Dr. Andy Galpin, muscle physiologist and director of the Center for Sport Performance, debunks rigid training and nutrition dogmas—like Marv Marinovich’s MMA prep or ketogenic diets for all athletes—highlighting metabolic trade-offs (e.g., carbs vs. fats in high-intensity sports) and individual variability (Helen’s weight-cut success, Pat Cummins’ fat-based approach). He critiques over-specialization, such as fatigued plyometrics or alkaline water hype, while endorsing adaptable protocols like nasal breathing for nitric oxide release or tailored heat exposure. Galpin’s book Unplugged ties these insights to nature’s role in performance and recovery, emphasizing that science refines uncertainty, not absolutes, and personalized flexibility beats one-size-fits-all solutions. [Automatically generated summary]
I am a muscle physiologist, so I'm a PhD in human bioenergetics, and I'm the director for the Center for Sport Performance, which all that basically means I study muscle physiology, why it grows, shrinks, repairs, dies, and all that crap.
Yeah, that's a major fallacy called the fallacy of authority, or appeal to authority, which is somebody really good did it, or somebody who coaches somebody really good, they did it, or a lot of people did it.
All three of those are examples of major logical fallacies, right, to break down in Aristotle's reasoning.
That's not what we do.
Now, they can help us with some ideas of where to go, but that's a really bad approach.
So, we have to understand, like, what works for somebody at a very high level is not necessarily going to work for the bulk of people, and particular, if, like, the great example is Schwarzenegger.
So, when he came out with his book of the Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding, everyone was like, fantastic, I'll go do those workouts.
You're not Arnold.
And you should be doing what Arnold did when he was at your stage.
With the context of recovery, the nutrition he has, all the other stresses that are eliminated from his life, all of that changes what's going to work or not work for you.
If you look at Joel Jameson, a friend of mine who trains Demetrius Johnson, like all those guys, they have very different approaches.
And I think the massive fallacy, this actually goes back to your original question, is thinking that there is one single answer.
That's the problem, right?
Whether we're talking training nutrition recovery ice any of these modalities The major reason we have so much internet fighting between experts and why it makes it so difficult for so many people to figure out Like what's the right answer is because searching for a right answer is the problem to begin with we're having the wrong Conversation with all of this crap.
It's not the right place to go so So those are two very different approaches.
For Demetrius, they reduce a lot of the strength conditioning they do during camp because they want to get very good with the fighting.
So all that stuff is gone.
So Joel believes in training as much as we can prior to camp.
get better at fighting.
Someone like Nick apparently has the opposite approach.
I don't think that either one of them is more or less effective than the other.
It really comes down to the combination of coaches as well as the athlete.
So some athletes, and you could attest to this, and I've seen this a bunch of times, if they're two days out, three days out, a week out, some of them get really anxious if they don't get to practice a skill.
Like, I want to be really sharp with my combination.
I want to be really good with my transitions, etc.
And if you take that away from them, they get very anxious and they don't like it.
And so what you almost have to do is program it based on this combination of physiology and psychology.
And that's a bit outside of my realm, but this is what makes coaching so complicated.
It's saying, okay, well, you know what?
For you, athlete one, you're going to do the opposite approach.
Athlete two, you're going to be doing the other approach because you just don't feel as good.
You're not as confident.
You're not feeling as smooth.
And more than anything, when they walk down to that cage or particularly two or three days before, they have to feel amazing.
So what worked for you in your second fight when you were 20 is maybe not the same approach you have to take when you're 30. I just got back from New York.
I was in there the last three days, and I was with one of my guys, Dennis Bermudez.
And we had this conversation, and when I first started working with him, we had to take a very different approach the week of, and especially even the hour before the fight, because the way that he got ramped up for a fight is very different than some other people that I've worked with.
What we had to realize, and I remember he called me right after one of his recent fights, maybe four or five fights ago, and he's like, I'm freaking out because I didn't freak out in the cage this time.
I was like, what?
And he's like, you know, I'm usually really freaked out in the cage, and this is what drives my performance, but this time I was really calm and collected, and I saw everything, and I'm nervous that I'm not nervous enough.
So I had to get him in with my good friend Lenny Wiersmo, who's a sports psychologist, who works with a lot of combat sport athletes, and say, okay, we need to get you in a place of optimal arousal.
Because if you're under aroused, that's a problem, but if you're over aroused, that's a problem as well.
So we had to change the tactics a little bit between everything from his walk down to the week of, before, the queuing, the things that we say to him, to make sure he's in an optimal state.
Every other athlete, all those approaches are completely different.
Everything from breathing drills to the cueing, the words you use.
So, for example, in the back, if you're a Dennis Bermudez five years ago, you know, Ryan Parsons would have to say, like, real vile, horrible shit, like, rip his fucking head off, I want you to bring it back in a plate, like, murder him, rip him to shreds.
Now it's a little bit different approach, and Ryan can tell you the details of what he does now, but some guys, like you tell some other people that backstage, they're going to be like, what?
There are very specific breathing drills, for example, we can have them do as they're walking down the cage, as they're in the cage, especially if they're the first one down or the second one down.
So if they're first down, sometimes that's a 10-minute delay between when they're standing in the cage and when they actually start throwing.
If you're not taking advantage of that time, or if that time is getting taken advantage of you, that can have a real problem with your energy.
Especially if you get a guy who's really savvy, like a Connor or a John Jones, who takes their time coming down, and they mess with you, they do different things on the way down.
That really influences what's going on with the guy in the cage, especially if they're less experienced or maybe attention to the underdog or other things like that.
But it's really difficult without telling too much of Dennis' story for him.
It's quite funny what happens with the game plan sometimes and what happens when they get in there, even with a seasoned guy like Dennis.
And I don't know if a part of that was because it was in New York, in Dennis' hometown, or if that was because of Pat, who was his good friend, fought right before and won a really crazy fight in the fight before.
If he saw that, you just don't know what goes in.
And then, you know, sometimes in the middle of a fight, the fight's over and you're like, I don't even know why we did that.
We got into this weird rhythm thing and we started doing this and that was, I don't know what happened.
And the rhythm can kind of take over the fight.
And Darren fought an amazing fight.
He did exactly what he needed to do.
But it was just, from my perspective as a scientist, one, I try to stay away from those things.
It's not my job.
But it's fun, and this is what makes it exciting for me.
It's why I work with these folks.
It's because you can have the perfect camp physically.
And sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.
And so then you go back to the drawing board and you go, well, do we throw everything out?
Again, he can say that, but from the feedback and from what we saw, he was like, no.
He just maybe had a hard time focusing.
Honestly, I haven't asked him very specifically what was going on there.
I kind of give them a few weeks to kind of get through that stuff before we start going back.
All right, let's watch the tape.
Let's go through it, like what he went through.
So I want to be careful not offending him or his direct coaches like that.
But yeah, I mean, from my vantage, it was like...
This is not what we were looking for.
He should have just been more active, particularly in the second round, which is what really got him.
And you saw in the third round, once he kind of got into it, Dennis, in our eyes, at least, was pretty dominated that round, or was at least clearly ahead, where one and two were not so good for him.
But yeah, just potentially a focus, potentially a lot of things.
Nothing physically that happened to him in the fight, was he like, oh, we didn't prepare for this, we didn't think this was going to happen, this is throwing me off.
He was just like, I just didn't go in the second round.
I isolate tens of thousands of muscle fibers at this point in my life.
And when I can help, if I think I can, I will.
But I try not to.
I don't work with the general public.
Our lab is different.
We'll put it this way.
Most labs that do the type of muscle research we do are focused on disease prevention or treatment, right?
So how do we fight cancer?
How do we get people back?
I'm one of the few that actually do this on the other end of the spectrum, which is, well, let's study optimization.
Like, how do we thrive?
How do we not just get to 80 years old, but how do we kick ass at 80 years old?
And be coming from the performance background that I have, my athletic background, It just makes so much sense.
I didn't come from a martial arts background at all.
I didn't do anything until much later in life.
But once I started paying attention to MMA, I was like, there's something energetically, physiologically far different about the demands of this sport, and it's really exciting, and it's a really complex problem to solve.
So I just started helping out and chipping in, and then once you help a couple of people and they're like, this is fantastic, etc., kind of the ball gets rolling.
So right now, basically what I do is think of it like concierge service, if you will.
I'm not like, you can't email me for a training program.
I don't have an online website you can buy stuff from.
I'm here.
If somebody's like, hey, I know a friend who could really need this or something, maybe I'll help out.
But the vast majority of what I do is a lot of conversation.
time on phone calls and Skype with them saying basically walk me through what have you done where you at how do you think I can help the number one thing I do then and say okay do you have who else on your team does this who's helping you let's get on a call with them not so that I can tell them what to do but just let me know what what your world is like and then I'll see if I can add some advice maybe I'll try this I can help you track things I can tell you with my experience about I've seen this happen before or I know someone that's
This is what happened with, the best example was, do you remember last summer at the Rio Olympics when Helen Maroulis won the gold medal?
The first American ever female to win gold in wrestling?
Go read the article in Sports Illustrated that she wrote afterwards.
She beat, I think Yoshida was her name, but she was a three-time defending gold medalist.
And a 15 times straight world title.
It was just like Rulon Gardner when he beat Corellman.
But the female version.
So Helen went down there.
It was crazy.
She was down 2-1 with like 30 seconds to go in the semifinals, came back and won.
She was down a point.
She in the finals ends up upsetting her first American to ever win gold.
Well, I worked with Helen for about a year on straight nutrition because she had to cut a whole bunch of extra weight for the first time.
And the whole wrestling community was like, you'll never get down to 53 kilos.
Like, don't do it.
You have to go up.
Because what happened was, wrestling is this really weird thing where world championships is at different weight classes than the Olympics.
So she was a world champion at 55 kilos and either had to go up to 58 kilos for the Olympics, which had a three-time defending gold medalist and a 15-time straight world champion, or go down to 53 kilos to wrestle somebody who also had that 15-time straight world title.
So we had to basically play a game of saying, if we give you the things that keep you from not being sick, that's also the stuff that actually harms iron absorption.
So if you're going to go travel internationally for a long time, you can take a big bowl of vitamin C and it may help you from getting sick, from getting cold.
But the point was, if you're going to go on like a two-week thing to Eastern Europe, I'm going to give you every advantage possible to not probably get a cold.
This is what I want you to eat and whatever it was.
And we'll do next.
And she's like, I'm right next to Michael Phelps.
I'm in the front.
Like, I don't want to get out of line.
I don't want to go back out and eat because I don't want to lose my spot next to Phelps in the front.
I'm like, okay, fine.
Well, she was supposed to eat whatever vegetable and food and fat source we had.
I don't remember.
But she's like, all they have is cookies and popcorn.
She's like, I guess I'll just like starve.
And we actually, that was one time we didn't want to do that because she was at a problem where she was so calorically underserved for so long, her body would crash quite often.
So we had to keep her nutrients really, really, really high, our vitamins and minerals to keep her at a low calorie count, but her body not freaking out.
So she was like, what do I do, not eat?
And we had to actually go to the popcorn because of the good fat in there, the butter that it had, to keep her from not feeling terrible.
So, all that is, again, I think the problem is thinking that there is one answer there.
I don't have any athletes that I'm like, this is what we do.
Hey, this is our method.
This is, I think, generally a terrible approach.
It's a combination of where they're at, who are they with, what have they done, what's their past history, what do they like, what are they not like, what do we really need to get?
So I try to identify what's compromising their performance.
Let's pick the best solution for that issue.
So you show up and you're like, your problem is agility, your footwork, you're just too slow on your feet.
Well, we're going to have a different approach to training than when someone says, you're getting out strength here, like someone's pushing you around too much.
I don't need to rebuild your feet, I don't need to improve your maximal speed because you're already the fastest in the division.
So we can actually measure the amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide coming in and out of the body, which allows us to get a number called a VO2 max, which is the maximum amount of oxygen that you bring in and exhale.
So it tells us basically your maximum cardiovascular capacity.
And it's pseudo-important for MMA. So the average person's like at 40, 45, just to give you some context of that number.
Anyone past about 60, if you continue to go up, it's not going to really make you fight any better.
So that's one of the things that we did, or we found doing all the research on MMA folks is...
There's a point of diminishing returns somewhere around 60. So if you show up and you're a Jake Ellenberger and you're at 52, and I can get you to 58...
Then that's going to help your performance a lot.
But when you show up and you're a Pat Cummins and you're 66 and I get you to 69, that's not going to make you fight any better.
So we can do your right foot on one, your left foot on another one.
So we can test everything from not only your force, which is like if I measured your maximum deadlift, I would know how strong your back is and your hamstrings and your glutes.
But how do you produce that force is the big key.
So a good example is years ago we had some fighters come in and one of them was clearly not fast enough, but he wouldn't believe it.
So he was strong, but it took him a long time to produce that force.
So to give you a number, let's say you could produce 100 newtons of force, right?
Just making the number up.
And I produced 100 newtons of force.
But if it took you one second to get there, and it took me half a second to get there, in an MMA fight, I don't have one second.
His coaching staff was like, we think this is a problem.
Well, let's put him on the force plate.
And let's see not only how much force you produce, because his strength numbers were high.
He squatted a lot.
He deadlifted a lot.
But the time it took him to produce that force, what's called the rate of force development, his peak velocity, the time it took him to get to that velocity, all that when I compared him to the other athletes and NFL players and stuff was just like off the charts bad.
So when we have two individual athletes, they come in, so say one is the opposite.
So one of them is really, really, really good at producing fast quickly.
And the other one takes a long time.
So the one that doesn't produce force very quick, we would put them on a drill where we say, okay, the goal of your training is to maximize how quickly you produce force.
I don't care how heavy you get, but this is a reactive strength thing.
This is a speed thing.
So you're going to do maybe a little bit lighter squats, but you're going to explode.
You're going to transition out of the bottom.
You're going to bounce.
You're going to use momentum.
You're going to swing.
You're going to generate fast as possible.
You're not going to go to maximal strength.
The other guy, we get the opposite.
We would take the speed advantage away from him or her and say, you need to be able to produce more strength without taking advantage of the speed.
And it basically comes down to using the muscle for force or the connective tissue for force.
Yeah, so we actually just completed a really cool study on monozygous twins.
So monosegous twins means you're the exact same DNA. So sperm went in, implanted two, implanted one egg, the egg split, and you became identical, right?
And so we found two twins that were the exact same DNA, but one of them had been doing marathons and endurance stuff for 35 years.
Cardiovascular stuff, VO2 max, strength, all these same tests that we do with the MMA fighters, muscle biopsies, fiber type, how much fast, how much slow twitch, all the ones in between.
What we found was, of course, the endurance athlete had higher VO2 max.
Like, no-brainer.
You run 100 miles a week for 30 years and your brother doesn't do anything.
You're going to have a better cardiovascular system.
Blood pressure, cholesterol, all that crap, better than the trained athlete.
But the strength did not favor the athlete.
The muscle quality didn't favor the athlete.
The total amount of muscle didn't favor the athlete.
The trained athlete and his quad was 90% slow twitch, 10% fast twitch, The untrained was 40% slow twitch, about 30% fast twitch, and then about 30% of some of the hybrids in between.
What do you mean by muscle quality when you're saying that?
Yeah, that's a good question.
You can take an ultrasound and you take an image of the muscle and it looks at it like a combination of how much menstrual muscular fat there is with how much total muscle master is in the size and a bunch of different things.
If you trip and you're about to fall and you can't put your foot out and catch yourself, you have to have the foot speed to get yourself out there, but the strength...
So my friend Brian McKenzie and I have a book that just came out a couple weeks ago on this whole idea called Unplugged where we need to expand past just lifting and running and think about what other physiological exposures do we need that are important for longevity.
So if we want to be able to sustain and perform as well as we can throughout life, we probably need to be able to handle a bunch of different challenges.
Right, so when you're preparing someone for a very specific event, like here you're ramping up for September 12th, boom, we have a protocol, let's get ready, but then after the fight's over, then you might be working on very specific balancing exercises or that kind of stuff?
Well, that's why I'm the director or the co-director, and I run my own lab, and I've got fantastic postdocs and students that are actually the operators that execute.
Well, I find myself honestly spending more time...
Being in the middle of saying, like, let's stop all the fighting between things and let's spend time saying, well, what was good about this and what was bad about this?
But just to finish the example, so post-lifting session, maybe not great, but maybe if you wait six hours or do it the next day, And when we're talking about icing, we're talking about ice baths?
So what I've read about cryo chambers is the big thing is the anti-inflammatory markers in the blood, or the reduction of inflammatory markers in the blood, improvements in cytokines, cold shock proteins, things along those lines, that those would be beneficial.
So, for example, if you get a lift in and you're like, oh man, my elbow always things up on me after I lift, but I got a competition in eight weeks or a show in eight weeks, this would be like a powerlifting competition or a bodybuilding competition.
And if you get in the ice, that takes that pain away for whatever reason, physiologically or antagonistic or anything.
And that allows you to train more.
Well, then we can't say that that was bad for you.
I see a lot of these guys popping up where they're trying to make a name for themselves.
It seems super common that someone wants to diminish the other people out there doing different things and like, this is our way and this is the only way, this is the right way.
But I think for some people, clearly, like, some diets fit better.
Like, I've had a bunch of friends that went plant-based and maybe not even vegan, but the majority of their food is plant-based and they just feel better.
Yeah, but I know a lot of other people that went fat-based, and they feel better, too.
I mean, like, a lot of coconut oil, a lot of avocados.
That seems to me especially true with people that are in intense exercise.
And I don't know why that is, but it seems like a lot of dudes that I know that lift a lot of weights or that are involved in jiu-jitsu or wrestling or anything, or there's a lot of explosion...
It seems to me like a lot of fats and fish oils and things along those lines.
When they add those to their diets, fish oil in particular seems to have a big effect on grapplers.
It seems to help them with joint issues and a lot of pain and maybe inflammation.
I would say that most people are going to far better on a more traditional carbohydrate diet that are in the more explosive power strength stuff, especially at the volumes that MMA fighters are on.
And you have to be careful because it's the exact same principle.
Either you're adapting or you're optimizing.
And if you're optimizing all the time, then you're not adapting and vice versa.
So if you push yourself to one end of the spectrum, you're going to probably compromise the metabolic ability to go back to the other side of the spectrum.
I mean, I don't know Dom, and I wouldn't say anything about him without him being right here.
It's not fair.
But everything I've seen of him has been fantastic.
I'm in very much support of the vast majority of what I've heard him say.
But his main lens is being focused on cancer prevention, epilepsy, these things.
But if you look at some of the research, and I'm not an oncologist, so I'm going to speak a bit out of turn here, but there are now actually identification of several cancers that thrive on fats rather than carbohydrates.
I have not seen this because he was talking about a host of different cancers that thrive on sugars and you stop them dead in their tracks by going on a fat-based diet.
So if an athlete's coming down in calories, and especially if those calories are coming from carbohydrate, and carbohydrates, their main source of carbohydrates are plants.
So if we've compromised that and they're really low in calories, then they go down in nutrients and biochemicals, and that's a real problem.
So we have to be very careful with getting them into keto if it comes...
And we gave her a bunch of nutrients and were like 40 ounces a day or up to 60 ounces a day of fresh-pressed vegetable juice and just like clockwork every day.
It's one of the problems with the bro science people, the people that do not have the real education in this stuff that are out there, you know, coaching athletes and teach them what to do and what not to do.
It's like, you don't really know what you're talking about, and that becomes a real problem.
I could tell you more about that than vast almost anyone on the planet, and then yet I'll still have people who are like, I read this guy's Instagram post, bro.
You're wrong.
I've biopsied hundreds of people.
I've isolated tens of thousands of fibers and ran them under lasers and studied them.
And you're going to tell me because you read one Instagram post or one review from two years ago?
And by the way, a three-hour video is a goddamn gift from God.
Because if you stop and think about how much schooling you would have to go through to get the information that's in that three-hour video, it would take a decade.
So the reason why we didn't think fiber type changed 20 years ago is because we didn't have the technology to actually have the fidelity to measure all the ones that we were missing.
So, for example, if you were the first one to try to publish a study that fiber types changed as a response to exercise training, and 20 years of research suggested otherwise, you'd have a very hard time getting through a review.
They would hammer you for every little thing, like, wow, did you do this, and did you do this, and...
So when your muscle gets bigger, the diameter of each individual muscle fiber gets larger.
So it just thickens, right?
Well, hyperplasia is a concept that you actually add more muscle fibers total.
So you add cells to the entire muscle.
And for decades, basically, you say that doesn't actually exist in humans.
And now as we're improving our fidelity of our measurement techniques, it looks like it happens a lot.
We know it happens in other mammals.
How it happens in humans, when it does, it's going to be very difficult and probably impossible to ever show.
But we have more and more evidence because we know the mechanisms now behind the cell growth.
So once we see the physiology and the mechanics behind it and the molecules and the gene expression, then we say, okay, it lines up with A, B, C, D, and E. We just can't show it with F because of technology.
Now, when you're dealing with athletes, and especially athletes that are trying to make weight, like a fighter, and do you ever tell them, like, say, like a Jake Ellenberger, who's a pretty thick guy, gets down to 170 pounds, and you got them exercising and doing all these things, and you do a body composition of them, do you ever tell them, like, you got to lose some muscle?
Do you ever say that?
Like, you're 205 pounds, getting down to 170 is really going to Kind of fuck you up.
But when you see a guy like him, and he got outpowered by a guy like Chris Weidman, what's the line in the sand you draw where you say, okay, Calvin, let's put on some muscle and some strength so that you can deal with the Yoel Romeros of the world, or let's lean you out and get you off the tacos so you can fight guys that you're supposed to be fighting, right?
If they really buy in to what I say, it's a needed conversation, but a lot of them won't, which is fine.
So I don't think you have a good answer there, man.
It's tough.
He's a classic example, though.
I mean, I've got to be careful.
I don't know his camp.
I've met him a handful of times, but we've never been to my lab.
I don't know how bad his stuff is or if he's got medical problems that no one knows about or if he has other issues that are going on that make it hard.
On short notice, when he had a whole camp, and has every reason to not have confidence, and like, 90% or more fighters would have just been like, no, I'm out.
Like, no way.
He takes the fight.
Like, no one would take that fight, because if you lose twice to the champion, you're done.
I just wonder, and this is unfortunate, but I wonder how many of these young new fans, I would like to say like post-Ronda Rousey fans, how many of them even know who the fuck GSB is?
And then, as a fighter, like, when you get to MMA in particular, guys have, like, nine years to compete at a world-class level, and then the wheels just fall off.
So, what people don't understand about when you watch professional athletes, fighters in particular, is a lot of what happens in that fatigue is either psychological or it's bad weight cut stuff.
So now he doesn't have that, but if he's lugging around extra weight that he's not used to, potentially...
Does it?
Now, he's got some smart people in his camp, so he's probably going to be fine.
But if someone gets in his head and tries to get him up to 202 or something and then come back down, like, he's probably not going to feel normal there.
But having said that, if we want to do a small circuit or something that incorporates one of those things in there, sure, but I'm never going to prescribe, if they're not doing it, like, hey, let's hop on and let's get an hour on the elliptical.
I'm not pro or con, but that's traditionally not where I'm going to go because it's far easier for us to help them lose weight through food than it is adding on an extra hour, and that adding on an extra hour of activity can be real harmful for them muscularly.
I don't feel like in camp it's a huge need with the exception of maybe like a recovery.
So you want to do like, hey, let's go an easy 45 or something on the bike.
But as like a 45 hard, with the exception of when you start moving to championship fights, I do think there's good cause for doing maybe once a week of saying, like we do this with Durkin all the time, like, hey, he loves to ride mountain bikes, so go out on the mountain bike and go ride for...
Anything that allow them to move that minimizes the amount of technical teaching you have to do.
Most people run horribly.
This is like a real, real, real problem, especially wrestlers.
If you ever watch a wrestler run, it's like you're a knee pain, you're a busted ankle waiting to happen.
So I'm not going to throw that on them and then try to teach them a new movement skill.
It's just not needed.
There's a thousand ways we can get there.
If they already run well and they have a running background...
And we could go there if they want.
Some of them do like it.
Okay, fine, we can get there.
But if they don't run well, I mean technically well, if they're landing in bad positions with their fear out everywhere and they don't want to take time to go to a running coach like Brian McKenzie or something, then...
Because generally, the foot position of the hill is much easier to get to, and it's harder to run bad uphill than it is on flat ground, generally.
So it is something you go to, but that's also probably something where...
You don't have as much teaching and you're at altitude, so that by itself is going to reduce how hard you work, which is going to reduce the stress on your joints and bones and ligaments.
So all that can be integrated where you reduce the likelihood of them getting a sore back or knees because you added some 45-minute running on there that didn't really have to happen.
Is Aerodyne or VersaClimber, are those things limited in the fact that the movement is very specific in terms of doing that versus maybe like a kettlebell cardio workout?
Oh, we're trying to improve your ability to repeat maximal sustained 15 second intervals with short rest and all at the same time keeping your breathing mechanics.
And so you think the good move would be to introduce a bunch of different things, like one day, yeah, one day do the kettlebell cardio workout, another day do the aerosol, was that aerosol bike, what's it called?
So, it'll effectively think of it like a heart rate monitor, but it's going to look at how...
So, your heart doesn't just go beat...
Beat, beat, right?
It has variability.
It's beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.
Well, that actually has some relationship with your autonomic nervous system.
So if it's really variable, you're in a good spot.
If you lose your variability and it becomes beat, beat, beat, beat, beat, you're actually potentially being overtrained.
So your nervous system is a little bit shot there.
So you can use those.
And Joel Jameson, again, has done a ton of this work.
And you can look at that to have an idea of whether or not they're over-trained.
So you can use that.
I don't particularly use those things for a couple of reasons.
Number one...
I know what's going to happen for the most part over the six weeks.
Like, as camp's going on.
Like, it's based on performance, the coach, the athlete, when I've been around them.
Like, we plan it out so that this is the volume this week, this is the volume this week, this is the volume this week, so that we don't get ourselves in those situations.
Like, say if you've got a guy like, you know, fill in the blank, Chris Weidman comes to you, and he wants to train with you, and he's preparing for a five-round championship fight.
I would have a conversation with as many of his coaches.
And honestly, the first time I worked with them for something like volume, I generally would just shut up and watch.
And go, okay, like, here's what you're going to tell me you did.
So write on a piece of paper what you did for the camp.
What's your plan for the camp?
What have you done in the past?
Then I look and we can assess some volume.
And then I can generally tell, okay, this is normal for a person of your caliber, of your age and your experience, or like you're way over what's normal.
But I don't know how that lands on you.
And then I watch.
And as we go along, and it's conversations continually and going, this is happening.
Now, I've talked to a bunch of people about this that have started doing this recently, like within the last year or two, and they've all experienced great results.
And that the idea being that you used to go to failure and then you'd be wrecked.
Like three or four days instead of that like say if you could do ten reps or something you do five and then you take a big rest and then you do five again and you take a big rest and then you wind up instead of doing 15 reps You wind up doing like 30 over the course of an hour and a half and then you're fine the next day Well, I mean you had Louie on like Louie Simmons, right?
Well, MMA training is, it's weird, it's really strange because MMA training is essentially, it's still in its infancy, right?
It really didn't even exist until 1993. And then it didn't even really exist even then until like...
I feel like Frank Shamrock was the first real professional MMA fighter, because he was the first guy to figure out that you have to be an insane cardio, and he was the first guy to be able to strike and also be able to grapple, to be able to fight off of his back, and piece it all together.
And the cardio was a huge factor.
When he beat Tito Ortiz, it was way smaller than Tito, but he beat him because of cardio.
But one of the things that I used to see early on that was so confusing to me because I came from a striking background was how many of these guys were willing to beat the fuck out of each other in the gym.
No, but they watch this and they're like, okay, and they'll come at me with a thousand really weird nutrition questions or something, or really weird advanced training ones, because I went to a seminar or something, and I'm like, back the train up.
Or you're doing that, or you're running 35 miles a week.
Got it.
That's the vast majority of what I do, is bring these guys back to life and go, like, let me help you sift through all this internet stuff that's really complicated, and let's take what's actually good and bad and dial in a very usable system.
Like, they get bogged down in the details way too much of things that really don't matter.
Your body's not that sensitive or insensitive enough where it can't convert something from something to something else.
And if it needs it, it will do that for the most part.
So there are some real small things at the end, but a lot of what we can do is, like, just get you on a reasonable program that's actually possible for you to implement.
And that doesn't drive you so crazy or is so difficult and so confusing for you that you get halfway into it, you abandon it, and then you want to start over.
Yeah, like he was always talking about guys on steroids, that he liked competing against guys on steroids because he knew they were mentally weak and they would break.
Like you have all this conflicting stuff and you try to do this dance, which is why again you need people, you need a team to do this stuff and say, okay, this is what I think.
So people have a really hard time with physiological truth or scientific truth And implementation.
So, a very easy one is sugar.
Right?
Now, like, I don't know anyone in the world who advocates adding sugar to your diet is a good thing.
But what you tell somebody is scientific truth versus what the message you spread to either your athletes or a bunch of people, that can be very, very different because of unintended applications or consequences.
So, for example, there's no physiological harm with sugar.
It's not bad for you in any way.
But as a message to the general public...
That's not the worst thing to say.
And so most of the fighting that goes back and forth between any conversation like this is people saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, but the actual effect of it is good.
Yeah, but the science is wrong.
And they're not conceding.
They're actually talking past each other far more than they're talking to listen.
So now you could have a person in the corner of left who says, like, no, you're an idiot, look at the science, sugar's not bad for you for a thousand reasons, and they're technically right.
But, when we have conversations to 350 million Americans, they don't want all that detail in between.
They want, do I do it or do I not?
And so, if I have to take a hard line and I go, you know what?
Sugar is bad.
Don't eat it.
It actually causes a generally good effect on people.
Well, even having this conversation, though, is going to be really confusing to a lot of people because you're talking about so many different variables.
And by your being intellectually honest about all this stuff and saying, well, it's, you know, there's no real good answer.
You know, and it's different for one person than it is for another person.
Some people might get over really well on, like, macadamia nuts and almonds and get their protein from, you know, and other people, they might actually have an allergy to those things.
Right, you can't like, ah, I'm a little tablespoon here, maybe a teaspoon, baking soda, baking powder, ah, same thing.
That does not work.
You can't bake like that, right?
You will not make anything, you would have a mush of crap in an oven.
Baking is chemistry.
You do this, in this order, and this, and then you add this, and you cannot do these in other orders.
It's very specific.
Like, roughly.
Cooking is like, well, alright, what's left?
I get some oil, get some hot, kind of dices, yeah, throw some, whatever, that you give a mishmash, right?
So, people generally, I find, work well with nutrition information, either one of two approaches.
So, if I said, Joe, I'm going to do a nutrition program for you for the next six months, whatever you want, and I said, you can either do this one of two ways.
We can work together every morning, weigh every single thing you eat on the scale, text it to me, I'll tell you exactly how many slices of avocado to have, how many jalapenos, and I'll tell you exact weights and volumes for everything.
Or we can maybe text once a day or once a week and we would just go over concepts and ideas.
Here's what we're trying to get to, do what you want.
So, giving people the information in the way that they absorb it is important.
So, if you talk to a baker, so chemistry, details, weighing, everything out, and I go, alright, here's what I want you to do, a little bit of fat, a little bit of protein, some grains, that's not going to work for them.
You have to give them a very, very specific system.
And if you're a cook, though, you're like, well, who cares?
And if a scientist could step in and go like, well, these are all the problems, and this, and this, and this, and this, and everyone's fighting back and forth, you're like, well, fuck, do I guess, do I eat fat or not eat fat?
I think somebody actually did a study of a bunch of those alkaline waters and tested them in the store, like bought in different brands, and they were all over the place acidity-wise.
But then I actually, funny enough, paid attention to what he was saying, and it turns out there was something there.
So it's funny how much you hated someone when you don't actually listen or read their stuff.
So he was promoting the training mask, and I'm like, like everyone else, I'm like, it doesn't work, evidence shows it doesn't work, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And then I listened to how he was actually using it.
So he wasn't using it to simulate altitude, because that's not really effective, but he was using it to teach people how to use their diaphragm.
And that's when I was like, oh, I get it here.
So I'll come back and I'll finish this in, but the quick analogy here would be if I handed you a pen and said, you know, like, does this pen work?
Well, it may not work as a dagger, but it worked pretty good as a pen.
So the problem with the mask was it's flipped.
It didn't work for what it was told you to work for, but it worked because, in this case, the act of restricting people's breathing sometimes can help them learn to use their diaphragm.
People who breathe with their shoulders up and they don't use their stomach and their diaphragm a lot, when you put that mask in front of their face, they don't have that option, and so they learn to breathe through their belly and use their diaphragm.
And this is actually, that's what turned me on to Brian initially, because I'm like, when Boss came to me with the O2 trainer, I was like, this stuff doesn't work, bro.
So I've been working with Wim for a couple years now.
So doing initial stuff with him.
And it's very clear, like, we can mess with a lot of different breathing protocols and get you a lot of immediate and delayed up...
Sorry, up Brian one more time.
He had his conversation with Jon Jones on Wednesday before the fight.
First time that ever met.
Someone put him in contact.
Brian put him through some of these breathing protocols.
As soon as they were done, John was like, hey, will you fly down here on Saturday?
Flew him down that day, had him in his corner, walked him all the way down, was right next to probably you and Dana.
And he's doing all the things.
So this is how impactful some of these breathing things are.
Our whim was great to get us started.
Boss's device was awesome.
The training maps were concepts.
But now Brian has really evolved and developed and said, actually, there's a bunch of different ways we can do it.
And he has protocols.
You're going to have to ask him, but he is the one that can say, like, do this for this thing, do exactly this way for this thing, you want this adaptation, you want this effect.
Depending on what you're looking to do, because one thing you can train your body to do is how well do you perform when you've generated a bunch of carbon dioxide?
So I can put you in a situation where you get a bunch of carbon dioxide buildup, and if I don't let you dump it, then you're gonna fatigue a lot faster.
But that's not necessarily a bad thing.
You could learn to then deal with a lot of fatigue.
This would be the assumption, yet to be scientifically shown.
But this is the thought process.
You could feel this intuitively.
You're like, wow.
And it's also a way for us to get a lot of training volume in, or sorry, a lot of cardiovascular training in because your heart rate goes way up without actually doing a lot of physical work.
And so for MMA guys, this is what we're looking for sometimes because of physical work in their training camp is so high.
We can't add any more volume to them that's going to beat them up.
So now we can get them a cardiovascular workout in that's easy on the joints and ligaments and the bones.
So the other approach would be dump all the CO2 or do other things like nasal breathing only.
So the whole workout where you're only allowed to breathe through your nose.
When you breathe through your nose, it actually can release nitric oxide, which is a vasodilator.
So we focus on the one or two that you're like, wow, this is moving something here.
But, I mean, just like the example we went over with the cold.
It's like, yeah, it's great for this, or actually it's terrible, and then people say, no, they want to make blanket statements like heat's good or cold's good or cold's bad.
Well, as we study it more, we start finding out, well, actually, it's good for this, and it's good for this, and it's bad for that, and that, and that, and that.
So we'd have to assume sauna would be the same way.
Like you and like me, I don't go out of my way to do too much sauna work because of the way I train, I get really hot.
And sometimes we'll train specifically with a little bit more clothing sometimes and get kind of like, well, instead of sitting in a sauna for 45 minutes, let me wear a little bit of extra clothing during my training session and get real hot.
But for the average people, I think it's a fantastic modality because they're maybe only working out once a week or less and you can get them hot and we can actually work on those health benefits and While we're building good quality habits and we can eventually lead them down the path to more exercise.
Because what's going to happen is you're going to compromise performance.
Pacing is a real problem.
Bisping is a great example of this too.
Dennis was a bunch of people.
If you fight in an environment like that, your pace and the amount of output you can do is going to slow way down in the gym.
It's going to be hot.
You're going to gas out.
And then when you go to fight in your fight and it's temperature controlled, you're not used to that pace.
So if you're used to fighting at the pace that it takes for you to sustain 10 rounds of sparring in the gym at 110 degrees, and then we come in and you and I fight and I'm ready to go with this beat.
You're not ready for that pace.
So it's not that you don't physically have the conditioning, but you're just like, oh my, I'm just not, this guy's just...
And you don't feel right.
So you have to be careful of training too far outside of what you're actually going to encounter.
Which is, you know, some of these guys run into those problems when they do, you know, I'm going to spar 10 rounds so that I can go 5 easy.
I mean, it seems like you're very passionate about it, but it also seems like, wow, it could be kind of stressful having so many variables and possibilities.
Well, there are some things that I would be confident in, saying, like, basically, we know that this is true now.
You need to drink water.
Like, I would basically say that that's true.
We need to have a lot of...
Like, the very standard stuff.
Then those are things I'm comfortable saying this is basically true.
And as we go on, we only keep adding to that list.
So more things get piled on.
Now we know for...
I told this story also on my podcast about the history of strength conditioning.
And how it went from the 1900s to where it is now.
And the quick story is there was a guy named Peter Karpovich...
He was a scientist and he was extremely, he was the guy who started the idea that lifting weights causes you to lose flexibility and it's bad for your health and all these things, right?
This is 1952, 54, something like that.
And he's a scientist, PhD.
And he calls in a guy, he gets a guy named Bob Hoffman.
He's called in, do you remember Bob Hoffman?
You're from the generation you may remember, York Barbell.
Because back then, weightlifting, powerlifting, bodybuilding was all kind of the same thing.
They said, bring them in, and let's put on a demonstration.
And so, they bring in all these lifters, and they put on this demonstration in front of the whole school, in front of Dr. Karpovich.
And...
Everyone's like, oh, they're great, they're strong and athletic, and everyone knows the showdown's coming.
Everyone's there to watch the show, but everyone's really there to watch.
Just like they are on the internet now, it's like, let's watch the shit show afterwards.
So everyone's done, and Carpich stands up, and he's like, it's great, you're strong, and you've got a lot of muscle and all that, but let me ask you a question.
Can you scratch your back?
The guy was like, sure.
You know, where at?
Like, where?
And he starts scratching, boom, landing everywhere.
What do you want to do?
What do you want me to do?
Drops into a full splits, grabs 50-pound dumbbells, does a standing backflip.
And at this point, Karpovich is like, uh-oh.
Like, my entire career is that strength training's bad for you, it's unhealthy, you lose flexibility, and these dudes, the strongest in the world, just showed up.
Not only are they not inflexible, but they just did his splits.
Their bodybuilders were reigning world champions.
So he was at a crossroads right there in his career to say like, do I admit in front of the whole world about how wrong my entire research line was?
Or do I find some excuse?
Well, he does the honorable thing and goes, I'm sorry, I'm wrong.
And changes his entire career of research going on to actually studying strength training.
And of course shows it doesn't do any of these things we do.
So this is the nature of science is we're mostly wrong.
Until we actually study, and then we get less and less and less wrong.
So that's really where we're at with everything.
That's an easy example, but if you told somebody 50 years ago...
Ah, flexibility or strength training makes you inflexible.
He was pulling the, like, walking out of the bathroom by himself and he had, like, his cell phone up to his ear, like, I'm on the phone, but I think his cell phone was dead, but he's, like, didn't want anybody to talk to him.
Yeah, I mean, I would look at them from the performance side of it.
I wouldn't look at brain damage at all.
I would say, well, here are your numbers in the room, stacked up to other folks we've had in this room, and if you're far below their performance-wise, I would say you might have a performance problem in terms of you might not be talented enough physically to compete.
Like, I'm not going to make a comment about your other reasons to retire, but if I tested you across the board and you were terrible at everything...
Then I might be like, well, physically, from my perspective, I don't know if you have what it takes anymore.
Can we come to get it tested to see if it actually got better?
Yeah, no problem.
But the other stuff I do is, like I said, it's so much usually helping them calm down through all the nonsense that I can give them a settling presence in terms of this is not something you should worry about or get to hear.
But yeah, multiple five, six years.
And we've got data.
We've got biopsy data off them from over the years, which has been very, very interesting, actually.
That was one of the first reasons I wanted to get into the sport because I'm like, I want to biopsy these dudes.
So, one of the things that we measure in our lab is called myonuclear domain.
So the nucleus is what holds the DNA, and it tells the cell to grow, shrink, die, like repair.
Well, like human muscle is really unique.
It's one of the only cells in all of biology that is multinucleated.
So that means it's got not only more than one, but it's got thousands of nuclei per cell.
The obvious advantage is that allows us a lot more plasticity, so we can recover and repair and adapt and adjust really, really quickly, which is why we see people's fiber type change in a matter of weeks.
A paper that came out last year showing actually a high-fat, high-sugar diet can change fiber type.
We've seen carbon dioxide concentrations alter fiber type, things like this.
So the nucleus is really interesting because the more nuclei you have, The faster you recover.
It's also what determines how big a muscle will grow.
Well, working right now through it, a lot of people are, but the old theory would be a satellite cell would come in, it would turn into a nuclei, and the cell will only grow as big as the amount of nuclei that are around it, or that are inside of it.
And so what that basically means is there's a certain domain or a certain size that each nucleus will control, and it won't exceed that size because it loses control.
So if you, all three of us, were all a nuclei and this whole room was one cell, if we wanted to expand the wall, we would have to bring in another nucleus because you'd be like, dude, it's too much area to control.
So when you go through, like, about a training, a year or something of heavy lifting, and we add those satellite cells that turn into myonuclei, and we expand the size, well, we used to think, like, if we stop training and the room gets smaller, we used to think that, well, all right, like, time to kick Jamie out of the room.
He's gone.
But now what looks like happening is he's staying around.
So then when I go to retrain, I've got more of those nuclei right there, and so it's easy...
It's easier.
Sorry, I got excited.
Hit the mic.
It's easier for me to expand my size because the nuclei are there.
And you can increase the amount of nuclei just by increasing the size of the muscle, and that makes it easier to go back to that if you lose some muscle.
Because the book is really a guide for how to use some of these training technologies in your training and how it can ruin your training and how it can help your training.
So a part of that is the importance of doing a couple of things.
Getting back to nature.
And how the physiology behind how that helps.
As well as this concept of choosing suffering and choosing discomfort and how that's physiologically important for you.
So, a part of the book is built in a way where the photos...
The layout, the quality of the paper is all part of the reading experience.
So what they basically identified is we didn't have a separate word for the color blue because we didn't differentiate blue shades.
It wasn't important for the world because blue doesn't happen very frequently in biology, in nature.
It wasn't until we had textiles and we started printing and making cloth and paper and stuff like that that we had all these different dyes and shades of blue, so then we developed different shades of blue and different colors.
So because of that, we started perceiving and focusing on different shades of blue.
So now the average person that comes to the room would be able to identify all these different blues, where prior to this we didn't care about it, we didn't focus on it, so we all just saw that as one color blue.
So if we think about it from this way, what's happening in the exposure when we're in this artificial environment versus being in the external environment like nature?
So what are we not being exposed to now that we could be exposed to out in nature?
The third part of the book is the consciousness aspect, which is we talk to a lot of people.
Tim Ferriss wrote a section or did a little interview thing for it.
Stephen Kotler did one as well.
And they talk about the things like getting into flow state and the stress relief of it and all the other psychological benefits that we have from detaching a little bit from our constant tech exposure.
Dopamine is another great example, right?
So if we look at the dopamine rush that we get from the constant exposure, Not from the actual tech, but from things like, oh, I want to look at my likes.
I want to continue to look at this.
That's completely different than when we get out in nature and expose ourselves to physiological elements.
Similar to the cold and the hot and the thirsty, the hungry.
I mean, you've been out in the woods and stuff before.
You know what it feels like going a full day without food or being extremely cold for a few days and then getting back home.
And the euphoria, the sensations.
Well, you can, but it's really beneficial to have ourselves exposed to that.
And it's a problem now, but really the book is about, wait 20 years and think about the problem that's going to be in 20 years when this technology thing only gets more advanced and it takes more portion of our life.