Joe Schilling reveals his extreme Glory 19 weight-cutting method—drinking five gallons of distilled water in three days, then dehydrating for 24 hours—while warning of its health risks and failed past attempts. He contrasts this with fighters thriving at natural weight, like Anthony Johnson, and discusses the toll of back-to-back fights, including nerve damage from a chest injury and ethical concerns over intentional knee strikes. Rogan highlights medical advancements like Regenekine for healing, while Schilling praises Nick Diaz’s improved kickboxing defense despite Anderson Silva’s striking prowess, debating Glory’s rule restrictions and the need for more American fighters to engage local audiences. [Automatically generated summary]
I read about it online probably five years ago from some wrestler and we tried it and it worked really well for me so I just keep the same way but I'll do two gallons of water like my weigh-ins on Thursday so I started on Sunday.
Two gallons of distilled water on Sunday.
Two gallons on Sunday, two gallons on Monday, one gallon, Tuesday to Wednesday, and then Wednesday for 24 hours, I won't drink any water, no salt, and it just kind of comes right off.
It just seems like, because I know my friend Aubrey, he went on this weird diet of distilled water.
He thought distilled water would be pure, and he started getting dizzy and shit, I think, and he went and got himself checked out, and they're like, dude, you don't have any fucking minerals in your system.
If I'm walking around, like, maybe six weeks ago, I was probably like 210, 212. You know, if that's eating whatever I want, you know, drinking beer, doing whatever I want to do.
Yeah, it really comes down to everybody and then also like your style of fighting some guys I think need to feel strong a lot bigger and stronger because maybe they're lacking or because they you know whatever reason they need to be bigger and stronger than the other guy but there's a hindrance you know I've cut too much weight and over hydrated and learned lessons that way where you you know yeah I think when I fought Simon Marcus the second time when I flew to Vegas I still had like one gallon of distilled water I was supposed to drink,
and they wouldn't let me take it on the plane.
Giant gallon of water.
And as soon as I landed, they had me doing press and stuff, and I didn't get to drink that last gallon of water.
So I started drinking coffee like crazy, thinking, well, that's diuretic.
It'll help me lose the water.
And when that 24-hour period came, where it was time to cut the weight, I hadn't really dropped anything.
I was still like 22 pounds over.
So I had to cut 22 pounds in 24 hours, and it was terrible.
It was awful.
I've seen, you know, the first round, I came out strong.
I felt really good.
And then after the second round, it was like, it was almost like, you know, when you have a dream and you're trying to fight somebody, but you're laying on your arm and you can't get the punch off.
And then you got a guy like Anthony Johnson that had a really bad reputation in the UFC. He got cut because he couldn't make weight, and then finally decided to stick to his natural weight, and he's killing it.
There's never been a guy like Johnson, who at 170, he's a good fighter, very good, but struggles to make weight and then fades late in fights because he's depleting the shit out of his body.
Goes all the way up to heavyweight and beats the shit out of Andre Orlovsky, and you're like, what the fuck?
If you don't do the weight cutting, or we did like same day weigh-ins, then you still have guys that are gonna try to cut the weight and fight the same day, and it's not healthy.
It's terrible for you with wrestling, but guys get away with it.
But with combat sports, anytime you're involving head strikes, you really don't have enough time to replenish all the water that protects your brain, all the water in your head.
And that was one of the issues that people used to have back in the old days where they used to weigh in and fight on the same day.
They changed that around the Dukku Kim fight, I believe.
It's also when they dropped it from 15 rounds to 12 in boxing because they just felt like 15 is too long.
Well, there's some guys that think, and I'm one of them, that MMA would probably be more realistic and better if no one wore gloves.
I feel like if you can knee someone in the face, elbow someone in the face, kick someone in the face, why you punched him in the face with gloves on...
It just protects your hands more than anything.
Also, the wrists.
Having your wrists taped up and nice and solid, it makes it so you can hit people harder.
You could be much more careless with your punches.
If you had bare knuckles, it would be a much more realistic scenario as far as what you can do with your body.
You're taping everything up and wrapping everything nice and tight and solid and patting it.
Yeah, and there's always going to be that one guy that, like, just like the one guy that did same day Wayne, there's always going to be that one guy that thinks he can still cut 30 pounds and fight the day of and he dies.
The one guy that doesn't care and keeps hitting the person when his hand's broken.
So you were in camp with Nick Diaz in preparation for his fight this past weekend with Anderson Silva, which was an amazing fight.
You know, and I've been thinking a lot about that fight after it was over.
And one of the things that really, really like locked into my head was there's a lot of people that are calling for Anderson to retire now, you know, and they're saying that, you know, and even Chris Weidman is one of them.
He said he'd like to see Anderson retire.
But I watched the fight and I was thinking about myself after the fight.
Nick and Silva, that was a better fight than Nick and Carlos Condit.
It was a better fight than GSP and Nick.
It was a good fight.
It was a good, competitive, exciting fight.
Anderson Silva fighting Nick Diaz is a tough motherfucker.
He's a good fighter.
He's very smart and very crafty.
And I think that the guy coming off of those two fights, it's almost like we expect more of him than of just a regular fighter.
If that was GSP in his prime and he put on the exact same performance, and if you just CGI'd GSP's body and made someone watch the fight, well, that's a good fight.
Well, the beginning was kind of ridiculous.
Nick was clowning him, which was hilarious.
I was howling, laughing.
I couldn't stop myself.
I was slapping the table.
When he laid down and put his head like he's taking a nap on.
I think Anderson did, like I said, I think he did better than Carlos Condit did.
He did better than George Cini-Pierre did.
George essentially fought him a little bit on the feet, but most of the fight he took him down.
He tried to take him down and control him on the ground, and George is a very strong guy.
He's got real good top control.
But, you know, Anderson stood up with him, and the entire fight was taking place kickboxing.
I think Anderson looked good, you know, and especially when you come off two big losses like that and your head's all fucked up and, you know, everybody's calling on you to retire.
First of all, the first fight had to fuck with his confidence so hard that he did that.
Because he was clowning and he got caught, which is everyone's worst nightmare.
Because, like, when you're clowning, you're trying to make fun of your opponent and then, boom, you get cracked with a big left hook and the lights go out and you're like, No way.
That way?
Like, to lose that way after all those victories, after the Vitor Belfort fight, after fucking up Chael Sonnen in the rematch, and after all those spectacular victories against James Irvin and Forrest Griffin, and, you know, to lose like that is like, holy shit.
Going into the camp, I was looking at stuff, because, you know, it was a really tough fight for Nick, and...
You know, a lot of people didn't think he was going to, you know, Forrest Griffin when the fight first came out said that, you know, it was just a silly fight.
It wasn't, I don't know, I wouldn't call it a super fight.
You know, he's just too small for that, you know, and I think a lot of people count him out.
But when I was looking at Anderson's fights, things that I noticed were people say he was showboating or whatever.
I think that when it didn't go his way against Chris Weidman the first time he started he kind of broke mentally and that's why he started showboating and I had done that in the past and paid for it but ultimately I think that his style is to bait people into coming so he can use his reach and then catching them with shots so right with Nick you know my thing was you have to find that middle range somehow you know either get him to come at you or go just enough that you're inside of that middle range but not go all the way into the
clinch and get and get stuck in his clinch you know right and That, I think, had a lot to do with Nick baiting him to come forward.
And I think that also messed with Anderson's head.
No one's ever...
No one's ever clowned Anderson, you know?
A lot of these guys go in there and they...
One, I think they get surprised by...
They're not prepared to fight that level of kickboxing.
You know, they're not used to seeing that level of striking, that speed, that range, those moves.
And then the other thing is that they...
They get out there and they're like, I'm fighting, you know, the best striker in the world.
This is the GOAT. This is the GOAT. Right.
And I think that was a big thing for Nick was, you know, I don't think Nick believes for a second that he's the greatest fighter of all time.
And same thing with Chael Sonnen the first time he fought him.
Chael fought, you know, for all the stuff that Chael said, Chael really believed he was going to beat Anderson Silva that night, which is why he did beat him for, you know, almost the entire fight until he got caught.
I think the second fight maybe was a little different, but I think most of the other guys that he fought didn't really think that they could, they didn't visualize themselves winning that fight, and then that gave it to Anderson.
You know, Nick and Nate, they get painted to be these, like, bad guys, and, you know, that's part of the persona that, you know, they promote, and that's all well and good, but, like, they're very, very respectful.
But, you know, when he, um, uh, when Nick beat Frank Shamrock, he was on the ground after the fight, and Nick reached down and picked him up and said, you know, you're a legend, you can't be on the floor, stand up, or whatever.
And this is, but all people see is, you know, they go for the stare-down in the press conference, and Nick flicks him off, and Frank Shamrock grabs his balls, but, you know, they're both very respectful fighters, and, uh, I think they get a bad rap sometimes.
I couldn't tell you what the hell is going on in his head.
That's just who he is, huh?
I think he gets people thinking he doesn't know what he's doing or he's crazy, but I guarantee...
Once you figure out he knows exactly what he's doing all the time, there's a plan, which there totally is, then, you know, but you worry about him sometimes.
But yeah, after I knocked out Simon in the Glory Tournament, We're in the back dressing room and they want me to lay down and ice me and all that stuff and I'm like, coach, let's go outside.
The guy that I weighed in against and the guy I got in the ring with were two very different sizes.
And that messed with me a little bit.
But he was running away.
Not running away, but he was trying to use his movement.
And every time I would try to throw, I just got really frustrated by him not engaging me.
And that was something I had to really learn from.
And going into the second fight, I was ready for that and prepared for it.
And I knew it was going to be an ugly fight.
It wasn't going to be...
The type of fight that I really like.
Simon is the type of guy I like to fight.
I like to be in essentially a war.
Let's fight.
Let's get it on.
Wayne was stepping backwards and putting his foot on the rope and jumping off the ropes and doing a lot of weird stuff that was just frustrating for me.
So I had to stay focused on that fight and then I got the W. I honestly didn't know who won the fight because neither one of us were really scoring, but after watching the video I see that I won the fight.
So I had about 30 minutes after the Simon fight, before I got up for Wayne.
But after the Wayne fight, it was like, go in the back, change your gloves, and there was like one fight between us.
I think it was like nine minutes before I was back in the ring again.
And I was walking to the ring, and I just kept thinking, like, how the fuck am I going to do it?
Like, what am I? This is...
I liked my call, and I'm like, this is fucking crazy.
And Nick was in the back, and he was just like, I don't know how the fuck you're going to do this, dude.
Like, my legs were just knotted all up and down.
My face hurt from headbutts and getting dropped when...
When Simon dropped me in the second round of the first fight, hit me right on the chin, and it didn't really affect me mentally.
I never got rocked by it.
My legs went out right away, and I felt all of the punch, like, in my neck.
It was like, pop, pop, in my neck.
Yeah, walking out to fight Artem, I was just really proud that I had the balls, I guess, to do what I was doing.
I was more in shock of what I was capable of.
But I really didn't feel like I had anything left to win the fight, you know?
That's some archaic shit those three fights in one night to get world-class fighters to fight three times in one night like I Went there and I talked to Kevin Kay who you know is one of the big wigs over at spike and I said this is awesome Well, you know the this event is awesome.
These fighters are awesome.
This is it's so cool You guys have world-class kickboxing go but fuck all this crazy fighting three fights in one night ago.
This is dangerous.
Yeah, this is not smart and If you guys lose somebody because of this, if someone dies, like a world-class guy dies because of this, you guys look like assholes.
If you have a war, if a guy has a war with another guy and gets dropped three or four times in a fight, like, you know, some fucking George Foreman, Ron Lyle type shit, where they're just blasting each other back and forth, and one guy manages to just get through by the skin of his teeth, And then he gets head kicked an hour later by somebody else.
That shit is no bueno.
And that is a possibility.
You fight, you should fight once in a night.
You're in camp, you're training for a long time.
Obviously you can do it, you did it, but if you had your choice to be at your best to fight a guy like Levin, You know, you want to be at your best.
You want to go through a full training camp, and you don't want to have two fights that fucking day, nine minutes before you fight one of the best kickboxers on earth.
And it's like, when you're going into that tournament, and both times that I fought Levin, your training camp is for that first fight, you know?
And then in the back of your mind somewhere, it's like, oh, well, if I get to the next round, it could be this guy, it could be that guy.
kind of try to get some sort of game plan for everybody but then the third fight after that you're just you know I hadn't even thought about getting to Levin in that tournament or how I was gonna fight him it was beating Simon who had beat me twice you know and then beating Wayne and then you know it was just it was really tough and yeah neither one I mean it wasn't at my best obviously it was I was all beat up when I fought him so I think the fans deserve to see and the same thing with with the first time I fought Levin it It was the second fight in the tournament that we fought.
Yeah, it would be really nice to see who is the best when they're on their game.
And that tournament was nuts because I was supposed to fight Steve Wankling, which at the time was the number two guy in the world.
And then I knew that I would be fighting Levin in the finals because of his matchup.
Yeah.
Like six days before the fight, Wakelin pulled out of the fight and they gave me Kingo Shimizu, who I'd never heard of, who was like the Japanese champion who used to fight at heavyweight and was coming down to middleweight.
I had like six days to watch tape on him and try to figure out a strategy.
We see it a lot in the UFC, where these guys are, you know, out, limp, and then right when the ref breaks them, they're going for a leg, or, you know, they're coming back, too, sort of.
Yeah, you see guys have their eyes roll back behind their head, and then they get hit again, and it's almost like they refocus, like the new jolt of electricity to their brain, like, clear!
That's another thing, like, with, uh, you've seen it with, like, Dan Henderson in some of those fights, you're like, oh, he's out, and then he comes back, or, like, uh, Chet Congo in his fight with, uh, oh my god, I can't remember his name.
But man, he's had some rough KOs over the last couple of years where he had never been KO'd, and then he gets KO'd by Congo, and then he gets KO'd by LeVar Johnson.
And in the second turn, he just was a different guy.
He's just a different guy.
Whereas you can be the same guy for the first round as you can for the fifth round.
Those big guys, what we were saying earlier about cutting all that weight, when you have that much muscle to feed, there's definitely benefits.
You could bum rush a guy and you're just a machine for as long as you have oxygen.
But there's that weird middle balance where you're trying to find the comfortable middle ground between Being ridiculously strong and being an endurance athlete.
I think there's a little bit of a confidence issue, too, when it comes to when you talk to the people that have trained with him and the people in his camp, you know.
Sometimes guys get through that.
Vitor went through a long stage where he had confidence issues and he got through that.
It's not insurmountable, but yeah, definitely the muscle, packing all that muscle is not good for you.
It doesn't help.
It helps a little.
It makes you really strong if you're a grappler.
It can certainly give you some advantage, but those guys, man, especially if you're built like that and you're trying to fight five rounds, you're taking a crazy gamble.
That gamble is, I'm going to get this guy out of there in the first couple of rounds.
There's just a point where you reach, and it's also how you prepare, right?
How many shots are you taking in the gym?
How are you training?
Are you training smart defensively?
Some guys are just fucking full pedal to the metal offense.
That's how they train, that's how they think, that's how they fight.
And then when it comes to defensive skills, they might have an A-plus for an offense, but their defense might be like a C. Right.
You know, and then when it starts going their way and they clang up, they don't know what to do.
They have to think instead of just being instinctive and rolling with stuff because it's a natural part of your everyday thing.
That's a weird thing about fighting, man.
It's like how much emphasis, especially when it comes to MMA, how much emphasis to put on striking, how much emphasis to put on grappling, how much emphasis to put on your cardio and strength and conditioning.
And I think that a huge part of that that's missing, I think, in a lot of people, or even just in this conversation, is like the mental aspect.
You know, you can train perfect.
You could have a decent weight cut.
You could do everything correctly.
And that two hours before the fight, from the time you check in to the time that you walk out in that ring, if you're not mentally strong enough and prepared for that, you just don't perform.
You know what I mean?
Was Anderson Silva that prepared for Nick to lay down and start heckling him?
He does a lot of seminars and goes to a lot of things and studies a lot of stuff.
I don't really know if he went to school for that or what that is, but he's very, very good at what he does.
He works with Liam Harrison, he works with Jordan Watson, he works with Julie Kitchen, he worked with Andy Howes and most of the really high-level kickboxers overseas.
Yeah, if you don't know who he is, he's a world-famous Thai boxer who was about 175, 180 pounds, fought Mighty Mo, who was close to 300 pounds at the time.
Head kicked him and it was just one of those ridiculous k1 matchups where they used to do in Japan They love freak shows.
They love to put together Noguera versus Bob Sapp or Bob Sapp's 375 pounds and you know, they put Bob Sapp versus even crazier They put Bob Sapp versus Manoa who's like 185. So you got a guy was ginky pseudo versus the Samoan the Samoan guy Genki Sudo also fought fucking the fat guy with the ball, Butterbean.
Sometimes they say, like, styles make fights, and like, sometimes it's, I mean, obviously you want to see who's the best of the best of the best, but sometimes you want to see these other, you know, these two might not be even in the top ten, but man, they're gonna fucking get down, you know?
I just think it's a little shady that your guy comes off with such a catastrophic injury and the first thing he does is start stomping away at somebody else's kneecap in a fight.
Yeah, the heel hooks are a particularly devastating one to hang onto.
If you hang onto a choke, you put the guy out.
With folks who don't...
It's not that bad to get choked unconscious.
I know it seems like it would be really bad, but it really is just like it shuts your brain off and then turns your brain back on again.
The best way to describe it is like a garden hose.
You pinch a garden hose, it stops the water, and then you let it go, and the water goes flowing through it.
It's not nearly as bad as getting knocked out.
So holding on to a choke and putting a guy unconscious, it's really not that big a deal.
But holding on to a heel hook, you tear the ligaments apart, and you're talking about a guy who's going to go through six months of rehab, surgery, the whole deal, and then it might not ever be the same.
So they can do incredible shit now with medicine and science.
Thank God there's so many eggheads out there that are just fucking pounding on the keyboards and, you know, doing in the lab and trying to re-engineer human beings.
Heard his left elbow, like, hyperextended his left elbow when we were training, like, maybe three or four weeks before the fight, and it really started messing with him, like, the week before the fight.
And we were in Vegas, and his manager actually called Dana to find out, you know, what doctor or whatever to go to to get him a cortisone shot into his elbow.
It was literally the size of a tennis ball on my chest.
It still swells up a little bit now.
But it swelled up so much that it pinched off all the nerves in my chest.
And then my arm would...
I'd have, like, stingers all the way down my arm.
And I'd wake up, I mean, for the first, like, week or two after the fight, I was, like, waking up in the middle of the night, like, shaking.
I would get a fever because I was in so much pain from this nerve stuff.
And I guess I got, like, multiple x-rays.
I thought my sternum was broken.
Couldn't figure it out.
There was no break.
And they said it was basically like, you know, you see these guys where they get hit in the face or hit in the head and they get these hematomas on their head.
And it's just blood and crap that's stuck between the skin and the bone.
Well, mine was, I guess, inside of the cartilage of my rib or whatever.
And, you know, even for the Melbourne fight when I would be training jiu-jitsu or I'd be working on my chokes or somebody puts their weight on my chest, like, it would swell up afterwards.
So I was thinking ibuprofen by, like, the handful there for a minute.
Yeah, to your organs try to protect your organs and then once you get back to room temperature it pushes it all out and it creates this amazing anti-inflammatory effect like all the soreness that you have and just it just does a weird thing to your body but the energy that you get out of it I don't know I don't know if it's an adrenaline rush if your body realizes like hey we're not gonna die life is beautiful look the Sun is shining I'm alive you know it's like one of those things where they say You don't really appreciate peace unless you've experienced war.
You don't appreciate love unless you experience hate.
You don't know how beautiful it is to be able to walk down the street and not freeze your dick off until you're inside one of those booths.
There's a lot of cool science, actually, with cold therapy.
After the last man standing tournament I was thinking about doing, I just didn't...
I don't know why I didn't end up doing it, but Nike makes a cooling vest that...
It's basically like it has all these pockets in it and it keeps you like really cool.
So I was thinking after the fight of putting that on because I found out that like 75% again don't quote me on these numbers but 75% of the Your energy system is spent on temperature regulation.
So if you had to have multiple fights in one night, how much time are you wasting sitting in the back sweating and you're wasting energy that you need later on in the fight?
So we were thinking about trying to use that cold pack or those cooling vests.
I think Nike came out with it for the Beijing Olympics.
Because we just came back from the Wayne Barrett fight where he just seemed like a lot bigger than me.
So I was like, you know, I was fighting at 175 before I signed with Glory.
And then when I went to Glory, it was automatically up to like 187 and 186. And, you know, the Glory 10 tournament, Artem Levin wasn't a very big guy.
And Kingo Shimizu worked out really well for me.
So I thought I was good at that size.
And then with Wayne Barrett, he was just so massive.
Like, he's just a big guy, you know?
And...
So I wanted to put on some muscles, so we did a lot of strength and conditioning.
I was doing, like, every day, sometimes twice a day, I was going to LA Fitness with my buddy and doing, like, strictly bodybuilding stuff.
No cardio, just...
I was taking, I think it's...
I was shooting for like 3500 calories a day, which is just...
I would feel lethargic and just exhausted all the time.
And I did that for a few months.
I think I got up to about 215, which was really big for me at the time.
And then the last...
I think it was probably the last five weeks I stopped with the strength and conditioning and was just focused on speed and trying to get used to that size that I was.
And I trimmed down quite a bit, but it was like build the muscle, bulk up, and then get fast and loose and then go into the tournament.
And then my cardio and my speed and everything kind of comes in the last four weeks.
Yeah, some guys, there's a lot of guys who like to do that for MMA. Like, they take off from a fight, and then once they're done, or they get out of camp, before they, say if they know they have a fight four or five months away, they'll do nothing but strength and conditioning.
No fight training, no sparring, you know, no getting hit, no grappling.
They're just lifting weights and just, like, jumping boxes and doing all kinds of plyos and shit like that.
That was the first time I had ever done that, that I really focused on the strength and conditioning stuff.
And then when I did start, um, When I stopped with that and I started doing the runs and stuff, Nick was actually in town and we went for a long run at Venice Beach.
We were over at Rhonda's house that day and we went for this long run.
And we did a six mile run.
I felt really good.
And then I was like, hey, let's hit these sprints on the way back.
And there's a bathroom and then it's like 200 yards and you have another bathroom or whatever.
And he's like, okay, we'll run to the next bathroom we'll sprint.
I was just in shock at how many gears I had.
I never ran that fast ever in my whole life.
It was the difference of that time that I had bulked up and really worked on the strength conditioning.
The period of cutting down and getting lean and getting fast again and I was just very very explosive and it was a really good sign.
I live in Alhambra, South Pasadena area, so it's not too bad for me.
I was living in downtown for a long time, and then my son started going to schools, and I was like, you know, I'd rather have him in a little better school system.
Jackson's MMA where you got like world champions training in one facility that's like this center spot It's almost seems like like for a lot of places like it might actually be better to be in a small town and bring the guys in and then of course you're gonna have less Distractions and less bullshit if that happens you're right, but LA doesn't have a lot of great kickboxing either There's not a lot of different spots.
I mean for as many people as there are 20 million people Yeah, when I moved out here from Ohio to pursue kickboxing, it was because Los Angeles and California was the center for kickboxing in this country.
It was the only place when I moved out here when I was 19. They were the only ones putting on sanctioned Muay Thai fights.
It was Dennis Warner and Vute Promotions.
But there's really good gyms in Van Nuys.
There's a really good gym in North Hollywood.
Two or three in North Hollywood.
Santa Clarita's got some really good gyms.
I think that there's a lot of Muay Thai here in Southern California.
When I was fighting amateurs and smokers in the smaller shows here in California, the amateur was a very high level.
You know, very high level.
I was 23 and one as an amateur and most of those were smokers, just local amateur fights before I went pro.
You know, and especially when you look at California, you would think, man, you know, this is, like, so much kickboxing, so much jiu-jitsu, so much MMA, like, you know, or so much, you know, so many fighters.
This is an interesting time because people are still trying to figure out how to train correctly for MMA. It's like you've got a lot of guys that are still holdovers from the early days where they would get together and try to figure it out and slug it out.
There was a lot of unnecessarily hard sparring or unnecessarily hard not smart sparring.
And then, you know, people are still trying to figure out, like, what's the best way to go about it?
And then you have people that have figured it out, like the AKAs that have figured it out, or the American Top Teams, where they have it down to a science, you know?
But there's just not that many.
Whereas, like, if you look at any other major sport, like at baseball or football, like, they have protocols, like strength and conditioning protocols, they put all their athletes through, and there's been programs, because they go through...
From high school to college to the pros, they know, state of the art, this is what we're supposed to do.
This is the best way to recover.
This is the best way to train strength and conditioning.
This is the best way to do this.
With MMA, also, there's so many skills.
There's so many things to learn.
It's one of the most interesting things about MMA, but it's also one of the things like, man, what do you concentrate on?
With me transitioning over to MMA, that's one thing I'm really enjoying.
I've done kickboxing for so long where I don't know everything there is to know about kickboxing, but I feel very at home.
If I get in good shape and my coaches are just sharpening me up and keeping me fresh, I think I can get in a kickboxing fight and just react naturally.
With MMA, I'm still learning and still thinking about things, and a lot of times I'm I remember what I was supposed to do like 10 seconds after I got tapped out.
I should have done this or did that.
It's a lot of fun to be evolving and keep learning new things for me.
There's so much stuff to learn and so many different styles and different ways to win.
That's really beneficial for me working with Nick and Nate is they think about it so analytically.
Going on top, going on bottom.
If this doesn't work out, then you're going to end up here.
You just fought Melvin Manhoof in a big MMA fight in Bellator, and then you're going from that, and a couple months later, you're fighting in a big kickboxing event.
I feel like I can be really successful in both right now, depending on the right matchups.
I don't think I'm a contender for a title in MMA just yet.
but uh yeah it's uh you know there's things i have to remember not to do um for both you know what i mean right if i knock somebody down in mma i don't walk away right right eight count you know that's your mark hunt yeah you know he's the king of the walk away ko in mma it was funny when i knocked out melvin um i felt the walk away like i needed to do though i knew he was out but um my coaches my coach and my manager were very adamant that The night of the fight and the week of,
this isn't kickboxing.
There isn't going to be an A-count.
If you drop him, make sure you go over him and finish him.
You need to finish right away.
I hit him with the hook cross.
I didn't even know I hit him with the left hand.
I thought it was just the right hand until I saw the video.
I saw him go down.
He's going down with his hands up.
I wanted to walk away.
It was this voice in my head like, go finish him, go finish him.
I went to go and...
Mike Beltran had jumped in the way.
And then I was just like, totally ruined my walk-off right now.
Everybody, like the week of the fight, everyone's like, Joe Schilling's fighting this guy, and they tagged me in it.
Every time I checked Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, it was like, People reminding me that I'm fighting this guy, and it was just like, knockout, knockout, knockout.
I mean, he should have been fighting 155. And he was going over to Japan, and they wanted him to fight 185. They were like, you know, you're a big guy.
Let's do some juice.
Let's get you pumped up.
And he was like, what?
He was used to dealing with American promoters, but they never said that to him.
They sat him down.
They flew him out there, sat him down, and they essentially told him to get on steroids.
The pay-per-view venture, I don't think it did very good at all.
But I think it was more about a...
A strategic thing.
Like, if you give away your product for free all the time, then it's hard to ever establish, okay, now you have to pay for it.
So I think they did that as more of, like, they needed to do a pay-per-view.
But their pay-per-view buys weren't that great.
Which I think was kind of unfortunate because that was, like, the end-all be-all for...
Combat Sports in one night.
You know, if they were going to put that on Spike TV, I think that would have done huge numbers for building their brand.
But they had a great, you know, the other thing they did on that was they had two cards at one time.
So you have, you know, Cro Cop was the main event on the card that was live on Spike TV. And I think it's just hard to get people, I mean, I love kickboxing, but I'm not going to watch it for an hour and a half and then Pay another 60 bucks to watch it for another hour and a half on Sunday night.
Well, they tried the UFC strategy, the way the UFC has the prelims on Fox Sports 1 and they have the main bouts on pay-per-view afterwards.
They tried that strategy.
But the UFC is just way more established.
I think it's really hard to do that with kickboxing because, for the most part, most of the people that are watching have no idea who anybody fighting is.
And it's kind of frustrating because for the new fan, even for MMA, you still get people like, oh, what's this boring stuff on the ground that don't appreciate the sport.
Yeah, obviously there was a lot more exposure from my fight with Melvin.
I always knew that there was a bigger fan base for MMA than there was for kickboxing, but I had no idea how much bigger it was.
When I won the Glory Glory 10. I was the first American to ever win a global combat tournament, ever.
And it was like a huge deal.
It was the biggest payday, I think, in American kickboxing history.
And I think there was like three stories done on me about it, total.
And then my fight with Melvin was, you know, it wasn't for title or for ranking, you know, it was just one fight.
And, you know, it's been all kinds of publicity and more following from that.
Within two days, there were people on my Instagram just writing the most degrading, disrespectful shit about my family and my mom.
Just ridiculous stuff.
You get more fans, you get more whack jobs, but there definitely seems to be a little bit more Ignorant fans that hang out trashing people in MMA. There's just so many dummies in this world that get there.
I don't pay attention to football or baseball, but every now and then I will read, like, comment sections on blogs just to see, like, if they're the same as, like...
If there was like a legit establishment where he could go to and just give them money, and it's just, to me, look, I have daughters, and the last thing I would ever want is my daughters to be prostitutes.
However, I believe that part of our issue that we have as human beings with prostitution is just this weird...
Puritan view of sex.
That sex is somehow or another this forbidden evil thing.
It's just two people touching each other's bodies.
No babies are getting eaten.
No fucking slaves are getting whipped.
No one's getting tossed off cliffs.
This is not a horrible thing.
It's fine if you do it for free, right?
No one has any problem if you have sex for free.
The idea that if you give someone money and you have sex, all of a sudden it's this terrible, awful, evil thing, I think that's stupid.
I think it's stupid and it's...
It's archaic.
And this world that we live in is changing and people are starting to realize that adult human beings...
Look, you got a fucking hundred years on this planet if you're lucky.
That's it.
It's just this wild ride of good times and hopefully friends and good food and wonderful life experiences.
And who the fuck is anybody to tell you that paying for sex or someone paying you for sex is bad?
I mean, who is that?
Who are those people?
Well, they're the same assholes that tell you you shouldn't pay for weed.
That actually came from, I think it was my second pro Muay Thai fight.
I just kind of went berserk.
And with elbows and knees.
And one of the guys that trained in my gym was like, oh, you know, you can't stop crazy.
And I just remember thinking that was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard at the time.
Dude.
Later on, there was a time when before Glory, before Lion Fight got a TV deal, there was kickboxing and all the shows that I was fighting on.
The fans didn't really have any connection to any one of the fighters unless you went to every show.
So it was really hard to set yourself apart as the high-level guy or the better guy, who was really doing it, because there was no media at all.
And me and the other...
Five or six best kickboxers in the United States got together and started like our own website, started promoting ourselves and we hired, got the best photographers in the sport and kind of just built our own media for ourselves.
Eventually Lion Fight got a TV deal and Glory came, but for a long time it was just us kind of making it for ourselves.
And we were like, what do we call it?
And I was like, oh, I can't stop crazy.
Okay, that's cool.
It was kind of a movement.
It really kind of took off.
It's weird.
I can't even describe what it is now.
People always ask me to describe it.
It's just a group of people that we sell t-shirts and we used to do our own interviews.
With no TV backing, you know, there was nobody promoting us, you know.
And, you know, it looks cool, but I'm constantly, every time I drive up north, I get a flat tire.
All the time.
I've had to repair the rims like three or four times just because the tire gets so low and you hit a bump and it puts a hole in the, or bends or cracks the rim.
It's like a canister and you can put a little Whippet cartridge in it and you hit the button and it'll fill up and you can fill up your balloon off of that.
Yeah, if you don't know what I'm talking about, it was almost like a very shallow swimming pool.
Where it's like it was flat in the bottom, and then for folks who didn't watch it, the edges were kind of sloped up.
But not a big slope.
Just a slight slope, just enough to let you know that you're at the edge, and then they would bring everybody back to the center.
It wasn't a very big thing, but I think that for MMA in particular, one of the things that drives people crazy is people being pressed up against the cage.
A lot of people don't like that aspect of MMA, like the clinching up against the cage and throwing knees to the leg, and they start booing, and they want everybody to separate.
I've always felt like...
If a football game can be played in a fucking giant 100-yard field, and a basketball game can be played in this really long court, why can't an MMA fight take place on a flat, just big, round, flat area like that, where you don't have a ring?
And there's a red zone where you're out of bounds, and make that red zone, whatever, to fucking five yards or something like that.
And then bring everybody back to the center.
Well, you don't have any of that.
If you're going to get a takedown, you've got to get an honest fucking takedown like you do in a wrestling match.
Not pushing a guy up against the cage and pulling his legs out from under him, but an actual legit takedown.
Because what they do is they'll shove you up against the fence and then they suck your legs out.
They use that sort of thing.
I'm a lot more comfortable defending takedowns in the middle.
It's a lot easier to stop a takedown.
Once they start smashing you against the cage, then there's a lot of different variables.
And yeah, how many fights like Tim Sylvia, I think it was Tim Sylvia and Brandon Vera, they spent like three rounds just smashed against the side of the cage the whole time.
If you're standing in the crowd, even if you're on the floor, a couple rows back, and there's a pillar, and they're behind that pillar, and they're fighting, you can't see shit.
Because if you're sitting there and the whole fight is going on on the opposite side of the cage, you can't tell what's being landed or what, you know?
They're throwing punches and a lot of those punches that...
Anderson was throwing on Nick.
He did a really good job of blocking him.
But if I'm 30 feet away, I can't tell if he landed or not.
I think he just knew if he doesn't want to engage, I think he said, I'm going to flip that switch.
I didn't realize that was the switch he was talking about, but God, was it awesome.
And really, like, It's hard, like, you know, there's an article that just came out that said, it was called The Sober Replay, like, The Sober Thought, like, when you watch a fight after, you know, like, the next day or whatever.
And when we were in the corner, you know, we were yelling instructions, but between Gilbert and Nate Diaz and Cesar Gracie and I, all of us were just sitting there like, this guy's such a fucking beast.
Like, we were so, like, blown away by what he was doing.
We were just so impressed, and, you know, I was really proud of him.
I mean, the judges scorecards, they gave all five rounds to Anderson.
but every one of those rounds were very competitive, I think Nick took off the fourth round, but every one of those rounds I thought was really competitive and really close.
He threw a wheel kick at one point in time, but there was no moment in time where he was treating Nick the way Nick treated him.
You know where he was like come on bitch like let's do this Let's do this, you know like stood in front of him.
He just wasn't ready for that I mean the psychological aspect also having a guy like Nick taught you if Nick knocked him out like what if he was taunting him and then all sudden boom Nick catches and he's down like that would just be Devastating and he just was not prepared for that or Nick lays on the ground and he jumps into you know Nick's garden is trying to triangles yeah Anything can fucking happen in MMA and a guy like Anderson knows it as much as anybody now and Especially after it happened to him.
I think also, too, the pressure of competing at that high level and being the champ for as long as Anderson was.
I remember when BJ Penn beat Matt Hughes, and I talked to Matt Hughes after it was over, and he was really honest about it.
In the cage, he said, honestly, it's a relief.
Being the champion is a lot of fucking stress.
He didn't swear, but he was like, it's a relief.
I'm glad I got this weight lifted off my back and I'm going to go back and relax and see what's up.
I mean, I'm good friends with him, and I really have no fucking idea what's going on in his head 90% of the time, which actually makes it really fun sometimes, you know?
Oh, you know, uh, I don't know, come on, shit like that.
Nick, when, um, let's see, when the, uh, for this last fight we were sparring, and Nick did, I think it was when the UFC was filming it, um, Nick had done, like, nine five-minute rounds with fresh guys.
It was, like, me, Chidi, and Jaquani I had brought in to spar with him, and then, um, another guy.
And like the last round I could tell that he was tired and was kind of like clenching me up against the fence and was like holding or whatever.
And I'm like, come on, Nick, let's go.
Kind of like motivating him.
He's like, fuck you, motherfucker.
And I started to whoop my ass.
But like, you know, the other thing about Nick, as mentioned, is like sometimes it's a lot better, which I agree with.
It's a lot better sometimes to spar with people you don't know instead of like your buddy.
You know, you get, you go a little harder or you get a little more competitive with somebody you don't know.
And like when Nick and I first started, I mean, he used to, It'd be a lot more competitive with me, and now we're pretty good friends, so I find myself talking shit to him or trying to piss him off or hit him hard to get him to push a little harder.
Like with Nick, yeah, sometimes he'll coast with this camp.
He was coasting in some of the rounds, or if I put him in there with somebody that wasn't that hard, he would not do so well, and we'd just kind of go at the level of the person he was going with.
So I found that...
You know, I would tell the people to hit him a lot fucking harder, almost try to piss him off, talk shit to him.
You know, there's a lot of people, interviews people, some guy, some interview guy, I forget who it was, but he was like, you know, how do you feel about this fight with Nick?
You know, looking at Nate's last performance, you know, I was trying to compare, like, Nate versus Nick.
Like, well, if Nate didn't do so good against Dos Anjos, then, you know, and I'm like, how the fuck?
But, yeah, a lot of times the people have complained that both of them don't block kicks very well, and their understanding of kickboxing is a little different.
So, like, for me as, like, a coach, so to speak, in this camp, I was trying to put and bring in the best possible sparring partners I could for them, so I brought in Artem Levin, I brought in Chidi and Jaquani who was sparring with me.
I believe, and I got a lot of flack for this, I believe all three of those people are better kickboxers than Anderson Silva.
Being that they're kickboxers and Anderson Silva is an MMA fighter, so it's not a knock on Anderson Silva, I just think that those are very high level.
Similar traits that Anderson has, but at a higher level.
I think I hit a lot harder than Anderson.
I'm a little more aggressive.
Things that I do well, translated well in Nick, as far as the looks and the feelings.
With Chidi and Jaquani, he's got phenomenal movement.
He looks similar to Anderson.
He's got like four inch longer reach than Anderson, but he has very, very similar movement patterns and the things that he does.
So my thing was...
You know, and Nick didn't necessarily beat any of us in any of that.
You know what I mean?
But he got used to seeing those situations so that when it happened, when Anderson threw that spinning heel kick, Nick was prepared for it and moved out of the way.
Most of the kicks he blocked, you know, Nick threw a lot more kicks than he usually does.
So his awareness of kickboxing had showed, you know, and that was...
I didn't know how the fight was going to go, but I felt a lot of responsibility as far as if Nick got caught with something, some kick or some kickboxing move, I felt like I was going to be my fault, but I didn't show him.
I think he did a fantastic job against the greatest of all time.
It's him and Fedor.
Those are the two arguments of who's the greatest of all time.
It's Anderson and Fedor.
There's no right answer.
Fedor had some amazing fights in Pride, but the problem is those guys that he fought, they came over from Pride and they fought in the UFC. They didn't look nearly as good.
So what is that?
Is that because Fedor beat them up?
Is it because they're not on steroids anymore?
Is it because they weren't that good in the first place?
But those are the two guys that, in my opinion, I go with Anderson, mostly because I've seen him live, and I think that the level of competition that he faced is probably a little higher.
But it's an argument that I could see.
When people say Fedor was the greatest of all time, I'm like, yeah, I could see your argument.
I'm not 100% against it.
But to go five rounds like Nick did, being a guy who fought his original career at 155...
Amazing.
I mean, he fought fucking Diego Sanchez at 155. And he fought a lot.
Sean Shirk, 155. And fights Anderson, 30 pounds heavier, and it's very competitive.
I was looking at the opponents and the strikers that Anderson had fought in his career, and then I was looking at the strikers and the opponents that Nick had fought in his career, and it was just from my own curiosity.
But, like, Nick fought straight with his hitters at their best, you know?
I just feel like right now is a great time for him if he wants to like follow through right now if he really wants to Remain active and jump right back in and there's so many marquee battles for him I would love to see Nick versus Hector Lombard you want to talk about I mean what the fuck would happen to Hector Lombard if Nick starts talking shit to him like that you know and it's a great fight Hector's a monster Matt Brown would be an awesome fight too.
Well, people are concerned about Anderson, first of all, that, you know, after the fight was over, to watch him, like, weeping like that is also one of the reasons why people are concerned.
You know, they're like, Jesus Christ, like, this is, like, the pressure on this guy must have been tremendous.
He got tagged earlier in the round, too, that I think contributed to that.
He got hit with some big shots earlier in the round where you could see he got dinged.
Dana and I actually talked about it before, and he said he felt like Chuck was hurt early in the round.
And, you know, that was just the one that just put him away, was the one that landed.
It was crazy that Rich was, he hit him with a broken arm.
You know, he hit him with the right hand, and then after the right hand, he hit him with his left, and his left had been snapped earlier in the fight.
He didn't even, you know, just threw punches and didn't even realize it, and after the fight, he realized, oh, shit, what the fuck's going on with this thing?
That's a common thing in kickboxing though, isn't it?
The bones, there's just nothing that makes them any tougher than, you know, you're born with a certain amount of bone density and you can lift weights and they'll get thicker and a little bit stronger, but...
So someone was telling me that, because usually all of the guys that I can remember that I've seen where they're breaking their legs were always black guys.
Somebody told me that and I googled it and sure enough there was a study done on it that your darker skin tone works as a filter and you don't absorb as much.
Well, they also say when you're kicking, like shin on shin all the time, what you're also doing is you get these deposits of blood and it fills up and calcifies and, you know, all the bruises when it heals, those micro fractures and tiny, you're getting all this calcification.
It almost leads to like a shin instep protector, you know, all over your shin.
Like, you ever see that fight in Lion Fight or Malapet?
Just starts, he kicks this guy, and you see the guy react, and so he just starts going shin to shin with him, just winging his shins, and I'm laughing at the guy, because Malapet's shins have just been numb since he was like six.
That's what I would be worried about, the arthritis.
My friend John, he used to do that shit.
He used to break bricks in those karate demonstrations and shit, but he would always practice, like, hitting the makiwara.
And his, uh...
Makiwara is just like this, for folks who don't understand, it's like a 2x4 that's wrapped with rope.
And they lock it into the ground so it's real stiff, and they would pound this 2x4 with a rope until you develop all this calcification and all this calluses all over the top of your knuckle where it's like one big knuckle.
The first two knuckles become one big giant knuckle.
But does that help your hands protect you from getting injured?
Well, like this is actually, if you break this and you go to the doctor, they're going to call it a boxer's fracture.
It's that common that it's...
I broke mine when I was a kid.
But these are usually the bones that break...
But usually they say you want to hit with these two bones, because these two bones line up directly with your wrist, and these two are kind of on an angle, so it's a lot easier to break these two.
Never broke my nose, although Simon Marcus, and I think our first fight, he had slammed me, tripped me, and landed on top of me and knocked me.
I was out of it.
And I stand up and I'm walking in the wrong direction, and the ref wasn't paying attention and said fight, and I just got blasted two more times.
But after that fight, one of the things he finished me with was a push kick to the face, and after that fight, all of the cartilage inside my nose, like this ball or whatever, is not...
That's really incredible when you think about the fact that he did have that amazing record coming into that fight with you.
That fucking right hand that you landed on him was so perfect.
It was so perfect to watch him fucking just drop like he got shot by a sniper in front of all the people in LA. I gotta tell you, that Can't Stop Crazy is fun until you have someone fucking yelling it over and over behind your ear while you're trying to watch the fights.
I was watching the fights and some chick was yelling, Can't stop crazy!
Can't stop crazy!
Like, fucking relax, honey.
Okay?
We heard it the first 30 times.
She literally kept yelling it while you were fighting.
And everybody was also recognizing that this was a big moment for kickboxing.
It's like kickboxing.
You know, I've been to a bunch of smokers, and I've been to some probe matches in L.A. and around the area.
It was always, they were small.
It wasn't that, you know, well received, it wasn't that big of a deal, but man, this was a giant deal.
All those Spike TV cameras, you know, everybody, people being interviewed, and the whole deal, it was like, it was, there was so much energy behind it that, like, everybody was realizing, wow, this might, and the fact that it was a big pay-per-view card, like, this might be a big moment where kickboxing becomes just like MMA, you know, becomes like this next-level sport.
Because I'd always have, like, when you look at the level of competition, like, when MMA became huge, The level of competition was not nearly as high as where the level of kickboxing competition is right now.
The level is very high.
Like the Nikki Holtzkins and the guys that are at the very top of the list.
There's this level that's like a real solid world championship, world-class level.
Where MMA wasn't really there in 2005 when it emerged.
But, like, the difference between, like, Rich Franklin of, you know, the Rich Franklin that fought Anderson Silva and, say, like, you know, like Mighty Mouse Johnson.
Who's, in my opinion, the most technically sound fighter.
That motherfucker is world class at everything he does.
Everything he does is perfect.
You've got that, you know, like with Mark Dubon.
You've got that with you.
You've got that with the elite kickboxers of today.
Whereas I don't think MMA had that when it started to take off.
So if the promotion was behind it, and if they just...
If it caught on with the American people and the names started getting established, you know, Joe Schilling and all these guys and, you know, these names became more established and it became something that became, you know, mainstream.
I just think, like, the quality is there.
The product is there.
It's all just a matter of promoting it and getting people to...
That's the other thing that Dana said when I was trying to get them to buy it, like, way back in the day.
They're like, you know what, Americans...
We're so poisoned by like PKA karate, you know, that they just have this idea in their head is like, it's just dog shit.
You know, like when guys would throw like a bunch of flippy kicks just to get the kicks in.
And then, you know, you have to throw like five kicks around or whatever it was.
Yeah, it was like, it was a weird time.
It just wasn't the same.
It's like...
The level just wasn't the same.
It's not like what you see today.
What you see today, when you see...
They're throwing kicks because the kicks are effective.
Like Raymond Daniels.
That guy's throwing some wild, crazy shit.
Daniel Gita.
He's throwing some fucking powerful fucking kicks.
It's lacking compared to the other divisions, right?
When you look at kickboxing heavyweights, you've got guys like Daniel Gita, who's like 6'5", like 245 pounds, throwing head kicks and has the punch speed of like a middleweight, you know.
Rico Verhoeven, like the heavyweights in kickboxing, you've got guys that are like 6'5", and they're still throwing head kicks.
They don't move like Tim Sylvia.
They don't move like these MMA guys are used to seeing.
It's just really, really exciting stuff.
Rico Rejuven is incredibly athletic.
He's a sparring partner with really high-level boxers in Europe.
And then Ariel Zimmerman is just a knockout artist from the K-1 days.
Yeah, and I think that those guys, when they're fighting and kickboxing as opposed to Muay Thai, there's like an element of their game that they've worked so hard to adapt and to get proficient at, and then that element's been removed.
Did Glory adopt K1 rules just because K1 was like the big organization and K1 started to fall off and then It's Showtime came along and It's Showtime put up some really big fights and then Glory kind of came along and took that over.
But, uh, now, um, and you remember Spike TV, when the UFC was still on it, and had the Ultimate Fighter, that was, like, kind of the home for combat sports, and I know that Spike TV is now rebranding, I think, in March, and they just signed, um...
I think it's a Roman thing, the name, but whatever.
Maximum Fighting Championship was what I was trying to remember.
MFC, Mark Pavlich's organization, which is up in Edmonton, which is another good thing to watch.
You see a lot of Ryan Jimmo came out of there.
A lot of young, up-and-coming guys that are really good fighters came out of these HGNet fights that they used to put on back in the day.
So if Spike can do that and just make it like the home for fighting, like every Friday night, boxing, MMA, kickboxing, people will get programmed.
If they just stick with glory, I feel like I can't miss.
It's just a matter of promoting it correctly, getting people to understand, like, these are the best kickboxers on earth, and it's super high-level shit.
It's not like, you know, they're just learning how to kickbox or putting them on TV. Like, these are the best of the best.