Steve Maxwell, a former NCAA wrestler and BJJ expert, debunks Reefer Madness propaganda, revealing THC’s benefits—like improved clarity and recovery—for aging athletes while critiquing sports’ rigid anti-marijuana policies. He contrasts brutal American wrestling (e.g., Mark Schultz’s illegal techniques) with Soviet-era precision, where coaches like Valentin Jordan avoided overtraining through controlled drills. Maxwell praises Ronda Rousey’s adaptive armbars and advocates playful jiu-jitsu over MMA’s wear-and-tear, linking Hellson Gracie’s "infinite exchange" philosophy to both combat mastery and kindness. Their discussion culminates in anti-aging training strategies, from blood flow restriction (Katsu) to custom kettlebell programs, emphasizing adaptability over reckless intensity as athletes age. [Automatically generated summary]
I was like, you know, hardcore athlete, wrestled NCAA, Division I. And for me at that time, I believed all the anti-propaganda.
You know, I was a pretty straight-laced guy.
And so, you know, oh, it's a gateway drug, and oh my god, you're going to go to hell in a handbasket, and this stuff will destroy your brain, and blah, blah, blah.
You've heard it all, of course.
And what was that really funny anti-marijuana movie that they had back in the day?
Well, almost every BJJ champ that I know was totally into marijuana.
They used it to relax because it's such an intense sport, you know?
I mean, if you think about it, it's such an extremist thing.
What do you do?
You go out and try to hurt someone as much as possible with joint locks and so forth, or you choke them to sleep, right?
Of course, that being said, I had way more injuries with college wrestling than I ever did with jiu-jitsu because you can always tap.
But I just noticed that these guys, you know, it's an intense sport, maybe not as intense as MMA, but certainly up there, and they all would light up at night and so forth.
You know, they'd have their bongs or, you know, roll up a joint.
It's like some sort of a metal cylinder with a lip on the end of it and you pack it with either oil that you can buy pre-filled little tubes of hemp oil or THC oil and you stick it in there and it has some sort of an element in there and it heats it up and you're just breathing in vapor.
So, yeah, I was just very curious, and well, I mean, you've been into this for a long time, very open about it, and I thought, well, you are really into your health and your body, and you take great care of yourself, and I figured, you know, if it's really all that harmful, Joe wouldn't be doing this.
There's no way that you would do something like that.
I mean, before I started smoking pot, I was in the same boat.
I really thought it was for idiots.
I thought it was for people that just wanted to escape reality.
They were weak.
They couldn't handle it.
They just wanted to get drugged out.
I thought about it the same way I think about pain pills today.
Like, I took...
I've had three knee surgeries.
My first major one, my first ACL, was a patella tendon graft, which is particularly painful because they slice your patella tendon, they cut a chunk out of your kneecap and a chunk out of your shin bone, and then they drill it all in place and screw it in place.
It's good because it's a native piece of tendon, so it adheres to the body very quickly, and there's very little chance of rejection, and it's very strong.
But it's very painful.
And they gave me a prescription for Vicodins or some shit.
I took one of them.
One.
And I remember sitting on the couch feeling so stupid and foggy.
And I said, I am done with this.
My other two surgeries, my other ACL and my other meniscus surgery, I didn't take anything.
My knee, my nose, when I had my nose fixed, I had my deviated septum fixed and my turbinates cut out, my nose stretched out and they put tubes in it and everything.
Nothing.
I didn't take anything just pot and I Don't like I don't like anything that leaves me like cloudy and that seems like that's what I thought pot was I thought pot was something that left you Stupid or cloudy and it's really just it's the opposite.
It tunes you in I was shocked I was utterly shocked and The first thing I noticed was my vision improved.
I've been nearsighted most of my life, and I basically found my eyes were getting worse each year, getting stronger prescriptions.
I finally read this book, Take Off Your Glasses and See, and I just basically threw my glasses in the trash and started doing eye strengthening exercises.
There's a lot of different exercises you can do, but The name of the book is Take Off Your Glasses and See.
And this guy was a disciple of the Bates method of eye strengthening.
But when I was at the summit of the Breathmasters in Moscow, they had a bunch of guys there that were using breathing and eye exercise and all sorts of stuff for the improvement of vision.
One was a former Spetsonist sniper, so I guess he knows a thing or two about vision training.
And he was showing some of the eye exercises he does, you know, real simple stuff.
And it was like, wow, this works, but only to a point.
It got really good to the point where I can drive during the day.
I'm still a little reluctant to drive at night.
I mean, I could, but I can't read street signs at night.
During the day, I can actually see signs.
But I'm a little reluctant.
And what I noticed when I would take the THC, I was using one of those vaporizer things, it was like my eyes would start to really clear, which leads me to believe that it has something to do with muscular tension.
I noticed that my digestion would improve.
And instead of getting foggy, Like I would be on my iPad maybe doing an email or something.
It's like somehow my fingers would just glide over the keys and just magically find the letters way faster, or at least my perception of how much faster.
Well, one of the things that people use it for with jujitsu is not just to relax after training, but before training because it focuses you in a very tunnel vision sort of a way.
When I roll, when I smoke pot and roll, I feel like I'm better at jujitsu.
Sat Solain, who's one of the most famous advocates of the kettlebell industry.
He talked about stretching being a big part of what holds you back is tension, psychological tension, not necessarily even flexibility, but that you're worried about...
Listen, man, never let it be said that Steve Maxwell doesn't experiment, you know?
I really think that one of the secrets to aging well is to be open-minded and just to experiment and learn new things, try new things, and don't be such a stick in the mud with your belief systems, you know?
Don't get so holier than thou with all your beliefs because, hey, man.
You know, if you think about it, a lot of really high spiritual adepts, they all use some type of either, you know, hallucinogen or—we talked last time on the show about ayahuasca and so forth and, you know, the shamans using their mushrooms and— Well, I think as you get older, I think especially when you have been around a lot of fools, you reach a certain point in your life where you don't want to tolerate any nonsense.
There was actually an article recently about ultramarathoners.
Jamie, see if you can pull that up, because I forget what publication it was in, but it was a big article where people were really being really shocked at the results and these guys that were ultramarathoners that were advocating smoking marijuana, and they were talking about, should this be banned from ultramarathons?
You know, there's another very interesting thing I've been experimenting with for years, and that's the theta brainwave meditation, where you actually – your brain produces different levels of brainwaves.
Your brain oscillates at certain speeds, and different parts of the brain produce different – like alpha, beta, gamma, delta, theta – But Theta is like the one that's most closely associated with that sort of between sleep and wakefulness when the subconscious mind can be programmed.
And there's a lot of really good programs out there.
It produces a beat.
And then your brain starts to adapt and copy the beat.
And you can slow the brain wave down.
That's what I did in the plane.
Like I said, I flew in from Sydney.
Like a 14-hour flight, man.
And didn't really get that much sleep.
But I did one of those binaural beats theta brainwave meditation.
I have one of those things in my house, and it's supposed to do all sorts of things as far as stimulate the production of various hormones and aid healing and circulation, but it makes you feel great.
But, yeah, like Feldenkrais, he was, you know, they have like a bouncing, shaking, vibrational kind of thing, and there's, like I said, the Taoist yogis have a thing where they do this kind of stuff.
When I was in Russia, they had, like, as part of their Slavic Russian health system, their mobility stuff, they would have shaking and vibrations and And all the stuff that you just kind of do to yourself.
I read this guy, Alexander Lowen.
He was like a psychiatrist that treated people with chronic mental problems with exercise and so forth.
Really?
He was really big into shaking and moving the body and all these interesting patterns.
I think mental problems and relaxation are so often not connected with each other.
Mental problems and exercise and exertion and the fact that a lot of people, a lot of their tension comes from not releasing energy and their body stores up this energy like a battery and then it's leaking all over the place.
It's just like they're short-circuiting.
When you see people screaming in traffic and, you know, and cutting people off and all this madness that, I mean, it really is like a form of madness when you see someone screaming at someone that's not even anywhere near them in traffic.
And all those emergency receptors are in the upper lobes of the lungs, and they're not bringing the O2 down into the lower lobes.
So they're in a chronic panic.
They're in a heightened state of vigilance all the time.
That's exhausting, man.
And it does all sorts of weird things to your hormones.
And it's definitely, it's hard to be in a good mood and relaxed when you're in this panicked state.
Your subconscious mind doesn't know that there's not like a threat looming over the horizon.
So everything that happens is perceived as a threat.
Every little comment, you know, someone cuts you off in traffic, people take it so personally because it's a threat because they're all caught up in the chest.
And man, I'm telling you, when you learn to do proper diaphragmatic breathing and bring the breath down in the lower lobes of the lungs, it's incredibly calming.
You know, Hoyce, Hoyler, you know, they all knew how to do this, and they weren't teaching us blue and purple bouts at the time, but now he's spending a lot of time teaching it.
I heard that Kron also is spending a lot of time, because I think it's really, really important for combat athletes to, you know, learn to relax, and the way you relax in combat is through breath manipulation.
But as far as actually being taught, I haven't seen it.
The Systema guys do a pretty good job with it, you know.
But it's funny because, you know, I started really getting into this and reading a lot.
But I wasn't reading stuff related to combat as much as mostly yoga stuff, you know, or Qigong.
So, yeah, it's kind of hard to find the information.
It's hard to know what's the best program for you.
I guess you have to try a few different ones to find out what you enjoy or what seems to benefit you.
But I think, especially when you're dealing with martial arts and you're dealing with...
Training and especially competing.
You're dealing with extremely stressful situations where your body is pushed at a very high pace, where you reach the point of exhaustion, and then you have to continue for three, four minutes while you're exhausted.
Everyone who's ever rolled has experienced that.
You're doing maybe a seven or nine minute roll, which means grappling, sparring.
For the uninitiated.
And a lot of times you're two, three minutes in, especially if you're rolling with someone good, and you are exhausted.
And you've got to figure out a way to get to a clinch and just Try to bring your heart rate down and try to do just enough to defend and keep moving But not enough to totally tax out your muscles and also don't let your mind get into that panic state like the breath is what Controls that yeah,
because if you can't breathe you're gonna freak out Yeah, I remember training with a guy who was like a real athletic guy, a very strong guy, but he hadn't done jujitsu before.
And so he was really excited to learn it and just try to get into jujitsu.
And, you know, he's in there sparring and he asked me to spar.
And I'm like, okay, alright, you know, how long are you doing it now?
He's like, oh, a couple months and this and that.
I'm just getting into it.
I'm just starting to spar.
I'm like, alright, let's go.
And so we start, I remember I got to a position, I like mounted him, and I could feel him just full panic.
His body locked up.
And I remember I'd never felt, because I'm not usually rolling with someone who's that inexperienced.
So to do like a raw white belt, it's only been doing it for a short period of time, he really didn't know what to do.
Anyone, especially that's learning and developing, you can lose, and you're probably going to lose, whether it's in sparring or whether it's in competition, when you come up against someone who's better than you.
But there's a big difference between losing and losing composure and breaking, you know, that term breaking.
When you feel a guy give up.
We've all seen it.
We've seen it in fights.
And some guys just don't break.
Here's a perfect example.
Jon Jones doesn't break.
He just doesn't break.
He might take breathers, but in his mind, he's the greatest of all time.
He's going to figure out how to beat you.
It's a foregone conclusion.
He's not going to tap.
When he fought Vitor Belfort, Vitor Belfort caught him in a beautiful arm bar from the guard.
And had his arm completely hyperextended.
Ruined his arm.
I mean his arm, John's arm was fucked up for like months afterwards.
He had to take a gig on the Ultimate Fighter and coach for a long time because he wasn't able to train and he wasn't, he was not gonna be able to fight for at least like six months to let that arm heal.
But it didn't matter.
He was, he was not going to tap.
Like he was gonna get his arm broken and he was gonna still win.
He was gonna find a way to win.
He is not breaking.
And then there's other guys The first moment where things go wrong, you see this look in their eye, they're like, oh shit, it's going wrong.
They lose composure.
And these doors that you go into with your mind, you get real comfortable entering these doors.
You get real comfortable entering these areas of the mind.
And this can apply to all aspects of your life, I think.
For folks who don't know what we're talking about, Haja Gracie, one of the very best black belts in the world, and Jacare, one of the very best black belts in the world.
Yeah, it was a huge Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu World Championship, and Hodger broke Jacare's arm, and Jacare just tucked that sucker in his belt and kept going.
We're talking about hardcore professional athletes that make their living fighting world championships on the line, you know, thousands of dollars on the line, but in class, I'm one of those guys that like, hey, if you catch me, you trick me, you know, fighting out of an arm lock or a triangle.
Look, the mistake's already been made.
You got me in the trap.
I made a mistake.
I acknowledge it.
You know, I mean, I'll fight a little bit, but, you know, as soon as I feel like, uh, nah, this is just tap and just forget about it.
Well, your body builds up, you know, bone and calcification around that injury, and you get those osteophytes, and before you know it, you pretty much lose range of motion in your joints.
Well, it's very possible that that is gonna happen, but also very possible that they're just gonna be able to regenerate tissue, that all your injured tissue, all your damaged areas are just gonna be able to regenerate them.
Well, there's a guy in Germany, Dr. Peter Weller, who is the same guy who created that Regenikine process that all the pro athletes, they were flying over to Germany to do it, and now they go to, there's a company called Lifespan Medicine that does it in Santa Monica, and they do it in Dallas, and I believe they're opening up other offices as well.
They take your blood out, they spin it in a centrifuge, and they heat it up, and the reaction to the heat makes your blood produce this really intense anti-inflammatory and I've had it done.
A lot of people have had really chronic injuries have had it done.
And it works miracles.
Well, he's developed this full-body MRI machine, which literally just gets a map of everything going on in your body.
And once he went and did it, he developed this and found out he had colon cancer.
Well, yeah, he had no idea.
Particularly aggressive type of colon cancer and caught it right away.
Early on.
Went into surgery, now it's fine.
But I mean, it's like, this is how amazing it is.
It's so amazing that it actually worked and benefited the guy who created it.
It says 28th of November to the 5th of December, and then the 5th of December to the 12th of December in 2015. So this is a start a new tradition, it says.
This is a new thing that you're starting to do, and what a great vacation.
You know, have some fun, go to El Salvador, do some surfing.
You guys have surf lessons.
You're going to teach jujitsu, teach...
Different ways of increasing your joint flexibility and preventing injuries.
Most guys, by the time they hit 40, they're not going to be doing it anymore.
They're going to have to quit because they're going about it wrong.
I was on that path myself.
When I was in my mid-40s, I'd be getting up in the morning and it was like, Oh my God, I could barely turn around to back my car out of the garage.
And I'm thinking, geez, what is it going to be like in 10 years from now if I'm just in my mid-40s already suffering this pain and stiffness and inflammation?
So I started really investigating the different exercise systems, mobility systems.
Of course, I've always been interested in diet and experimenting and so forth.
And, you know, I've been doing this for a long time.
And I discovered a lot of really good things I like to share with people so that you can continue to do what you love so we can all be like Master Elio Gracie and, you know, 95 years old, I mean, getting on the mat and still having fun with it.
That's like the love handles or with women, sometimes it's the saddlebags in the side of the thigh.
Sometimes you see women in the upper back or the tricep area.
With guys, it's usually the belly or the love handles for most guys.
Then you have internal fat.
That's the dangerous stuff.
The intra-abdominal fat, that gut fat, that's what can kill you.
Then you have subcutaneous fat.
It's like the smooth fat underneath the skin, like an insulation layer.
And then, of course, they've identified the brown fat also.
It's like an active fat.
It produces heat in the body.
It's like part of the survival mechanism.
Back when our ancestors had to tolerate a lot of extremes in temperatures, like cold, you have this brown fat that's like a metabolic active fat.
Kids have it, but by the time you're like 12, it almost disappears because we have this regulated temperatures all the time.
People don't expose themselves to cold.
They're always bundling up and their homes are overheated.
But what a lot of people are saying now, you can actually get that metabolically active fat, the brown fat cells going, which helps keep you lean and helps burn the other yellow fat.
So cold showers, cold water treatments, exposing yourself to cold, a really good thing for developing that brown fat.
And it builds your immune system, and you have a much better tolerance to cold, and much less likely to get innervated in cold weather, so you don't have a tendency to come down with colds or flu and stuff like that.
You put on a surgical mask, you put on earmuffs, you wear socks that go up to your knee-high socks, and those rubber Crocs, because you don't want to stand on the floor.
And you also wear gloves.
And you wear underwear, very important, ladies and gentlemen.
And you don't want to have any moisture in your body.
The moon varies from like 250 degrees to 250 degrees below zero, depending on whether or not the sun is hitting you or whether or not you're in the shade.
Well, there's this new system that they've developed in Japan.
It's called Katsu.
And I don't know the gentleman's name who created it, but I had a chance to try it out this weekend in Austin.
And what it essentially is, is like these, they take these straps and they constrict your bicep, like right below the delts.
And then you go through like a 15 minute routine.
Like 15 minutes of, you do curls, you start off, you do push-ups, you do curls with a kettlebell to failure, and all this is while your blood flow is restricted.
And then you do like ropes.
And you do sets of three for 15 minutes.
By the end of the 15 minutes, your fucking arms are dead.
Dead.
I mean dead because you're restricting the blood flow and then they release it and take it off and Apparently the response that your body has to the fact that your blood flow is restricted it triggers all sorts of responses as far as your growth hormone your testosterone all these different your body starts trying to compensate for the fact that it doesn't have enough blood flow so it just over ramps everything up and it's apparently fantastic for healing It's fantastic for people that have injuries.
Recovery time from injuries reduces drastically.
Like Bodie Miller, the Olympic skier, he used it to get back in shape from surgery much quicker than he would have without it.
It's just one of these new methods, much like this cryo thing, much like many of these other protocols, where they're trying to figure out ways to kind of trick your body into ramping up the healing process or ramping up the...
Yeah, and the idea also is that it puts a strong load on your muscles, but not on your joints.
Because everything you're doing, like say if you're doing like kettlebell curls to failure, I was doing it with like a 35-pound kettlebell with two hands.
That's not a lot of weight, you know?
It's not a lot of weight, and you're just cranking out reps.
But because your biceps are tied off at the top...
But I just fucked around with it yesterday for the first time, and apparently the results are amazing.
And at Onnit, we're starting to look into this and trying to see what we can do to bring this To the mainstream, but to try to get more athletes involved in doing things like this, you kind of get these results where you start going, oh, okay, well, if you do that and this, what if you do cryotherapy and this Katsu method and also the breathing?
Also, what's the difference in the response to your body?
What's the difference in how quickly you can heal, how quickly you can get in shape?
That's a big issue for MMA fighters is the downtime from injury and then ramping your body back up to competition shape afterwards.
Anybody who's ever gotten to a very good fitness level and then got injured, it's so frustrating getting back to the gym and then trying to get back in shape.
And, you know, Dale used to invite me to come on down and train now and again.
And I took him up on it a couple of times.
Unfortunately, it was just a little bit too far away to be driving.
You know, I had a day job.
Wrestling is one of those sports that you pretty much have to have your mid-afternoons open because that's when all the universities train and that's when most guys train.
So I was really, you know, jones for some grappling experience, but it was really hard working a job.
And at that time I was married and a householder with a family and all that.
But I did go down a few times, and I got a chance to tour the facility, and it was really impressive.
And I had a clinic with, well, the guy they didn't even mention was that guy, Valentin Jordan, the Bulgarian guy.
That's the guy that DuPont gave his whole fortune to.
When he died, his fortune went to this Bulgarian coach.
What is it about the Bulgarians and a lot of the Russians and, you know, there's a lot of those people from that part of the world that are such good athletes.
There's so many tough people from that part of the world.
So, I mean, those guys are just, you know, they grow up in a really tough neighborhood, kind of like dog-eat-dog, and it produces like a really tough, kind of-minded I think a lot of these Eastern European countries, they don't have much.
They have a lot of time on their hands.
There's not a lot to do for the kids.
They end up, like most boys, getting into trouble and fighting and doing all this kind of crazy stuff.
I think that's one of the reasons why this new urban playground gymnastics kind of stuff that the guys are doing has become so popular.
I've traveled to, like, you know, down around the Black Sea area.
I've been to a lot of the Slavic countries, too, you know, Serbia and Slovenia.
Man, the guys are huge, big, strapping guys.
And you just don't see the obesity, either, man.
They don't have the food to just, you know, they can't afford just to overeat like we do in America or, you know, in the rest of Europe or the UK or whatever.
You see some, you know, some real fatties.
But man, when you're there, wow, people are pretty lean and wiry and stringy.
And a lot of the younger guys are just like specimens.
And those are the people that bred and those are the people that kept going.
What you notice also about a lot of those people from that part of the world, which is interesting enough, is not just that they're tough, but that they're very technical.
There's a lot of really technical wrestling that comes out of Russia and out of the former Soviet Union, that area.
Those guys, those Russian nationals that went up to Montreal, that's a lot of where George St. Pierre learned how to wrestle.
Never wrestled in high school, never wrestled in college, but became one of the best wrestlers in MMA, and that's part of the reason why.
I remember I wrestled, this was in the 70s, I wrestled in the Montreal Open Wrestling Tournament.
And this was just at that time when the Russians were making a big influx and they were starting to try to defect and flee to the Western world.
The Soviet Union still existed.
And I remember I wrestled Viktor Silberman.
In the finals and got my ass handed to me, man.
And so I was trying to talk to him later because I was really impressed with this guy's technique and his skill and everything.
And I was utterly shocked when he told me that he only lifted weights once a week.
He lifted weights four times a month.
And I thought, how is that even possible?
I thought these Russian guys, like, lifted weights every day, twice a day.
And he says, no, no, no, no.
We practice technical wrestling as the base of our training.
And then I was utterly shocked.
I had a guy that was training with me in Philly for a while.
He was a five-time Ukrainian national wrestling champion.
He used to be on the national team.
This was back when the Ukraine and Russia was all part of the Soviet Union.
And he was telling me that they would only spar really hardly twice a week because they found that the live wrestling was what was producing all the injuries.
But when they would train, they would train like real slow motion and they would gradually build their speed to the point where they were just going all out hard.
And they would just do this for long periods of time.
And wow, it is amazing.
It's an unbelievably hard workout when you're shooting high crotch singles, doubles, and so forth at match speed over and over and over and over.
You know, I've lost a little bit of touch with the wrestling community, but, you know, our wrestling coaches are fantastic.
You know, they're smart guys, so I'm sure they're taking a hard look, because the Russians have been really successful, as have the Iranians, as the Turks, the Bulgarians, you know, all these countries that perennially put out, like, world champions.
Azerbaijan, you know.
The Mongolians are really starting to dominate Judo, and, you know, they've always been tough as shit in wrestling.
So, I think that for sure you can learn a lot from their basic programs.
They're pretty simple programs, really.
They don't have a lot of sophisticated equipment and so forth, but they make up for a lack of sophistication with equipment and facilities and all that with technique.
We'll see if we can find some highlights of it, but what I'm going to ask Steve about it after he gets done using the little girl's room.
What was incredibly impressive was not just the skill level that Dos Anjos showed, but the pace and the fitness.
He doesn't want to toot his own horn, so I'll toot it while he's out of the room.
He's so knowledgeable, and he got Diego Sanchez into probably the best shape of his life when Diego challenged BJ Penn for the belt, and Diego wound up getting beaten pretty badly by BJ when BJ was in his prime.
BJ's like an all-time great.
And just one of my all-time favorite fighters.
But he was in incredible shape for this fight as well, which was always like kind of his Achilles heel.
He was so talented, but he just never really...
He was able to continue that sort of strength and conditioning program that got him into the shape that he was when he fought Diego Sanchez.
And what we were talking about with Steve being that the technique is so important.
It is so incredibly important, but MMA is so unbelievably grueling.
I had a conversation with Chael Sonnen about it, who's a former UFC fighter and fought for the title several times, a great fighter and also a very open guy, very open as far as his own limitations and his strengths and weaknesses.
And he was just talking about how the time that you spend inside the Octagon, competing for 25 minutes, is almost impossible to really do.
It's almost too much time.
What I was saying was that...
Steve's back.
What I was saying that the amount of time that you spend in the octagon fighting in a championship fight is so insane.
I remember from my days of competing that when guys were really aggressive and I was backing up a lot, trying to move away, I'd get so much more tired because you're always thinking.
You're dealing with this guy attacking you and you're backing up, which is kind of an unnatural movement.
I mean, a lot of people run, but very few people run backwards.
And you've got to realize that when you're going backwards, you're kind of using your muscles in a different way.
Muhammad Ali used to run miles backwards because he was always backing up and then moving forward, backing up and moving forward.
And one of the most beautiful things about him when you watch him, like in his prime, like the Cleveland Big Cat Williams days, before they took his title away because he didn't want to fight in the Vietnam War, His footwork and movement was just magical.
And his ability to back up.
I mean, you really couldn't catch him.
He was just backing up and moving forward, backing up and moving forward.
And that's something he had to work at really hard.
But three minutes in a boxing match is so much different than five minutes with wrestling and leg kicks and elbows and the clench.
God, it's...
I'm curious to see what you think after you watch this fight, because one of the most impressive things about the fight, as far as Dos Anjos' performance, was his cardio was insane!
I mean, I've given this guy credit, but I want to give him credit again.
Andy Foster's been the director of the California State Athletic Commission for a few, I think a couple of years now.
But he's a former fighter, a longtime martial artist, and he's very smart, very diligent about this.
And I've had some...
I had a conversation with him when the UFC was in Los Angeles, and one of the things that he said, he goes, first of all, we're going to test everybody tonight.
We're not just testing the guys at the main event.
We're not just testing the people that are involved in the pay-per-view.
We're testing everyone that competes tonight, blood and urine.
It's goddamn huge and there's some guys we all know some guys you try to hit Singles on them you try to like try to do an arm drag and it's like trying to pull a wall You know some dudes like look at who some are Paul Harris is a perfect example that damn dude is so strong He's so ridiculously strong.
Do you see guys like John Fitch tangle up with them?
I mean John Fitch is an elite wrestler elite Took him down and cranked on his leg in the first round.
I mean, John never got out of the round.
He just couldn't get out of the round.
All of a sudden, he's leg locked and just didn't know what to do and got his leg hyperextended.
But these performance-enhancing drugs they're catching guys for, some of them I've never even heard of.
You cannot engage in an extreme sport like MMA. And maybe to a lesser extent, jiu-jitsu and judo and wrestling at that competitive level without the tweaks.
But I wonder if a protocol will eventually be established, the most intelligent protocol, similar to what you're getting with these Russians that have developed this program for wrestling, where they're just doing a lot of technical training, not nearly as much sparring, but a lot of technique, a lot of repetition and drills.
I wonder if that will slowly work its way into MMA and be established as this is the way to do it, the way they're doing it, say, in Russia.
Yeah, well, I think it's going to have to at some point because, you know, the career window for a lot of these guys right now is like, what would you say, like two years maybe?
Yeah, there's also the issue where they're kind of forced to keep competing on a regular basis once they become successful, especially you break into the top ten and you want to keep competing and winning, and so you win a big fight and say, okay, the UFC calls you up on Monday, hey, we've got blah, blah, blah in four months.
You're like, fuck.
Okay.
And you think, you know, man, I would really love to rest this knee.
I'd really love to, you know, get some therapy on, you know, this elbow or whatever issues you have.
And oftentimes that's not an option.
They have to go right back into training camp and these injuries become chronic.
Yeah, Mark Coleman, first ever UFC heavyweight champion, his body is starting to fail him.
He had one hip replacement, and apparently they have to replace it again.
He had a massive infection when they went in to look at it, and he's in the hospital now.
And there's a GoFundMe.
I'll retweet the link later today after this podcast is over for folks who want to help out Mark.
But he, you know, his body is just all banged up from the years of wrestling, high-level wrestler, and then from there, all the years of competing in MMA, he's getting his hip replaced too.
And I think you can extend your grappling career well into a band stage.
I think of all the martial arts, you can pretty much do jujitsu and submission wrestling, if you're smart, well into a band stage, unlike a lot of other things.
And there's really a difference in this in comparison to striking arts because, you know, if these guys were kickboxing after a few leg kicks, Well, as long as you know how to do your breakfalls, you can...
Even a professional like Dean, and I mean, Dean probably knows a hundred escapes from a headlock, but man, you get caught by surprise and get locked up in that thing, man.
You know, that same position?
I was actually giving a seminar for the United States Secret Service.
I used to go down.
They were just a 90-minute drive from my gym, Philadelphia.
And I got to know some of these guys through Pavel.
And I used to go down and give self-defense seminars as well as conditioning and kettlebell seminars.
So one of the guys was an ex-wrestler who got me in that position that Josh got Dean.
I made a big mistake, man.
The guy says, well, how do you get out of this position, you know?
I mean, he's way thicker than when he was fighting at 205 in the UFC. I don't know what he's walking around on, but he looked to me to be like in the 240s or 230s at the very least.
I love also the different approaches that Josh has a different approach and you see that that different approach that cast wrestling approach can be just as effective if he gets you in one of those positions You know it's it and it might be something you're not accustomed to so you haven't trained to get out of it I remember one of the first pro Grappling matches.
Yeah, it's really interesting when guys get super sharp at one particular technique.
And if you're not aware of that particular technique, it could become really dangerous.
You know, Braulio Estima is famous for having that very bizarre guard as well, where he'll, you know, do those reverse triangles or inverted triangles.
And he gets himself into a position where, to the outside observer, it looks like, wow, this guy is like on his neck here in this weird position.
And then all of a sudden he's got a triangle on the guy and he's tapping people.
Just so good at that position.
He's good at all positions.
But that one position he's been particularly successful at because it's such an unusual thing to defend.
Very few people are that scary with it.
And it's like, some people criticize certain techniques.
They go, ah, you know, I played around with that, but that doesn't work.
Well, okay, really?
What about, like, head kicks?
Did you play around with head kicks and you say they don't work?
Because you know how many times you have to drill a head kick to get it effective?
But then you get it up to, like, a point where, like, an Anthony Pettis has it, or an Anderson Silva has it, and it becomes a real dangerous weapon in your arsenal.
Crow Cop, perfect example.
Crow Cop drilled that damn head kick to the point where he could throw it out like another guy could throw out a straight punch, a standard straight punch.
That's how good and fast his head kick was, and still is.
And when you discount a technique simply because you don't have the proficiency in it, you can really get caught, because you really can sort of define the world in an inaccurate light, and then you see a guy, like maybe this Barambolo guy, or Eddie Bravo with his twister...
Or, you know, there's a million different techniques that you're starting to see emerge in MMA that guys have discarded.
Like the front kick to the face.
Nobody was worried about the front kick to the face.
If you don't know how to cinch up a choke, if you don't know how to cinch up an arm bar, you're never going to know exactly what you can get away with when you're defending.
And once you get adapt at offense, then you'll truly understand defense because you'll understand what would I be trying to do to me if I was in this position and how do I stop this guy from doing that.
Yeah, and you see certain guys who have a very small wheelhouse of techniques that they utilize, especially attacks.
Like Marcelo Garcia is, of course, one of the best of all time.
But he has a very, if you look at his, if you took all of his jiu-jitsu matches that he's won and look at how he won them, it's a very small number of chokes that he's used.
I mean, it's almost all, I mean, Rico Rodriguez, I think he got him with a leg lock.
Most guys, he got Jake Shields with a wrist lock, I believe.
I remember Rico Schiaparelli had a professional jiu-jitsu tournament thing that he was doing in Los Angeles.
Jacare competed against Randy Couture, and Marcelo competed against Jake Shields.
And I believe he got Jake in a wrist lock, which is, you know, he's got some crafty shit in there.
Yeah, the only problem I have with the gi is that I think a lot of people get brainwashed into thinking that you need to learn the gi to be good at jiu-jitsu and MMA. And Eddie Bravo in particular is very adamant that that is a ridiculous idea.
He's like, that's like saying you have to be really good at racquetball to be good at tennis.
Well, there's just so much to grip, and you see so many guys that are world champions or that compete at a very high level with the Gi, and then they fight in MMA, and everyone's sweaty, and they have gloves on, and they can't grab things, and they seem lost.
Well, some guys, you know, be aggressive and rude about it, but some guys can do that with jujitsu, where you kind of have to think yourself through every step, and you're not kind of aware.
I mean, that's how I always feel when I would roll with guys who are like at a really, really high level.
It's like, I'm not prepared for all the steps that you could take to counter my step.
You know, I will do a move, and you will do your move, but you also have all these other...
You're already anticipating to counter this, I've got to do that, so I'm going to stop this by putting my hand on your knee here, and putting my foot on your hip here, and now you're going to have to try to get out of it, but I'm not going to let you get out of it, because I'm already anticipating that.
He says, maybe, maybe if I got sick or injured and was in the hospital for like three years and didn't train, maybe if I came back, you might have a chance.
Well, technique is, as we said before, is paramount.
And her technique is so laser sharp.
If she got in there with a guy who doesn't have that good a technique, just because he's a man, the physical strength and the benefits of being a male, whatever advantages that he may have, Aren't necessarily going to counter the technique that she has when they're the same weight.
Now, if you're dealing with a guy like, you know, she competes at 135. Okay, if you deal with her versus a guy at 170 like Johnny Hendricks.
Like, Jesus, of course that's a mismatch.
Johnny Hendricks is a powerful, big, strong man, and he most likely would beat her up.
But you're talking about a guy who's her weight, and then even if he's physically stronger, maybe he can hit harder, but how much of a technical advantage does she have on the ground?
She could easily catch you in something in a scramble.
Usually, it's rare occasionally, but usually women won't use power.
They do think differently than men.
They have a different logic, and they surprise the heck out of you with some of their attacks and the way they put their game together.
It's really fun.
And usually women are pretty flexible, so their guards are a nightmare to get, you know, some of these girls with their De La Havis and spider guards are like, wow, controlling those feet is a nightmare.
Yeah, and you think about someone's guard, someone's legs have to carry their body around, you know, say if they weigh 140 pounds like Rhonda or 135. And, you know, you're carrying 135 pounds around all...
By the way, she doesn't really weigh 135. She weighs 135 on weigh-in day.
And then I would imagine she rehydrates up to around 150, close to it.
So you're dealing with someone who knows how to manipulate their body and they have these legs that are carrying around All of this weight all day long.
Your legs are amazingly strong.
It's amazing endurance.
And when you factor that in, if you've gotten, like, I remember doing drills with my friend Felicia.
Felicia O is one of Jean-Jacques Machado's black belts.
Well, the difference between male and female legs is a very small percentage, you know, in studies that they've done.
Upper body, there is a significant difference, but with a trained woman, she can close that gap.
And I'll tell you, for you older guys listening out there, you know, you guys over 40, or if you're a guy that's been injured, start seeking the girls out for sparring partners, and you will have a wonderful technical spar session.
There's so many different ways to crack the nut, so many different systems, and they all work, more or less.
It just all depends on what it is that the guy wants.
So people really need a lot of help just sorting that stuff out.
So that's what I do.
And extensive questionnaire.
I analyze photographs for structure, you know.
Postural stuff and then you get a custom workout program and you send me training logs and I review them and send the information back and do progressions with people and so forth.
So anybody who's interested in any sort of strength and conditioning workout, if you want to mix it up or just want to just tap into the database of knowledge, that is Steve Maxwell, maxwellsc.com.
And all of these upcoming seminar dates are all available there.