Oct. 24, 2016 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:11:30
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| We're live. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| What's up, brother? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Boys! | |
| What's up, man? | ||
| So nice to have you guys on, man. | ||
| It's nice, first of all, to... | ||
| It's nice to have you guys in studio, but it's nice to have Muay Thai, which I've been a giant fan of for so long. | ||
| I feel like it's starting to get more ground in America, and we've done our best to try to promote it as much as possible on here. | ||
| And it's been frustrating for the longest time for me watching... | ||
| What I think is one of the most exciting combat sports in the world and sort of kind of slip under the radar when golf is taking off. | ||
| Fucking golf's everywhere. | ||
| They had Scrabble on ESPN one time and that was just gut-wrenching. | ||
| They had Scrabble? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it is a sport. | ||
| There's a lot of training involved. | ||
| Hey, man. | ||
| It's brutal. | ||
| But to see that and then to see us just with nothing, no coverage whatsoever for so long and, you know, it's finally on TV but still relatively under the radar. | ||
| It's tough to watch, but knowing that it's going to be there eventually, it's just a matter of time, you know? | ||
| So it's nice. | ||
| Every time we take another step, like when it got on AXS TV, it was such a giant leap compared to where it was prior to that. | ||
| So what's coming next? | ||
| What's coming next? | ||
| It's just a matter of time and the right people coming along doing the right things. | ||
| One can only hope. | ||
| We talked about this today, but Dana White had a point that I think he's probably right about, is that in a lot of people's eyes in America, kickboxing got kind of poisoned with that whole PKA karate stuff that was on in like the 80s or the 90s. | ||
| Yeah, it put a bad taste in people's mouths. | ||
| So it's hard to break free from that mentality of you think kickboxing, you think Muay Thai, you think pants fighting. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, I remember... | ||
| And the shoes and everything. | ||
| The shoes, the booties. | ||
| Everybody thinks, oh, you do that thing with the pants and the shoes, you know? | ||
| I took a buddy of mine who was a... | ||
| He was the producer of Fear Factor, actually, my friend David. | ||
| I took him to some Muay Thai fights in Burbank. | ||
| This was a local show that was at some hotel. | ||
| You know, they just had a ballroom. | ||
| And this was back when... | ||
| God, who the fuck was fighting on that card? | ||
| I'll remember. | ||
| I'll remember. | ||
| But some good names, some really good fighters. | ||
| This was back in 2001, 2002. And he had never seen Muay Thai before. | ||
| He really had no idea what to expect. | ||
| And he was like, oh, when they kick the legs, it makes a big difference. | ||
| I was like, yeah, it makes a fucking huge difference. | ||
| Well, every time you have to, somebody asks you, so what's Muay Thai? | ||
| I feel so, I really dislike when I have to sit. | ||
| It's like kickboxing with elbows and knees. | ||
| I die a little bit inside every time I have to say that. | ||
| It's a matter of how long you want to sit there and talk to this person. | ||
| Because you can be like, no, it's actually this, this, that. | ||
| So sometimes it's like, is it like kickboxing? | ||
| Yeah, see you later. | ||
| With elbows and knees. | ||
| It's hard to explain it. | ||
| Kickboxing looks the same when you're looking at it. | ||
| Like if you're watching Glory, it looks the same. | ||
| And then when people talk about it, like I've had people over watching the fights, they go, wait a minute, this isn't Muay Thai? | ||
| Well, it's real close. | ||
| It's like on the door. | ||
| It's like the difference between American football and rugby. | ||
| Like they're similar, they're running, there's a ball, but they're not the same whatsoever. | ||
| They're two different sports. | ||
| Is it that dissimilar? | ||
| I just think it is, yeah. | ||
| Completely. | ||
| Because it's a completely different pace. | ||
| It's a completely different mentality. | ||
| Yeah, you're limited on just a few weapons, which seems very minor. | ||
| But unless you fight it, unless you do it, it's night and day. | ||
| It's night and day. | ||
| Well, I would imagine that it would make, there would be a big adjustment. | ||
| For people that are listening that don't know what we're talking about. | ||
| Kickboxing, if you watch Glory or now Bellator, is having kickboxing as well. | ||
| And of course, K1 was really the first one to start it on a global scale and make these big, gigantic events over in Japan. | ||
| Kickboxing does not allow the use of elbows or knees and a very limited amount of clinching. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whereas in Muay Thai, especially in Thailand, you see a tremendous amount of clinching and it's very technical. | ||
| There's a lot going on in that clinching. | ||
| And I've always maintained, I've been a big fan of Lion Fight because what Lion Fight is doing is giving you the actual pure Muay Thai, other than the dancing and the music and all the stuff that happens before in a traditional Muay Thai fight. | ||
| Yeah, they're doing a really good job. | ||
| And as you said, they've had to limit a few of the things in order to get it out there to the general public, which it's unfortunate. | ||
| You can't just throw it out there in people's faces with all the culture and the traditions, particularly here in America. | ||
| People would turn away from it so fast. | ||
| So I think at some point we'll be able to build up to that. | ||
| You start slowly educating people on what that is and the history and everything. | ||
| And hopefully, eventually, we won't get so far away from that that Muay Thai does become kickboxing because we've taken so much from it. | ||
| And for people who don't know what we're talking about, again, the dance that you do, the warm-up dance before a Muay Thai match called Y-Crew, right? | ||
| And how long does that usually take? | ||
| It depends, really. | ||
| You know, different gyms, different people do longer and shorter ones. | ||
| You know, I do a very limited shorter one when I fight. | ||
| Well, I haven't done it in forever, but because of that, you know, and knowing that people don't really want to see it, you know, you kind of Americanize it and shorten it, where some of them, I've seen some longer wide crews than fights in the past. | ||
| What's a long one? | ||
| Five minutes? | ||
| I don't know if it's that long. | ||
| Borkout has one of the longest ones I've seen. | ||
| He takes his sweet time, goes down, does everything perfectly. | ||
| It's like a whole routine. | ||
| But then in those situations, people are very educated and they want to see that. | ||
| They want to see the beauty of it. | ||
| It almost becomes part of the entertainment, part of the fight, besides the fight itself. | ||
| But when you go see a professional Muay Thai match, I would estimate that 50% of the crowd trains. | ||
| They're very educated in what it is. | ||
| It's like baseball here in America where you don't have to play baseball in order to appreciate and love it because it's our pastime. | ||
| And that's what it is in Thailand. | ||
| Not everyone there is actively training or fighting or has fought, but it's so embedded in their culture that they just love it and they appreciate it. | ||
| Everything about it. | ||
| So to go to a live Muay Thai fight in Thailand is just, you can't even describe it. | ||
| I can only imagine. | ||
| It's on my bucket list for sure. | ||
| But in America, if you go to see a live event in America, half of the audience, at least, is either people from the gym or people that know people from the gym. | ||
| And it's sort of almost an incestuous kind of an environment. | ||
| Yeah, especially like when I was coming up, the only people that were there... | ||
| We're trained. | ||
| We're family or friends of the people fighting, you know, so that you weren't hitting this wider audience, you know, where now it is getting on TV and there are people seeing it who don't know anything about it. | ||
| And it's slowly building momentum and getting out there and getting a little more popular. | ||
| But it's just one of those sports where, you know, it's not for everybody and you got to... | ||
| Find the way to bring it to everyone. | ||
| It doesn't have this mass appeal. | ||
| The fight in itself does. | ||
| But everything that goes with it is very different. | ||
| It's very traditional. | ||
| The Thai style and then the music is very traditional. | ||
| For a lot of people, for whatever reason, they just don't have an open mind. | ||
| They don't want to accept that. | ||
| It's strange. | ||
| And like we were saying, watching it live compared to watching it on TV is two different things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, there's nothing like it. | ||
| Even for me, I'll watch it on TV, and then I'll be there in person. | ||
| I'm like, geez, man, like, why do people do this? | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, I do this too. | ||
| But it's with any combat sport. | ||
| When you're there live, you can feel it. | ||
| You feel the energy in the air. | ||
| You feel the impact. | ||
| As opposed to watching it on TV, which is still great, but nothing compares to being there in person, particularly Muay Thai. | ||
| It's just brutal. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| And there's something about it when you're not hearing any commentary, you're just literally feeling the slap of the shins. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Bone to bone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It just makes you cringe. | ||
| I was in LA a couple years back when they had that big pro Muay Thai event. | ||
| They had a lot of big name fighters fight, and Buakau fought, and he apparently had some beef with some dude that he was gonna fight, and there was a lot of shit talk back and forth. | ||
| So he had this long Y crew where he was shooting arrows at him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Do you remember that? | ||
| Yeah, that was the NPL, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What happened to that organization? | ||
| Same thing that happens to a lot of organizations. | ||
| They try to go too hard out the gate. | ||
| They pay all this money for all these super high-level fighters, which, you know, you're... | ||
| Muay Thai fans are going to know who they are, but your general public has no idea. | ||
| And that's who we're trying to reach, is the people that don't know anything about it. | ||
| So those people aren't going to come out just because there's this high-level Muay Thai guy. | ||
| They don't know who this is. | ||
| They don't know anything about him. | ||
| They'd be more likely to come out to a local person because at least, like, hey, that guy fights out of California or whatever. | ||
| And that's been the biggest thing that's slowed Muay Thai down is these promotions try to go too hard out the gate as opposed to building it up, which, you know, you got to lose a lot of money and build these people. | ||
| With anything, you got to start, slow, and build people gradually, build the promotion, build the fighters, build your audience, and eventually you can get to that level where everyone on the card is like top 10 people. | ||
| But you can't do that from the beginning when you were just trying to grow and build. | ||
| Yeah, I remember I went to the event and Larry Merchant was there. | ||
| Remember the boxing guy, Larry Merchant was there. | ||
| A lot of people were there. | ||
| Ernesto Hoost was doing commentary. | ||
| And I was like, wow, maybe this is going to work. | ||
| It seems like these guys have got it. | ||
| Too big, too fast. | ||
| Too many big names right away. | ||
| I'm pretty sure they ran out of money by the second or third show. | ||
| It just didn't work out. | ||
| And that's where Lion Fight has been doing a really good job at growing their talent and trying to get better. | ||
| They're putting really good fights and really good matchups with guys from around here. | ||
| Well, the match-ups and the talent level is very high. | ||
| It's way higher than the credit it's getting. | ||
| It's like, you know, I watch... | ||
| I have a DVR in my gym. | ||
| I've got... | ||
| I mean, what number are they up to now? | ||
| Like 30-something? | ||
| 32. 32? | ||
| I've got way back to like... | ||
| 21 or something. | ||
| Just saved up. | ||
| And I can watch them all while I train. | ||
| And it's... | ||
| There's such high level. | ||
| There's so much good fights. | ||
| There's so many good guys. | ||
| It's so exciting. | ||
| And it's such a dynamic, technical sport. | ||
| And that's one of the things I think is probably... | ||
| It probably slips by some people when the casual observer is watching it. | ||
| Just some of the stuff that we were doing today, where you were showing me just the little shifts and variations and stances and little things like that. | ||
| When you train in it, when you try it, it makes the experience of watching people compete in it richer. | ||
| Because you kind of understand. | ||
| You're like, wow, this is very complex. | ||
| There's a lot going on here. | ||
| It's not just guys going, and just trying to fucking kick each other. | ||
| Yeah, and there's so many levels to this, and your casual fan isn't going to know that. | ||
| And a big problem a lot of promotions make is... | ||
| They try to cut corners and put guys out there who aren't very good, but both those guys are at the same level. | ||
| So if you're an average person, they're kicking and punching each other. | ||
| They might be very, very low level, but they just wanted to get some cheap people they could put on the air. | ||
| So they'll cut all these corners just to save some money, but in the end it hurts everybody because you're putting crappy fights out there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Not good matchups, not very talented guys because you want to save some money, or they'll spend so much money on the main event and the co-main event that they have to cut those corners with everybody else. | ||
| And so you're putting these crappy fights out there, and you're trying to bring this new audience in, so people come and are like, this is terrible. | ||
| Why would I want to come to this? | ||
| You know, because they're bad matchups. | ||
| And as we were talking about Lion Fight, what they did from the beginning was they had quality matchups throughout the entire card, whether it was the main event, whether it was the undercard, whether it was the amateurs. | ||
| They were good, exciting matchups, regardless of the level. | ||
| And that's what really helped build them up. | ||
| Now, how long have you been fighting in Muay Thai now? | ||
| I started when I was 10 back in Lima, Peru. | ||
| And how old are you now? | ||
| 24. I think it's really interesting you were telling me today we were talking about your training partner, Mazzetti. | ||
| What's his first name again? | ||
| Gabriel. | ||
| Gabriel. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Who just fought this past weekend in a lion fight. | ||
| You watch him. | ||
| Fucking sensational. | ||
| Holy shit is that kid dynamic. | ||
| And his brother is bigger, older, and even more aggressive. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| He's a lot bigger. | ||
| What's going on in Peru? | ||
| Like... | ||
| Man, my first coach, Rodrigo, you know, he had a vision of the sport, you know, when he first started. | ||
| He came here to train with Alex Gong at Fairtex San Francisco, you know, it was very small, but he went back and I remember I started training with him and it was, everything was so small back then. | ||
| Like, the amount of talent there is now, like, I mean, Kevin and Kieran saw it when we went to Peru last November. | ||
| Kieran's hiding in the corner over there. | ||
| He's here, but he's not here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was supposed to be on cameras. | ||
| I don't want to There was 150 fighters in the national tournament last November when me and Kevin were fighting. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| The amount of talent and how much is growing. | ||
| Peru is definitely going to be a powerhouse in the future. | ||
| Is it because of one coach? | ||
| Has the country embraced it? | ||
| Has it taken off in popularity? | ||
| It's getting a little more popular, but like I said, Rodrigo really helped. | ||
| He got together with the government so they could start helping him out and bringing guys out to IFMA and everything. | ||
| It's just crazy. | ||
| All these kids are really 16, 17, 18, 19 years old. | ||
| Really good kids. | ||
| It's just fascinating that that one part of the world is starting to produce a lot of really high-level talent. | ||
| And then, talking to you about it, you were saying that it's like soccer, and then Muay Thai is really coming up in popularity behind soccer, which sounds crazy to me. | ||
| Yeah, and then our soccer team sucks, so... | ||
| Everybody's trying to turn to Muay Thai. | ||
| It's really cool to see. | ||
| It's really cool to watch. | ||
| That is really fascinating. | ||
| Muay Thai is the predominant striking art in MMA. It's the most, I would say, probably the most successful striking art in MMA because it has all the elements of boxing and a lot of the elements of a lot of the other traditional martial arts, but There's something about the combination of kicks and elbows and the technical style of Muay Thai that really lends itself to MMA. And I think when Maurice Smith came along, | ||
| like Maurice Smith was probably the first guy who was like a really high-level technical striker who gave MMA a try and was showing everybody the effectiveness of Muay Thai in MMA. But for whatever reason, it translated to Muay Thai getting more popular in MMA, but it didn't necessarily translate to Muay Thai getting that much more popular. | ||
| Yeah, it's one of those things that... | ||
| With MMA, it kind of helps and it hurts. | ||
| It helps in the sense that it gets it out there, but it can hurt as well when you're getting a bad representation of the sport you do. | ||
| So for a good stand-up striker in MMA, they might not be that great when it comes to real Muay Thai. | ||
| So you're saying, hey, this guy's got really great stand-up. | ||
| Well, he has really great stand-up for MMA. So people assume that's what good stand-up looks like in MMA. Muay Thai or traditional stand-up art. | ||
| So it's the pros and cons of it getting out there. | ||
| So it's tough. | ||
| Everything kind of helps as well as takes away from the sport, too. | ||
| Well, I think all martial arts make an adjustment. | ||
| They have to make a technical adjustment when they're being applied to MMA because you have to deal with the takedowns. | ||
| And even wrestling and judo had to make adjustments for Muay Thai. | ||
| Because as soon as you involved leg kicks and then knees, you know, a lot of guys were shooting for takedowns and they're getting knee to face. | ||
| Like that cyborg Michael Page fight. | ||
| Crazy knockout where his whole head got crushed from that knee. | ||
| Yeah, he had to do that surgery and everything. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he literally had to have his skull put back together again. | ||
| The most brutal injury I've ever... | ||
| Have you ever seen one of those before? | ||
| Have you ever seen his skull get crushed? | ||
| No, I actually had my skull fractured, but not like that. | ||
| That was one of the worst things I've ever seen. | ||
| How did your skull get... | ||
| I got kicked in the back of the head, and the guy had a steel plate in his shin guard in China. | ||
| What? | ||
| In his shin guard? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So he had a shin guard on with a steel plate in it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I didn't really think anything of it at the time. | ||
| You know, this was, what, like 10 years ago, you know, and we would just fight everywhere, anywhere, whatever, you know, and not really think twice about it, and... | ||
| So I fought. | ||
| He kicked me in the back of the head. | ||
| I got dropped, got up, ended up knocking him out. | ||
| Fought again the very next day. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah, knocked this guy out too. | ||
| And then when we got back to the States, I was having headaches all the time. | ||
| I just thought I had a bad concussion, you know, but like up to like almost like a month later, I kept seeing these like flashes of light. | ||
| Anytime someone would ever touch me, you know, I'd be working with like little kids or girls and smaller people and just them touching me, I'd get this like jolt and you know, it was kind of freaking me out. | ||
| And I was getting ready for another fight and I had to get my MRI or a CAT scan. | ||
| I remember what it was. | ||
| And they're like, yeah, you got an inch and a half crack in the back of your skull. | ||
| And they're like, I don't know why you're not a vegetable right now. | ||
| You should be. | ||
| They're like, if you even hit that again, it would probably kill you. | ||
| Doctors always say that, though. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, of course. | |
| When was the last time you heard that? | ||
| If I get knocked out one more time, I'm dead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If it was one inch closer to my spine, I'd be dead. | |
| It was a pretty rough thing to happen, and I couldn't do anything other than hit the bag by myself for, I don't remember how long it was to let it heal. | ||
| But it was a... | ||
| So it just essentially had to close? | ||
| Yeah, on its own. | ||
| You know, it was just like, don't get hit. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Don't get hit. | ||
| And I was getting ready for a fight, and I actually still tried to fight anyway. | ||
| But the doctor who diagnosed it was the doctor for the fights. | ||
| Oh, that's hilarious. | ||
| He was like, dude, you can't fight. | ||
| Get out of here. | ||
| How long after that was the fight? | ||
| After the diagnosis? | ||
| Like a week. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I didn't fight with a fucking engine. | ||
| He told you you could die. | ||
| That's just kind of the mentality I had coming up. | ||
| How old were you at the time? | ||
| 25? | ||
| So you just felt invulnerable? | ||
| No, not really. | ||
| I mean, my mentality from the beginning has always been, I'm gonna fight as long as I'm breathing. | ||
| And, you know, I've gone into fights with some of the worst injuries ever. | ||
| Broken hands, broken skulls, broken faces, and that's just the way I came up. | ||
| You know, like, you're gonna fight no matter what. | ||
| You're gonna fight anyone, anywhere, anytime, any weight class. | ||
| And that's how I was able to get as much experience as I did. | ||
| Karrion's nodding back there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| Fight! | ||
| Fight good! | ||
| It was the mentality we had coming up. | ||
| This was that time when YouTube wasn't even out yet. | ||
| Nobody knew what Muay Thai was. | ||
| It was like, you've got to be ready to fight all the time or else you're never going to get any fights. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Where now it's like everyone's kind of looking for the big show or picking their fights. | ||
| Like a month is short notice for people. | ||
| Where us it was like an hour. | ||
| It was like, yeah, we're ready. | ||
| We're here. | ||
| Fight. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| The time I came up was a different mindset than it is today. | ||
| And that's kind of the pros and cons of it getting bigger. | ||
| The bigger things get, you've got to take the faker people with it. | ||
| When I started and I was at fights, you knew every person that was at that fight I was a diehard Muay Thai fan. | ||
| There's no other reason to do this other than the fact that you loved it. | ||
| You're losing money. | ||
| There was no show to get on. | ||
| There was no television to get on. | ||
| There was no reason to do this sport except for the fact that you loved it. | ||
| It wasn't a question. | ||
| There's no reason to do this except for you love it. | ||
| With everything that's in you. | ||
| So everyone you met, everyone you talked to, every gym you went to, every fight you went to, you were surrounded by people that had the same heart and mentality as you. | ||
| Whereas now, you know, people are doing it for different reasons. | ||
| You know, maybe they want to get famous or they want to get Instagram followers or, you know, they want to look cool doing pad work. | ||
| And that's kind of the good and the bad of things getting bigger. | ||
| So you think that by the sport getting more popular, by more people paying attention to it, it opens up the door to more people doing it, but they just don't have the pure intention. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And that kind of waters down the sport at the end. | ||
| It's interesting because there's a line, right, between where it's intelligent to fight injured, like with your broken head. | ||
| I would never tell anyone to do what I did. | ||
| Would you do it today? | ||
| Would you think you would be in the same situation today, or would you go well with weight, age, and wisdom? | ||
| I'm not going to fight with a broken head. | ||
| I'm not going to say it, me personally, but fortunately I have good people around me who would be like, look, that's not smart. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, yeah, you're right. | ||
| And again, it was in a time where if I don't take this fight, who knows when another fight's going to come along. | ||
| You've got to take what you can get when you can get it, and that's why I'm fighting people who outweigh me by 30 pounds, and just taking a fight on a couple hours notice, because... | ||
| There wasn't opportunities, so you gotta do what you had to do to get in there, to get experience, and that was the only way you were gonna get fights. | ||
| Was it difficult to motivate yourself during those times? | ||
| Because for a lot of people, motivation requires some sort of an end goal. | ||
| Not so much about... | ||
| It was more about getting fights than it was about what am I getting out of this fight. | ||
| So it wasn't about making money. | ||
| It wasn't about getting on TV. But there was a long period of time when I just couldn't get a fight to save my life. | ||
| And that's when I was highly considering switching over to MMA. Because everyone I trained was fighting. | ||
| They're fighting in the UFC. They're getting fights all the time. | ||
| They're fighting every month. | ||
| And I'm sitting here busting my ass. | ||
| And I can only get a fight or two a year. | ||
| There was a time I had over 30 fights fall through. | ||
| preparing myself for it and then they'd fall through and they'd fall through and they'd fall through and that's why I started just taking a boxing fight even though I'd never trained boxing in my life or taking a San Shao fight that is that one in China was a San Shao fight because I just had to do what I had to do to stay busy or taking a fight on a day's notice or fighting with a cracked skull because I knew I had to stay in there and stay active and stay busy or else I'm never gonna get better especially if I want to compete with guys who have like 400 fights and been fighting since they were eight years old you How are you going to fight against a guy like that if you don't get the experience? | ||
| You have so much to make up for anyway. | ||
| I didn't start until I was 23. You know what I mean? | ||
| I'm so late to the game. | ||
| My mentality was always, I'm always going to be playing catch-up. | ||
| No matter how good I get, I'm playing catch-up. | ||
| And so I've got to do everything I can, every way I can. | ||
| Maybe it wasn't the smartest thing, but I wouldn't be where I am today if I didn't take those risks and maybe take those not-so-smart fights. | ||
| But yeah, there is a fine line between Putting yourself out there and being dangerous. | ||
| But I don't know where that line is. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think anybody does, right? | ||
| Different for everybody. | ||
| So I was always on that. | ||
| I'm like, I'm just going to do it no matter what. | ||
| Because where do you draw the line? | ||
| Do you stub your toe and you're limping a little bit? | ||
| Should you not fight? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| But I'm going to do it. | ||
| Yeah, when you say you started at 23, was that when you started competing? | ||
| That was the first time I stepped foot in the gym. | ||
| You were 23? | ||
| No training at all in martial arts before that? | ||
| Zero. | ||
| What motivated you to get in there? | ||
| Well, the first time I ever saw Muay Thai was like 94, 94 or 96. They went back when ESPN used to play them late at night, like the old school fights. | ||
| I'd always thought about boxing and doing some kind of fighting, but I always loved martial arts, you know, and When I saw Muay Thai, I was like, that's it, man. | ||
| Because every other kind of thing with, like, kicking and knees was, like, taekwondo or point fighting and not that real boxing style of hardcore fighting, you know? | ||
| So when I saw Muay Thai, I was like, if I'm going to do anything, that's going to be it. | ||
| But unfortunately, at that time, I was too busy living in Vegas and drinking myself to death every day and partying, you know, and... | ||
| It was never one of those serious things. | ||
| So I never told anybody about it. | ||
| Because I didn't even know how serious I was. | ||
| Because obviously I couldn't live the way I was living and compete. | ||
| So I knew that if I was ever going to do this, I would have to completely stop drinking, partying, living the lifestyle I was living. | ||
| And I wasn't ready to give that up. | ||
| I wasn't ready to give up my friends and lose all these people. | ||
| Not to say that I would, but I knew that was a possibility. | ||
| And I only ever told one of my friends about it. | ||
| His name was Mo. | ||
| You know, I always figured people would laugh at me if I told them I want to be a fighter one day. | ||
| If you knew me back then, you probably would have laughed at me, too. | ||
| Like, what are you talking about, man? | ||
| Like, you drink every single day. | ||
| All you do is party. | ||
| And I told him, to my surprise, he didn't laugh at me at all. | ||
| He's like, why don't you go after it? | ||
| And I was like, well, I'm like... | ||
| I was only like 18 at the time, and at that point I thought I was way too old to start. | ||
| I'm like, I can't start now. | ||
| I can't start now and make it anywhere. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| These people start when they're like 10. It's too late for me. | ||
| He's like, you should do it anyway. | ||
| If you want to do something, you can do it. | ||
| And he was born with a bad heart, and he ended up passing away. | ||
| And I promised myself when he died that I would do it. | ||
| I was like, I'm going to go after this dream, if not for myself, then for him. | ||
| Because he was never able to live, you know? | ||
| And unfortunately, his death sent me just in a really bad downward spiral, even more so than I was already in drinking and partying and all that stuff. | ||
| This continued on for years and years and through a month-long series of really horrible things happening, like friends dying or almost killing people, drunk driving, and myself getting pulled over, doing like 120 on the 215 in Vegas. | ||
| And for whatever reason, the cop let me go. | ||
| And that was just... | ||
| All these things happened. | ||
| It was this huge wake-up call for me. | ||
| And I realized that if my friend was still alive, he would... | ||
| Beat the shit out of me. | ||
| You know, he's like, well, you're wasting your life. | ||
| You're wasting this dream you have because you're too scared to do it. | ||
| But this dream, I mean, you had never even stepped foot in a gym. | ||
| So this is like a dream of you one day attempting to learn something. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| That's a very crazy thing because it was always hanging over your head then. | ||
| Yeah, and again, it was that thing where... | ||
| I'm not going to be able to get anywhere in this, but... | ||
| I finally realized that where I get to isn't what matters. | ||
| How good I can get doesn't matter. | ||
| Me giving all of myself to this sport and dedicating myself to this is what really matters. | ||
| Where I make it to, I don't know where I could make it to. | ||
| I could be the best in the world or the worst in the world, but as long as I'm putting myself out there... | ||
| Why is that more important? | ||
| Why is the most important to put everything you have into it? | ||
| I've just always believed if you're going to do something, it's all or nothing. | ||
| I never wanted to half-ass it and that's why I knew if I was gonna do this I'd have to give up partying and drinking and hanging out with my friends and going out all the time and I wasn't ready to do that you know I've always been in that mentality of if you're gonna do something do it you do it all the way you don't do it at all because because you're sabotaging yourself and then you can just say oh I didn't make it because of this that and the other Right, | ||
| but what were you getting out of it when you realized that it wasn't really about how good you get or how far you go, it was about giving it everything you have? | ||
| A lot of it had to do with seeing my friend pass away at 18, you know? | ||
| There's no reason to ever halfway do something because there's people who don't get the opportunity to even attempt to go after these things because of whatever reason. | ||
| They might die. | ||
| They might have a disease. | ||
| They might not have all their legs. | ||
| And you can do this. | ||
| Maybe you can't be the great, but you can do this. | ||
| You can at least attempt this. | ||
| And you owe it to yourself and you owe it to them to give it everything that you have. | ||
| I always felt like I owed him something. | ||
| Everything to go after my life with everything I had all my dreams I need to go after a hundred percent because there's people that don't get to I'm asking this because I think this is a common theme with people is that when they're pursuing a dream or when they're attempting to do something they realize somewhere along the line that You're doing something more than just like trying to get really good at Muay Thai or whatever you know fill in the blank with whatever sport it is your I I was the expression I was used is that martial arts Are | ||
| a vehicle for developing your human potential. | ||
| And I think that until you have a really difficult task in front of you, like becoming a professional Muay Thai fighter, which is one of the most difficult tasks in all combat sports, until you have that task in front of you, until you go down that road and realize how much is actually required of you, you don't know how much you can give to something. | ||
| And once you do realize how much you're capable of giving you something, and then you can give a little more, and then you can give a little more, and then you realize, like, did I give my all? | ||
| Did I watch what I ate? | ||
| Did I sleep enough? | ||
| Did I think about things the right way? | ||
| Did I get anxious when I shouldn't have? | ||
| Did I keep my mind clean? | ||
| You know, what was I doing wrong? | ||
| What was I doing right? | ||
| How can I improve? | ||
| And then it sort of trickles over into your life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, well, in the beginning, as I said, for me, it's always been all or nothing. | ||
| You know, I didn't realize that at the time, but looking back, I can kind of understand the mentality behind it, is there's so many things that are going to come up that will deter you from going after it. | ||
| Maybe you get injured, or maybe you're not getting the opportunities, and if you're not in it, 100%, those things are going to steer you away. | ||
| Those things are going to make you quit. | ||
| People kind of look at people who have made it as if they just had this easy path and all of a sudden they're in the spotlight and they're a world champion and doing these things. | ||
| But it's like any person who's made it to a high level, whether it's an athlete or a business person, if you go back in their life and see the things they've had to do and overcome and the obstacles in their way, you have no idea. | ||
| And that's why everyone's like, well, they didn't have to deal with this, or they didn't have to deal with this. | ||
| You don't know what they had to deal with. | ||
| You don't see the obstacles. | ||
| Isn't that always a problem when you're watching something kind of condensed to one performance? | ||
|
unidentified
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Of course. | |
| You know, like, if you watch, like, Gabriel go out the other night, you look at him, he's 19 years old, he destroys that guy, what was the guy's name, Josh Shepard, who was a really talented fighter himself, goes out and destroys this guy in the first round, like, well, how hard could he have worked? | ||
| He's fucking 19. Dude, I was training that kid. | ||
| I mean, Kieran and I were training that kid, and I was running him to the ground every single day. | ||
| I mean, he's really good. | ||
| He's really talented already. | ||
| But I was like, you're in this position right now. | ||
| This is what you're going to do, and we're going to work really hard. | ||
| And I dedicated myself to him throughout his camp, too. | ||
| I mean, we were training together. | ||
| When I was fighting for my world title fight, and then he just kept training and going. | ||
| He's trained like three months for that fight, and that's why he looks so good. | ||
| He dedicated everything. | ||
| Do that. | ||
| Also, he's super talented. | ||
| Also, there's something about being 19, right? | ||
| Isn't there something about being, like, really... | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Is it a physical thing? | ||
| Or is it a mental thing? | ||
| Is it that you don't have as much responsibility? | ||
| I think it's a combination of a lot of those things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Without a doubt. | ||
| But it's super rare that a guy is, like, 35, and then, like, how long has Gabriel been training for? | ||
| He wasn't even that good before. | ||
| He was good, but he didn't get that good until he went to Thailand. | ||
| He started taking really tough fights. | ||
| He's been training since he was 13, I think. | ||
| So think of that. | ||
| That's only six years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's very rare that a guy would be like 34 and then when he's 39 he's this motherfucker of motherfuckers like he is. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like what is it? | ||
| I've always wondered like is it that life just you burden yourself down with responsibility and information and just life itself, relationships, bills, bullshit, stress, existential angst, the fucking grave calling, all these different things. | ||
| There's so many variables. | ||
| You can't really pinpoint it on one specific thing. | ||
| And everybody's variables are going to be different. | ||
| We all have different things to overcome and deal with. | ||
| Just because I view yours as maybe they're not that difficult, I don't know everything he's dealing with. | ||
| He doesn't know everything I'm dealing with or have had to overcome. | ||
| But if I sat there and listened to his story, I'm like, geez, I wouldn't want to do that. | ||
| I'm sure it's a crazy story, but when you go back and watch Mike Tyson when he was 19, You see Mike Tyson hitting the bag with Teddy Atlas when he's 19. You just go, Jesus fucking Christ. | ||
| How does anybody get that good? | ||
| What happens from 13 to 19? | ||
| How is it possible that someone can just reach that insane level? | ||
| And it seems that it happens primarily when someone's really young. | ||
| I mean, I started when I was 10. And when I was 16, you can ask Karen, I felt invincible, man. | ||
| Much like Kevin, I would take any fight, any weight. | ||
| It didn't matter, you know? | ||
| I was 16. I couldn't fight as an adult yet because I wasn't 18. But we lied and said that I was 18 because I ran out of people to fight. | ||
| I ran out of juniors to fight. | ||
| So from 16 to 18, I was technically an adult. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And I was just taking as many fights, anywhere from 132 pounds to 147. Any fight that I could possibly take, I needed to get the experience. | ||
| And that's what I wanted to do. | ||
| I wanted to dedicate my life to it. | ||
| Do you think that that's possible for an older person? | ||
| Kevin, you obviously, you were still young. | ||
| You were 23. You're saying you were older, but a lot of people listening are like, God, 23, you're still like a baby. | ||
| You can still learn a lot. | ||
| I mean, relatively, though, for the sport, Kevin was old. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'll have people come up to me like, wow, I'm too old. | ||
| I'm like, how old are you? | ||
| Like 19. I'm like, dude, I didn't even start until I was 23. What are you talking about? | ||
| Because I think people just like to view things as an excuse. | ||
| Like, oh, I can't do it because X. Right. | ||
| But we all have something that we can point to and be like, well, I can't make it because of this. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| But there's people who have had that and worse and have made it. | ||
| So what excuse could you possibly have? | ||
| You're a very technical fighter. | ||
| You're a very technical guy. | ||
| Do you think that maybe there is some benefit in having started a little bit later, being a little wiser? | ||
| A hundred percent. | ||
| I think that's a huge thing. | ||
| That just because you start, you know, when you start when you're a kid, There's so much of it like you're just doing it for whatever. | ||
| But once you've matured in a certain way, like I started to, for only one reason, I want to be the best I can be. | ||
| I'm developed enough physically and mentally to apply these things to what I'm trying to apply them to, to be the best fighter I can. | ||
| Whereas, yeah, when you're younger, you're still growing and learning and developing physically as well as mentally. | ||
| Yeah, like, my first fight, I was 11, 10. Like, I didn't know what I was doing there. | ||
| I just knew, like, I kind of liked it, but I didn't have, like, a purpose to it. | ||
| Like, I just really enjoyed training at the time. | ||
| It was exciting. | ||
| It was exciting. | ||
| Right, and you had skills, you wanted to try them out. | ||
| Yeah, but I wasn't like, oh, I want to be the best in the world right now. | ||
| Like, that didn't come until, like, 14, 15, when I was like, I really want to dedicate my life to this. | ||
| Now, were you living in America at the time? | ||
| No, I was in Peru. | ||
| When did you come to America? | ||
| When I was 13. When you were 13. And did you go straight to CSA? Was that the first gym you trained at? | ||
| No, I started at Fortex, and then when I was 16, 2008, I met Karian. | ||
| And ever since, we've been inseparable. | ||
| Well, you guys have a very unique gym. | ||
| And it's... | ||
| One of the most important things for a young fighter is to find the right environment to develop and we were talking about that earlier today like you can get unlucky and Find a bad coach in a bad gym and you get all tangled up with that person psychologically and they become family and then you know You're kind of fucked. | ||
| Yeah, it's a very difficult break for a lot of fighters to make and Yeah, man. | ||
| Honestly, I've been truly blessed since I started all the way to now. | ||
| I started with Rodrigo, then Fairtex, I was with Johnson, somebody who Kevin still trains with to this day a little bit. | ||
| I've always had really good coaching since I started. | ||
| Another unfortunate thing is just because somebody's a great coach doesn't mean they're great for you. | ||
| You know, so sometimes you'll see these people, like, leave their camps and go to this really high-level coach who's had a lot of success with certain individuals, but that doesn't mean they're going to be great for you. | ||
| So I try to always tell people, you have to find what works best for you, whether it's a coach, whether it's your diet, whether it's your training schedule. | ||
| What works for me won't always work for you. | ||
| You've got to find what's best for you, and that doesn't always necessarily mean I need this great coach, because you guys might just clash. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Like coaches and fighting, it's very much... | ||
| It's like having a relationship with somebody, with another person. | ||
| You just might clash together, not work. | ||
| And it's also, what you just said is super important, about finding that winning formula. | ||
| Whether it's training, whether it's diet, whether it's coaching, and then gym partners. | ||
| I know you guys are fantastic partners. | ||
| You guys work together really well. | ||
| I've watched a lot of videos of you guys training together. | ||
| I mean, how critical is that to have someone who's an elite fighter that trains with you on a daily basis? | ||
| It's one of the most important things. | ||
| There's so many factors that go into building a fighter. | ||
| It's not just one thing, you know what I mean? | ||
| And that one thing needs to constantly be adjusted because the way I train today isn't how I trained even a year ago. | ||
| You continually need to be hopping back and forth on this line of too much and too little of one thing. | ||
| What's the difference between how you train today versus how you train a year ago? | ||
| I'd say the older I get, the more it's a mental approach kind of thing. | ||
| My technique isn't going to be altered that much at this stage, but the way that I apply them, the way I go about them, the way I think about them, very much is going to change. | ||
| At a certain stage, it's like you have all these weapons to use. | ||
| It's just a matter of which ones you use, at which time, at which speed. | ||
| In the way that you apply them, where in the beginning you're just trying to do things well and you're trying to almost put all these tools in the toolbox as your career develops. | ||
| But at a certain stage, not to say I'm not adding more, is that I have all these tools. | ||
| I need to figure out which ones work best for me and which ones work for me at which time against which opponent, which venue, which sport. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| There's so many things that you can play with and adjust and Good and bad. | ||
| That was a huge thing I struggled with after my knee surgery was like, I almost forgot how to fight as myself. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Because it was like, okay, here's all your weapons. | ||
| Pick up which ones you want to use. | ||
| I'm like, I don't know. | ||
| I don't remember which ones I used and how I put them together. | ||
| And it took me a series of fights to find myself again as a fighter in the ring. | ||
| How much time did you take off because of your knee surgery? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nine weeks, nine months in one week. | |
| That was between fights? | ||
| That was between the day I blew my knee out and the day I got back in the ring. | ||
| You had ACL reconstruction? | ||
| Yeah, I completely threw my ACL. Which way did they do it? | ||
| Cadaver. | ||
| Yeah, I had that way. | ||
| I just talked to a friend of mine. | ||
| She had it done. | ||
| She was in Austria in a skiing accident. | ||
| They took some meat out of her calf, which I've never even I haven't even heard of before and reconstructed it. | ||
| Well, like, you know, there was those options, but I was like, I don't want to take anything else out of myself that might weaken that thing. | ||
| Like, I got enough to deal with now. | ||
| I can't weaken something else. | ||
| So for me, it was, and in talking to other athletes that have had it, it just, it seemed like the better approach for me, and it has worked best for me. | ||
| It worked best for me, too. | ||
| I had both knees reconstructed. | ||
| I had my left one done with a patella tendon graft where they take a big chunk of your patella tendon with a piece of bone from your shin and a piece of bone from your knee. | ||
| And it's fine, but that was like a year before it felt good again. | ||
| But the right knee, I have zero problems with it. | ||
| And I was training. | ||
| I was doing jujitsu again in six months. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And it was with no pain. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There was no consequences for the injury. | ||
| Whereas the left one, still, where they'd cut the bone out, if I kneel down on a hardwood floor, I could still feel it. | ||
| There's a lot of people that are scared of cadavers, though. | ||
| They're scared for medical reasons. | ||
| Like, for me, it was more of a mentally a strange thing, you know, to have something of someone else's who passed away. | ||
| And, you know, that was just a weird, very weird thing mentally to kind of deal with. | ||
| You know how it works, right? | ||
| It's just a scaffolding. | ||
| No, no, not really, no. | ||
| What it is is they take... | ||
| Usually they use an Achilles tendon because it's much stronger. | ||
| It's actually 150%, I believe, stronger than the original ACL. They take that Achilles tendon, they put it in place, and then your body... | ||
| Reproliferates that tendon with its own tissue. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that tendon is not there anymore. | ||
| Your body fills it up with cells because they reattach the blood supply and as your body starts, it starts using that to regenerate tissue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So it puts your own cells, but in the form of a much larger tendon. | ||
| It's really kind of interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| My right leg, which is the one I blew out, feels so much better than my left one does. | ||
| Like stronger. | ||
| That's thick, man. | ||
| They use a thick-ass fucking tent. | ||
| I mean, we have a shitty design. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The human body, the ACL in particular. | ||
| I'm just going to get everything replaced. | ||
| Well, as soon as you figure out heel hooks, as soon as people figure out heel hooks, you just realize, like, oh my god, my knee is, like, so stupid. | ||
| Like, who designed this? | ||
| Because all you have to do is get that heel here and, like, pop, it just pops off. | ||
| It's terrible, you know? | ||
| I mean, and it happens all the time in jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Guys get their knees blown apart. | ||
| That gives me nightmares, man, just watching that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, well, it's, I mean, some guys get nightmares, they watch you guys kick each other. | ||
| I know. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I've blown up a couple ACLs kicking people. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure. | ||
| Yeah, it didn't feel good, man. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I was like, God, did I do that? | ||
| Was it a planted leg? | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Most of the time? | ||
| Yeah, I just, yeah, a couple tough guys that try to come in the gym, go hard, you know, and I'm like, alright, man, let's go. | ||
| Oh, that's why I tell a lot of people like learning how to absorb and take a punch or a kick is just as if not more important than throwing it because you're going to get hit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| No matter how good you are, you're going to get hit. | ||
| And if you don't know how to take that and absorb it and minimize the damage, you're going to have a lot of really serious injuries. | ||
| And unfortunately, so much of what we do is applied to the offensive side of it, hitting people, you know, and those kinds of things. | ||
| But if you don't know how to take a punch and obviously you don't want to just be like, all right, I want to learn how to take punches really good. | ||
| But that's a skill that... | ||
| that you need to have. | ||
| Yeah, there's a subtlety to it that I think is lost on a lot of people, the ability to just move with something. | ||
| And the way I always try to tell people, have someone hold their hand up Then have them move their hand just a little bit. | ||
| And you still try to punch it, but it doesn't feel good. | ||
| It feels good when they meet you. | ||
| It's like people hold pads and they slap you. | ||
| It feels good. | ||
| You hit it. | ||
| But if someone just kind of pulls away a little bit, so much of the punch is diminished. | ||
| It really just drains the life out of you. | ||
| Because you feel like you're giving someone all you have. | ||
| And in your mind, you're hitting them. | ||
| But nothing is happening. | ||
| We have that winning, that big shield, you know? | ||
| And Kieran uses this sometimes to train us, like towards the end of camp. | ||
| It's awful because you're like giving everything you got to this thing and it's just... | ||
| So fat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's nothing coming back at you, so there's no reverb off your head. | ||
| It's like you're punching into a cloud and it's like, oh my gosh. | ||
| Well, I've seen some gyms that have that crazy 300-pound bag that just sits on the ground. | ||
| It doesn't even swing. | ||
| It just sits there and you wind up kicking that thing. | ||
| And I'm always like, man... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Is that good? | ||
| Is it good to kick something that doesn't move? | ||
| It's another one of those things where it's just a piece of the puzzle. | ||
| It's good to develop your power and stuff. | ||
| But yeah, if that's all you're doing, when something's moving around on you, it's giving you very different looks. | ||
| It's kind of like a... | ||
| Like we do a lot of technical sparring, you know, with no gear on and stuff. | ||
| If you have all these pads on and you have this false sense of security and then you get in there with someone who's got nothing on and it's just like you're kicking things wrong and you're catching elbows and you're messing your feet up because you haven't... | ||
| Learned how to place things correctly and where they need to go and where you maximize their damage and minimize yours. | ||
| Is there a point of diminishing returns though with a heavy bag where like at a 300-pound bag and you're kicking it, it's probably not developing your power as much as even maybe a 150-pound bag would. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| I guess it just depends on what it is you're trying to do and work on and improve. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| When you're hitting one of those immobile bags, what would you concentrate on primarily? | ||
| Power. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Power, yeah. | |
| Just dig in. | ||
| Just dig in as hard as you can. | ||
| Because I know that's going to be right there. | ||
| I can close my eyes and hit this as hard as I want to. | ||
| I don't have to worry so much about my balance and my speed. | ||
| I can just blindly do this kind of thing. | ||
| So just dig in, work on just explosion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But isn't there some benefit in the bag having some sort of a give, so that your shin is pushing? | ||
| Without a doubt. | ||
| A lot of times when I'm working on speed and movement and stuff, I don't really just try to crack the bag. | ||
| I'm just touching it, so I'll work on a much lighter bag. | ||
| And I'm just trying to work on my angles and the bag moving and targeting and those kinds of things. | ||
| But again, it's very specific in what I'm trying to do. | ||
| And there's not just one way to do this. | ||
| And then I think that's another thing that not a lot of people think about or apply is just like, oh, I'm just going to hit pads. | ||
| I'm just going to hit the bag. | ||
| But why are you doing it? | ||
| What is it that you're working on? | ||
| What are you trying to develop? | ||
| Because there's so many aspects to this. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But it's another thing that you just figure out over time. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Do you remember when the water bags were a big deal? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was like a big thing. | ||
| There was a thick foam outer layer, then there was water in it. | ||
| That didn't really catch on, did it? | ||
| We have an aqua bag. | ||
| It's a little different. | ||
| It's a little thicker, like rubber. | ||
| It's good for power punching. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| I like it to throw elbows at it, too. | ||
| Because it gives in on you a little bit? | ||
| I mean, not that. | ||
| It's very well put together. | ||
| So it doesn't give in as much as you think it would. | ||
| What are the misconceptions that you think maybe even traditional martial artists might have when they're looking at Muay Thai? | ||
| Maybe that's really one-dimensional. | ||
| I think we have this kind of... | ||
| We think about it almost like the... | ||
| Who's in Street Fighter? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Krio? | ||
| Ryu? | ||
| No, Saget. | ||
| So we think about that. | ||
| Which one is he? | ||
| The old school Thai boxer. | ||
| When you think about Muay Thai fighters just being this mindless, like we're just going to throw power at each other and just stand there and we have no thought or process behind anything. | ||
| Yeah, there's definitely fighters who do that. | ||
| And maybe to an outside observer, they might not see all the small... | ||
| Details and the complexity of the things they're doing, just because I'm standing in front of you not moving doesn't mean there's no thought behind it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's like I've learned how to use those head movement and footwork things on a very, very small scale. | ||
| So to me, I am doing a lot of movement and footwork, but to an outside person, I'm just standing there mindlessly just winging shots at each other. | ||
| So you don't see all the complexity that goes into it where I can watch it and view those things very well. | ||
| Is it one of those things where you're watching, like say, if you're watching an MMA fight, for example, where a lot of times when you're watching MMA, you're watching someone who's pretty good at a bunch of different things, but not maybe technically proficient at any of those things. | ||
| And you're seeing a lot of that, where guys are just kind of standing in front of each other and almost playing Muay Thai, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| And as a high-level fighter, do you guys watch MMA and go, Oh my god. | ||
| I mean, especially, it hits me really hard sometimes. | ||
| Friday night lion fights, you're there live, and then you're watching whatever UFC or whatever other card there is on, and you're on TV, and it's like, oh my god. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But there is some good strikers in MMA. Sure. | ||
| There's guys like Barboza. | ||
| There's some pretty high-level guys. | ||
| Joana. | ||
| Joana's really good. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Valentino. | ||
| Shevchenko, yeah. | ||
| But there's also a lot of different elements they have to think about. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Takedowns. | ||
| It's definitely like we were talking about earlier. | ||
| You've got to implement what works for you in MMA. Yeah. | ||
| So what works for you might not work for somebody else either. | ||
| So it's really tough. | ||
| It's different. | ||
| Now you, at 24 years old, you already have a very successful Muay Thai career. | ||
| Have you thought about doing an MMA? So actually, I just signed a deal with Bellator. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| So I am making the transition up. | ||
| Not only with MMA. I wanted to do Muay Thai, keep doing Muay Thai with Lion Fight, but that hasn't worked out so good. | ||
| I'm going to be doing Bellator kickboxing and MMA. Why hasn't that worked out? | ||
| They're going a different route, so it's not going to work to promote an MMA fighter with Lion Fight. | ||
| Scott Coker has signed me, and he's going to be able to work both angles with me, so that's going to be really good. | ||
| Now, you're a guy who clinches a lot, and that'd be a great thing for MMA, but what about for kickboxing? | ||
| Are you going to do Bellator kickboxing as well? | ||
| Because I know Bellator is doing a really interesting thing right now. | ||
| They're kind of combining kickboxing and MMA on the same card. | ||
| Has anybody talked to them about abandoning the kickboxing aspect and just doing Muay Thai? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I've said some things to Scott about it, and I think they're just trying to establish that kickboxing side of their cards, and hopefully one day he might bring in some Muay Thai fights. | ||
| Maybe once the Bellator kickboxing can be more of a standalone promotion, I think they might be able to venture out into mixing the cards and maybe have some Muay Thai fights on the undercard or in between fights as well. | ||
| But for now, I think they're just trying to start out and do things right and build up that portion of it and having those mixed cards where it's the Bellator MMA and the Bellator kickboxing, which has worked out very well. | ||
| And I think people really enjoy it because we're having both fights on the card. | ||
| But eventually, it'd be nice if the kickboxing can stand alone and then kind of develop from there. | ||
| Yeah, it just seems to me that it doesn't make any sense to eliminate elbows and knees. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| It just seems kind of crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But again, it's a different sport. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It is, but it's striking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I mean, if you're kicking, why aren't you elbowing? | ||
| Why aren't you kneeing? | ||
| Yeah, I agree with you. | ||
| It's a beautiful... | ||
| I mean, I think... | ||
| The more complex striking gets, the more beautiful it is. | ||
| I mean, the more variables that exist. | ||
| Like, when I watch a guy like Sanchai is a perfect example, because he's such a wild guy to watch. | ||
| He fights in his own very particular style, and he's very light on his feet. | ||
| There's a lot of switching of the feet, a lot of kicks that you don't know where they're going. | ||
| You think they're going low, and they kind of come straight up and go high. | ||
| Kevin fought Sanchai. | ||
| Did you? | ||
| When did you fight Sanchai? | ||
| When was that? | ||
| 11? | ||
| 2012? | ||
| Yeah, 11 or 12. I forget. | ||
| August 2012. It was right before you moved to CSA. No, I fought Sagatau before I moved to CSA. How was that? | ||
| What was the fight in Sanchai? | ||
| I'll watch it, man. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| It was a great fight. | ||
| It's hard to describe what it was like, man. | ||
| I was so dialed in physically and mentally that... | ||
| I look back and I'm like, geez, dude, I can't believe that was me in there doing that. | ||
| It was just so... | ||
| I was in another mental plane, you know what I mean? | ||
| Everything was just firing the waves. | ||
| Is this it right here? | ||
| Okay, we'll watch a little bit of this while we're talking. | ||
| As long as we have it in the background. | ||
| I want you to see how Santai looks after the fight. | ||
| Cecil Peoples is a referee. | ||
| Yeah, he kind of screwed me. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Who saw that coming? | ||
| Did he do that thing where he lifts his knee up and does the karate thing at the beginning? | ||
| I got to watch that. | ||
| That shit's hilarious. | ||
| How did he become the person to... | ||
| Cecil Peoples is a very nice guy. | ||
| I will say that. | ||
| I want to be a nice... | ||
| I want to see this. | ||
| There it goes. | ||
| He did that thing that he does. | ||
| That weird knee thing that he does. | ||
| But yeah, Sanchez is one of those guys, like, he doesn't fight like a traditional Muay Thai fighter, and he's the best Muay Thai fighter of all time, arguably, you know? | ||
| He's certainly one of them. | ||
| He uses so many things from different arts, and, you know, Taekwondo, and Muay Thai, and kickboxing, and... | ||
| Yeah, he's got that really sneaky left leg, too, man. | ||
| That left leg literally comes straight up. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| And you have no idea where it's going. | ||
| It might be a front kick, leg kick, body kick, head kick. | ||
| I knew he was going to kick me. | ||
| I just didn't know where the hell it was going. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, he's really good. | ||
| Have you ever seen Lawrence Kenshin's breakdowns of Muay Thai fights? | ||
| What is the name of his? | ||
| He does them on YouTube. | ||
| Do you know what the name of his is? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I've seen one guy do a lot of breakdowns, and they're really well. | ||
| I don't know if it's his name. | ||
| I think Lawrence just does him under his name, but he's a really, really smart guy and really, really aware of Muay Thai and really aware of the complexities. | ||
| And he did a breakdown on Sanchai and one of the things Sanchai setting up high kicks. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| And the way he'll sort of test you with some other kicks. | ||
| And then he's got that really unusual way of throwing his kicks, too. | ||
| Where they literally come straight up. | ||
| Yeah, there it is. | ||
| But let's go back to that fight. | ||
| I want to go back to that fight. | ||
| I don't want you to change. | ||
| Oh yeah, I've seen some of the guys. | ||
| And that's kind of what we were speaking of earlier in the gym is... | ||
| It's just that one thing, his kick, but he has so many ways and variables to set that up as far as speed, and so he uses all these things to test you, and once he figures that out, you're done. | ||
| And that's how he's able to destroy basically everyone at every level of the sport, because he has so many answers to that one question. | ||
| You beat him, didn't you? | ||
| No, it was a split decision. | ||
| Split decision? | ||
| Why did I feel it? | ||
| Oh, Kieran's saying you won. | ||
| Some people think it is. | ||
| If I didn't get dropped, but not really dropped, won. | ||
| Oh, Cecil Peoples got you with a bad count? | ||
| It was a split, right? | ||
| It's kind of ironic having Cecil Peoples be the referee in a fight that's a Muay Thai fight because Cecil Peoples is one of those guys that says that you can't stop people with leg kicks. | ||
| That was like one of his quotes. | ||
| It was one of the bad decisions that went down where he's like, leg kicks don't stop fights. | ||
| I'm like, oh my god. | ||
| How are you allowed to even say that? | ||
| It's the unfortunate thing about fighting is you have people regulating these arts who have no idea about them whatsoever. | ||
| Well, that's a giant issue with the UFC. It's a giant issue with judging. | ||
| And I would imagine with Muay Thai, it's even more difficult to find competent... | ||
| Judges and referees. | ||
| You just can't. | ||
| You're getting boxing judges doing Muay Thai. | ||
| You're getting karate guys doing Muay Thai. | ||
| And these are the people who are basically controlling the outcomes of these fights if there's no stoppage. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And it's crazy. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Now, in Thailand... | ||
| Wow, that fucking sneaky left leg he's got, man. | ||
| In Thailand, how do they approach the clinch? | ||
| Because you're seeing in this fight, like, Cecil is breaking you guys up almost immediately as soon as you tie up. | ||
| It's... | ||
| It's such a complex thing, too. | ||
| It's not just the fact, are these guys working? | ||
| Well, what are they doing? | ||
| If you don't have a deep understanding of it, you're not going to be able to judge it or ref it accurately. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So it's not just a matter of time. | ||
| It's not a matter of people moving around. | ||
| It's what are they doing? | ||
| Are they affecting each other? | ||
| Are they hurting each other? | ||
| Are they just mindlessly lifting their legs up to appear to stay busy? | ||
| Where if somebody doesn't know that, me just lifting my leg up, be like, oh, well, he's staying busy. | ||
| He's active. | ||
| Why are they breaking him up? | ||
| But I wasn't really doing anything. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| A lot of times they're like, I'm going to let you guys work in the clinch, but you're not doing anything and they just let it go. | ||
| Not knowing when people are stalling out or trying to buy time or just moving their legs for the sake of looking like they're actually kneeing each other. | ||
| These judges and these refs don't have an understanding of that. | ||
| That's an issue with ground fighting as well. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| It's an issue with the UFC when certain fights go to the ground, whether it's judging or whether it's even refereeing. | ||
| Some guys are setting up certain positions and then the referee will come up and stand them up. | ||
| That is crazy. | ||
| They're working. | ||
| They're fighting. | ||
| But I think that in the clinch as well. | ||
| There's a lot of times they separate guys from the clinch when... | ||
| Two guys, if they're clinching up and they're both working to try to establish dominant positions, one is eventually, maybe, going to win that dominant position battle, and that's part of the grind. | ||
| Part of the grind is a guy imposing his skill set, his will, his conditioning, all the above, on his opponent. | ||
| And if you just get in and separate that because you want to watch a knockout, you're kind of diluting the sport. | ||
| And it's like I don't care how many fights you've watched or how many courses you've taken. | ||
| If you haven't done this before, if you've never fought before, you don't know what's going on in there. | ||
| And that's the problem. | ||
| You have people, even if they've been in the sport for a very long time and may have been around it for a very long time, if you've never fought, at least at some level, you don't know what's going on in there. | ||
| Yeah, you're seeing it, but you really don't know what you're seeing. | ||
| And you don't know how much of it is actually effective, and how much of it the guy's actually just absorbing things and blocking things. | ||
| It's so complex, and I think that's one of the things that gets lost about... | ||
| Fighting arts in general, but Muay Thai in particular, is all of the complexity that goes on. | ||
| Like, what you were saying, that a lot of people, the misconception is that they're looking at two guys that are just bruisers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But what I'm watching here, I'm watching all this complex interactions of footwork and kicks and elbows and knees and clenching and knowing when to time things and dealing with a really high-level opponent who's very crafty and he's sort of... | ||
| Calculating all this stuff in his head as well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's kind of the problem with there's only so much you can learn from a book. | ||
| There's only so much you can learn from watching videos until you apply those things. | ||
| It's like street smart and book smart. | ||
| If you don't have that street knowledge, your knowledge is very limited, you know? | ||
| And so I don't care how much you think you know. | ||
| If you've never applied it, Even just like sparring. | ||
| I don't care how much you spar, you know? | ||
| Until you get in there, you don't know what it's like. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I can only imagine. | ||
| You know, I think that's the case with a lot of things. | ||
| I mean, I even joke about golf because I think golf is stupid. | ||
| But I get the people that do it a lot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| To them, it must be complex. | ||
| Like, they must understand all the different aspects of it. | ||
| And I say that about playing pool, too, that it's an art form that's only interesting for people to do it. | ||
| And I think that's one of the things that's cool about going to, like, what I'm seeing here. | ||
| This is a small arena or small crowd. | ||
| Super small. | ||
| I mean, it looks like there's only, like, four or five hundred people in that whole place. | ||
| Yeah, it was tiny, man. | ||
| And so that kind of shit, I mean, look, here's you, world championship caliber fighter, fighting another world championship caliber fighter, both guys in their prime, and you're fighting in front of 50 people. | ||
| And making a couple books. | ||
| And it's super complex. | ||
| I mean, what's going on is this exchange, the interactions. | ||
| And I think one of the things about having guys like Lawrence Kenshin putting out these videos, and a lot of other people that have done these tremendous breakdown videos of Muay Thai, is that People that are fans, even if they don't train themselves, even if they just watch it, they can see things now that maybe perhaps they wouldn't have seen before and then appreciate what these athletes are doing. | ||
| There's a lot of people that watch football that can't fucking play football at all, but they can enjoy it. | ||
| And I think that you're seeing that in this, you know, and watching the, whoa, there's the, is that where he called a knockdown? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But he got right back up. | ||
| I mean, why was that a knockdown? | ||
| Because he got kicked in the head. | ||
| Carian, if you want to talk, you've got to talk on the mic, okay? | ||
| Look, motherfucker, I told you you were going to be on the show. | ||
| Why don't you get a goddamn chair and Jamie will pull up a microphone? | ||
| No, this is the one thing. | ||
| This one thing that's lost that hasn't been discussed is because Kevin doesn't talk about it, is to this day, and how long ago was this fight? | ||
| Four years ago. | ||
| To this day, this is the only time that the WBC has ever sanctioned a diamond belt fight for a Muay Thai fight. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| What it means is that in boxing, when you have two great fighters from two different weight classes that meet at a catch weight, they make it a diamond belt fight and they put real diamonds on the belt and it's the epitome of the WBC title. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's the only time in the history of the sport that the WBC made a diamond belt for a Muay Thai fight. | ||
| That's what a watershed moment this fight was for Muay Thai in America. | ||
| Okay, go sit down. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| No, for real. | ||
| I mean, and also just important because it's rare that you see guys of this caliber going at it like this. | ||
| I mean, it's a super exciting fight. | ||
| Great fight. | ||
| Where's Sanchai fighting now? | ||
| He's starting to do MMA, isn't he? | ||
| No, he was calling out Conor McGregor for a second. | ||
| Was he? | ||
| Probably just to get a little attention. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| They're always talking about stuff and doing stuff, but will it actually... | ||
| I mean, they talked about Bukow doing MMA for a long time because he was training a little bit, but is he going to actually do it? | ||
| I don't... | ||
| Well, what's interesting about TIE fighters is that they're really good in the clinch and taking people down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, and really good at avoiding being taken down. | ||
| Yeah, well, a lot of people don't understand how much similarities there are when it comes to the clinch and wrestling and judo. | ||
| And, you know, I went and trained with the Black Belt judo team. | ||
| San Jose before I had a shoeboxing fight, and they just could not believe that I could hang with their high-level black belts. | ||
| And I'm like, well, it's all this kind of similar stuff. | ||
| Like, yeah, your setups might be a little bit different, but all the fundamentals that go in a Muay Thai clinch are very similar to... | ||
| It's just a difference of things you can and cannot do, but the base and the fundamentals of it go across the board. | ||
| Yeah, you see that a lot with sweeps and trips, and you see some really interesting trips and sweeps in Muay Thai that are very, very technical about manipulating guys, setting them up in one direction, then changing direction on them and throwing them to the ground. | ||
| It's really cool stuff. | ||
| Well, a lot of the stuff in the Muay Thai clinch is very similar to Greco wrestling. | ||
| You know, all upper body throws and stuff because we can't shoot in, but everything we can do is above the waist and those kind of manipulations and off-balancing. | ||
| And that's why, like, if I just do Greco wrestling, I do pretty well, you know. | ||
| And people are often surprised by how well my wrestling or jujitsu is if I'm just messing around doing it because there's so many similarities. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| Now, when you're watching fights in Thailand, the clinch is a very important part of the fight. | ||
| Whereas, a lot of times in America, when you're looking at the clinch, we think of it the same way we look at a clinch in boxing. | ||
| The guys are just stalling. | ||
| It's a way to dominate and show your strength and ability over your opponent. | ||
| If you can control someone and damage them and land these clean knees on someone, it's showing your superiority over them. | ||
| But again, like you said here, we don't have a We just view it as, oh, they're just resting, or they're not doing anything in there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Now, when guys take guys down in Muay Thai, how much does that count? | ||
| How are they scoring fights? | ||
| Obviously, knockdowns are critical, but if you dump a guy a bunch of times, meaning you sweep him and trip him and slam him on his back, how much of a factor is that in a fight? | ||
| It should be a huge factor. | ||
| If they're scoring these correctly, because again, showing your balance, your dominance, and your control is one of the most important things. | ||
| So being able to throw someone on the ground and you're still just standing there is a huge scoring thing. | ||
| Is how you're doing it important? | ||
| Because what if you just get double underhooks and just crush them towards you and just bend them over? | ||
| You know, there's so many factors, man, that go into it. | ||
| And again, if you have a judge or a ref that basically has a very elementary understanding of this sport, they can't give you an accurate judge of this or an accurate reffing of this because they're not so... | ||
| Their knowledge isn't so deep. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| It's like me watching a jujitsu match and trying to score it. | ||
| I mean, I can kind of score it, but I wouldn't be able to if I spent my life in the sport. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| What I'm kind of getting at is their style points. | ||
| Style points? | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Looking cool? | ||
| Something that's dope. | ||
| You hit a guy with a beautiful sweep and dump him on his back. | ||
| It's like if you sweep somebody and seamlessly do it and make it look like nothing as opposed to sweeping them and falling on top of them and you both lose their bounce, of course, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, without a doubt. | ||
| That's a weird thing to objectively call though, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Judging is such a strange thing. | ||
| It's tough, man. | ||
| And I'll be the first one to admit that it's a very complicated thing. | ||
| I've judged five and I'm like, I don't know, man. | ||
| And then I'm trying to think of it from the mentality of someone that's never done this before. | ||
| Or only taking a course? | ||
| I'm like, how can you do that? | ||
| I have a hard time doing it. | ||
| And I've spent 15 years doing this sport. | ||
| You had a controversial loss in Lion Fight. | ||
| Yeah, earlier this year. | ||
| I fought Crumpet, tied with over a couple hundred fights. | ||
| That was your first loss? | ||
| That was my first loss. | ||
| Yeah, I didn't think you lost that fight. | ||
| I watched that fight twice. | ||
| They overturned it. | ||
| They did? | ||
| Yeah, after, yeah. | ||
| That fucking never happens. | ||
| 18 judges from all around the world or something like that. | ||
| They can do that? | ||
| I guess. | ||
| Holy shit! | ||
| Honestly, I didn't care. | ||
| I still don't because I had a great fight and I put everything on the line. | ||
| I thought I did the best that I could. | ||
| I mean, there's some things that I think I could have done better. | ||
| It was a great fight, no doubt about it. | ||
| It was a close fight, no doubt about it. | ||
| But I thought you won. | ||
| And I watched it and I was like, hmm. | ||
| And then I remember Pat Miletic and Michael Ciavello were both saying they thought it was a bad decision. | ||
| And so then I watched it again. | ||
| I said, well, I'm going to watch it one more time. | ||
| And I was like, man, I think that was a bad decision. | ||
| And I remember now that you're saying that, I remember hearing that it was overturned. | ||
| I think maybe they brought it up on a broadcast afterwards during your next fight. | ||
| Is that what happened? | ||
| Is that when they brought it up again? | ||
| Maybe? | ||
| Am I making this up? | ||
| It was the next event. | ||
| I wasn't fighting on it, but they brought it up. | ||
| Oh, it was the next event. | ||
| And I was on the broadcast. | ||
| Is that rare that they overturn a fight? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, yeah, I'm pretty sure it's rare. | ||
| Yeah, I never seen it. | ||
| It's such a tough thing, especially in a fight that wasn't so lopsided, relatively close. | ||
| It's just a matter of how you're viewing it, what you're giving more or less credit to. | ||
| And it seems like a simple thing to do on the outside. | ||
| Well, he hit him more or well, he rocked him more. | ||
| But there's so many levels to this. | ||
| It's kind of like we were talking about earlier. | ||
| It's not an on or off thing. | ||
| It's a dial. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Unless you're in there, you can't even tell how much impact this is doing on it, how much it's really hurting you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, from the outside. | ||
| And that's why it's very important, especially, like, for the ties to have that stone-cold face where nothing is affecting them. | ||
| Because you don't really know. | ||
| This person could just get crushed with a right hand, and they didn't even move or show anything. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It makes it very difficult for a judge to say... | ||
| Well, this punch should get this amount of credit or this much credit as opposed to just that pitter-pat stuff. | ||
| So, you know, it's a very difficult thing to do and to do correctly and accurately because there's so many variables and so many things you're seeing or not seeing depending on where you're sitting, how you're viewing it, if you're in there, if you're out there, if you're on the left side of the ring, the right side of the ring. | ||
| It's too complex a thing to... | ||
| That's why I could never say anything about a decision. | ||
| It's like, well... | ||
| It's such a difficult thing to do. | ||
| Unless it was so one-sided. | ||
| How in any way could you view this? | ||
| But if any fight is relatively close, I don't see how you can complain really about the decision because no matter what, sometimes you're going to be on one side of it and sometimes you're going to be on the other side of it where maybe you didn't win and they gave it to you. | ||
| One of the things I love about talking to fighters, and especially about putting on a podcast, is I think it gives people the impression of fighters, like a similar impression to what I have. | ||
| I think a lot of people have the wrong impression. | ||
| They have this impression that fighters are all, hey, I'm a bad motherfucker. | ||
| I'm out there to fuck the world and kick ass. | ||
| But really, the very best fighters are almost all very intelligent and very complex people. | ||
| Yeah, no doubt. | ||
| What you do when you fight, when you compete, is like a representative of your focus. | ||
| It's like all the stuff that you had to do to get to that moment, especially after you've done it a few times and you're aware of all the demands and you've risen to the occasion on more than one time and you realize all the variables that are involved in it. | ||
| It's cool talking to you guys and going over that stuff. | ||
| I think there's a lot of people that are listening right now like, these fucking guys are sharp. | ||
| There's a lot going on to this that I didn't think. | ||
| It's a thing that you don't see the whole thing sometimes. | ||
| Yeah, ever. | ||
| When it comes to fighting, you're viewing things. | ||
| 15 minutes of something someone put their entire life into, and you judge them on this very small fraction of a moment in their life. | ||
| And that's why fighting is one of the, I think, more stressful things. | ||
| Sporting things you can do because we put so much into such a little thing that is viewed and this is the only thing we're judged on. | ||
| We're not judged by how hard we train or how much we kill ourselves or the things we've had overcome in the gym. | ||
| It's like what you did on that day in that moment and how you came across means everything. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Whereas other things, there's other ways around it. | ||
| And you're like, yeah, you could have a bad day, but tomorrow you're going to have a better day. | ||
| It's like, this is the day. | ||
| This is the only day. | ||
| And not the only day, 15 minutes or half an hour, whatever it might be. | ||
| It's not like football where there's a season and, okay, we'll make it up the next game. | ||
| You know, people don't really truly understand how much goes into this and how much we put into our camps and everything. | ||
| And that's why bad judges and bad refs is like, it's life and death. | ||
| Like, you literally have my life in your hands and you are incompetent. | ||
| I mean, even in the UFC, you lose three times, you get cut. | ||
| Sometimes twice. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, depending upon—there's a lot of variables that are involved in that. | ||
| But what fighting is to me, the way I always like to describe it, is high-level problem-solving with dire physical consequences. | ||
| And so when you watch someone who's absolutely sensational at it, you know, like when you watch an Anderson Silva in his prime, you see some guy who's just figured out a way through this puzzle in this really extraordinary way. | ||
| And there's a beauty to that that I think the people that really love and appreciate fighting can understand it and can feel it and see it. | ||
| And I always want to try to find a way to express that to other people. | ||
| Like, do you see what I'm seeing? | ||
| Because if you saw what I'm seeing, you'd be fucking freaking out just like I am. | ||
| Yeah, it's tough, man. | ||
| Especially, like you said, if you don't have experience in that sport or have trained or fought yourself... | ||
| You can't appreciate it as much as someone who hasn't and is just viewing it from the outside. | ||
| You know what goes into this. | ||
| You know how hard it is. | ||
| You know what it feels like to get hit. | ||
| You know what it feels like to have overcome these obstacles in training and preparing yourself for a fight. | ||
| It's not just this surface thing like two guys in the ring and they're fighting and it's over and it's done. | ||
| When you saw there was some recent event that, what was it, NBC or whoever was putting it into, they spent like hundreds of millions of dollars on boxing. | ||
| They had a few events. | ||
| They lost a shitload of money. | ||
| And then it's done. | ||
| It's out. | ||
| And it falls apart. | ||
| I've watched something like that. | ||
| I'm like, goddamn, they put so much effort into this. | ||
| If they just put together a fucking stacked Muay Thai card, just a stacked one, and just let people know, and put it on primetime TV, just like they do with Fox, with the UFC, I feel like you can't miss. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I feel like it's one of those things where the product is there, the talent is there, the fighters are established. | ||
| There's so much high-level talent. | ||
| I mean, when anybody watches Muay Thai, even on TV, live especially, they're like, they just fall in love with it. | ||
| It's like, oh my god, like, where has... | ||
| Where's this been? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where's this been? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you're a fan of exciting shit, you should be a fan of Muay Thai. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| Yeah, it's... | ||
| As we said earlier, there's so many variables that go into it, and it's just a matter of all those right pieces coming together at the right time. | ||
| Just like when the UFC really started blowing up with the Stephen Bonner and Forrest Griffin fight, how long it had been around, how many amazing fights had been going on, and it was just that, the right time, the right people, the right thing. | ||
| Blew it up. | ||
| Yeah, it was 12 years old. | ||
| A lot of people forget. | ||
| The UFC was 12 years old when that happened. | ||
| How long did they struggle? | ||
| How much money did they lose? | ||
| How many promotions came and went? | ||
| It's the same thing with Muay Thai. | ||
| It's just you don't know what the right combination and the right time is in Hopefully one day all those pieces will come together. | ||
| If not, we're just doing the best we can with what we have. | ||
| Now you as a fighter and you're 34 now? | ||
| 36. 36. This is, you know, when you're an athlete, this is the, you know, there's a window. | ||
| I think Sanchai's 36 too. | ||
| Yeah, where's the same age? | ||
| Where there's a window. | ||
| There's like where your body is going to function at the level that it's at right now for a certain amount of time and not much more. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Does that fuck with you? | ||
| Sometimes. | ||
| After I had two really bad losses, I lost my world title by stoppage, and then I got knocked out the next fight. | ||
| I was really struggling mentally with a lot of things. | ||
| Like, I don't know, can I still do this? | ||
| I'm too old to do this. | ||
| And I had all these questions in my head. | ||
| And what I realized, what Kiryan helped me realize right before I won that WMC title in Peru, was I've had all these questions from day one. | ||
| I'm too old to do this. | ||
| I don't know if I'm good enough, you know. | ||
| But my answer has always been the same. | ||
| Do I love to do this? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Can I physically still do this? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, then I'm going to do the best that I can and give this everything that I have. | ||
| And that's not going to change. | ||
| I don't know if that's going to be over today, tomorrow, 10 years from now. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So as long as I'm physically able to do this, and as long as I still have a love and a passion for this, I'm going to keep doing it. | ||
| People have been asking me how long I'm going to keep doing this for over 10 years. | ||
| There's an old expression that a fighter lives and dies in their own mind. | ||
| And when you're at your best, like you were telling me, when you were 16, you felt invincible. | ||
| When you're confident, you can pull the trigger faster, you have more belief in yourself. | ||
| When you're saying, I'm just going to do my best. | ||
| Is there a thing in your head that says, man, I wish I was in that state where I felt invincible? | ||
| Or does that not matter? | ||
| Yes and no. | ||
| It definitely does. | ||
| There's a point where thinking you're invincible can backfire. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Like you think about Tyson. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| He was invincible. | ||
| But as soon as he lost that... | ||
| He couldn't overcome it. | ||
| Have you ever heard Tyson talk about what was going through his mind when he was walking to the ring? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Have you ever heard him do that thing? | ||
| Have you heard him do that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I fucking love that recording. | ||
| I've played that like 30 or... | ||
| You got it? | ||
| Cue that shit up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because there's something about that where it's so raw and it's honest. | ||
| It's after he had been retired and he just was kind of reflecting about all the nerves that would go through his mind and all the... | ||
| Here goes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Most guys were pretty much intimidated. | |
| They lost the fight before they even got hit. | ||
| Most guys. | ||
| I knew the artist of Dougury. | ||
| I knew how to beat these guys psychologically before I even got in the ring with them. | ||
| As soon as I come into the ring, as soon as I come into the ring, I'm globed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, stop it. | |
| That's not true. | ||
| While I'm in the dressing room, five minutes before I come out, my gloves are laced up. | ||
| I'm breaking my gloves down. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm pushing the lever on the back of my gloves. | |
| I'm breaking the middle of the gloves for my knuckle. | ||
| I could pierce through the leg. | ||
| I feel my knuckle piercing against the tight leather gloves on the Everlast boxing gloves. | ||
| When I come out, I have supreme confidence. | ||
| I'm scared to death. | ||
| I'm totally afraid. | ||
| I'm afraid of everything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm afraid of losing. | |
| I'm afraid of being humiliated. | ||
| But I'm totally confident. | ||
| The closer I get to the ring, the more confidence I get. | ||
| The closer, the more confidence I get. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The closer, the more confidence I get. | |
| All during my training, I've been afraid of this man. | ||
| I thought this man might be capable of beating me. | ||
| I've dreamed of him beating me. | ||
| But I always stayed afraid of him. | ||
| But the closer I get to the ring, I'm more confident. | ||
| Once I'm in the ring, I'm a god. | ||
| No one can beat me. | ||
| Gives me chills, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If that shit doesn't give you goosebumps, when I came that ring, I'm a god. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| I fucking love that. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| Because that... | ||
| What you were saying about... | ||
| All that work for that one moment, there's so much mind-fucking going on. | ||
| And so mental, you know? | ||
| And that's the thing, like, people don't understand how mental fighting is, and they can't really appreciate it. | ||
| And the hardest part is after you have been broken, to still get that back. | ||
| And that's a very tough thing to do. | ||
| So if you've gone undefeated for so long, you finally lose, not a lot of people come back from that. | ||
| Or not a lot of people get back to the level they were. | ||
| Like, I was very fortunate. | ||
| I got crushed my first fight. | ||
| And I was able to overcome that and to build myself up and help it motivate me. | ||
| And then I went on to win like 18 fights in a row after that. | ||
| But I saw a lot of people go undefeated for 10, 15 fights and they just had this amazing confidence. | ||
| They were just crushing everybody. | ||
| But they were also not learning a lot of very important lessons that they needed to learn. | ||
| And so once they finally lost, it almost destroyed them. | ||
| And it's very tough to get so far in a game and miss all these lessons you need to learn. | ||
| Until you're forced to learn them, you know what I mean? | ||
| So if you can find a way to learn them as well, but nothing teaches as good as losing. | ||
| There's also losing, I mean, you see it in MMA, like fighters from different disciplines, maybe grapplers or something like that, that lose by KO for the first time. | ||
| It's a completely different animal. | ||
| Yeah, and that's what happened with me when I was saying my two losses. | ||
| Like, I'd never been... | ||
| I've never been stopped. | ||
| Well, I've been stopped, but not really hurt or really knocked out before. | ||
| And that happened twice in a row. | ||
| And it was really devastating for me mentally to have that happen and to try to get back to where I was prior to that. | ||
| And not just skill, like skill, skill, skill. | ||
| But there's so many other factors that go into this. | ||
| The way that you think about things, it's like being confident, but not overconfident. | ||
| Being confident, but... | ||
| Understanding the danger and the things that'll keep you sharp without affecting you. | ||
| It's like finding that balance between being too nervous and too calm. | ||
| I've always been way, way too calm for my own good. | ||
| You're kind of a calm dude most of the time. | ||
| You're very mellow. | ||
| In the beginning, I thought everybody was like that. | ||
| Then I would see people getting ready for fights and they're freaking out. | ||
| They can't walk and they're like, I can't do this, I can't do this, I can't do this. | ||
| These high-level people who I've been watching, I'm like, jeez, man, what's wrong with you? | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| What are you so nervous about? | ||
| You're amazing. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| But one day I realized being too calm isn't so great either because I went into a fight once and I had no adrenaline going. | ||
| I'm like half asleep. | ||
| I'm like, alright man, you're about to fight and this guy's coming across the ring from me. | ||
| I'm like, alright, this guy's going to try to kill you. | ||
| You better get going. | ||
| It took me a whole round to get back into that mental zone. | ||
| You ever seen that Cowboy Cerrone video of his breakdown walking to the cage? | ||
| No, Cowboy has a breakdown? | ||
| It's just like that, where he's talking about his mental process and everything. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| He's changed a lot of stuff in his game, and he's a guy that has survived some pretty devastating losses and come back even better. | ||
| Yeah, and that is really the key, because eventually, if you do this long enough, those things are going to happen. | ||
| And how you overcome them is really what shows you what a great fighter is. | ||
| Because anybody that goes around winning and just crushing people is, yeah, that's great and all, but if you have never come back from total destruction, you're not a complete fighter, I don't feel. | ||
| Yeah, Cowboy, since the Dos Anjos fight, is the best version of Cowboy ever. | ||
| And before that, it was the Pettis fight. | ||
| The Pettis fight, he got stopped in the Pettis fight, came back better than that. | ||
| He's a guy that is like, the adversity builds him. | ||
| It makes him stronger. | ||
| Have you ever worked with a psychological coach? | ||
| Yeah, a little bit. | ||
| Back when I was in Vegas, I originally started doing it because I broke my hand three times in a year, and I was always so hesitant to throw it. | ||
| It's always painful and stuff, and I just mentally couldn't get over it. | ||
| That was how I originally started working with a mental coach with... | ||
| Sort of hypnosis, but more just getting to that right mind frame, like going into the ring. | ||
| And then I started going from there as very specific things I wanted to work on. | ||
| Because it's all about having that right mentality when you get in there or when you're getting into training, as opposed to just going through the motions. | ||
| And you can get very, especially when you've been doing this for so long, you can get very comfortable and too comfortable. | ||
| And that's one of the problems I've had, especially being so calm as I am. | ||
| It's very easy for me to just be like, ah, this is whatever. | ||
| We're just hanging out. | ||
| I'm sorry, I'll get to you. | ||
| No, it's okay. | ||
| So your mental coach would help you with your mindset for training, to prepare? | ||
| Training as well as fighting. | ||
| What kind of stuff did you work on? | ||
| For training? | ||
| Just having that... | ||
| I'm here for a purpose. | ||
| I'm here to very specifically build myself up, get ready for this fight. | ||
| I'm not just here to work out. | ||
| It's the difference between working out and training. | ||
| You're very focused on the task at hand. | ||
| Why are you doing this? | ||
| You're doing this to be the best. | ||
| Like, you're getting ready for this date, you need to give it all you have at this very specific moment, instead of just casually getting through the training. | ||
| You know, you're doing everything you're supposed to do, but if you're not mentally doing that as well, when you get into the ring, you're gonna fight in that kind of laid-back, casual way, as opposed to this being this very, you know, dangerous thing you're doing. | ||
| So you're training, you're specifically gearing up to an event. | ||
| Yeah, like just dialing everything in, you know what I mean? | ||
| Some people have more of that automatic thing. | ||
| They're like, when I'm in the gym, I'm very focused, very determined. | ||
| I'm doing this for this specific goal. | ||
| But after you've been doing this for so long, it just becomes like, I'll just get through it and do it. | ||
| You kind of almost get lazy mentally. | ||
| I've never been lazy physically. | ||
| You know, I've always pushed myself almost too much, but mentally there's been times when I've had those bad fights is when I've allowed myself to slip. | ||
| Whether that's because, you know, the person I was fighting didn't give me enough threat in my mind or there was things going on outside the gym with family and pets dying and things like that that kind of broke certain things to me down where I was still doing the work, but mentally I was just broken. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Relationships are a big one with fighters, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, when you see fighters, they get in a broken up relationship or they have a crazy girlfriend or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, there's a lot of fighters. | ||
| Like, there's a buddy of mine who used to work with fighters and it would seem like every time his fighter was getting to get ready to compete, his girlfriend would have some fucking major drama and she'd be waking him up in the middle of the night and screaming at him and she just wanted to fight, like, as he was gearing up to a fight because he was pulling away from her and We're good to | ||
| And go away to camps, you know, things like boxers and stuff. | ||
| They'll totally leave town and, you know, set up shop somewhere else because you have to be so focused on this one thing. | ||
| I mean, your life is on the line. | ||
| Even just in the gym, your life is on the line. | ||
| We don't really think about it or put that much emphasis on it. | ||
| But every day we get in there, we risk injury and death, which is obviously a severe case, but it happens definitely. | ||
| And if you're not taking the necessary precautions and going into it with that right mentality, then you can get hurt really bad. | ||
| What were you going to say? | ||
| I've been really lucky. | ||
| I've been with Karen since I was 16, so he's not only been my coach, but he's also been my mind coach. | ||
| He knows me so well. | ||
| As soon as we're going to hit pads, if something's going on or I'm in my head or anything, he knows. | ||
| Just my body movement, he's like, hey, what's up? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Let's get out of your head. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Are we going to work? | ||
| What's the deal? | ||
| He knows me so well that he knows... | ||
| He can see it a mile away. | ||
| Even just by my texting or whatever. | ||
| I'm really lucky. | ||
| And that's why it's important to have... | ||
| It's like not just... | ||
| A great coach or a great team. | ||
| It's having people around you who know you. | ||
| And they can see these elements that maybe someone who you haven't been around long enough wouldn't see before. | ||
| They might not pick up on just that very subtle vibe you have. | ||
| I'm like, dude, what the hell is going on with you? | ||
| Even though you're doing everything correctly, you're training really hard, but you can see that thing that's off in their head. | ||
| And that's what's great to have people who you're friends with and have been around for a long time. | ||
| I can see that in him. | ||
| He can see that in me. | ||
| And be like, dude, like, we need to talk about something? | ||
| Like, what's going on with you? | ||
| Like, maybe you need to just ease back a little bit and you need to, like, fix that thing, whatever. | ||
| And there's so many things that could be, you know what I mean? | ||
| Whether it's you overthinking the fight or whether there's something going on with someone outside the gym or you just got a bad vibe or... | ||
| And it's knowing when sometimes you've got to take a little step back and maybe not push yourself so hard. | ||
| Be like, hey man, just ease back a little bit. | ||
| It's all about finding that winning combination. | ||
| And obviously your mindset, what you need to think about, is probably going to be different than Gaston's mindset. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Completely different. | |
| And probably going to be different than, fill in the blank, Joe Schilling's mindset. | ||
| Everybody's got their own little weird... | ||
| Tweaky shit. | ||
| That's why I can't just tell him, oh, just do this. | ||
| I'm like, I don't know, dude. | ||
| So people ask me, well, what should I do mentally to prepare myself? | ||
| I'm like, I have no idea. | ||
| I don't even know for myself what that is because it's a constant learning and adjusting thing. | ||
| It can change every camp, you know? | ||
| People don't like that. | ||
| People like to be able to show up at work at 9 o'clock. | ||
| There's a coffee break at 10.30. | ||
| At noon, they go to lunch. | ||
| At 5 p.m., they go home. | ||
| I wish it was that easy. | ||
| But you don't. | ||
| You don't. | ||
| You'd hate it. | ||
| You'd hate it. | ||
| I would hate it. | ||
| I'm like, why? | ||
| This is stupid. | ||
| Everybody can do this. | ||
| Well, when you've experienced life at 10, like you guys are living, you know, you're living this extremely dangerous, difficult, incredibly complex life. | ||
| I mean, the task of being a professional combat sports athlete... | ||
| Is one of the most difficult jobs that is available to a person. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| It's incredibly difficult. | ||
| And it's incredibly difficult psychologically. | ||
| It's not just difficult. | ||
| It's difficult across the board. | ||
| There's not a single fucking thing that's easy about it. | ||
| And to find the right formula to make that thing work for you... | ||
| It's so... | ||
| There's so much involved. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you really have to pay attention to it because the longer you let things slide and don't realize, like, hey, you're letting this slip over here, the harder it is to make those adjustments. | ||
| That's what I was saying. | ||
| Like, every day, you're on both sides of too much or too little of one thing or another, whether it's training, whether it's your mental approach, whether it's your diet, whether it's how much or how little you're running. | ||
| What about strength and conditioning? | ||
| Do you guys follow a strength and conditioning routine? | ||
| Tons, tons. | ||
| What kind of stuff do you do? | ||
| I can't even begin to describe it. | ||
| We do some Tabata stuff, you know, a lot of sprints. | ||
| It just really depends. | ||
| It switches. | ||
| And again, it's that thing where you have to find what works best for you on that day, in that moment, in that certain fight. | ||
| It's like, how much is too much? | ||
| How little is too little? | ||
| And you're dialing that in constantly. | ||
| Because sometimes you go to bed like, okay, this is what I'm going to do tomorrow. | ||
| But then you wake up and you're like, this is not going to work for me today, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You're sore. | ||
| And so sometimes just doing it for the sake of, yeah, I'm going to do it because I don't feel like I'm doing it. | ||
| I need to push myself. | ||
| Sometimes that's not the wisest thing. | ||
| Just pushing yourself for the sake of pushing yourself isn't always the right answer. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And trying to find that is very difficult. | ||
| It's like I was saying before about how... | ||
| What injury is too bad to where you should take this fight off? | ||
| And what's an owie? | ||
| I don't know, dude. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's that? | |
| What's an owie? | ||
| What's an owie and what's an injury? | ||
| I stubbed my toe. | ||
| Going into my world title fight, I busted my rib nine days prior to. | ||
| I couldn't even breathe. | ||
| I couldn't even move for two days. | ||
| I'm like, hey, maybe you should not fight. | ||
| And yeah, that went through my head, of course. | ||
| Because I couldn't do anything. | ||
| I couldn't even touch it. | ||
| But I'm always somebody, like I said, I'm going to do it no matter what. | ||
| How bad was it broken? | ||
| What was it? | ||
| Intercostal tear? | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So it's the tear of the tissue in between the ribs? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, that's very painful. | ||
| So when it happened, my rib was sticking out like that. | ||
| I'd pop it back into place and like duct tape it down. | ||
| And I literally couldn't take a breath. | ||
| And I was like... | ||
| How am I going to fight? | ||
| I can't even train. | ||
| I still got like over a week to go. | ||
| You know, I got to make weight. | ||
| I got to do all these things. | ||
| And so I'm laying in bed for two days just taking these short breaths. | ||
| I couldn't lay down. | ||
| I couldn't sit up. | ||
| And I'm just like, I've been working so long to get to this point. | ||
| And this happens to me right before. | ||
| It's like, it was brutal. | ||
| So what'd you end up doing? | ||
| I fought and crushed him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did you get a cortisone shot or anything in it? | |
| No, no. | ||
| I got a lot of body work done. | ||
| I worked with my mind coach a lot. | ||
| Because I was just like, literally, if somebody touches me there, I'm done. | ||
| My body's going to fall, even if I'm mentally strong. | ||
| That's what I was so worried about. | ||
| I was like, I'm going to go out there and this guy's going to touch me and I'm going to fall. | ||
| I'm like, oh, he knocked me out. | ||
| I was really worried about that, but I was like, well, you know what? | ||
| He still has to do it. | ||
| He might go the whole fight and not even touch me. | ||
| I can't be so concerned about this one thing that I'm not going to allow this to break me. | ||
| At what point do you allow things to break you? | ||
| And I'm like, there's nothing that's going to break me. | ||
| There's nothing that's going to stop me. | ||
| If I can physically get in there, I'm going to do it. | ||
| There's a fine line that people make when they're training and they're putting together a schedule. | ||
| There's a big debate, especially in MMA, over how much strength and conditioning you should do versus how much fight-specific skill training you should do. | ||
| Where do you guys fit in on that and how do you make the distinction? | ||
| I feel like there should be a balance between both. | ||
| You gotta know what you're... | ||
| So you think you have to do strength and conditioning? | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And then you should run. | ||
| There's a lot of MMA fighters that don't run at all. | ||
| Running, sprinting, strength and conditioning. | ||
| But again, it's different for every person. | ||
| Now when you say running, do you run distances? | ||
| Do you run hills? | ||
| I run miles at a time. | ||
| We do a lot. | ||
| The shortest run that I do is four miles, and most of the times I do that twice a day. | ||
| So you run eight miles in a day? | ||
| I mean, it just really depends, you know, how I'm feeling that day. | ||
| So I go either four or, you know, whatever. | ||
| But every day I have to get my run, otherwise I feel like I'm not training. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So you do the run in the morning and then you train at night? | ||
| Is that how you were doing it? | ||
| So I run. | ||
| Monday is not as long of a day for me. | ||
| I have a long training session in the afternoon, but then Tuesday I run, then we do strength and conditioning, then I come back in the afternoon, I hit pads, then we all spar together. | ||
| So that's kind of like a longer day for me. | ||
| So you have a couple days where it's just a big, brutal, crazy day. | ||
| So that's like four workouts you're doing. | ||
| You know, I mean, you're running. | ||
| Running, conditioning, running again, pat work. | ||
| Sparring. | ||
| Sparring, you know, then pull-ups, neck exercises, you know, crossfit in there. | ||
| I really try to put everything that I can into my training. | ||
| So fight day comes. | ||
| I'm like, there's nothing else I could have done. | ||
| This is it. | ||
| But you also have to find that balance between those things, too. | ||
| So it's not like I can't 100% crush every single thing I'm doing. | ||
| I can't sprint for six miles, crush the pads as hard as I can, spar as hard as I can, kill the bag as hard as I can. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Right. | ||
| What is it that you're working on in that moment? | ||
| Am I just working on my technique and my things and my footwork and my movement as well as that? | ||
| So it's not like every time we do strength and conditioning, it's this full-on kill-yourself sprint. | ||
| Or it might be. | ||
| But later on, maybe we're doing a little more technical stuff. | ||
| So we definitely switch it up at the gym. | ||
| And how do you man I mean that that balance which is it what's interesting about it is like how do you know? | ||
| The right way to go about it like don't fade or towards the end of his career I mean he's obviously back now, but towards the end of his MMA career. | ||
| He abandoned all strength conditioning and he's just doing fight training It's what works for the individual. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like like what would I do? | ||
| It's not gonna tell everyone you need to do this because then you're gonna be like me we don't have a The same schedules. | ||
| Yeah, we're very different. | ||
| We do a lot of stuff together, but there's a lot of stuff we don't do the same at all. | ||
| What's the differences between you two in terms of training? | ||
| I probably don't run as much as he does anymore. | ||
| I used to, yeah, but the older I get, the less I'm running. | ||
| I hate it, man. | ||
| I hate it. | ||
| I'm like, I've done the running. | ||
| But is there benefit to you doing it? | ||
| Is there anything wrong with you not doing it? | ||
| I don't feel so. | ||
| But you have to find a way to make up for that. | ||
| I know people who hardly run at all, but they also find a way to supplement that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know what I mean? | ||
| They might do a lot harder bag rounds or a lot more rounds when it comes to that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't feel so. | |
| There's not just one thing. | ||
| You have to do this this many rounds, this many miles. | ||
| You have to eat exactly like this. | ||
| You have to do it exactly like this. | ||
| It changes. | ||
| And it changes for me daily, weekly. | ||
| Every fight's different. | ||
| I might do more, do less. | ||
| I've had fights where I couldn't run because I snapped all the tendons in my ankle and I had to swim instead. | ||
| You know, and I still felt great in that fight. | ||
| I felt like I had just as much cardio. | ||
| But I had to make up for it somehow in other aspects of what I was doing. | ||
| And you're making up for this. | ||
| You're the one who's got this schedule in your head. | ||
| So there's that mindfuck of, am I slacking off? | ||
| Am I pushing myself hard enough? | ||
| And how do you know? | ||
| That kind of comes from the way I came up. | ||
| You know, I came up with Thai trainers who didn't speak English. | ||
| You know, I had to learn everything. | ||
| Very much so by doing it myself and figuring it out myself. | ||
| I never had people telling me what to do or what I should eat, what I shouldn't eat. | ||
| Everything I've done and learned, most of what I've done and learned has been by application. | ||
| I find it's hilarious and fun to watch when you see Thai guys training with American people and the American people don't speak Thai and the Thai guy doesn't speak English and they're trying to teach him a technique and they're just kind of like... | ||
| It's this weird thing where you're looking at each other and they're trying to figure out what the other guy's saying. | ||
| Well, it's interesting because I didn't really start thinking of how complex what I was doing was until I started teaching people. | ||
| Because I'd been doing this for almost 10 years before I actually started trying to train people. | ||
| And I remember the first time I taught somebody or maybe it was a seminar or something, I'm like, whoa, just kick. | ||
| You know, just do it. | ||
| Do it. | ||
| And then I'm like, oh, well, you got to do this. | ||
| You got to do this. | ||
| I'm like, geez, there's like 15 steps involved in just the kick. | ||
| Well, that's funny you said that because we worked out today and you're very complex. | ||
| I mean, we were talking just about the switch kick and I think you went on this 10 minute rant of just all the different variables that are involved in it. | ||
| It was very illuminating. | ||
| It was awesome. | ||
| Again, I learned it by doing it, but it wasn't until teaching it that I had to figure out what all those steps were, which has helped me in what I do and helped me improve a lot of the techniques I have, is realizing all the complexity of every technique, of every movement. | ||
| When I explain it to people and I train people, a lot of it is just me telling them how you do it. | ||
| How I learned was just do it. | ||
| Go run. | ||
| Go kick the bag. | ||
| You've got to fix this. | ||
| By watching and studying, that's really how I learned. | ||
| Well, what's interesting and maybe unfortunate is that you could train with a lot of people and they would never point out some of the stuff that you guys pointed out today. | ||
| It's finding someone who's technically proficient and understands how to relay that information. | ||
| It's one of the harder parts of being a martial artist, unless you're a self-starter and you just do a lot of... | ||
| Well, now today, obviously, when you were there, you couldn't do YouTube, but now... | ||
| You could just get online. | ||
| You could watch a million. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But you might find some shitty ones, too. | ||
| I've found some shitty ones on all sorts of things where they don't know what the fuck they're talking about on all sorts of different martial arts techniques. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, it's a thing that kind of... | ||
| It's like the unfortunate part of... | ||
| A lot of times, high-level people... | ||
| Didn't really have to learn things because it came so naturally. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| They didn't have to learn all the fundamental aspects that go into this technique. | ||
| Whereas somebody that might not be as good, they've studied it a lot more. | ||
| And that's why a lot of times you'll see not the highest level fighters be the better coaches. | ||
| because they've had to study it so much more and they've had to really look into it and dissect it that much more because they weren't able to or for whatever reason do it so naturally Like Freddie Roach. | ||
| Yeah, without a doubt. | ||
| I mean, he was an amazing fighter. | ||
| He was a good fighter. | ||
| Really good fighter. | ||
| Really good fighter. | ||
| But, you know, he wasn't Mayweather. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Where, you know, Mayweather's probably not the best coach in the world. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But a guy like Freddie Roach has really had to develop that and figure those things out. | ||
| And he can tell somebody else, how do you do that? | ||
| This is how you do it, because I've had to figure it out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And that's something I've gone out of my way to do. | ||
| It was much more natural for me to do, but throughout the years, I've realized that. | ||
| And how do I tell someone how to do this? | ||
| I've had to figure out what those things are, and how do I tell someone how to do this? | ||
| Because I can just do it just by doing it. | ||
| I can watch somebody do something, and I'm like, I want to do it. | ||
| But how do I explain this to somebody? | ||
| And I've had to dissect my own self and realize all these things and all these aspects of the technique and it allows me to translate that to somebody else as well as fine-tune it in myself. | ||
| Now when you guys watch MMA and you see someone like Stephen Thompson that has a few elements of Muay Thai he uses, but he uses a lot of sport karate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is, you know, a completely different stance, a completely different style. | ||
| What's your take on that when you watch that? | ||
| What, his style? | ||
| Or when they say that it's Muay Thai? | ||
| Well, they definitely don't really. | ||
| I mean, he uses some leg kicks and some techniques, but essentially he's doing a sport karate style. | ||
| Well, it was kind of the same thing with Anderson Silva. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's like, just because someone's throwing an elbow, just because somebody has a clinch, doesn't necessarily make it Muay Thai. | ||
| There's a lot of arts that have those things, you know what I mean? | ||
| I'm not gonna view him as a Muay Thai fighter. | ||
| You didn't think of Anderson as a Muay Thai fighter? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not at all. | |
| He thought of himself as a Muay Thai fighter. | ||
| Well, that's okay. | ||
| But I wouldn't view him as a Muay Thai fighter at all. | ||
| View him as an MMA fighter. | ||
| I don't think anything he did was very Muay Thai. | ||
| Even his clinch was... | ||
| I mean, that's such a fundamental basic clinch. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That's just because everyone else was so terrible at it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's like, grab the neck. | ||
| Like, you don't see that in high-level Muay Thai. | ||
| Guys going up and grabbing each other by the neck. | ||
| It's in transition when they hurt people, when they get tired. | ||
| It's very much us struggling for dominance, over, under, those kind of things. | ||
| So it's like a big, sloppy, ridiculous arm bar? | ||
| Yeah, dude. | ||
| That's like day one Muay Thai. | ||
| So when you saw the Rich Franklin fight, were you going, what in the fuck? | ||
| How did he not learn this his first day in training? | ||
| And what was even worse was I had a friend that I trained with that went out to help him for the second one. | ||
| And he just didn't want to hear it. | ||
| Like, they did not want to hear that, like, dude, you don't know what you're doing at all. | ||
| Because as of what we talked about earlier, these guys get to a high level and think that their maybe Muay Thai technique is good. | ||
| And I'm like, dude, you are like a kindergartner. | ||
| Like, you don't know what you're doing at all. | ||
| So he didn't want to listen? | ||
| No. | ||
| Wow, that's crazy. | ||
| All right, good luck. | ||
| So who was it that went out with him? | ||
| Anthony Brown, the training partner of mine. | ||
| And he was specifically brought there because of his Muay Thai. | ||
| Yeah, without a doubt. | ||
| Why would you bring me in if you're not going to use me? | ||
| I've been brought in for people too. | ||
| Why wouldn't you use what you've brought me in here to do? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You brought me in for my Muay Thai, for my knowledge in this thing, and you just want to keep doing what you're good at. | ||
| Why am I here? | ||
| This is stupid. | ||
| That's unfortunate. | ||
| He's such a nice guy and such a smart guy, too. | ||
| He was a math teacher. | ||
| Without doubt. | ||
| How did he not see the math of that? | ||
| It's when people have a false sense of where they're at in the sport and what they can do. | ||
| You literally know nothing, but you have this mentality that you're decent at stand-up, you're decent at Muay Thai, and you're terrible, compared to someone that really does know what they're doing. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Most people's understanding is very elementary, if that. | ||
| You know, you take another person and I could beat you without even, like, touching you. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And just let you mess yourself up because you don't really know what you're doing. | ||
| It's crazy to think that someone could reach a world championship level in something that involves Muay Thai. | ||
| But there's so many variables that go into it. | ||
| There's wrestling, there's jiu-jitsu, there's all these things. | ||
| You can get away with a lot more, like the striking in MMA, you can get away with because of those variables, because of the smaller gloves, because of the takedowns. | ||
| You put that person in the ring with even a moderately good Muay Thai person, a moderately good boxer, they're going to get murdered. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Just like you can bring a really good Muay Thai fighter in, but they don't have any wrestling defense or no jiu-jitsu. | ||
| They're not going to be able to do anything. | ||
| They're going to look like an idiot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's one of the appeals of MMA, is that the guy who wins is most likely the best fighter. | ||
| Because if it was just Muay Thai, or if it was just wrestling, or if it was just jiu-jitsu, you would see someone who's the best at that. | ||
| But when you throw everything in, like, it's the kitchen sink, get in there, and... | ||
| That's when, you know, you get to see, like, who's been... | ||
| I mean, it's an even more complex puzzle. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's why, like, I've never really understood the argument of, like, pitting this person against that person, or, like, who's got the best Muay Thai and MMA? Well, nobody, because they're not doing Muay Thai. | ||
| They're doing MMA. Right. | ||
| So that argument, that conversation is completely invalid. | ||
| Like, oh, if you put this boxer in against this Muay Thai fighter, who's going to win? | ||
| I don't know what rules are they fighting under. | ||
| They're fighting under Muay Thai rules, he's probably going to get crushed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Well, it's interesting that Wonderboy Thompson is going to fight Tyron Woodley, who's the UFC welterweight champion and who's this super powerful wrestler, but he's also training with Duke Rufus, who's obviously very talented, knows a lot about Muay Thai, great coach. | ||
| When you see a guy like that, the reason why I keep bringing up Wonderboy's style is because it's so unique. | ||
| We brought up Raymond Daniels in Glory, who's one of the only guys that has that similar background. | ||
| And then Michael Page, of course, in MMA who fights for Bellator, has a very similar style, too. | ||
| That sport karate style. | ||
| What are the holes in that style? | ||
| What's the pros and cons that you see as a guy? | ||
| I think what we were speaking of earlier, if you've never applied that in a fight, a real fight, not point sparring, not that kind of thing, there's certain techniques and things that are completely worthless. | ||
| And unfortunately, in a lot of those sports, you don't get exposed by that until it's way too late. | ||
| So you're trying these techniques that... | ||
| A decent person is just going to walk right through because they look good and they're flashy and they're great on the pads and all that, but when you have to damage someone... | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, obviously Thompson knows how to do that, though. | ||
| Right, without a doubt. | ||
| And it's using those techniques but applying them in a more fight-centric way. | ||
| And it's a completely different thing. | ||
| But when you see, what I was trying to get at is that such a weird style where he stands sideways and he leaps in and out and he moves back and forth from the waist like a snake. | ||
| I mean, he's got a lot of, there's a lot of weirdness to the way he moves and it's very difficult to find anybody that has that level skill with sport karate, kickboxing, but also has a really good wrestling base too. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that's one of the biggest things and why he's able to apply those things because he can deal with the wrestling and everything else that goes in. | ||
| So that's why you'll see him throw those techniques because he's not as worried about it as someone who might be just as good as him with those things and has zero ground or wrestling where they're not going to throw because they're going to get taken down and crushed. | ||
| Yeah, it's like we were talking about your experience in a Taekwondo school, that you went there, and the first day you start doing sparring, you threw a low kick, and they're like, get out of here! | ||
| Get out of here! | ||
| Time to go. | ||
| You're doing something too effective. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So being able to apply things in a real fight and being able to apply them in the air is very different. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Obviously, we see Thompson can apply them in a real fight. | ||
| What is he doing that you see that's different? | ||
| Obviously, he's not a Muay Thai fighter. | ||
| He's a kickboxer. | ||
| But when you see that stance, that weird stance, that sideways stance, what do you think about that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't think much about it because I don't watch a lot of MMA. You don't? | |
| I mean, I do a little bit. | ||
| I wouldn't say I follow it. | ||
| I watch it when it's on, but I'm not paying attention to the fighters or tracking them throughout the years that much. | ||
| I'm just so curious because you're so Muay Thai. | ||
| Your style is so Muay Thai and you're obviously an expert at it. | ||
| I'm always curious as to how a person like you observes an expert striker in sort of another realm. | ||
| Well, I think he's an expert and he's become an expert striker in MMA. So he's applying all the techniques that he knows and have worked for him in MMA. So it's different than if he would get in the ring and do Muay Thai. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How many fighters like him have done Muay Thai? | ||
| Obviously, Raymond Daniels has done kickboxing. | ||
| Some, you know, but it's another one of those things where being able to apply the things from your other sport into that. | ||
| So, like we were talking about with Raymond Daniels and Nicky Holtzkin, like, he just walked him down and was like, bop, bop, crushing the legs. | ||
| And Valtellini, too. | ||
| Same thing, yeah. | ||
| At a certain level, you lose that, where your spinning flashy techniques are going to work against those mid-level guys, but you put them in there with the best in the world, and a lot of that stuff gets exposed and is not working out so well. | ||
| You think that essentially demonstrates the effectiveness of Muay Thai at the highest levels. | ||
| You think it's the best. | ||
| It demonstrates the holes in some of the stances and techniques. | ||
| If I'm not flinching on the things you do and don't really care so much about you hopping around and spinning around, I'm just walking down crushing you. | ||
| That's where that kind of gets exposed. | ||
| It's like putting a boxer into a Muay Thai fight. | ||
| All I'm going to do is kick your legs and you can't punch me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| But you take a boxer and teach them how to defend those kicks and stand in a little bit more of a squared up way where I can't use your weakness against you as much. | ||
| You're going to have much better success. | ||
| Even if you never throw a kick, now you just can take those kicks better and just kill me with your high level hands. | ||
| You said that you had taken some boxing matches? | ||
| I had four boxing fights, yeah. | ||
| And you just did it to stay active? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, they were all on like a week's notice. | ||
| One of them was like the day I got there, like, well, this was when I was saying I was having all those fights fall through, and I went to this fight, it was supposed to be a Muay Thai fight, and I told the promoter way ahead of time, like, look, I've had all these fights fall through, I'm not coming out there unless you have a fight for me. | ||
| I'm like, not only do you need to have a fight for me, I need you to have a backup guy for me as well. | ||
| He's like, don't worry, don't worry, we got it, we got it. | ||
| I'm like, I'll call them before I went out there and be like, so the guy's still gonna fight me, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You got the backup guy too, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Alright, get out there. | ||
| Well, yeah, they both backed out, so I don't know what we're gonna do. | ||
| I'm like, look, man. | ||
| Day of? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Day of. | |
| Does that have much of an issue? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And I was like, look, if you don't get me a fighter, you need to drag your ass in the ring and we're gonna fight because I killed myself and you promised me we had a fight. | ||
| He's like, oh, man, I'm gonna get you something. | ||
| I'm gonna get you somebody. | ||
| I'm like, alright, so I weighed in. | ||
| Left. | ||
| Came back. | ||
| He's like, well, we got somebody, but he's a boxer. | ||
| Do you want to do a boxing fight? | ||
| And I used to carry my boxing shoes with me just in case. | ||
| And I would bring my mouthpiece and my cup to fights even if I wasn't fighting just in case. | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| That's just how we came up. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And he's like, well, you can box. | ||
| And I was like, all right. | ||
| All right, let's do it. | ||
| And this guy's standing right there. | ||
| He was freaking out because, one, he was like 20 pounds bigger than me. | ||
| I'd never boxed a day in my life before. | ||
| And he's like, what is wrong with this guy? | ||
| I was like, yeah, let's go, man. | ||
| He's like, well, he's 20 pounds heavy. | ||
| I'm like, I don't care. | ||
| I'm like, let's go. | ||
| I got some shoes. | ||
| I got some gloves. | ||
| Let's fight. | ||
| And I went out there and knocked him out. | ||
| And that was my first time boxing ever. | ||
| But it was always like that, like a last minute thing where I'm like, I can punch, man. | ||
| I'm going to do whatever I can do. | ||
| Now you're preparing for MMA. Yeah. | ||
| So how much different is your training? | ||
| Are you still taking Muay Thai fights as well? | ||
| Well, right now we're in the transition. | ||
| I just signed with Bellator. | ||
| I don't know what's coming next, if it's going to be kickboxing or MMA, but I'm definitely preparing for both. | ||
| So they haven't told you? | ||
| I don't know yet because I don't know what card I'm going to be on. | ||
| But my MMA training, even when we hit the paths, I stand differently. | ||
| I move differently when I'm training for MMA. You know, I'm doing a lot of MMA rounds, actually, with the guys from Team Cejudo. | ||
| Well, the good thing about MMA is it'll still allow you to do spinning elbows. | ||
| The bad thing about kickboxing is you can't do spinning elbows. | ||
| People don't know, that's one of your signature techniques, probably your signature technique. | ||
| Probably, yeah. | ||
| I mean, you had some spectacular knockouts in Lion Fight with spinning elbows. | ||
| Thank you, man, yeah. | ||
| How the fuck could they take that away? | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you know, I'm really looking forward to doing both, to be honest. | ||
| I'm looking forward to, you know, improving on my boxing and really having to exercise that style of fighting. | ||
| And I'm really looking forward to doing MMA as well, you know. | ||
| And you were fighting 145 in Lion Fight? | ||
| 140. So MMA, I don't know yet. | ||
| I'll probably start at 145, then going down to 135. You think you can make 135? | ||
| You're a big guy. | ||
| I made 139 last time. | ||
| How much do you weigh right now? | ||
| Probably like 160, 158. What the fuck? | ||
| God, everybody's just killing themselves. | ||
| That, to me, is one of the most unfortunate aspects of fighting, is the drastic weight cuts. | ||
| I just think that juice is not worth the squeeze. | ||
| I just feel like fighting itself is so goddamn difficult. | ||
| Like, why complicate it even further by dehydrating your brain 24 hours before the fight? | ||
| Yeah, and that's why I cut down so much, and I've been working with Mike Dolce for my last three camps, and it's been great. | ||
| What has Dolce got you doing differently? | ||
| Just the fact that he sends me all my diets. | ||
| I have an off-season diet as well. | ||
| I'm just getting ready all year round. | ||
| So do you have pre-prepped meals that are in the little containers and you open them up and they're all portioned out? | ||
| Out of the Cave is a meal prep company that we have out there in Dublin, and Kevin's sponsored by them too. | ||
| It's really easy. | ||
| I get my diet from Dolce. | ||
| I give Out of the Cave my diet, and I just get my meal prep every week. | ||
| Oh, that's nice. | ||
| That's gigantic. | ||
| It definitely makes it a lot easier to not have to worry about cooking, not have to worry about any of that, and just training, eating. | ||
| You're good. | ||
| That is gigantic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Now, primarily, what kind of foods are you eating? | ||
| And do you vary that? | ||
| And do you have different results with different diets? | ||
| My last diet was pretty good. | ||
| I would have, like, oats in the morning. | ||
| Oats in the morning with chia seeds and hemp seeds and that kind of stuff. | ||
| Then I would have my first workout. | ||
| My second meal would be eggs. | ||
| And then at night, I would have, like, fish or chicken or anything like that with asparagus or broccoli. | ||
| I found that to be really successful, you know? | ||
| So if you do vary it, what do you vary as far as the fat content versus the carbohydrate content versus the protein content? | ||
| Do you mess around with that at all? | ||
| I used to do mostly a paleo diet. | ||
| It was 90% paleo except for a little bit of milk in my coffee. | ||
| But now I actually add all these grains like oats and brown rice at night and I feel great. | ||
| You feel better with that? | ||
| I feel better with that. | ||
| What is the difference between adding the grains and the extra carbs? | ||
| I have way more energy. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| I have a lot more energy and my weight is even lower than it was when I was just trying to do all fruits and meats. | ||
| Yeah, there's a certain amount of carbohydrates that a lot of people that are involved in, like, very strenuous shit, like whether it's triathletes or somewhere along those lines. | ||
| Like, there's a lot of people that try, maybe they go with a ketogenic diet. | ||
| I tried that a little bit and I just had no energy. | ||
| It did not work for me. | ||
| I've heard that. | ||
| Like, I was just like, I felt like I was brain dead. | ||
| How long did you do it for? | ||
| It was like about a couple weeks. | ||
| Oh yeah, see that's the problem. | ||
| You're supposed to wait. | ||
| You're supposed to not even do anything strenuous for the first three or four weeks until your body transitions over. | ||
| But in my case, I'm always trying to get ready for fights. | ||
| I was just like, dude, I have no energy. | ||
| I don't know what to do. | ||
| They call it the keto flu. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know some guys have made the transition successfully and then they compete and they do a lot of things, burning off fats. | ||
| But I'm always curious about extreme people, like people that are doing ultramarathons, people that are doing things that are extreme energy requirements, you know? | ||
| Yeah, well, I was living with Karin at the time, and he was like, after like a little bit, he's like, dude, what the fuck are you doing, man? | ||
| This shit's not working for you. | ||
| You need carbs, you need grains, you need that stuff, otherwise you're not going to have any juice, man. | ||
| Well, if you talk to Mark Sisson, who he calls his diet the primal blueprint. | ||
| The whole problem with the term paleo is that the Paleolithic era, they ate a lot of grains. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's just not historically accurate. | ||
| It's not a good word for it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the people that are successful with it, apparently there's a curve where you go through that keto flu stage for a few weeks and then you get better. | ||
| But I've talked to people that never get better. | ||
| I know some friends, jujitsu friends, that went through the whole process and didn't train hard for three or four weeks and got themselves to a state of ketosis but just did not feel right. | ||
| I mean, I know it works for power lifters and stuff like that, and people like that, but me as a fighter, personally experienced it for a little bit, I just would not do it again. | ||
| Well, your description shows me that you didn't really get through it. | ||
| You can't do it for two weeks. | ||
| I mean, he told me, like Mark Sisson, when I did it, he told me, don't do anything hard for three weeks. | ||
| Don't do anything. | ||
| He's like, even if you're on the treadmill for 45 minutes, just at a slow pace, that's probably too much. | ||
| I think that was my mistake. | ||
| You know, I was training just as hard as I always do, but trying to eat like that, I was like... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It takes your body a while, apparently, to make that adaptation. | ||
| But it is controversial. | ||
| I mean, it works for me and it works for some people, but obviously my lifestyle doesn't have the same energy requirements that your lifestyle does when you're training for fights. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, like all things, you've got to find what works out best for you. | ||
| That's why I'll make the adjustments I feel like I need if I feel like I need some more carbs, some more grains on a certain day or going into a certain workout. | ||
| I'm going to have them. | ||
| That's why I wouldn't say I have a specific diet because it varies. | ||
| It varies how I'm feeling, what's working, what's not working. | ||
| Do you guys get blood work done? | ||
| Do you get your blood work checked out? | ||
| I actually have. | ||
| I've got a buddy in Vegas who does that. | ||
| Years back, you know, I had my blood looked out. | ||
| It was messed up, man. | ||
| I had a lot of plaque in my blood and stuff, and I was really surprised. | ||
| It looked like it was really unhealthy, and I never would have known that if I never had gotten it done. | ||
| What were you eating at the time? | ||
| Same stuff I'm eating. | ||
| I think it was more of a hereditary thing than as far as my diet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, and got me on a lot of, like, the red algae, and I don't remember everything, but got it completely clear. | ||
| It was just crazy to see it. | ||
| Like, I could see the blood, and, like, he showed me, like, you know, how it's moving around. | ||
| So, like, yeah, there's a big chunk of crystals right there. | ||
| He's like, that's not good, man. | ||
| If this gets any worse, he was, like, really surprised by how bad it was. | ||
| Was this guy a doctor, or is he, like, a... | ||
| Healer. | ||
| No, no, he was a PhD. | ||
| He's legit? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Healer. | ||
| There's a lot of fucking people. | ||
| You'd be amazed. | ||
| Like, world-class athletes that go to quacks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
| And, you know, they'll come back and tell you something. | ||
| Well, I'm balancing out my alkaline and my energy and my chakras. | ||
| What? | ||
| Huh? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Yeah, it was nice to visibly be able to see it, like him take the blood, put it on things. | ||
| So you could see it in a microscope? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So we had it on a projection up on the wall, and I cleared it up within a month or two. | ||
| What about like vitamin supplementation or things along those lines? | ||
| Well now I'm hooked up with Onnit and all their amazing stuff. | ||
| So I've been hooked up taking all their multivitamins and things like that, which I think all their stuff is really amazing. | ||
| Yeah, we try. | ||
| We try to get the best shit. | ||
| Yeah, their stuff is awesome. | ||
| I mean, like, I have days, you know, towards the end of camp that I'm like, dude, like, I cannot, like, even with my diet and everything, like, you're so sore, you've busted your ass for so long, you know, you're like, I just can't. | ||
| And I've taken that AlphaBrain stuff, and, like, that stuff puts you on, for sure. | ||
| It's a great thing to take before workouts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A lot of people don't think of it as that because you think of it as something for mental energy or for your memory or for clarity. | ||
| I take it during sparring and I feel like I'm on, like 100%. | ||
| Well, I feel like mental fatigue is a huge factor in physical fatigue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Enormous. | |
| Yeah, which is one of the next questions I wanted to talk to you guys about. | ||
| Sources of inspiration. | ||
| Do you actively seek out inspiration? | ||
| You know, personally, when I was... | ||
| When was it when I got knocked out? | ||
| 18? | ||
| 17? | ||
| When I got knocked out, I had a really bad time after that. | ||
| Like I said, I was invincible, and then I had a really bad weight cut. | ||
| That happened. | ||
| And then Karian brought out Kevin to help me out. | ||
| So Kevin's been my inspiration since he moved out. | ||
| Every day, just seeing this guy, how hard he works and everything he puts on the line every day, that's been my inspiration since then. | ||
| I knew Kevin before that. | ||
| The first time I ever saw Kevin fight, I thought he was going to lose. | ||
| He fought Coke. | ||
| I was supposed to be in that car, the fight fell through, and then I watch him, and then I'm talking to Kieran on the side, and he's like... | ||
| He was betting against me, man. | ||
| I was like, dude... | ||
| Who'd you fight? | ||
| Coke. | ||
| I was like, dude... | ||
| What's his full name? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Chenowat. | |
| Chenowat? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that was when I was like, damn, who's that? | ||
| Because at first I was like, dude, white boy's about to get smashed. | ||
| And Kieran's like, you don't know Kevin Ross, dude. | ||
| I know Kevin Ross. | ||
| He's about to smash this guy. | ||
| And I was like, after the fight, I was like, dude, that's my new favorite fighter. | ||
| Yeah, that's funny. | ||
| And you get to train with him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What I meant was, do you seek inspiration? | ||
| Like, do you read books about inspiration? | ||
| Or do you read anything about mindset or psychology or anything along those lines? | ||
| I read a lot. | ||
| More along the lines of biographies and stuff. | ||
| I read Mickey Ward's book, which is amazing. | ||
| It's that Unbroken book, which is unbelievable. | ||
| What's Unbroken? | ||
| Angelina Jolie made that movie about it, but it's about... | ||
| What's that freaking guy's name? | ||
| The Runner guy? | ||
| Yeah, he was a runner, and then it was World War II. That was a great movie. | ||
| I thought it was really good. | ||
| Oh, that was the Japanese people torturing him, and he wouldn't give up? | ||
| Yeah, dude, but read that book. | ||
| Man, the movie is such a small fraction of what this dude went through. | ||
| Seeing how much stuff he overcome, not once, not twice. | ||
| Every time you think there's no way this guy can overcome this, he did it again, did it again, did it again, did it again. | ||
| Unbelievable stuff, man. | ||
| It's one of my more favorite books. | ||
| But people like that, I'd say I'd seek that out and look for stories of inspiration, not just fighters, but in any art or aspect of life in general. | ||
| Seeing the things that... | ||
| People overcome. | ||
| As I said earlier, if you go and look at anyone's story who's ever made it, you can take inspiration for them. | ||
| Seeing the struggles they went through, it's unbelievable. | ||
| When we don't know these things, we think of ourselves as the only ones that have to overcome stuff or are dealing with things that That might have slowed us down, but you're like, well, that guy had way worse than I ever did. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And that's why I've always tried to be very vocal about the things I've struggled with and overcome. | ||
| And like the first highlight video I ever had done for me, it was very important for me to show myself getting knocked out and dropped and all these things. | ||
| I'm like, everyone just shows these highlights of their life. | ||
| It gives you a very skewed perception of what it is we have to deal with and go through, especially to reach a certain level. | ||
| Like... | ||
| It's terrible, man. | ||
| We go through a lot and people don't know it because you just see the end result of all this hard work and you see the glamour and the lights and the highlights and stuff, but you don't know what people have come with and dealt with, things that would crush most people. | ||
| I think what's really important about inspirational videos and books and biographies and things along those lines is it gives you an insight into someone's perspective that you... | ||
| You can find parallels. | ||
| You find parallels to your own life and it normalizes some things that might just seem incredibly confusing because maybe to you it's the first time you've had to overcome something that's so difficult. | ||
| But then you find out that other people have done it as well and it kind of You can take a lot of comfort in people that have gone before you. | ||
| We've all had to overcome something. | ||
| Just sitting down and talking to somebody, hearing their story, it can be very inspirational and really help you overcome anything you might be facing. | ||
| And again, that's why I've always tried to be very vocal about my story and share some of my fight experiences or training experience or life experiences because Most people, they don't ever hear that side of fame, if you want to call it that. | ||
| They don't see that. | ||
| It doesn't get put out there like the successes do. | ||
| We see everyone's success. | ||
| We don't see their failures. | ||
| Well, that's one of the things that I think is interesting about you. | ||
| You're obviously a very intelligent guy, and you're a guy who's gone through a lot of things, but you're also a guy who wants other people to know that you've gone through all these things. | ||
| You're a guy who wants—you're assuming not just this role of a fighter, but you're also assuming a role as a mentor and of an example to— To those that are coming up. | ||
| Well, it's something that's been very important to me because, like, as I was coming up, you know, before YouTube and everything, like, I didn't really have anyone to look at and be like, well, he did it, I can do it too. | ||
| So it was very, it still is very important to me. | ||
| One of the most important things to me to show people that they can do it, you know, and to show people... | ||
| How late I started and where I was and the things I've overcome because when you've seen that someone's done it before you or similar and overcome these things, it makes it that much easier for the next person. | ||
| There's a really amazing book called The Rise of Superman and I don't know if you've ever read it. | ||
| They talk about... | ||
| Like the leaps we've made in athletics. | ||
| They were more talking about extreme sports. | ||
| One of the things they were talking about was the four-minute mile. | ||
| That used to be physically thought of as impossible, whereas now it becomes a requirement. | ||
| For people to do. | ||
| And like kids in high school are doing it. | ||
| Where they used to think of it as like there's no way you can physically do this. | ||
| And they brought up I think it was like the 900 on a skateboard. | ||
| Like it was impossible to do. | ||
| It's like there's no way you can do this. | ||
| And then Tony Hawk or whoever did it. | ||
| And now eight-year-old kids can pull this off because that thing that's viewed as impossible becomes the norm. | ||
| And as soon as that happens, you can get to the next level and the next level and the next level. | ||
| And the only way to do that is for someone to break through whatever that impossible thing is. | ||
| And if these things aren't put out there and people don't know about them, you're still always viewing that barrier as this is as high as we can go. | ||
| In that sense, do you think of yourself or view yourself as a part of this process? | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Yeah, 100%. | ||
| I've always felt like... | ||
| I've always known where, speaking about Muay Thai, where the sport could go. | ||
| You know, coming up, I never thought I'd still be actively doing it while it got out there and got the exposure it's been getting recently. | ||
| But I always knew I would be a person that helped it go along. | ||
| And that was a huge thing that kept me from ever venturing full-time into MMA or into boxing. | ||
| Because I was like, there's only a handful of us doing this. | ||
| Me and Joe Schilling and Tiffany and Kai and a lot of other people. | ||
| I was like, if there's only a handful of us doing this at this level and going out there and taking these almost impossible fights, and I leave, who's there to do this? | ||
| Who's going to do this? | ||
| Somebody's got to go through the gate. | ||
| And get bloodied up. | ||
| You know, that first person has to do it. | ||
| And I can't, like, pass this off on somebody else. | ||
| I can't give up. | ||
| Like, that's gonna make it that much harder for them. | ||
| So, yeah, I've always felt like I needed to be the inspiration I wanted to see in the world. | ||
| Do you find a great benefit in being able to train with him because of that? | ||
| I mean, before, when we first started training together, dude, I would get this, like, adrenaline dumps when I was sparring with him. | ||
| I was like... | ||
| I was like, oh my god, I'm sparring with Kevin Ross, and then slowly it would get better, and now we've become great training partners, and he's been a huge part of my career, obviously. | ||
| I mean, yeah, definitely. | ||
| Well, you're the up-and-comer, you know? | ||
| And then, of course, you've got... | ||
| Guys that are coming up that are in the same place that you were a few years ago and you get to see it now, that it is this sort of long, crazy chain of events and this process that really essentially you only get a couple decades out of it if you're lucky, if you're super, super lucky. | ||
| And it's such an unbelievably difficult experience. | ||
| Endeavor to do what you guys are doing. | ||
| And I'm a fucking huge fan. | ||
| So to me, this podcast was awesome. | ||
| I'm like a kid in a candy store. | ||
| I hope people got a lot out of it. | ||
| Hey, we feel the same way, man. | ||
| We're really happy to be here and, you know, been wanting to do this for a really long time. | ||
| This is awesome. | ||
| Let's do it again sometime, man. | ||
| Maybe when you guys aren't fighting, we'll do a fight companion. | ||
| Have some fights on and come in and we'll talk some shit. | ||
| Alright, your Twitter is... | ||
| Bolanos Gaston. | ||
| Instagram, dreamkiller underscore Bolanos. | ||
| And you are... | ||
| That's Soul Assassin with a D-A, Soul Assassin. | ||
| That's my Twitter as well as my Instagram. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| And Combat Sports Academy, how do they get a hold of your gym, Kieran? | ||
| CSA. CSA Gym everywhere. | ||
| Find it. | ||
| Google it. | ||
| You'll get there. | ||
| All right, folks. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| We'll be back later tonight with Wim Hof. | ||
| The Iceman returns tonight at 8 o'clock. |
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