine test, which is quite fascinating because the UFC has taken a lot of flack about their stance on performance enhancing drugs and people's like, oh, it's just lip service.
UFC doesn't give a shit.
This is how much the UFC gives a shit.
They've tested all of their best athletes with blood tests in a way that has fucked up a lot of performances.
They have stepped in and it costs more than $40,000 every time they do this.
So every single athlete, they're doing this outside of the jurisdiction of the athletic commissions.
So the athletic commissions has their own specific protocol for how they test a fighter.
Then the UFC steps in and brings in Like, the highest, most stringent Olympic testing that they can find.
They bring in the best guys.
Not only that, they have a chain of command.
They have a chain of evidence, rather, of possession.
Where, like, say, if Mike Dolce comes to the gym and you test Jamie, you fucking carry that shit on a plane to wherever the lab is.
He's beating the fuck out of everybody with this floppy gut.
And I'm like, this motherfucker.
He was kicking everybody's ass, and he looks like he just stepped out of his fucking station wagon and waddled onto the beach to play volleyball with some friends.
He was much bigger, actually, early in his career.
And then as he got older...
He lost a lot of body mass, a lot of muscle mass.
But, man, I would love to see what those guys were actually doing.
But in that case, if you're going to sign that contract and then you're loaded up to the gills, I'm not going to sit here and judge morally because you're agreeing to those rules.
It's like kicks to the face on the ground if you're going to agree to it.
But in the UFC here where there's unified rules, it's a whole other ballgame.
They just looked at him, you know, Jason's a handsome bastard, and they said, like, this fucking beautiful bastard, we need some muscles on this motherfucker to sell.
Well, it's interesting because Kung Lee is 40, but in Kung's defense, he said that he had had a series of aggravating injuries, and this was the first camp where he had had surgeries, he had fixed up all those injuries, and he went on a pretty rigorous strength and conditioning regime.
Dan Henderson, who knocked him out, wasn't popped for steroids, but he was on a legal version of testosterone replacement therapy before they outlawed that stuff, which I think is a good thing to outlaw.
And this is coming from a person who takes testosterone.
I'm 47 years old.
I take testosterone every week.
I used to take a cream.
Now I take a shot.
It seems to last longer.
It seems to work better.
But why do I do it?
First of all, because I'm not competing against anybody, and it makes me feel better.
My body works better when I take it.
That's what testosterone replacement is all about.
But when it comes to professional athletes doing it, man, it's very tricky.
Because on one side, an athlete can take it and it can make them feel better and they can perform better when their career would be over.
Like you take a guy like a Roger Clemens.
And I don't know whether or not Roger Clemens did anything, but most people believe he did.
And he's a baseball player, and then deep into his 40s, all of a sudden the motherfuckers, he's still throwing 95 mile an hour fastballs, and he looks fantastic, and he's built like a brick shithouse.
What's going on there?
Well, most likely he got on hormone replacement.
So the idea being that when you're getting older, you're getting wiser, and you have accumulated all this experience and all this knowledge, but...
Your body does not perform the way it did when you were younger.
It just doesn't.
The hormones, they go away.
Your body's preparing for death.
Essentially, that's what's going on.
But it isn't bullshit because it's kind of the way the world works.
And this is obviously hypocritical coming from me because I just admitted that I did take testosterone.
But when you're a fighter, there's the guys that they've gone through all this experience, their bodies started to fade off, and then they get on it, and then boom, all of a sudden, they're world beaters.
The best example is Vitor.
Vitor Belfort, I maintain that TRT Vitor was one of the most spectacular fighters in the history of fighting.
His knockout of Luke Rockhold, his knockout of Bisping, his knockout of Dan Henderson, he was a fucking destroyer when he was on test.
He would show up with muscles on his fucking eyebrows, I mean, literally.
He had muscles on his gums.
His whole body looked like a muscle.
It was insane.
And he was so aggressive and so confident.
It was a completely different Vitor than the Vitor that fought like Sakuraba when he fought in Pride, which was a decade earlier.
I mean, it's crazy to see something like that happen.
And on one hand, I love it.
On one hand, I want to see Vitor fight like that.
I want to see a destroyer.
I'm a guy who likes watching entertaining fights.
I like watching spectacular performances.
But on another hand, I want to see someone fighting someone Where it's just will and determination and discipline and focus and you work towards something and then you achieve it and you do it just by hard work.
There's a bunch of shit that they would give him after every meal.
It was all legal.
It was all glutamine and things along those lines and fish oil and all these different various supplements.
But those various supplements, that's not food.
That's food that has been broken down and they've isolated very specific components that they've shown to enhance performance.
So you're taking performance-enhancing supplements when you're taking anything.
The reason why you take multi-minerals and multi-vitamins is you want to enhance the performance of your body, period.
That is what's going on.
It's just going on at an edge level, as opposed to a jump.
When you're tested up, Vitor tested.
They caught him before.
This is what made them cancel testosterone replacement in Nevada.
I mean, they had already had issues with it, but they started testing guys off, like, just randomly.
Like, come here.
Like, pee in that cup.
That's how they got Overeem.
Vitor tested, an average person, it's like an average male, 300 to like 800 is like a high level.
Vitor was 1,475.
That's insane.
It doesn't exist in nature.
It just doesn't exist in nature.
And that was one of the reasons why they were like, okay.
And this is not idle speculation coming from me, by the way.
This is me talking to people that are in the know, people that were actually there.
The whole conversation that went down, I was...
Privy to a lot of it.
And it was very tricky because you have to find out what's ethical.
I mean, they allowed it in the first place because doctors were saying, my client has low testosterone and he has an issue, gonadism or whatever, hypergonadism.
Whatever the issue is.
My client has low testosterone.
I, as a doctor, believe that he has a medical issue that needs to be addressed.
We're going to supplement his testosterone.
So the athletic commissions allowed this, but they didn't totally understand what they were allowing.
Because they didn't know that you could take testosterone.
And if you took testosterone and then got off testosterone, your natural levels crash.
So then you show up at the doctor and you say, Hey man, test me.
I feel pretty weak.
And the doctor says, You have low testosterone.
I'm going to write you a prescription for testosterone.
Then you bring that to the Athletic Commission.
My doctors allowed me to take testosterone.
Here's my blood work.
And they go, all right, it seems pretty good.
Go ahead, take it.
I mean, that was going on.
That's what happened with Nate Marquardt.
That's what happened with a lot of people.
That was the issue with when Nate Marquardt was pulled out of his fight with Rick Story at the very last minute is because the Pennsylvania Athletic Commission tested him and he was jacked through the roof.
And they were like, what were you doing is dangerous?
These guys were taking hyper levels of testosterone.
When they give you testosterone...
Unless you are going to the doctor, and that doctor is the only one who administers testosterone, and they do it right in front of you, you can put as much in as you want.
You know, if Mike Dolce gets a prescription for testosterone, and you go to your doctor, your doctor's going to give you a fucking month's supply, and you could say, I want to put the whole month in right now.
And then you're just fucking running through walls, like the thing from the Fantastic Four, just...
It's very weird.
If you're on anything else, if you're on any other kind of medication, you take two pills in the morning, you take two pills at night, and here's your pills.
Take those pills.
But you could just decide to throw the whole bottle down your throat if you're fucking nuts.
The only way you could prevent that with testosterone is by restricting access and making that access only through that medical provider that does it right there.
Everyone knows.
And so they decided to just stop the testosterone replacement.
There was no way they could regulate it.
There was too many ethical concerns.
There was too many concerns with...
But the thing is, they started it, and they let these people get on it, and then they got them off of it.
And when you get people off of it, their whole endocrine system just crashes.
This Vitor-Weidman fight is going to be spectacularly interesting from that perspective.
Sure.
Vitor's previous performances have been some of the best performances I've ever seen in all my years of watching MMA. He just looked fantastic.
And if there was no concern whatsoever, if there was no issue with testosterone, if he wasn't on anything, he was just fucking training like a wild man and putting in, you know, if he was younger and this was all going on, if he didn't have like a noticeable I think?
Maybe you should look it up, Jamie.
Find out what Chris Weidman over Vitor Belfort is.
If you look at how Vitor destroyed Dan Henderson, you look at how he destroyed Luke Rockhold, you look at how he destroyed Bisping, you would say, how could anybody be a favorite over this guy?
And the reason is, is because of the testosterone.
When it's over here, you've got to get your, you know, if you're going to go to a gym and become a bodybuilder and you want to get testosterone or steroids, you're going to have to do dealings with some shady people.
in the sport so we think of bodybuilding like the golden era is like the Arnold Schwarzenegger the Franco Colombo the pumping iron days and the bodies didn't change that much 70s to 80s they were kind of similar and then the early 90s that's when Dorian Yates came and just exploded onto the scene then Ronnie Coleman followed up in these 260 pound mass monsters 5'6".
So cutting weight is one thing, using a very powerful pharmaceutical diuretic.
That's like water and fucking, you know, rubbing alcohol.
As far as, you know, putting that into your body.
And that's what, like, Mohammed Benaziza and I think Andres Muncer, some of these famous older bodybuilders, were just huge into those prescription diuretics.
And they just fucking blow their body up from the inside out.
Look amazing on the outside.
And then guys like Paul DeLette, you know, I'm kind of really, you know, going back 20 years of my remembrances of bodybuilding.
I remember these guys collapsing And just thinking like, oh, you know, they look like such specimens.
Why are they so unhealthy?
And that's really, I think, what turned me into what I am today.
I saw that, you know, and take my story back even farther.
I touched on it, you know, years ago, where I saw my father collapse, massive stroke.
I was an eight-year-old kid, and I was like, He was really in shape.
He was a thoroughbred horse trainer.
He just fucking had a massive stroke.
And I was like, how the fuck?
Like, spun.
How is this even possible?
And then all the doctor's visits and all this shit for years.
Well, he was burning his candle at both ends.
Fucking drinking coffee in the morning, not eating until late at night.
Working like 16, 20-hour days.
Really hard, hard-working days.
Sitting back, kicking some beers and whatnot.
Burnt his body out from the inside.
Family history of heart disease.
Hypertension.
Didn't take care of himself.
Boom.
Fast forward, I see this bodybuilding shit, and it really fascinated me.
I was fascinated as a boy all the way up through.
I was fascinated.
And as I continued, and I was a 280-pound powerlifter at some point.
Brought my body weight all the way up in my mid-20s, 280 pounds.
And one day I go to the doctor for a basic health test, wellness test.
High cholesterol, high blood pressure, hypertension, sleep apnea.
Get hooked up to a halter monitor.
Had heart palpitations.
Doctor's like...
What are you doing?
I'm like, I don't fucking know.
I'm trying to be big.
I'm trying to be Arnold Schwarzenegger over here.
And she's like, yeah, this has got to change.
And that's when my mind spun.
I just saw it for what it is.
I pictured my father.
I was like, I've got to fucking change this immediately.
And that's when I was performance science-based.
Lots of supplements and lots of micronutrients and protein ratios and all that bullshit, that bodybuilding bullshit.
And then spun it.
And that's when I became this fucking organic, like, pseudo-hippie health longevity dude.
And when I focused on that, I lost 110 pounds, you know, through my own personal experience.
But I was always working with athletes.
You know, like, since I was 17 years old, first of all, my training business, I was always working with athletes.
And I took that performance side, and I went to the longevity side.
And what I saw is once we all started focusing on longevity protocols as opposed to performance protocols, everybody's performance went through the roof.
I mean real food, getting rid of all the supplements, getting rid of all the pseudoscience, getting back to what's most natural.
I use the term earth-grown nutrients because I used to say Whole Foods and people thought that meant go shopping at the supermarket.
No.
Eating food from the planet.
That was like really the first step for me.
And I don't care as much about micronutrient ratios and weighing because I used to weigh my food and I used to sit there and I would spend a half hour every night and program all my meals and come up with all these different training cycles.
And I was that dude, that insane dude about making these performance enhancements.
This is fucking ridiculous.
You just need to focus on eating real food, extremely nutrient-dense foods from the planet as fresh as possible, as live as possible.
And all the science that's out there shows that that's the healthier way.
And all these different cultures that eat like that tend to be much healthier, perform at a higher level for a much longer period of time, longer lifespan, and a high utility.
And that's really the difference.
Not only do they live longer, they have a very high utility while they're Living longer.
50, 60, 80, 90, 100 plus years old where they're still able to go out, fish, swim, do all these different things.
That's what really turned my mind and this is back 15, probably 15 years ago now.
And then I started implementing that with my athletes, whether it's the powerlifters, the wrestlers, or the grapplers.
And then early 2000s, it was with the NHB athletes before MMA. That's kind of how I got the start into the MMA world was through Team Henzo Gracie on the East Coast.
Guys like Kurt Pellegrino and Dante Rivera, when they were fighting for that ring of combat, NHB titles and whatnot, focused on those guys.
And it was all real foods.
Everyone was like, what do you mean?
I don't have to take my cytosport and my protein powder and pop all these fucking pills?
I was like, no.
It was almost like a leap of faith for a while for a lot of athletes to buy into, you mean I have to eat salads and fruit and make a smoothie?
Now that we talk about it and the culture is a little more advanced, I think the science is out there and it's been proven for a decade plus.
That people realize, well, that's the better way to go now.
But going back, you know, 10, 15 years ago, that was like, everybody was living out of fucking jugs.
You know, protein powders and GNCs and all that shit.
That was the big rage in the late 90s all the way into the early 2000s and such.
So, spun that, switched it, focused on the real foods, and that's what we've been doing with the athletes since.
So, going back to the longevity, when I work with an athlete, like a Tiago Alves or a Ronda Rousey or whoever else, My goal is not for them to win a world title.
My goal is not about their weigh-ins.
My goal is not about really anything sport-related within the next five years.
My goal is for them to be 120 years old.
Healthy, fresh, vibrant.
Showing their great, great grandkids photos of back when they won the UFC world title and all these great times that they have.
If we focus on it now, because we're talking, that's 80 years from now, and with the medical advancements that are happening, with the way science is continuing to evolve, it's possible if we don't fuck it up early.
And this is where I talk to the athletes about the weight cutting starts 52 weeks beforehand.
If we don't fuck everything up now, science is going to advance to the point to keep us healthier, longer, offset some of these issues at a later stage of life, instead of having a Mike Matarazzo.
You need a fucking heart transplant when you're 40 instead of, well, maybe when you're 80, it slowly starts to give out because you've eaten fucking great, highly nutrient-dense foods your entire life.
You've been resting your body completely, not burning your nervous system out.
You're training intelligently, enough to stimulate progress, but not enough to shut anything down and break anything down.
You're living a rewarding, happy life surrounding yourself with positive people, and that's something that you talk about here all the time, and that's almost the most important aspect.
Is being a very well-adjusted, happy, positive individual.
And this is something that when I work with athletes, a lot of people think, oh, this is just this fucking diet dude, or I'm just making eggs for you or handing my athletes water.
I think that's the least of what I do.
The most of what I do is I try and get inside the athlete's head and help them focus on their life and what they want out of their life.
Setting up goals and helping them develop action steps and eliminating this negative energy around them so they can truly realize their full potential.
And that's, you know, I call it, we put a bubble of positivity around the athlete, especially as we get closer to competition, because that's when it's most important.
But it's really, we will try and keep that around them their entire life, give them the tools, teach them the lessons now that they can carry on.
So, will we all live to 120?
I don't know, but I've read scientific research that assumes or believes that there's humans being born right now, on the planet right now, that will exceed 200 years old.
Yeah, but you bring up some really important points about stress and about surrounding yourself with positive things and positive energy.
You can tell the difference.
If you have some bad shit in your life, you have some conflict, you'll feel bad about that conflict.
The key is to resolve that stuff as much as possible and then figure out a way to make peace with the rest of it and move on with your life.
The less you put out battling it, the better you'll feel about it.
When I was younger, I would argue with people about everything.
I was constantly involved in conflict.
And then I realized as I got older, the less conflict I have, the better I feel.
And the more I resolve conflict and not get in it, it's better for everybody.
It's better for that person, it's better for me.
There's certain shit that's unavoidable, but all these people that are running around suing people all the time, those are the motherfuckers that die of heart attacks.
Those are the motherfuckers that have stress, because they're constantly involved in battle.
And not the right kind of battle, either.
either not like a competition you know but just trying to lash out and then dealing with people lashing out at you and all your day is spent thinking about it and if he says this i'm gonna say that and then if she says that i'm gonna tell her what the fuck is up and that kind of shit wears on you man you're grinding your gears all day eats you alive and people don't Think of it.
You don't think of that as being a stress.
They think of stress as being bills.
They think of stress as being traffic.
No, stress is every...
All those things are stress.
Relationships, friendships, work, conflict.
When you're at work all day and you hate your job, that's stress.
That is stress.
That grinds on you.
That feeling.
When you get out of work at the end of the day and you have that...
Weight lifting off your shoulders, that means you're in a bad job.
You gotta figure out a way where you don't have that.
If it's possible, if it's possible, find that way.
I sat around a boardroom table and I was a lot younger than my closest peer and I'm looking at all these older dudes and we're all sitting there in suits and like, we're so fucking important, you know, being those dickheads.
And they're all overweight.
They all have red faces and they're all talking about how they're going to fucking, you know, sneak off to the bar before they go home because they don't want to deal with the fucking family and the kids and all the fucking bullshit.
I gotta get the fuck out of here.
I have to get the fuck out of here or I'm gonna fucking die like this.
I gotta change my life and that's what we did and I kind of threw that away, resigned from the position, took the job as the strength coach at Team Quest up in Portland, Oregon, moved across the country for fucking minimum wage to clean toilets and left that job behind and I fucking loved it.
I loved scrubbing disgusting shitty gym mats at 5 o'clock in the morning and not sitting in a beautiful corner office for X amount of dollars per year Because I was doing what I loved and I gave myself the opportunity and a chance to do something with my life and get rid of the stress.
I think that's why I'm kind of veering off.
That's what it was talking about.
I was so stressed out.
I was riding my bike.
I remember it was freezing cold fucking raining and I'm riding my fucking stupid bike because we had one vehicle.
My wife had to go fucking work.
I'm riding my fucking bike six miles to the gym and I fucking loved it.
It was such a pure, crisp, cold morning and I was just so alive in life.
Have you ever kind of analyzed, like, what drives you to get your ass out of bed, make yourself uncomfortable yet again on another day that you can just fucking put your feet up and lay by the pool and enjoy the sunshine?
The only time I ever feel like I have to have a fucking brutal day where I can enjoy television.
But if my day is brutal enough, I'm like alright bitch, you can sit down and watch a little TV You know, that's the only way I'll allow myself Those those rewards but if I do do that I can really enjoy it.
I can really enjoy a nice foot up, you know Relaxing sit there, you know, have a have a cocktail watch some television.
I can enjoy that But if I don't I can't enjoy it I think a lot of people they're giving themselves rewards all the time, but there's no risk and And then there's also, there's no, like, sacrifice that led up to that reward.
And you gotta enjoy the sacrifice.
You gotta enjoy the grind.
You know, when I say that 90% of the shit I do I don't enjoy, I don't, but I enjoy that I can do it.
You know, like, who the fuck wants to lift weights?
No, you want the reward of the lifting weights.
And the only way you get a strong body is if you do shit you don't want to do.
When you get to that third rep, you're like, I'm good.
But you're not good, stupid.
You got seven more to go.
And if you don't do those seven more, you're going to feel like a fucking loser when you put those weights down.
You're like, I'm a bitch.
I should have fucking kept going and I stopped.
If you stop, you're missing out on the whole point...
When you fucking kick your own ass, you're totally spent.
That's when you...
Reward yourself with your earned TV time or whatever it is, your cocktail.
Same thing when it comes to health and fitness, and this goes to the accountability side.
If you want to be successful, you want to set yourself up to succeed, well, you have to be accountable.
I can't fucking do it.
I can't do it for you.
I wish I could.
There's 7 billion people on the planet.
I can't do it.
I can barely do it for my own self, let alone every other fucking person out there.
And each one of us, we are entirely alone, 100%.
We're surrounded by all this stuff, which is just a facade.
It's all bullshit.
It's here to kind of amuse and entertain and often distract us.
But if we're going to be successful, it has to be because it comes from the inside, that driving force to make us successful.
So the people that want to cheat on Saturday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, they go to the gym, They do their little thing.
They eat their chicken and rice.
You know, Monday through Friday, maybe.
They're kind of okay.
They cheat just a little bit here and there.
They go off-menu, let's say.
And then Saturday's my cheat day, or Sunday's my cheat day, and football's on.
And what happens Monday?
They look fucking exactly the same.
And then they do the same basic workout for the same basic reps and they do that, you know, the same.
It's just the fucking same and they're on that rat wheel.
So if you really, you know, talking to people out there, if you really want to break out, you really want to be spectacular, you really want to start to fulfill your potential, you have to make yourself uncomfortable, you have to challenge yourself, and then you have to earn it.
So with my athletes, with myself, our earned meals are maybe once or twice a month.
And what is an earned meal?
I don't know, maybe it's my wife's birthday, maybe, you know, just...
Going to see a fucking movie or something is coming out.
And then what is my earned meal?
My earned meal is typically a little bit more food that I normally fucking love anyway because our recipes are fucking delicious.
I'm not going to eat some shit burger outside when I can make a kick-ass grass-fed fucking burger with baked sweet potato fries.
I'm going to eat four of those motherfuckers instead of just eating my traditional six or eight ounce one.
You know, once upon a time, I was the dude that would, I'd get a whole pizza and I'd put a half a pound of provolone cheese on top, eat that whole motherfucker.
Half gallon of ice cream, big king-sized Snickers bar, and something colored to finish it down.
Colored beverages only.
Like high C? What high C, fucking crush, Hawaiian punch.
If it was colored, it had more calories than I was fucking drinking it.
Unfortunately, it's all preservatives, it's all chemicals, it's all coloring, it's all additives, and it's very little of the nutrition you're actually purchasing it for.
It's such watered-down components of what is on the front label, just enough so they can legally put it in there and not get fucking sued, and it's a shitload of everything else.
So your journey to becoming this MMA fitness diet guru, you've kind of like changed your own life in the process.
You've sort of figured out what makes you happy, what makes you consistently perform well.
And in the process, you've sort of become this guy by trial and error and education and application.
And now here you are in this position where, I mean, fucking 90% of the guys that I see That are doing well in MMA. I see guys with these Dolce Diet shirts on.
I mean, you have so many athletes that follow your protocols, and whenever someone is in trouble, and they have a hard time cutting weight, they come to you.
How did all this start?
How did you become this guy?
Was it through, like what you said, Kurt Pellegrino, and then Kurt told other people, and that kind of shit?
That was like 2002, 2003. I was working with guys on Team Henzo Gracie.
I started training under Henzo, and I'd been a powerlifter for years before that, and I was an amateur wrestler for years before that.
So I've been cutting weight since I was 13 years old.
I was a varsity captain as a freshman, so a four-year varsity letterman, captain of the team, and I was just, since I was eight years old, fathered fucking massive stroke.
I dove into bodybuilding and weightlifting at that age, and I was just attuned to it.
I was in honors, sciences, biology, mathematics, and I just had that type of analytical brain, and I would analyze everything and all this shit.
So, you know, I won't get too deep into that.
As I went through, I was always cutting weight, always trying to get bigger, always trying to get stronger.
I was rather short, had no money, family was broke, wanted to go to college.
How the fuck am I going to go?
Poor kid from fucking New Jersey.
How am I going to go to college?
Only way I could do it was through a scholarship.
There's no cash.
Mom's working three jobs, and there's no heating on it in the fucking house.
So there's no extra money for this kid number three to go to fucking school.
And that became my focus.
I had to focus on that, and I had a shit wrestling team.
Loved the guys, and they made me who I am.
But we were a parochial school.
I started on the team.
It was the second year.
The team was even in existence.
Our coaches were great dudes, but they didn't have the high-level experience from them.
None of my teammates did.
How am I going to advance?
It's not through technique.
It's not through experience.
It's not through grinding steel on steel.
It's just being in better shape than everybody.
I had to be that guy, and that's the guy that I actually became.
And that's what really started more of this focus on the strength and conditioning.
Do you work with guys on strength and conditioning as well as working with them with diet?
How do you balance that out?
Because I talked to Steve Maxwell about this, and Maxwell, who's a really well-respected guy and a very knowledgeable guy when it comes to strength and conditioning and athletics.
He believes that you should do all of your strength workouts and your conditioning workouts kind of building up to a camp.
And then when you're in camp, the majority of your work should be spent doing the actual sport itself.
Without knowing his entire protocol, I agree on principle.
And what I do and how I work best is not just overseeing the nutrition, the diet, and the weight cut.
It's, I call it the peaking program, and I bake it out into the traditional Western periodization program.
When I talk about 52 weeks, it's a 12 month periodized program.
When I started working with Tiago Alves in 2010, we came up with a seven year program for him.
Now, unfortunately he had some injuries along the way, but it's transitioning him from the body that he once had and the bad habits that he had once had to slowly rebuild, regenerate, and continue building him all the way through until he's 35 when he plans to retire and the specific goals that we have set.
So a guy like Nick Lentz, I took over five or six fights ago when he was a 55-pounder.
It'll be a little long-winded, but to kind of help explain your answer to the question here.
Took him over and he was doing a lot of the wrong things.
Training really hard.
Totally over-trained.
Over-reaching syndrome constantly.
Malnourished.
Couldn't understand why his body wasn't losing weight.
He was walking around in the mid-160s.
Could barely make fucking 55 without damn near dying.
Said, will I work with him?
I said, yes, but only at 145. And he's like, are you fucking crazy?
I told you I can't make 55. I said, you'll be a world champion at 145. I do believe that.
You're an undersized 155 pounder.
And you're not training properly.
What I want to do with you is I want to add 10 to 12 pounds of muscle and grow you into the 145-pound class.
Blew his mind.
It didn't make any sense to him, but to his credit, he said, okay, and just gave me the reins.
So from that point on, I looked at multi-month cycles, three-week cycles, three-month cycles, and then a 12-month cycle.
To put on lean mass.
And what we did, we took him from 163 pounds to 175 pounds.
We dropped his body fat from probably 13 to 14 down to right about 10%.
And then he's able to make 145 consistently now easily.
So using Steve's methodology in the off season, it's much more volume.
It's more strength building.
It's more muscle work.
Not exactly hypertrophy because I don't really believe in that, but we're always staying anabolic.
That's the goal.
We always want the body constantly regenerating, regenerating, regenerating.
Because once we stop regenerating, then we're breaking down.
Once we start breaking down, everything goes to shit.
So, with Nick, using him as the example again, build him up in the off-season, and that's where I start to break down these three-week mini-cycles.
Three weeks before the fight, that's the peaking phase.
That's when everything, the volume drops dramatically, the intensity goes up, but it's safe intensity.
You're not sparring your fucking hardest those last three weeks.
weeks you're sparring your most intense and most precise without that bone-on-bone collision weeks you know four five and six in the middle that's a little bit more medium volume maximum intensity that's when you're really getting your hard hard goes to build that um you know ability to withstand the damage that's going to happen in the fight to callous your body over and also to callous your mind you have to go through that the three weeks before that so that's you know seven eight nine
that's more of a volume your mind meaning you just you resolve like mental toughness mental toughness i mean we see guys unfortunately that they get into the octagon they get put a bad spot that they haven't been in before and they fold because they haven't been there you have to go to those spots unfortunately but you have to do it in a very calculated fashion because you go there too often you'll break in training and you'll give up in the fight you don't go there enough you'll break in the fight and again, it's going to be the same result.
So you have to touch it just enough, and this is where that periodization comes in.
So I help oversee the overall training program.
I help the athlete.
Usually it's spar less.
I try and pull them back because a lot of these athletes are sparring two and three times a week, and I try and only have them spar.
Once a week, really from six weeks out, one good hard spar, proper spar, and one tech spar is really the methodology that I push.
Save the brain, save the body, let's get more precise.
And then hit the other hard drilling in certain phases.
And then as we get farther out, it's more skill building.
We're looking to just add tools and see what tools fit the overall game.
You know, throw ten different techniques on the ground and see what fits.
And as we get a little closer, we take the ten, we put it to five.
As we get a little closer, maybe the athlete's only going to keep one or two usable techniques that will actually show up come fight day.
We're not trying to add new techniques six weeks out, three weeks out for sure.
At that point, it's just fine-tuning and perfecting, but that also comes into their physical preparation.
What's their body weight like?
What's the health?
Again, health is everything.
It's mental health.
It's physical health.
That's what allows them to perform at their ultimate.
So long-winded way of saying I agree with Steve quite a bit.
Strength building, that's off-season stuff.
We want to keep that type of strength, that explosive strength, that absolute or maximal strength that we build in the off-season.
We want to keep that, but now we want to turn it into a different type of strength, like a strength speed or speed endurance, as we get into this specific competition.
Normally, I don't really pull back the veil, but I think because this is such a public situation, and Oliveira and his team, they've already spoken on it.
Unfortunately, what they said was incorrect from what we saw.
So Nick and I, this fight's on Friday.
Nick and I, we get there on Monday, and we're already...
Nick gets to town at 164 pounds.
He's fighting at 146. That's the official weighing weight.
And that's actually lighter than Nick normally is.
But we tightened up his diet just a little bit for Charles specifically.
We knew Nick was going to overpower him.
We wanted Nick to be just a little bit lighter, a little bit leaner, a little bit faster for this fight in better condition in case it was a three-round dogfight.
Charles called Nick out, by the way.
So Charles asked for this fight after they had had a no contest years before.
So, Monday, Nick and I, we start doing our thing, cutting weight.
And I want to feed the athlete as much as possible, hydrate them as much as possible, keep them as strong and healthy as possible so they can endure the process of cutting weight, whereas I like to frame it positively as purification.
We're purifying the body as we go through this Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Step on the Scale Friday phase where the body is completely clean, pure, and we can just put the best possible nutrients back in When you say no working out, you mean nothing?
I mean nothing.
I mean the most that we'll do, and I talk about that in three weeks to shred it, what I do with Tiago Alves.
This is a great...
Maybe we should talk about this next.
Tiago's last fight, he weighed in at 171 the night before weigh-ins using this new protocol that we're using because they're fucking healthy.
We're not tearing them down during fight week.
Actually, I build my athletes to this scale.
Everybody else tears themselves down to this scale.
I build my athletes to this scale.
And it sounds counterintuitive, and a lot of people think I'm...
Fucking lying or whatever, you know, bro-sciencing out.
But no, this is the real fucking shit.
So with Nick, what we doing, we don't work out.
We're going downstairs to the hot tub and we're just hanging out.
He's playing his fucking, you know, whatever video games because he's a tech head.
He's playing his fucking games.
We're fucking chilling out to music.
We're just shooting the shit like you would do with your boys.
Just hanging out in the hot tub for a little bit.
Comozzi's coming down and hanging out with Ben Rothbro a little bit.
We're just shooting the shit down there.
Charles and his coach are in the fucking sauna on Monday in plastic fucking suits and sweatpants all goddamn day long.
Nick and I were in the hot tub for a half hour just to break a sweat, drinking water the whole time, eat beforehand, stay hydrated during, go upstairs and eat again.
This is what we do and that's what we did typically twice a day during fight week.
Every time we went downstairs to the spa, which was beautiful at this hotel, Foxwoods, Charles was in the fucking sauna.
Plastics on, in the sauna, and they would pick him up, carry him out, and just fucking let him lay on the floor, and then they'd cover him with towels.
So archaic, and this is what a lot of athletes do.
Maybe, maybe I can see athletes doing that like the night before in the morning of.
They're doing it fucking Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday.
Now, we waited on Thursday.
On Wednesday, and this is fun, so we're watching him just break this fucking kid.
He's laying there in the sauna, I mean, just not moving, you know, and he'd get up and, you know, he'd do and he'd kind of like give us a thumbs up.
He was a nice kid.
Nothing bad to say about Charles.
Nothing bad to say about his coach, but what they did was wrong.
They broke him in the fucking sauna.
Nick and I saw it and we're like...
You know, high five.
I mean, it makes our job a hell of a lot easier because Nick's fucking great.
And, you know, Nick's there.
At one point, Charles comes in, sits in the hot tub at the very end, and he's looking at Nick, and Nick's just sitting there drinking water, you know, shooting the shit.
Charles is over there, dry mouth, just sucked out, big dark bags under his eyes after being in the fucking sauna for God knows how long.
And just kind of laid out on the wall.
So Wednesday comes in.
This is actually funny.
Wednesday comes, middle of the day.
Charles' coach, they drag him out of the fucking sauna.
They're just sitting there.
I took a photo of it.
I was going to tweet it like what not to do.
And I was like, ah, that's, you know, fucking bad.
Maybe I shouldn't do that.
Maybe I should have.
I don't know.
He comes over and he's like, hey, guys.
I want to have a proposition for you.
And I think, oh, this fucker's not going to make weight.
They want to catch weight.
I have a proposition for you.
What's up?
He's like, what you're doing right now, this is not going to work.
He's like, you're not going to lose weight like this.
In the back, I have salt and I have alcohol.
And I want to pour it in the tub for you.
So that in 30 minutes, you'll lose the same amount as you'll lose in three hours doing what you're doing right now.
What we do is 10 days out, we increase sodium, but not a dramatic amount.
What I tell the athletes is add more salt to your foods, but not so much that it tastes bad.
Just add more than you normally do.
So let's say you're taking it the week beforehand.
So 10 days out typically should be your hardest training session.
Okay, because any more than 10 days out, now we're too close to the competition time, you might not be fully recovered and you're not going to perform at your best.
So right about 10 days out, usually the Tuesday before the fight or the following week, that should be the hardest day.
And then everything else we start to pull way back.
Light and medium workouts, much shorter intensities.
Start to increase your sodium just a little bit.
So you can taste it, but it's nothing that you don't like.
Never too much that it's not good.
Add a little bit more to your water.
We add pink Himalayan sea salt.
Love the Onnit brand, actually, for that.
That's the one I use almost primarily.
To the water, while they're training, just add a little bit more.
So we increase their sodium content just a little bit.
And then usually, depending on the athlete, Saturday or Sunday, sometimes even Monday morning, we pull that back.
We don't add any more.
We don't add additional salt.
So we rise the sodium up, then we pull it back down to normal levels, probably anywhere between 1,000 to 2,000 milligrams, depending on the athlete, depending on their lifestyle, and we really focus on feeding them a similar caloric content, but more often.
So it's basically the same, let's say, 2,000 calories a day, but instead of 5 to 6 meals, now we're eating 8 to 10 smaller meals all day long.
The metabolism speeds up.
We're also focusing on more fiber, cleaning out their digestive tract.
A lot of times, athletes will step on the scale with impacted food matter still sitting inside of them.
I think he drank almost a gallon of water that morning.
And just by drinking the water so frequently, it pushes the water out.
And then we cut...
So he woke up at 158 the day before.
He floated two pounds off by the time we got to the tub later on that night.
He went to bed at 150. So we lost about six pounds, and that's usually half.
And that's a good estimate.
The day before, we want to lose about half the night before.
You're going to float one to three pounds typically while you sleep, and then the next morning is usually two to four pounds.
So it's very small, controlled, you know, elimination of weight and it's water weight and he's still eating.
He's never not eating.
He's still picking.
He's not having these big meals, but we go from meals to, you know, kind of snack size to now it's handfuls just to keep his metabolism moving, keep his body processing the food, keep pulling the nutrients, keep his blood sugar stable, keep his brain on, keep his mood elevated so he doesn't feel like shit.
So with Tiago, what we did in the beginning, you know, he missed weight with John Fitch in 2010. I started working with him two days later, brought him down, fought John Fitch, John Howard, and His weight issue was gone.
And then he had some injuries.
He had his knees fixed.
He had his shoulders and arms fixed.
He was on the shelf for two years.
25 months actually.
We came back and he fought in Orlando in April.
And the new and improved Tiago had been on the meal plan almost the entire time.
Was eating properly those 52 weeks out of the year.
He does his Sunday fun day and he has a little barbecue, but that's controlled and that's okay.
We allow that to a degree, but he would really follow the meal plan from about 12 weeks.
When the fight was offered, he went on and he didn't break.
He didn't go off.
So when I got to him three weeks before the fight and Tiago is one of the few athletes I actually travel for, for an extended period of time anymore.
And I went and stayed with him and he was one 96 or one 98 three weeks before the fight jacked, probably, you know, 8%, 9% body fat.
And he's fucking looked awesome.
Slowly but surely, I tightened up his diet, I tightened the wheels and the switches just a little bit, really made sure he was getting enough food to fuel, but not enough to spill over.
And we were able to slowly bring his weight down to the lower 90s.
The same exact principle, different foods for Tiago than what Lentz ate.
Tiago is much more of a protein and fat metabolizer.
Nick Lentz is much more of a vegetable and produce metabolizer.
They perform better or their analytics are much better when they have those type of foods and that just comes through experience working with these guys.
So Tiago was more heavy.
It was chicken and steak and eggs, avocados, different types of oils and seeds.
To really bring him down.
Anytime he has the heavier carbs outside of the breakfast bowl, oats and such, berries first thing in the morning, he tends to bloat up and really hold on to that water.
It's to refill the body of lost glycogen to make sure that usable energy is available.
And it's also a mood elevator because a lot of times the athlete starts to get a little, you know, shitty if they're not getting more carbohydrates.
And the brain runs on carbohydrates also.
So you can see the mood kind of decrease just a little bit.
And also performance.
I'm working with Manny Gamburian right now to drop him from 45 to 135. Got him on the first program, the initial program.
And it was just a little bit too low carbohydrate.
And he's like, oh, his mood was down just a little bit.
He didn't feel that snap in practice.
And we really just brought him up about 100 extra carbohydrates per day.
And he fucking felt amazing.
So it was really trying to find the line that is exactly what they need without spilling over.
And once we got that, we got him feeling good for 10 days.
We're able to stage it down just a little bit and he feels even better.
So now we're slowly into that last three-week phase, the peaking phase, and he's now 148 pounds yesterday, which his last fight for him to get under 155, he felt like he was going to die.
So now he's training at 140. It feels fucking amazing.
Fully fed, six-plus meals a day, but everything's kind of perfectly controlled.
When she fought Misha Tate, her fight lasted into the third round, and Misha's a very well-conditioned athlete, one of the better-conditioned female athletes in the game, and Ronda looked amazing, and that was a scrap.
Back when we filmed The Ultimate Fighter, he was 162 pounds.
He was in the low 160s back then.
And then they broke off communication with me.
After the ultimate fight was over, I didn't hear from anybody from their team, their camp, until the very end of May, which is just a few weeks before fight week, and they were in a bit of crisis mode.
Now, I didn't get to...
Hawaii to first actually, you know, be a part of the camp and the team until June the 9th, which is less than a month before the fight.
When I got there, BJ had said he weighs, I said, wait, what do you weigh, champ?
157 pounds, but I went out last night with Dominic Cruz and we had some pizza.
I weighed 157 today.
And I'm thinking, fuck, why do you need me to be here?
You know, the fucking, you know, Dolce Diet dude.
If you're 157 pounds, I mean, you're 10 pounds over what the weight class is after eating some bad shit.
You're probably closer to 55-54, I'm assuming.
So it was kind of, it was an anomaly.
It was really an odd situation.
How did he lose the weight?
You know, just eating a little more, he's paid more attention to his food as he got closer to the fight those last couple weeks I was there.
I didn't prepare any meals for him.
I stayed in a completely different location.
He stayed in one area.
I stayed a few miles away in another area.
It was a weird situation.
It was one of the oddest training camps I had ever been a part of, and I was there for less than two weeks physically in Hawaii and had very little experience.
Influence, unfortunately.
And I made some very strong suggestions and I made, you know, very strong observations to members of the team of what I saw and what I am accustomed to and what I think would really benefit.
And we'll just compare it to Frankie Edgar's team.
Now Frankie Edgar has Mark Henry there, who's a world-class striking coach.
He has Steve Rivera there, who's one of the top wrestling coaches in the country.
And then he has Carlo Mader there, who's one of the top Brazilian jiu-jitsu coaches, practitioners in the world.
And then Frankie's got a shitload of UFC-level guys that he's training with on a daily basis.
And BJ had none of that.
He had a coach who was a nice man who, from what I understand, has no experience in boxing or Coaching, you know, professional athletes, certainly not the world-class UFC MMA level.
There was no wrestling coach there.
And, you know, the only, the top-level jiu-jitsu guys, of course, BJ, who's very accoladed, but his brothers were there, and it didn't seem like they had any influence as far as technical proficiency or strategy or, you know, game plan or training.
And it was, you know, minimal.
The only training camps there of, you know, training partners there of value were the two guys I brought in at the last minute, which was Nick Lent and Mursad Bektik.
Now Lentz left very, you know, he got there and he left because he didn't want to be there.
He didn't feel like it was going to be a good training environment for him.
So he left early.
And then Mursad stayed, but Mursad's, you know, a young, tough kid.
Mursad was actually a great training partner for BJ and really tried to do his best to mimic what Frankie was going to do.
Is it one of those situations where, in all fairness, BJ, who's a great champion, who's a real MMA legend, is almost too strong of a personality to be coached because he's been so successful and because he's been such a destroyer at points in his career that he has something in his head and who the fuck are you to tell BJ Penn what to do?
It was very, you know, I don't know why there was no coaches there that were able to truly make influence.
The suggestions that I made were, and I made them officially, and they were accepted but not responded or reacted to.
And it was just a matter of, you know, this is, that's the direction he's choosing to go, and he's either going to win and look like a fucking genius, or he's going to not win and he's going to make the odd makers look like a genius.
In all fairness, there's other issues besides diet.
There was also his upright boxing style that confused the shit out of a lot of people.
No one understood.
He had this narrow stance and he stood completely straight up.
It was very odd.
And when he was asked about it, he said that it was very effective for him in training and that they came up with it to, somehow or another, reserve energy.
So by not lowering his body weight, meaning by not lowering his stance and pushing off of his legs more, by standing up straight, he would extend less energy.
It would be less difficult for him to do.
I found that incredibly bizarre.
And the last thing you should ever be thinking about if you're about to fight Frankie fucking Edgar is conserving energy.
I mean, goddamn, you better be ready to go balls to the wall for five fucking rounds because Frankie is going to.
Yeah, it's just, it's so hard when you're a fan of a guy like that, where you almost want to just be able to, like, get inside of his head and just, you know, man, if you had, like, a Matt Hume-type coach, someone that you could completely listen to.
It's really a fascinating sport in that this sport has evolved before our eyes and we've seen the training change and move and adjust.
It's one of the reasons why I brought up the idea of whether or not people have unreal expectations because of performance-enhancing drugs because it's very confusing in a lot of ways.
Everyone's sort of imitating the successful behavior that they see around them.
You know, this guy uses ropes.
He swings ropes around.
I gotta get some ropes.
You know, this guy likes to fucking use a tire and a sledgehammer.
We see everyone sort of imitating what's successful and what people have done successfully before them.
And then there's guys like Fedor that confuse the shit out of everybody because he's throwing rocks and fucking, you know, throwing punches with little hand weights, and that's basically all you ever see from them.
You know, as a sport, though people have been fighting for years, never like this, never at this level, never with so much on the line, you know, multi-millions of dollars available now for the top dog.
So there's a race, and that's obviously what brings in the PEDs, but it's also what pushes athletes like Ronda Rousey forward to constantly evolve and work on her striking more and find new ways to diet and do her strength and conditioning better and use her mental visualization approaches to really make sure she can be at the top of that cresting wave.
And the thing about the performance-enhancing drugs, I mean, they exist in all sports, of course, but in MMA, it's almost like there's not enough time in the day to do everything.
There's so many different things that you have to be on top of that an athlete almost doesn't have the time or the physical resources.
Like, their body can't do all the work that's required.
That way, you're able to What we're going to be working on for this three-week phase and then we're going to work on something different but synergistic on the next three-week phase and we're slowly going to be the best possible version of ourself at that time when we step into the octagon or step into the competition circle and then it all starts over again and we look to add more tools.
A lot of the things, unfortunately, that said were factually incorrect and I chose not to...
This is the first time I'm even commenting about it.
I go on the underground every day, and a lot of the people on the underground seemed to have a pretty good take on what the reality of the situation was, and I didn't feel the need to personally comment.
What I'm going to say is that he had a house full of food.
I personally brought over tons of amazing food that was available.
He was two minutes from a Whole Foods that was right down the street from him.
You know, there's his house that, you know, shit, 10 gallons of water in it, and a gallon of coconut water, and a running faucet, and there's sea salt everywhere, and, you know, just, you know, a big, I brought a huge vat of the power pasta with grass-fed beef, and, you know...
It's a brown rice pasta, so it's a higher carbohydrate content food.
I made two 16-ounce boxes of it, which would basically feed a family of four really fucking big dudes or a family of six or so.
Two pounds of grass-fed ground beef was mixed up in there and just I think like two peppers and two red peppers and two green and two red onions and just really high quality nutrients.
And a full fucking smoothie, massive handful of kale, handful of spinach, handful of red grapes, handful of blueberries, handful of strawberries.
So do you think that what happens is after a fighter loses, there's an interesting thing that happened with Travis Brown.
Travis Brown did this interview, and I really love Travis.
I think he's an awesome guy.
I think he's a great fighter, but he's also super honest, which I thought was really cool.
And he said that after he lost to Fabrizio Verdum, he goes, I went through the whole process.
I blamed myself.
I blamed everybody around me.
I took turns blaming people.
He goes, I fucking cried.
I did the whole deal.
And then I figured out, all right, what do I need to work on?
What do I need to change?
What do I need to adjust?
He's working with Edmund, Rhonda's trainer, on his striking and trying to tone things up and change some things and learn some new skills and learn some new variables that he could add to his fight game.
But what I love about the fact that he was honest about how after the fight there's this instinct to sort of blame.
Blame himself, blame others, rotate, you know, no, fuck it, it was everybody else's fault.
It wasn't me.
And after the BJ fight, I kept hearing all this shit about, you know, blaming Mike Dolce.
I'm like, man, how much fucking impact can a guy who's telling you what to eat have on how you fight?
Because what I saw in that cage was a guy getting overwhelmed by a guy with a fucking incredible gas tank with a better strategy.
He was the number two guy in the world at the time.
BJ was coming off of a massive layoff.
And we knew it was a very uphill battle.
I was as shocked...
I mean, I was really hurt when I heard the first comment and I saw the things being said and kind of the finger being pointed my way because I know what happened.
And I know what my influence or lack of influence was.
And I will go down with the fucking ship.
Any athlete that knows me, that I work with, knows the type of person I am.
And I think I've built a solid reputation within the industry.
And it was just uncalled for.
It was unfair.
And I kept my mouth shut because I wanted to be a professional.
And I didn't want to say anything because BJ's got a lot of fans.
I'm a fucking huge fan of the kid.
I still am a huge fan of the kid.
And I understand because I've fought before.
I've lost before.
And I've been hurt before.
And I've wanted to blame.
And I still could blame.
But what is that going to get?
And with my, you know, defend myself here for a second...
I know what I did, and I think I was probably one of the only bright positives with true world-class experience that was around him.
We have to make sure everything's working properly so there's no surprises, but we're not overworking the athlete.
We're warming them up and then we're just cooling them right back down again, making them...
A big part of it is also building confidence because they go through the weight cut process and sometimes you feel a little shitty and you're like, fuck, do I still have it?
I felt like, you know, shit yesterday.
I felt weak yesterday.
God, he looked so big yesterday.
And you get in there and they feel, you know, obviously Nick weighs in at 46 and he was probably 46, closer to, you know, 65 the very next morning and felt like a fucking machine.
And he left that room with a smile on his face like, I'm going to fucking kill this dude.
These guys, just because you compete in an unlimited weight class or nearly unlimited weight class, doesn't mean you can have an unlimited body weight.
What's the proper body weight for performance?
For most athletes, it's somewhere between 8 to 12 percent.
Is there a proper body weight for a heavyweight as far as like when you get too heavy, you're dealing with gravity, you're dealing with mass that needs to have blood pumped through it?
Because isn't the one variable that's not very different in people the size of your actual heart?
That's what Kane is, but Kane eating properly, and he's the fucking dominant champion of the world, so I'm not saying he should do anything, but there's no reason why any professional athlete should be walking around with excess non-functional weight.
And a lot of what's floating around Kane's midsection are athletes like Kane, and he's one of the better conditioned, but without that 8, 10, 12, 16 additional pounds, how much faster would he be?
Force production would probably be very similar, unless he really sits down on a single punch or one single blast, but he'd probably be faster, he'd probably be more agile, he'd be more capable of scrambling, he'd be able to do a few more things with no loss in strength.
But okay, in response to that, the two guys that we were talking about, both Kane and Fedor, are both guys that had high body fat who are known for their high output and their long fights with incredible endurance.
Yeah, I mean, as we're talking about this and talking about different styles and different people's training, it is interesting that there's no one answer.
Like, this is what you have to do.
In order to do X, you have to start out with Y and put in W. There's no answer, right?
It's like everybody has to figure out what works well for them.
And when you see guys like readjust and rebound and try to reassess their career, like Overeem is a perfect example.
Overeem is now at Jackson's and he just fought against Ben Rothwell and got knocked out in the first round.
Looked great for a little bit until he got clipped.
Yeah.
But, you know, he was doing things a lot differently.
Throwing those oblique kicks to the knee, which a lot of people don't like.
Strength and conditioning, I think, is very similar, and it's...
The athlete is really going to gravitate towards what suits them, but it's all...
You know, like I said, the athlete changes, which is why my...
We have the principles, so the principles don't change.
You know, Dwayne, let's say, throw a punch with your right hand, left hand has to be blocking.
I think Duke would say the same thing.
But the individual application, that's where it changes on...
The individual basis per athlete, per time they compete, or on different athletes.
So the principles are always the same, but we always have to evolve the application.
I'm sure just like Eddie's doing every night he goes in the gym, he's like, oh shit, I saw this fucking white belt do something that just totally killed the black belt's move, what?
It's an interesting growth and evolution of the sport and it's really cool to see the different athletes different body types and see this new generation now Coming out there because what we're seeing guys like Cruz and Dillashaw He's the champ now, but he's part of you know a younger generation But there's another tier below him now that's gonna be coming soon and make Dillashaw look a little you know not one-dimensional But a little slower Let's say you know two three years from now.
There's some fucking kid in the middle of nowhere that's gonna come out I can't imagine that, but I know you're right.
It's going to happen, right?
Remember when GSP came out?
And we were all like, God damn, this dude is like an Olympic gymnast.
And then, you know, you have a guy like Dillashaw coming out, moving the way he does, putting his wrestling together, all the feints that he's doing, hitting with power, you know, kind of like what you were saying about Diaz, where they're able to off-speed their punches and their strikes and really change angles.
And that's something that people need to take into consideration when they discuss training protocols is that what's happening with a lot of fighters is they're going through the same sort of thing that they went through in wrestling practice.
And what wrestling practice is fantastic for is developing mental toughness.
I believe there are no tougher athletes in the world than someone who goes through high-level wrestling camps.
Someone who goes through Purdue, like a John Fitch.
When you go through these fucking camps, you go through Iowa, you go through these high-level wrestling camps, amateur wrestling, college wrestling camps, those people are fucking animals.
They have a level of mental toughness that if you don't understand it, they're going to wake up 15 minutes earlier than anybody else because they know that no one else is awake.
They're going to run an extra mile because they know no one else is going to run it.
They're going to do all these different things because they pride themselves in being uncomfortable and in grinding it out.
And there's good in that, but there's also bad in it.
And the bad in it is the physiological reality of the body's ability to recuperate.
And that if you tested any of these high-level professional wrestlers, or amateur wrestlers rather, at their highest level, when they're going through camps, I guarantee you a lot of them are going to have low testosterone.
And it's just because their body's being broken down and it's just the sheer dogged determination of their own mind that allows them to get up every morning and keep doing it.
Well, you could wrestle, or you could wrestle, or you could wrestle.
And, you know, like how he made him do, you know, push-ups and sit-ups and chin-ups and shit when he was a little boy.
He was doing fucking 500 push-ups.
I mean, he just had that kid as a youngster with a very high tolerance to work and just this drive.
He pushed him so that everything else would be easy.
I mean, he made it so everything at home, all the training he did, all the wrestling practices were so fucking hard that everything else would be easy.
And should have been the first time he fought GSP. Agreed.
In my opinion.
I mean, he got the title with the Robbie Lawler fight, but I thought he beat GSP. And the only people that disagree that I've talked to were people that were in that Henzo Gracie camp that were a little bit biased and thought that George won round one, which I didn't understand.
I think damage is more important than anything, and I think Johnny, without a doubt, did more damage in that fight.
They pointed to the guillotine attempt in the first round, but I didn't think that was a successful attempt.
I thought it was never close.
Did you see Scoggins vs.
John Moraga this last fight?
The first guillotine was very close.
The second guillotine locked it up.
George never had a guillotine like that.
You know what I'm saying?
It wasn't like one of those where it was like Scoggins barely got out of that first guillotine where Moraga locked it up.
But he was in deep shit.
And then he caught him with the second one.
That's not the kind of guillotine that Hendricks was caught in in that first round.
So I didn't understand anybody saying that they thought that GSP won.
Is there a time where a fighter should be told to stop?
Because if George was my friend...
I would tell George to stop.
And the reason why I would tell George to stop is because we did some sort of a fight metric thing where we calculated all the times he'd been hit inside the octagon.
And he had been hit in the head 880-something times over the course of his UFC career.
And I'm like, what's the number where a guy can walk?
Because if you talk to George now, he's lucid.
He speaks well.
But I know that he was having migraines.
I know that he was having memory issues.
And I think there's only a certain amount of times a guy can fight.
There's only a certain amount of blows a guy can take.
And George, if he stopped now, could he have another fight?
Very possibly, but could he come back and take some damage that five years from now we're gonna see a much compromised George and that's possible as well, right?
Probably and I've had this conversation with athletes before and it's it's difficult and it's emotional and And it's, you know, it's in their best interest and sometimes, you know, they've gotten mad, but they know it's out of love and care and concern.
And it's, there's a risk to reward.
And, you know, anytime an athlete, whether you're an amateur or you're making millions of dollars, there's a risk.
And what is the reward?
Is it some sort of personal challenge?
Are you trying to scare away a demon?
Are you trying to provide a college education for your daughter?
These are things that they get put on the scale and they become intellectual conversations to have.
And then you say, all right, is this worth the risk?
But a guy like GSPE, I mean, he's proven everything.
I said, and the quote, so I hope nobody out there is going to quote this out of context, was athletes need to get rid of their, need to fire their managers and hire attorneys.
And it wasn't meant to be that every athlete needs to get rid of the manager because I said there's some great managers out there.
But there's some managers out there that they have their hand too deep inside the athlete's pocket where the athlete can't excel and can't develop themselves as a professional because they're spending 20 and 30 percent of their purse and all their earnings going straight to their manager.
And then the athlete has to pay for an attorney to come in and do contract review.
Then they have to pay for an agent to come in and bring in sponsorship.
Then they have to pay a striking jujitsu, wrestling strength coach.
Then they have to pay their income taxes.
Then they have to put food on the table for their family.
And at the UFC level where these contracts are much more strict, and that's really what I was talking about.
It was during the Kelvin Gastelum comments.
Was at the UFC level, there's not a lot of negotiation room for most.
It's more of contract review legalese.
And some of the managers came out and they said, yeah, they were pissed at me.
And I asked all of them specifically.
I said, how many of your clients have come to you because their manager fucking sucked?
And they're like, oh, shit, a bunch.
That's what I'm talking about.
Maybe you're awesome.
But at the same time, these athletes, they need attorneys.
It's nice to really look at the paperwork.
And yeah, there's a building phase and you're getting them notoriety and such to get to the UFC level.
But because you get them there doesn't mean that you should stay there.
And a guy like Mike Pyle, he fired his manager a few fights back.
He talks directly with Joe Silva.
He does all the negotiation.
He gets to keep all of his money.
He makes more money now.
And he hires an attorney to come in and do the contract review and such on a per hour basis or a per contract basis.
He speaks very openly about this.
He's one of the guys who's in the UFC and he's one of the higher paid athletes out there doing it.
Well, you know, obviously, I love the UFC. Obviously, it's a huge...
It's a huge honor for me to call the fights and to be a part of the organization, but I think the only way that the UFC is ever going to satisfy the athletes, I mean, the only way the athletes are ever going to be in a situation where they're completely, totally happy with what they get paid is if they're at the top of the heap.
And GSP, as big as he was, is never the draw that Floyd Mayweather is.
Floyd Mayweather is a draw, like, internationally, nationally.
He's gigantic.
Yeah.
And he's also the promoter.
I mean, he's got a lot of shit going on.
Unless a fighter becomes a part of a promotion, I mean, it's just not the same thing.
You know, if the UFC, like when Oscar De La Hoya was Golden Boy Productions and when he was fighting as well and making insane amounts of money in that, again, there's only one Oscar De La Hoya.
And there's also, the UFC, like it or not, and I love it, they're essentially the number one game in town.
And it's not like there's a close number two.
Whereas, Bob Arum, Golden Boy, you know, there's all these different promotions.
The money team, there's a lot of different promotions when it comes to promoting fights.
Whereas the UFC is like, there's Bellator.
You know, Bellator's not bad.
They're on Spike TV. They're doing real good.
You know, I'm a big fan of Scott Coker.
I'm a big fan of Spike TV. But the reality is there's a goddamn huge...
What she does outside of the octagon as much as she does what she does inside.
And that's something I try and talk to athletes about, the athletes that I have the ability to influence.
And that's what I see other athletes do, a guy like Alan Belcher.
Alan Belcher makes far more money running his gyms and online training business than he does when competing as a professional athlete inside the UFC. And he makes a good payday inside the UFC. And the athletes, they need to understand that they're as big or as good as they want to be, and they can certainly build their brand in areas like yourself.
You find areas that you enjoy and that you're good at, or you're not good at yet, but you want to be good at, so you bust your ass to push your way into that field and that niche.
And athletes, they have more than enough time to do that, whether it's flipping real estate like Bristol Marundi's doing right now.
Who's Bristol Mirondi?
Bristol Mirondi fought in UFC a couple times, fought for Strikeforce.
He was on The Ultimate Fighter a couple seasons back.
He's flipping real estate in Las Vegas.
An article came out about him recently.
He makes a shitload more money doing that than he does fighting.
And he's fighting because he enjoys fighting.
You know, Alan Belcher, what he's doing, what Ronda's doing, priming Ronda's outside the octagon money is going to eclipse what she makes inside the octagon.
But she's going with what she has, and there's a lot of athletes out there that can go with what they have.
They all have something.
Look at what Ludwig did.
He went from being a high-level fighter.
At the end of his career, he transitioned into a coach, and he'll be a much more successful financially and business-wise as a coach, growing his affiliate system, building his brand that way.
And he made good money as a fighter, as a top-tier fighter, knocked out Jen Pulver, won the K1 Max North Americas.
I mean, he did some really good things inside the sport.
So just taking that concept.
And I'm not shilling for the UFC here, but I'm saying if athletes are sitting home and they're looking at their paycheck at the end of the year, saying they're not happy with it, there's a lot of other ways that they can monetize, that they can use their brand, they can use what they do to get out there and build.
And it's not sitting back waiting for sponsors to just hand them a check to put on a T-shirt or to hold up an energy drink.
There's other ways to go out there and take care of it.
Yeah, it's tricky for fighters to find that and sort of explore that while they're also trying to improve their skill set, improve their conditioning, and also to have the energy to do it.
People are fucking exhausted after they're done training.
You know, at the end of the day, they're just like, oh, Christ.
Because I think they look at him as this cocky black guy.
And I think a lot of people have an issue with that.
And I think that if he was a white guy and he was doing the same thing, a la Chael Sonnen, I think he'd be way more popular.
And Chael was never the successful athlete that John is.
But I think that Chael was way more successful as a promoter than John is.
And John has not been nearly as cocky or outwardly braggadocious as Chael was.
But somehow or another, when Chael did it, first of all, Chael was very entertaining, very articulate, best shit talker, bar none, in my opinion, combat sports has ever seen.
He's a superhero and I think he goes through a couple more wins and beats some tough guys.
If he beats Cormier, he will become the Ali of our sport.
He has that type of young, brash, outspoken outlook.
And I want to see the next, you know, chapter two or the second act of John Jones and then the third act.
I'm really excited as just a fan of this sport to follow his career, follow his arc, and, you know, I'm friends, you know, with Cormier, of course, also, so I'm not going to pick a horse in that one, but it'd be really interesting to see how Jon goes.
It's almost impossible not to be at that age and at that level of accomplishment.
I think everyone is evolving.
You evolve till you die.
You change and grow and learn.
If you're not, you're stagnant and you're rotting away.
Because I think I'm a better, whatever I'm better at now, I'm better than I was a year ago.
And if I wasn't, I'd be disappointed.
And I'm 47. I mean, when I'm 48, I guarantee you I'll be looking back saying, whatever I do, whether it's podcasting or comedy, I'll be better at 48 than I am at 47. And when I'm not, that means I'm fucking dying.
It means the gears stop turning.
The nootropics stop working.
The testosterone replacement's failing.
There's going to come a wall.
You're going to hit that wall.
I haven't hit it yet.
When I hit it, I'll know I hit it.
But I think that when a guy like John Jones is 30 and looks back at who he was when he was 25, yeah, he'll have said some things that he didn't think he should have said.
But the trials and tribulations of being that guy are almost unimaginable.
Just the stress and the pressures and all that jazz.
You know, so it's fun to watch, you know, what John's going through, and I would love to see him just go straight heel, fuck you all, you know, double fingers up in the air, I'm the best in the fucking world, fuck you, and not try and play, not pander to the comments anymore, not try and be the Christian dude, not try and, you know, make people happy.
So when Chael was fighting him, I was helping Chael for that one, and John wouldn't look at Chael, and there's a photo, and I made a comment on the photo, like, you know, Jones must be scared.
He's not even looking at Chael.
Just, you know, some hype in the fight.
And John saw me backstage, and he's like, man, he's like...
And then to have to cut all the way back down again, there's no way we can expect his body to respond.
I'm not sure how they cut weight, but I know those guys, they don't cut weight In the healthiest manner, they really struggle and sacrifice to get down.
We see them all the time.
So they just tortured this poor fucking kid.
And then you don't let an athlete, just from experience, you don't let an athlete stand up.
Athletes, if you're in the bathtub, you roll out of the bathtub onto the floor and you slowly stand up.
You use hand grips.
You have two people in there to help you stand.
Never should a coach's hand be off you and whatever cream allegedly they put on him.
Well, that's the difference is you, a lot of these guys that are, you know, these weight cutting guys and these people that people get brought in is the amount of documentation that you have and the amount of just raw data just from dealing with various athletes.
I mean, it's proven, and then it's never perfected, but it's always evolving.
What worked last time against, you know, with everybody, well, that's what we're sticking with, and if something was an anomaly, well, we consider it, and we look into it, we research it, but we don't add it to new protocol.
No athlete under my watch has ever missed weight, but the one I would like the redo, I mean the Hendricks one in Dallas, I would have loved to have made weight on the first time with that one, but there was a whole comedy of errors.
I've been at events, and I won't say the promotion, where the scale got dropped, and then you get on the scale at the early day pre-weigh-ins, the scale got dropped somehow between the venue and the hotel, and now all of a sudden it's got a crazy reading like you're saying right now.
The last minute the scale gets switched because it goes to the wrong place where it doesn't get through.
So I've seen almost every odd issue I've been at.
I don't even know how many weigh-ins now.
And it's not as easy to weigh in properly when you're trying to keep the athlete as healthy as possible.
You're not just trying to get the athlete to 170 pounds and just leave them there for four hours.
You're trying to minimize that period as much as possible and really just skim the top of the weight and let them bounce right back up because we're trying to preserve their health, which is going to increase their ability to perform to the best of their ability.
So, you know, like with Hendrix and the weight, it was a matter of get him out of here, get him calm again, because he's freezing cold.
And it's crazy, because we're talking about how you should rest, and you should train smart, and you shouldn't overtrain, but it's like the overtraining is what made them so mentally strong, and that becomes one of their biggest weapons.
Yes, and this is now my opinion based upon a lot of scientific research.
There's other research that says the opposite, so now we're just going to throw it up in the air.
So my philosophy, the Dolce Diet Principles, number one is earth-grown nutrients, and that's eating real food from its natural source and its natural habitat, raised and bred in the natural way.
You cannot beat that when it comes to nutrient quality, nutrient density.
And that's what we always go after.
So I want line-caught fish.
Salmon primarily.
That's one of my top choices.
Line-caught salmon.
Excellent.
Grass-fed beef.
And when I say grass-fed beef or meat, I want that roaming in, you know, the trees somewhere.
And I want to, you know...
Take it out myself with a bow or with a bullet where it doesn't even know any humans within 100 miles.
That's the best possible.
So there's no anxiety.
There's no cortisol.
There's no stress state.
It's eating the exact food it's supposed to be.
It has no illness, no injuries, no disease, no chemicals.
Same thing, really anything.
With your vegetables, with your spinach, with your blueberries, the most natural cannot be beet.
And that's...
That's the number one principle.
If you're only eating earth-grown nutrients, real food, and you don't pay attention to the time of day, you don't pay attention to the quantity, you're going to be much better off than most of the other people.
We've toyed with it a little bit, never worked together officially.
Do I work with any specific vegans?
No, I do.
I mean, not professional athletes, but in our normal business that we do, we have some vegans, and that's pretty easy.
A lot of my recipes are vegan-centric, which is easy to do.
But if you're a combat athlete, it's really hard to excel.
It's possible if you're an outlier.
But it's very hard to excel without that animal protein.
And most vegans agree with that.
It's very difficult unless you're dogmatic about your sourcing of nutrition.
It becomes a full-time plus job in order to eat the right foods at the right time and you have to go to the market and you always have to have that supply.
You can't miss meals because your body is just constantly breaking down.