Aug. 9, 2017 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:22:06
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| - Yes, and we're live. | ||
| What's up, man? | ||
| How are you? | ||
| Fantastic. | ||
| Thanks for doing this. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| Appreciate you letting me come up. | ||
| So, why don't you tell people what you do? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Now, when you're dealing with athletes and you're dealing with state-of-the-art performance, how much does that stuff change year-to-year? | ||
| Like protocols? | ||
| Like what people used to think was the way to go? | ||
| What's the new way to go? | ||
| Well, if you take a look, or if you examine just the idea of science in general, it's the understanding that we're wrong. | ||
| That's really what science is. | ||
| If we knew what the answer was, we wouldn't look into it. | ||
| What's the point of doing a study if we know the answer? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So by definition, we're always evolving in that sense, but it's quite funny how the central tenets are really not that different. | ||
| You take nutrition, you take training, the vast majority of those things are similar to what they were 20, 30, 80, 100 years ago. | ||
| So the bulk of it, what matters for the bulk of athletes, is fairly standard. | ||
| Where it differs is the last few percentage points. | ||
| It's getting us that last 10% gains or being very specific. | ||
| So you, on a personal level, need this little bit of difference, and then you need this tiny bit of difference. | ||
| But the bulk of it really is not that different. | ||
| Well, when you watch MMA fighters in particular, you see so many different methods, so many different ways to approach things. | ||
| And I never know who's right. | ||
| You know, it really depends upon who's successful, and then you go, well, that guy obviously has it down. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Not at his stage. | ||
| Well, also he's doing a bucket of steroids. | ||
| Well, that too, right? | ||
| That's a big factor. | ||
| Especially back in those days, they didn't come clean about that stuff. | ||
| No. | ||
| So guys are like, hey, how come my biceps are ripping off the bone? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or how come it's not working for me? | ||
| So all that is really important to understand. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Now, there's a bunch of different ways of approaching things. | ||
| I've always been fascinated by the Marv Marinovich method, and now Nick Kurson takes that method as well. | ||
| And their idea is that strength and conditioning, especially when a fighter's in camp, is more important than anything. | ||
| More important even than skill work. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because you already know how to fight. | ||
| So strength and conditioning should take precedent. | ||
| Get all that done. | ||
| So get your body to the point where you have the most horsepower, the biggest gas tank, the best tires, the best handling. | ||
| And then you already know how to fight, so just approach it that way. | ||
| Yeah, so the guy that actually trained Marv, Michael Yesis, is a Fullerton guy. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| It's Cal State Fullerton. | ||
| Michael Yesis? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's his name? | ||
| Yeah, Y-E-S-S, Russian name. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ah. | |
| He's awesome. | ||
| He's like 85 now or something. | ||
| And if you want to get massively entertained by somebody, he's a good one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because he's just very opinionated. | ||
| But nonetheless... | ||
| Yeah, that is, I think, an important one. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You have to have that combination. | ||
| Yeah, it is weird that, like, there is no answer. | ||
| No. | ||
| You know, like, Mark Hunt is going to have a completely different set of requirements than, you know, Derek Lewis or Mighty Mouse Johnson or anybody. | ||
| So, like, everybody's got different needs and everybody's coming to the table with a different set of skills and a different set of problems. | ||
| Especially when you look at experience, too. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We can't have the same thing. | ||
| How do you train a guy to do his walk down? | ||
| Oh, there's a lot we can do. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And I'm not a sports psychologist, so I don't go too much. | ||
| But do you know what they do? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That works? | ||
| For some guys. | ||
| For Dennis. | ||
| At that point. | ||
| At that point. | ||
| Not anymore. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Huh. | ||
| Like, don't say that. | ||
| Just like, tell me what to focus on. | ||
| Remind me of my cues and my timing. | ||
| And so the guys that are too ramped up... | ||
| 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. | ||
| So... | ||
| That can all be messed with. | ||
| Now, a guy like Dennis Permudez is a good example. | ||
| You're working with him. | ||
| He's obviously a world-class fighter, but he always seems to fall just short on these big fights. | ||
| This is where it's outside of my expertise. | ||
| I'm a muscle physiologist, not a psychologist. | ||
| Right, but with his last performance. | ||
| Against Darren Elkins. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Who's a really tough guy. | ||
| Very awkward. | ||
| Really just blood and guts type of fighter. | ||
| But that was a good matchup for him. | ||
| Very good fight. | ||
| Good matchup skill-wise. | ||
| It should, on paper, it should have been a good matchup. | ||
| It should have favored Dennis in a lot of ways. | ||
| There's no way to beat around that. | ||
| I feel like... | ||
| Two things are happening in that fight. | ||
| One, I feel like Darren Elkins is getting better. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| And he was super motivated and energized by his performance over Mursad Bektik. | ||
| Amazing comeback. | ||
| That was incredible. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| But a lot of people felt like he was the favorite. | ||
| That Dennis was the favorite going into that fight. | ||
| Yeah, on paper, clearly he was. | ||
| From a lot of vantage points. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Do we try something different? | ||
| What was it though? | ||
| Was it psychological? | ||
| Is it physical? | ||
| That's the thing to think about. | ||
| He was physically fantastic. | ||
| What was the physical game plan? | ||
| Like you planned on, you must have planned on knowing how Darren fights. | ||
| A super high-paced, in-your-face type of fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| That part's not a problem for Dennis. | ||
| He doesn't really get tired in the vast majority of his fights. | ||
| But he looked a little bit like he was getting tired in this fight. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So it's a weird job you have because you're kind of relying on someone else to pull the trigger. | ||
| You're relying on someone else to make the moves. | ||
| And you could train them all you want. | ||
| You can get them in incredible shape, but then, you know, ready, go. | ||
| They're on autopilot. | ||
| They're doing their own thing. | ||
| Especially me because I'm not the guy who's in practice all day every day with them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, I'm not the Nick Curzon. | ||
| I'm not seeing him 12 hours a week. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I'm out there. | ||
| I'm just like, like Dennis, I won't even see Hall Camp sometimes because he's in New York and I'm in L.A. So what do you do? | ||
| Do you give them a protocol? | ||
| Do you give them a schedule? | ||
| So my role, depending on which fighter I'm with, is completely different. | ||
| So sometimes it's one phone call at the beginning of camp. | ||
| Sometimes it's just like, hey, this came up. | ||
| What do you think we should do? | ||
| How do we go about this? | ||
| Sometimes it's a text three times a day every day for the whole camp. | ||
| Sometimes it's phone calls. | ||
| I try to do, like, this is not my full-time job. | ||
| My full-time job is to research muscle physiology. | ||
| I work with MMA fighters and combat sport athletes just because I love it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I love the challenge. | ||
| So it's just almost like a side job, a side hobby. | ||
| Yeah, if you want to think of it that way. | ||
| Because I have my full-time living. | ||
| I've got multiple labs to run. | ||
| This is what I do is publish research. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I take biopsies of people. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So do you coach people for diet as well? | ||
| Do you go through everything with them? | ||
| Yep, depending on what they need. | ||
| And how do you decide what a person needs? | ||
| Say if Darren Elkins came to you, he might be very different than Jon Jones. | ||
| How do you decide what a person needs? | ||
| So it depends on if they're local or not. | ||
| Blood work is the easy one. | ||
| 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? | ||
| No, I wasn't paying attention. | ||
| Oh, dude, joke. | ||
| 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 pounds-wise, it's like three kilos, like six pounds, yeah. | ||
| Roughly. | ||
| Which is not a big deal, but when you're already, like, scraping to get there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so she had to make the decision to go up or go down. | ||
| And what happened was she had a nutritionist, Eric Revello, who you may know Eric. | ||
| He works with Barnett. | ||
| He's been around Josh. | ||
| Big, huge dude. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Wrestler. | ||
| But Eric was her nutritionist, and Eric reached out to me because he's right down where we're at and Helen's down here. | ||
| And he was basically like, I know what I'm doing, obviously, but let's get as big a team as possible to make the right decisions as possible. | ||
| So that's how I like to work. | ||
| So when a new person reaches out to me, I go like, well, who else do you have on board? | ||
| Don't fire them. | ||
| I don't want anybody to get fired. | ||
| Let's all put our heads together. | ||
| Because with MMA specifically... | ||
| They're not making any income. | ||
| Olympic wrestlers are the same thing. | ||
| She makes like 15 grand a year or something. | ||
| She's poor. | ||
| So what you have to understand when you're coaching them, it's not Team Dr. Andy. | ||
| It's Team Helen. | ||
| And all of us have to be focused on her. | ||
| And it doesn't matter if anyone knows what I do with her or not or anybody. | ||
| I don't care if you get the credit, another nutritionist gets the credit. | ||
| If you want to actually help these professional athletes, you have to let your ego go completely out the door and say, why throw people out? | ||
| Let's take every information I have about everything you've ever done and come together with solutions. | ||
| And if somebody else has an idea that you don't like, that's up to you to figure out and give it to the athlete. | ||
| Okay, so what'd you find out with her? | ||
| Like, what was the issue and how'd you get her to lose the extra? | ||
| So, actually, it was like a year of issues. | ||
| A year? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, like, every day, every week, every month, something else came up. | ||
| So, it was like, we tackle this problem, and then we had another problem. | ||
| Iron was a huge one for her. | ||
| Iron as in deficiency? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| And we had, she was basically almost flat-lined on her iron. | ||
| Like anemic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| And we had to come in and go, okay, well, we're going to add this, but she was also traveling to Mongolia. | ||
| She was going internationally, so she kept getting sick. | ||
| Mongolia? | ||
| Yeah, for tournaments, because she had to qualify the spot. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| And she's cutting. | ||
| I would imagine wrestling a Mongolian chick is terrifying. | ||
| When you're a world champion, it's not that terrifying. | ||
| They're hardcore, though. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They scared the shit out of me. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like vitamin C, for example. | ||
| Vitamin C to keep you from getting sick. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that can help you get sick. | ||
| So you're talking about while she's dehydrating? | ||
| Is that what you're saying? | ||
| Anytime. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Does that really affect it better than probiotics do? | ||
| Well, probiotics, we're on that too. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right, but wouldn't you do that on a regular basis? | ||
| Like, why would you accentuate the diet on a traveling trip and give it some stuff? | ||
| I mean, wouldn't you want that boost everywhere? | ||
| So the probiotics are basically a no-brainer all the time. | ||
| But I mean, even vitamin C and everything else? | ||
| Yeah, but you have to be careful because any time you go with a vitamin specifically, you're going to have potential toxicity. | ||
| Vitamin C? Absolutely. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's the toxicity rate of vitamin C? It's not going to actually... | ||
| Well, put it this way. | ||
| Generally, anytime you're getting a vitamin from a food source, you're probably nowhere near toxicity level. | ||
| So natural consumption of food, you're not going to be in a problem. | ||
| You start taking three, five, six grams of vitamin C at a time. | ||
| You're potentially going to have problems. | ||
| And it's a whole host. | ||
| And what makes it really complicated is there's interaction with other vitamins and minerals. | ||
| So the iron, for example, if you give them with vitamin C, it's going to help absorption. | ||
| But zinc is going to do the opposite. | ||
| And so if you do these other combinations, you potentially have problems or you're potentially safe. | ||
| So you say the opposite. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Do you mean zinc doesn't help vitamin C absorption or doesn't help iron absorption? | ||
| Iron. | ||
| So zinc actually messes up your iron absorption? | ||
| Anytime you have a vitamin or a mineral, you have potential either co-absorption or you have confliction. | ||
| So you've got to cut things off. | ||
| How does zinc conflict with iron? | ||
| I don't know the chemistry behind it. | ||
| That's weird. | ||
| Yeah, you have a lot of that. | ||
| I mean, you look up basically vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin K, magnesium, vitamin K with bone absorption. | ||
| So you have to make sure that, like, say if you're eating one at breakfast, you eat another one at lunch. | ||
| Is that how it works? | ||
| Well, if you get it from food, you're basically safe. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, we don't really, this is stuff we don't worry about at all. | ||
| But even if you supplement, like, during your lunch or during your breakfast? | ||
| Yeah, this is why the general answer is don't supplement with vitamins and minerals unless you have a very specific reason. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And we did that for the vast majority camp, but she was continually getting sick because of a variety of reasons, some that I probably shouldn't say. | ||
| So we were like, okay, fine, we addressed that. | ||
| And then it was like, okay, now you're super anemic, so let's get away from that. | ||
| But what we did basically is get iron back to a decent level as soon as possible and then go off of everything. | ||
| Go right back to food. | ||
| How are you feeling? | ||
| And that one, she was so low on iron. | ||
| As soon as we got her to a decent level, like within days, it was just like tears of joy. | ||
| Like, I feel so much better. | ||
| I'm not lethargic. | ||
| I'm not sleeping all the time. | ||
| But it was continual. | ||
| The hard part with her was getting her down. | ||
| And then you would be shocked what the food was like in Rio. | ||
| In Brazil? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| At the Olympics. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Like, they told them you'd have A, B, C, D, and we get down there, and she called me the first day, and she's like, they have nothing. | ||
| We've got McDonald's, we've got popcorn and cookies. | ||
| Like, there's nothing down here. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| At the Olympics? | ||
| Oh, horrible. | ||
| I mean, the basketball players probably had something, but... | ||
| She's a wrestler. | ||
| She didn't have anything. | ||
| So they had better food for the more prominent sports? | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Because they probably brought their own chefs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So she's down in with the team. | ||
| And then she had to be shipped out of Rio to some other city two hours away or an hour away or something. | ||
| And she's like, there's no grocery store here. | ||
| I can't even walk to the store to get anything decent. | ||
| So we had real problems. | ||
| She was about to do opening ceremonies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And we had a plan, you know, for food. | ||
| Like, basically, we're going hour by hour. | ||
| How do you feel like? | ||
| Where are we at? | ||
| These types of things. | ||
| And she wanted to do opening ceremonies. | ||
| And she called me. | ||
| She's like, I want to do opening ceremonies. | ||
| We're like, fine, cool, no problem. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Jesus Christ, you had to go for popcorn for nutrition at the Olympics? | ||
| And she was there for like six hours. | ||
| They were supposed to be there for like an hour and go in. | ||
| It was a shit show. | ||
| That's a mess. | ||
| Now, what about other athletes? | ||
| Like, I mean, forget about the specific requirements of someone who has to lose a ton of weight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, when you deal with most athletes, like, what kind of, like, strength and conditioning protocols do you have them on? | ||
| What kind of recovery protocols? | ||
| Like, are you using cryotherapy or sauna? | ||
| Like, what kind of stuff are you using? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Maybe your strength is your issue. | ||
| So do you do a bunch of tests on them when they come to you? | ||
| What kind of test do you do? | ||
| So we have an entire Center for Sport Performance. | ||
| We've got six or eight laboratories in it with a whole host of equipment. | ||
| Do you do that thing where you put the mask on and make them run? | ||
| VO2 max? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, if we need to. | ||
| What does that do? | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That's not your problem. | ||
| What makes you lose in a fight is other things that you need to spend that precious training time on. | ||
| So when you get a guy or a girl and you have them in your studio and you start work, what's the first thing you do with them? | ||
| Honestly, the first thing would be, well, what did the manager or why did they reach out to me? | ||
| Because usually when they come to me, it's problem fixing. | ||
| They don't come to me like, hey, I've won seven fights in a row. | ||
| I feel fantastic. | ||
| Usually, it's, this is going on. | ||
| I'm losing because of this reason. | ||
| That's got to be frustrating, though, because when someone's losing, the problem is, like, that's a slippery slope. | ||
| It's hard to catch yourself. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's the game, too, of, like, sometimes they just want another answer, which is not, like, you're just not good enough. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Ooh, that's a rough answer. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like, I'm not going to tell them that. | ||
| I'm not a fight coach, but I'm like... | ||
| Okay, so I'll watch the fights, of course, talk to their team. | ||
| So I'll give you a specific example. | ||
| So they come to me and go, hey, like, I don't think we're fast enough on the feet. | ||
| This is a problem. | ||
| Okay, well, we've got force plates that are really, really sensitive measurement equipment built into the ground. | ||
| And we can have them do a variety of jumping tests, moving tests, lifting tests. | ||
| Force plates? | ||
| How does it work? | ||
| So it's a really expensive scale, basically, built into the ground. | ||
| How big is it? | ||
| They're as big as your laptop or as big as the table. | ||
| Oh, so it's fairly small. | ||
| Oh, as big as the whole table? | ||
| Yeah, they can be. | ||
| Not ours. | ||
| But we have one that's maybe the size of, I don't know. | ||
| Small coffee table? | ||
| Yeah, and then there's two of them back to back. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you don't have 100 newtons of usable force in your sport. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| No, what's interesting, you just said he didn't believe it. | ||
| So he didn't think you were slow? | ||
| No, he thought the problems were other things. | ||
| What did he think the problems were? | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Coaching, like, I'm not getting the right things. | ||
| You know, they had my walkout song wrong. | ||
| So you told him, you're slow, dude. | ||
| That was my thing. | ||
| I'm like, I don't think so. | ||
| 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 what exercise do you do to measure that? | ||
| So now that's a great example. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that's really what we can tease out. | ||
| Now, how much of speed and athletic performance is genetic and how much of it is what you've been doing and how much can you improve? | ||
| 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. | ||
| The other hadn't done anything in 35 years. | ||
| So we had this exact question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| That's crazy. | ||
| Identical DNA. One variable different, which is, well, one major variable. | ||
| That's a huge variable, though. | ||
| One is a super endurance athlete, and the other one's a lazy bitch. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| Or maybe studies a lot. | ||
| Yeah, something. | ||
| I think it was a truck driver or something. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| It's so weird. | ||
| That's unusual, isn't it? | ||
| Extremely unusual. | ||
| They usually kind of share similar interests. | ||
| If not, if their difference is mild. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I kind of do this and you do a little bit more, but... | ||
| So what are the differences in their body types? | ||
| So we tested them for everything. | ||
| 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 speed didn't favor the athlete. | ||
| Really? | ||
| No. | ||
| And the craziest part is the fiber type. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Does that make sense to you? | ||
| Because the guy was just constantly running, Darren's work. | ||
| Now, that's really weird, the muscle quality. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Didn't favor the athlete. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So you get this rough idea of quality. | ||
| How does it not favor a guy who's exercising constantly? | ||
| Well, you have to be careful. | ||
| It's only one subject. | ||
| Well, two. | ||
| So we don't know. | ||
| But the one implication could be that, yes, endurance running and cycling is great for you. | ||
| There's a clear health advantage to that. | ||
| But if that's all you do for 30 years, that's probably not enough to save the muscle capacity. | ||
| We know things that are actually going to predict mortality. | ||
| VO2 max, leg strength is one of the most significant predictors of how long you live. | ||
| Leg strength is? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| How weird. | ||
| Well, sort of. | ||
| Tom Platt should live forever. | ||
| Yeah, right? | ||
| Some of these guys that squat 900, now obviously there's diminishing returns, right? | ||
| Right, I'm sure. | ||
| If you squat 400 and I take you to 450, you're not living a day longer. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But think about it this way. | ||
| What's one of the big reasons why you go from living by yourself to an assisted living home? | ||
| Can't walk. | ||
| Can't walk. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Can't stand up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And the biggest one that they're actually starting to look at now is foot speed. | ||
| Foot speed? | ||
| Why? | ||
| Why? | ||
| 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... | ||
| To stop yourself from falling. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| So balance and... | ||
| Yeah, well, it's eccentric strength. | ||
| The ability to block all those forces into the ground to catch your whole body mass from falling. | ||
| Or wouldn't it be also your ability to manipulate your body like yoga? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| To be able to control yourself in awkward positions? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| The other thing they see is huge increases in general just physical activity when you're stronger. | ||
| So when you're really, really strong and you're 70, you're much more likely to go to an extra yoga class. | ||
| I'll go take the dog for an extra walk. | ||
| I'll go grab the thing. | ||
| But if I'm super weak and getting off the toilet is a maximum effort squat, I'm more likely to just keep in my chair. | ||
| Just stay on the toilet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow, that's incredible that there wasn't an increase in muscle quality. | ||
| Well, that's also one very specific type of exercise, right? | ||
| Endurance work, where if this guy was a bodybuilder, who knows? | ||
| So that's exactly the point. | ||
| I think the first question you asked when we started talking was, what's the best type of workout? | ||
| Or what's the new age stuff, right? | ||
| Well, it goes back to, I think every one of us would agree, if you want to be as healthy as possible, you need to do a variety of training. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It can't just be one modality. | ||
| So if you've only done yoga your whole life, you're probably going to have strength problems or foot speed problems. | ||
| If you've only run, if you've only lifted weights, if you've only exposed yourself to a few of these stimuli, you're probably in a real problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| How well do we do when we're hungry? | ||
| How about cold? | ||
| How about thirsty? | ||
| Hot? | ||
| How well do we do? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Meaning performance-wise? | ||
| Meaning everything. | ||
| So, like, are you manipulating diet to make people perform better when they're cold? | ||
| Like, what are you doing? | ||
| Every combination. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So you're talking about longevity now, not like necessarily athletic performance in professional athletes, right? | ||
| We would use this under that umbrella, but very, very carefully. | ||
| So, for example, I would not recommend extensive fasting during the middle of a six-week camp prior to UFC fight. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, this is not at all what we're saying. | ||
| But this is something maybe we implement outside of camp. | ||
| Okay, so for example, we have somebody who's very, very carbohydrate-dependent, right? | ||
| And we have a hard time using fat as a fuel source. | ||
| Okay, well maybe, during that six-week camp before a UFC fight, I'm not messing with a tremendous amount. | ||
| We're not going on a new diet five weeks before a fight. | ||
| Like, that's not going to happen. | ||
| But maybe, oh, you got hurt, you know, you got an extended layoff. | ||
| Now we start to work on that other part of your physiology, so that next camp we've got more what's called metabolic flexibility. | ||
| So we have an ability to switch back and forth between fuel sources. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Exactly, so I'm of the belief that during those last few weeks, you need to be very specific to what you're going to do. | ||
| Get on weight, get focused, get all these things. | ||
| But now, because if we over-specify for too long, We have problems. | ||
| We have this complex, these fighting forces called optimization versus adaptation. | ||
| So generally, when you're optimizing, you're not adapting and vice versa. | ||
| How does that work? | ||
| So for example, you brought up ICE earlier. | ||
| So we do this stuff a lot. | ||
| We've done a lot of studies and published in this area. | ||
| So, we're just learning some of the physiology behind what's going on with ice. | ||
| And a lot of people ask me this, like, well, are you for ice or pro-ice or against it? | ||
| I don't understand why we have to be in one side of the camp. | ||
| Well, there's one guy who doesn't believe in ice. | ||
| Misha Tate had him on our podcast. | ||
| He's like the anti-ice guy. | ||
| He's like saying you shouldn't use ice. | ||
| But I've looked at some of the PubMed studies and some of the various things. | ||
| There's a lot of benefits to ice. | ||
| I don't understand why anybody would be anti-ice. | ||
| Does that make sense at all to you? | ||
| No, it totally does. | ||
| And this is exactly where I'm going. | ||
| Anti-ice makes sense to you or no? | ||
| It can. | ||
| It can. | ||
| In what way? | ||
| Because there is good scientific evidence to show that there are consequences of the ice as well. | ||
| Like in post-injury or post-workout? | ||
| So it depends on the workout context. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So we'll go two easy examples. | ||
| So it's not so vague and like theoretical. | ||
| Post a workout that you try to get bigger and add more muscle mass. | ||
| You don't want to do that right afterwards. | ||
| Bingo. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And why? | ||
| Well, because your body has time to recover and the actual inflammation is supposed to be good for you. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's not good for you. | ||
| It is the signal to grow. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So people have this really weird thing where they like to personify or humify chemicals. | ||
| And physiology. | ||
| Like, it doesn't know. | ||
| It's not good or bad. | ||
| Like, inflammation isn't great or bad. | ||
| Like, it just is. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's a chemical. | ||
| Like, it doesn't give a shit at all. | ||
| It doesn't know. | ||
| It's not conscious. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, if you were to do and hop on a nice bath post a lifting session when you're trying to add muscle mass... | ||
| You're actually gonna fuck up your gains. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Yeah, but you're supposed to wait like two hours, right? | ||
| Isn't that the right number? | ||
| The more the better, probably. | ||
| More? | ||
| Probably four to six. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Why mess with it? | ||
| Why interfere? | ||
| I read something about two, that two hours is good after a hard lift. | ||
| Well, we don't have any numbers to say optimal yet. | ||
| Like, it would take a lot of studies to figure out, well, two's not good, but three's better. | ||
| So everything you're hearing now is rough. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How would you know? | |
| We would have to titrate it out. | ||
| We'd have to do a study that says one group gets two hours, one group gets three hours. | ||
| And then you'd have to, like, concentrate, like, effort, like, how much effort is this guy putting versus that guy? | ||
| It'll have to be in the same training program. | ||
| We'd have to biopsy them all pre-imposed, take blood marks. | ||
| God damn, you got a lot of jobs to do. | ||
| There's a lot of work. | ||
| That's why I'm so busy. | ||
| And there's creativity involved in it, too, because you have to manipulate things and figure stuff out and contemplate. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But it seems like everything is constantly evolving and shifting and changing. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Now, when it comes to ice, what about an injury? | ||
| Like, what if somebody twists their ankle or something like that? | ||
| Do you believe in icing it right away? | ||
| I have to defer. | ||
| That's not my area. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Is that what you're talking about? | ||
| Or are you talking about a cryo chamber? | ||
| We don't have a tremendous amount of cryo chamber research. | ||
| So I'll have to say... | ||
| Well, actually, I should say this with everything. | ||
| This is as we know it now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But as I started the show with... | ||
| If I'm wrong in a year, I'm going to say, like, actually all that was wrong. | ||
| This is part of it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But if you're saying that... | ||
| But you've got to be careful on beneficial. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So beneficial for some things, but they're always going to come in a compromise with something else. | ||
| Okay, so maybe not beneficial for a power lifter, but maybe beneficial for an endurance athlete? | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| Yes, but I'm gonna make it worse. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| What? | ||
| So, you have physiology, which is what I do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And this is what science is. | ||
| We biopsy, we took blood, we measured one marker. | ||
| But that doesn't take into context anything else in their life. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or if you were like some of my fighters who they're like, they feel more accomplished when they do it. | ||
| They feel like they've done some work. | ||
| So they feel less anxiety because they got in work. | ||
| Well, then now we're playing a game here of... | ||
| Yeah, physiology said that. | ||
| Would it feel more accomplished when they got in the exercise or the ice bath? | ||
| In this example, the ice bath. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| But it would be true of anything. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So setting them up for a psychological win. | ||
| Oh, that's fascinating. | ||
| So you factor that in? | ||
| You have to. | ||
| Like, we're dealing with human beings, right? | ||
| Right, but it might not even be real. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| But real is... | ||
| But real is perceptive, right? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Yeah, I guess so, for sure. | ||
| I mean, confidence is a giant factor. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Especially with combat athletes. | ||
| And there's some preliminary evidence that suggests perhaps an ice bath, I think, specifically post-exercise increased mitochondrial biogenesis. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So now you say, like, well, it's bad or good post-exercise. | ||
| Well, what's the goal of the training session? | ||
| Now, when you say increased mitochondrial biogenesis, is that within a certain time period post-exercise, or is that just period? | ||
| Well, it would be when they took the biopsy of the blood marker. | ||
| Right, but I'm saying like within an hour after exercise, within five hours? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The eye session? | |
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, so this one I believe was immediately post-exercise. | ||
| Oh, and now increased it. | ||
| So like finish and get it back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| Whoa, so now you got a conundrum. | ||
| But this is physiology. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's crazy. | |
| This is why I get so fucking irritated when people say, like, nah, this is the thing. | ||
| And then they pull up flags about, like, this is what we do or what we don't do. | ||
| Because I stand in the middle going, like, you're going to be a terrible coach. | ||
| Because you're going to be in a situation where you're going to need to violate those rules. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's just complicated. | ||
| It is. | ||
| I mean, this is why we're eternally wrong. | ||
| Do you find that that's the case of diet as well? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I am a big proponent of variable diets, and I think that there's a lot of biodiversity. | ||
| Well, obviously there is, where people are allergic to certain types of foods, you know? | ||
| But I just think this one-size-fits-all approach to diet seems... | ||
| The more I study diet, the more it seems crazy. | ||
| So... | ||
| I would ask you this. | ||
| What do you think about if I came to you and said, I'm going to do one workout style the rest of my life? | ||
| Everyone would be like, that's stupid. | ||
| Well, if you want to be a yogi, I'd say that's the way to go. | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| But most of us would say, oh. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| I just don't think it's fun. | ||
| So why is that acceptable to do that with nutrition then? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why is it I have to be ketogenic and this is what I do the rest of my life? | ||
| Or I have to be paleo? | ||
| Or I have to be anything else? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Why? | ||
| In fact, when you said variability, I assume you mean having a wide variety of foods in your daily. | ||
| Yeah, I think also a wide variety of foods in your daily life, but also I think what works for you might not work for Jamie or might not work for me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that's the bio variability. | ||
| But we're going to go inception on that one because, you ready? | ||
| We're going to go another level. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That is absolutely true, and most people recognize that. | ||
| But what we don't appreciate is the fact that there's not one diet that works best for you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So there might be one diet that works best for me if I'm powerlifting, but it might be different if I'm running hills. | ||
| Or it might be the exact same. | ||
| What the fuck, bro? | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| I mean, what you're highlighting is a real issue. | ||
| And it's also one of the reasons why there's a lot of what I would call confidence men out there. | ||
| And I don't use that in a good term. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I mean, yeah, I mean, confidence men like con men. | ||
| Because there's a lot of people out there that tell you, like, this is my diet. | ||
| This is the way to go. | ||
| You've got to follow my way. | ||
| And, you know, and they almost always mock other diets, which is, yeah. | ||
| How helpful is that? | ||
| Not good. | ||
| No, it doesn't help anything. | ||
| It's a big issue in the MMA community. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that's a straight ego shot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Also, I think what they're playing to is that fighters in particular want someone to come along and go, Andy, I got the fucking solution, okay? | ||
| You come to me. | ||
| This is Joe's fucking house of power. | ||
| We're gonna get this shit right. | ||
| We know what we're doing. | ||
| We got a team of experts. | ||
| Dude, he's got a team. | ||
| Joe's got a team. | ||
| And then you go, I'm with the team. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, I signed up with Joe's team. | ||
| And you really start believing, like, okay, this is gonna work, but... | ||
| Do you think physiology is that precious? | ||
| It's pretty precious. | ||
| Not like that. | ||
| It doesn't care. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| In terms of like, oh, it has to be lined up perfect and there's one magical combination of everything. | ||
| Oh, no, I don't think so. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Their body just works better. | ||
| I would say the vast majority of us would. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, it could. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Because of the amount of output they're doing, like the glucose requirements of the muscles. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Spectrum meaning what? | ||
| Like when you're defining it? | ||
| Anyway, but in this particular case, I mean, so say for example, you get very good at metabolizing fat as a fuel. | ||
| That may come with the consequences then of being able to use carbohydrates as a fuel. | ||
| So if you're in a sport that requires that, that's potentially problematic. | ||
| What sport would require you to use carbohydrates versus ketones? | ||
| Anything that's anaerobic. | ||
| So almost by definition, so anything that's maximal intensity difficulty is going to be heavily carbohydrate. | ||
| Man, I wish I had got you in here with Dom D'Agostino. | ||
| Oh, you just had him on, right? | ||
| Yeah, and he's all fat-based. | ||
| I mean, he's 100% keto, and he believes that ketogenic diets have a host of benefits and that the human body just functions better on them. | ||
| Well, so here's a good example. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I'm sure he's totally right on that. | ||
| I did read something about a type of brain cancer, though, that does not feed on sugar. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, again, it would be like, well, good for cancer? | ||
| Well, what kind of cancer? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Maybe 80% of them, he's right. | ||
| Maybe 90%. | ||
| I don't know what the number is. | ||
| It could be environmentally caused cancer. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But the vast majority of high-intensity exercise is powered by carbohydrate for most of us. | ||
| Now, why would it be carbohydrate versus ketones? | ||
| It's more efficient and it's faster. | ||
| Man, see, I wish I had you in here with him. | ||
| I think he would disagree with you. | ||
| Well, there's not really... | ||
| When you say it's faster and it works better, like... | ||
| Well, you have carbohydrate directly in the muscle cell. | ||
| That's where it's stored, is muscle glycogen. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And so it is an immediate fuel source. | ||
| And how does ketones work then? | ||
| Those are systemic. | ||
| Those are coming from the entire circulation. | ||
| So when you use carbohydrate for fuel, you're using the carbohydrate in the muscle that is exercising. | ||
| So if you're doing bicep curls, you're burning glycogen from the bicep fiber, not even the muscle, but the individual fiber that's contracting. | ||
| And how would that be more beneficial than systemic? | ||
| So it's faster. | ||
| I'm right there contracting. | ||
| I don't have to move it throughout my bloodstream. | ||
| When I use fat as a fuel source, it has to go through lipolysis, which means say it's stored fat in your entire body. | ||
| See, people right now listening to this podcast go, I don't know who the fuck to believe, man! | ||
| It's not a belief. | ||
| You got a dude on Monday who says one thing. | ||
| You got a dude on Wednesday who says another thing. | ||
| Shit! | ||
| So I guess that's what I would say my biggest message is. | ||
| It's not like a right or wrong thing. | ||
| That's the wrong question entirely is who's right or wrong. | ||
| Do you have any athletes who are on a fat-based diet? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| Who? | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Probably those ones I shouldn't say. | ||
| Are they secret? | ||
| No, they're just like, hey, don't talk about my diet stuff. | ||
| Ooh, really? | ||
| They say that? | ||
| Yeah, some do. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The basketball jury don't compete. | ||
| Helen did. | ||
| I brought up Helen. | ||
| We go through periods of that with her, for sure. | ||
| For a lot of reasons, it's very successful with her. | ||
| Periods of that, but not when she's competing? | ||
| Even during training. | ||
| But not when she's competing. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Not like on competition day, no. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But sometimes the week of. | ||
| So on competition day, no, because you feel like the glucose-based diets are more efficient in terms of actual physical performance? | ||
| Well, most specifically for rehydration purposes, too. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Oh, right, because she's dehydrating heavily. | ||
| And if you don't consume carbohydrates in the rehydration process, you're going to have a real problem. | ||
| Okay, that makes a lot of sense. | ||
| So we don't go there. | ||
| But we'll do it even maybe like five days out or the working of or something. | ||
| But we have to be careful there. | ||
| And this is one, again, this is no, I'm not bad mouthing Dom at all. | ||
| Okay, no worries. | ||
| But he's not dealing with somebody who's generally hypochloric. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So when we're going through an athlete who's six weeks of coming down in calories, and if we start cutting out carbohydrates... | ||
| We actually did address that. | ||
| He was saying that when you're talking about ketogenic states in particular, when you're talking about most people during a regular life... | ||
| 50 grams of carbohydrates would keep you in a ketogenic state. | ||
| But when you're talking about some pro-athletes, powerlifts, you're in hundreds. | ||
| It's 100, 250, and you're still ketogenic because your body has much more requirements. | ||
| So like I told you, he's a smart guy. | ||
| I'm generally on board with what he's saying. | ||
| He's a scientist just like you. | ||
| But the problem is micronutrient quality. | ||
| 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... | ||
| With a compromising of vegetables. | ||
| Of nutrition, right. | ||
| What about, like, cold-pressed juices or anything like that? | ||
| That's exactly what we do, actually. | ||
| A lot of the times, we did that specifically. | ||
| In fact, that almost single-handedly saved Rio for her. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| It was a real problem. | ||
| She had a real physiological crash. | ||
| That just sucks to think that at the highest level of amateur competition, they have poor food. | ||
| Yeah, well, we had to do, like, especially because she was basically broke, we had to, like, go out, real struggle to find... | ||
| Cold press things we could get to her because she was on like 40 ounces a day of that for a while. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And you know what's funny? | ||
| We did that and that's, I don't know, you could do the math, but 200 grams of carbs or something. | ||
| And the second we did that, her weight just started falling. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Really? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| So we added 200 grams of carbs and boom, weight just flew. | ||
| What did you attribute that to? | ||
| A combination of physiological and psychological factors. | ||
| Psychological? | ||
| She felt better. | ||
| So it caused her weight to drop? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She was stressed out. | ||
| She was freaked out. | ||
| And that cortisol level keeps your weight higher? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| So she was panicked and she was freaked out and she was stressed because she didn't feel good and she's like, I'm not losing any weight. | ||
| And one part of it was we gave her a system that she believed in. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay, we can do this. | ||
| Oh, now I also physiologically pumped some nutrients into you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mmm. | |
| So I don't know. | ||
| Like, honestly, I don't know what part of it was... | ||
| It could have been all psychological. | ||
| It could have been all physiological. | ||
| I don't know, but what we know is it worked. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know, this is such a complicated subject and it's so nuanced and there's so many different variables that... | ||
| I feel like you have to be a scientist to really truly understand this. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Yes and no. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You have to get care... | ||
| Like, it's funny because... | ||
| I don't know, Dom, like I said, but he's an example. | ||
| I've never heard him plant a flag and be unmovable on an idea. | ||
| And it's funny because those of us that do this for a living, rarely do we do that. | ||
| It's the other dicks that do it. | ||
| I think you're right. | ||
| It's like everyone else is like, what do you mean? | ||
| I get this one on fiber type more than anything in the planet. | ||
| Fiber type. | ||
| That's what I do for a living. | ||
| 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? | ||
| What the people are talking about? | ||
| Well, people love doing that, though. | ||
| Oh, it drives me nuts. | ||
| And they love it because of that reason. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| They love to call bullshit on you. | ||
| I don't respond, so it doesn't matter. | ||
| But it still gets you. | ||
| Now they know. | ||
| Yeah, good luck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Now they know, Andy. | |
| Well, now they can't because I bombed them with YouTube videos showing them, walking them through the science, and it's like, all right. | ||
| Yeah, but they don't read that or watch that. | ||
| They're like, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Dude, you're wrong. | ||
| Saw an Instagram post. | ||
| I had somebody on something a few weeks ago, some Instagram or something was like going through. | ||
| She was being super respectful, so I didn't mind like helping. | ||
| But I was like, okay, we're done here because I already told you about my three-hour video on this. | ||
| And you didn't watch it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Fuck off. | ||
| Bingo. | ||
| But you know, the three-hour videos are hard, man. | ||
| I don't care! | ||
| 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. | ||
| It took my career. | ||
| And you can boil it down to three hours, and people are like, man, not interested. | ||
| But I went to an Instagram page, and this guy had some shit that said, you're an asshole. | ||
| Well, I did a five-minute video. | ||
| That's why. | ||
| The first one was like a five-minute video. | ||
| And I just kept getting so much, like, blah, blah, blah, yep, you didn't do this. | ||
| And I'm like, really? | ||
| You think I missed that? | ||
| You think I didn't read that one? | ||
| And I was like, fuck this. | ||
| Like, here we go. | ||
| Here's the whole shabami, and there you go. | ||
| There's the link. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| I'm done. | ||
| And threw it all up there, and I still get the... | ||
| They don't change. | ||
| They don't change when you train. | ||
| I'm like, oh my god, here we go again. | ||
| Now, so if someone has a lot of fast twitch muscle fiber, like Mike Tyson in his prime as an example, is like a ball of fast twitch. | ||
| Could you turn a guy like Mike Tyson into an ultramarathon runner? | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, he could maybe complete one. | ||
| Right. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| But he wouldn't be elite. | ||
| Okay, so genetically he's elite at fighting. | ||
| He's just an explosive individual. | ||
| But making him like a, you know, fill in the blank, David Goggins type character. | ||
| No, I mean we have, so the easiest way to understand this is plasticity. | ||
| Your ability to change, your adaptability, is far higher than what people understand. | ||
| And in fact, there's almost a direct link between the increase in technology and the increase in our thoughts of what change and how much they change. | ||
| Oh, so our ability to measure it. | ||
| Bingo. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And is there also probably a psychological factor in there as well from the people that are measuring it? | ||
| It's probably easier to say that it doesn't change than to say that it does. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| I don't know that. | ||
| It was just more of like... | ||
| The evidence. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| So it's confirmation bias. | ||
| The first 10 studies have not shown it, so therefore you're not looking for it really hard. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| Move on. | ||
| Because otherwise you'd be chasing your own tail forever on that. | ||
| Well, I can tell you right now, it's hard to get things into publication when they completely challenge an entire... | ||
| The entire thought. | ||
| Can you give me an example? | ||
| 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... | ||
| Because you're going to be very skeptical. | ||
| Right. | ||
| For good reason, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's how it should be. | ||
| That's how it should be. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I have no beef with that. | ||
| What the problem is, when the other people who aren't scientists and don't pay attention, like if you don't know it like I do, then you need to... | ||
| You can talk about it. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| I talk about stuff I'm not an expert about all the time. | ||
| But you need to be careful when someone else walks in the room and goes like, well, I do this for a living. | ||
| You don't just concede the point, but you need to be a little more open with listening and going, oh, really? | ||
| Didn't know that. | ||
| Yeah, that's interesting. | ||
| Can you think of anything other than the fiber types that's changed the way people look at things recently because of technology? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's a good example. | ||
| The hyperplasia is probably the biggest one. | ||
| And what is that? | ||
| 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 we need to rethink our position here. | ||
| And that's probably the biggest one. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We've done that a little bit in the past. | ||
| People have come and said, hey, will you test me and tell me if you think I can go down to 55 or 85 or something? | ||
| My general approach is you're better off staying or going up. | ||
| It's almost always better if they're that close. | ||
|
unidentified
|
To go up. | |
| To go stay at weight class or go up weight class. | ||
| I could not agree more. | ||
| And you've seen the performances of fighters when they do go up. | ||
| They look so much better. | ||
| Jorge Masvidal is a perfect example. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, sure. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Fought at 55 forever, fought at 170. He's one of the best in the world now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Donald Cerrone, another good example. | ||
| There's been a ton of fighters that move up and look so much better because their body moves. | ||
| Like, Calvin Gastelum, he's another great example. | ||
| Yeah, he's a diet one, though, for the most part. | ||
| Like, he gets that dialed. | ||
| He should be able to make 70, no problem. | ||
| But God damn, he looks good at 85. He looks good everywhere. | ||
| He's a tank. | ||
| He's awesome. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah, man, that's an internally question that... | ||
| 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. | ||
| That happens from time to time. | ||
| It could just be ice cream. | ||
| It could just be ice cream, man. | ||
| There's a lot of guys that are super talented that just love to eat. | ||
| Man, it's crazy. | ||
| A lot of those folks will go to food for their... | ||
| Comfort. | ||
| For that and for the control. | ||
| That's what they can control. | ||
| That makes sense, especially in such a crazy world, the world of competition and combat sports. | ||
| Especially in this sport where winning and losing is so finite, and when you get to the top, rarely people win more than they lose. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's just so hard. | ||
| So hard. | ||
| In NFL and Major League Baseball and soccer, there's a clear pecking order. | ||
| You beat this person, then you beat this team, then you beat this team, then you get to play for the championship. | ||
| Where in MMA, it's not like that. | ||
| Well, it's definitely not anymore. | ||
| You know, in the UFC, it's real weird. | ||
| Like, especially the 185-pound division. | ||
| Like, good fucking luck. | ||
| Ugh. | ||
| You know, everybody's waiting in line to fight Michael Bisping. | ||
| He's probably going to fight George St. Pierre. | ||
| And people like Luke Rockhold, all these other guys. | ||
| Like, what the fuck? | ||
| When he beat Rockhold, that's my single favorite MMA moment in history. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I'm not like an obnoxious Bisping fan or anything. | ||
| But that just was the culmination of a dude who put in so much time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| And he did everything to make it a business. | ||
| He did everything. | ||
| And then he not only steps in and fights, just a killer in Rockhold, who I thought has been underrated his whole career. | ||
| He's insanely good. | ||
| But he'd already lost to him, convincingly. | ||
| He got subbed in the first round, yeah. | ||
| And older guys don't come back and beat younger guys in rematches, ever. | ||
| Right, especially on short notice. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because you're not going to get third. | ||
| Just every risk possible. | ||
| And he just nails it. | ||
| Just unbelievable. | ||
| Clips him and knocks him out. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| I loved Rockhold, but that was just incredible. | ||
| It really was crazy. | ||
| And you could really tell that Rockhold just thought he was going to win that fight no matter what. | ||
| This is a done deal. | ||
| Totally underestimated him. | ||
| He's just being so scrappy. | ||
| He's one of the most mentally tough guys in the sport. | ||
| Because he doesn't have some freak issue of Al Romero athleticism or anything. | ||
| It's just hard work. | ||
| He's not particularly fast. | ||
| He's not super mobile. | ||
| He's very skilled. | ||
| And he's got a lot of physical issues too. | ||
| He can't even see out of one eye. | ||
| You know, he's had a bunch of issues with, like, joints and discs. | ||
| He doesn't move well anymore. | ||
| No. | ||
| And he's not big for the division or anything. | ||
| He's still fucking people up. | ||
| Well, he's pretty big for 185. Well, not, like, amazing. | ||
| He's not, like, towering over wide men or Rockhold. | ||
| No. | ||
| He's not beating those guys. | ||
| Those guys are giant. | ||
| Yeah, those guys are giant. | ||
| And he doesn't have some amazing skill set either way. | ||
| He can fall back on a world championship in wrestling to get through. | ||
| Like, he just is, like, pretty good at everything. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And still just finds a way to get him. | ||
| He's a guy I would love to biopsy and figure out, like... | ||
| How much slow twitch and fast twitch does he have? | ||
| 34 beats per minute wrestling heart rate. | ||
| Yeah, he's fit. | ||
| Yeah, that's a big factor. | ||
| It's a big factor and then he could push a tremendous pace and then keep it going. | ||
| Like one of my favorite fights of Michael's was when he beat Kun Lee. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Because he just overwhelmed him and just you see Kun starting to get tired and Bisping just He poured it on. | ||
| Just gave him a beating. | ||
| And that was sort of, in a lot of ways, like a shift towards... | ||
| I mean, he was always a world-class fighter. | ||
| There was a shift towards the upper end of the division. | ||
| It was a big moment for his career, too, because if he lost that, that's probably about night-night for him in terms of... | ||
| Yeah, he could say that, but he doesn't give a fuck. | ||
| He got knocked out by Vitor, comes right back. | ||
| He got knocked out by Henderson, comes right back. | ||
| He's one of the guys... | ||
| I've been around him a bit. | ||
| He's hilarious, but he's one of the guys where, again, he doesn't... | ||
| You're just not going to shake him like that. | ||
| No. | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| He's undeniably tough. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And he's undeniably, like, when he says, like, oh, I'll fight that dude, he legit. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| He's there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you can say, like, oh, he's scared of Romero. | ||
| No, he's not. | ||
| Like, he's not scared of any of these dudes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| He's trying to cash in when he should. | ||
| Well, I think the Bisping GSP fight is a fascinating fight. | ||
| It's fascinating. | ||
| First of all, GSP's never fought at 85. He comes back. | ||
| He fights for a world title. | ||
| It makes it compelling. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think there's a lot of... | ||
| My wife definitely does. | ||
| Well, she's a fan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But I mean, I wonder of how many of the new ones, you know, the people coming up, Actually know who he is and I mean it's been a long time. | ||
| Yeah, you know a couple years, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
More than that. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| When did he lose to Johnny Hendricks? | ||
| I want to say it's three years ago at least at least Yeah, well beat Johnny Hendricks Yeah! | ||
| I'm not a big believer in that decision. | ||
| I feel like, at most, that was a draw. | ||
| I felt like Hendricks got the most of it. | ||
| My buddy Troy's brother had 50k on Hendricks on that fight. | ||
| Did he? | ||
| Yeah, and afterwards he's like, here we go. | ||
| Like, we're done. | ||
| That Hendricks thing was interesting, because Hendricks is one of those guys that, like, you go, like, what happened to that guy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, like, what... | ||
| A lot of speculation on that, where you can all read between the lines there. | ||
| Well, that's the problem, right? | ||
| There's the USADA speculation, there's the motivation speculation, there's a lot of speculation. | ||
| You also have that thing, too, with guys like that that put in that many years of wrestling, and you start competing that hard that young. | ||
| Wears on you. | ||
| There's a time frame that you just run out of. | ||
| Yeah, there's a, like, people believe there's a nine-year window as a world-class fighter. | ||
| I've heard that before. | ||
| It depends on the sport, but yeah, that's probably fair. | ||
| As a fighter. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, get in, get your money, get out. | ||
| Yeah, if you can. | ||
| If you can. | ||
| Yeah, that's why at 38, I think Bisping's 38, That GSP fights the right move. | ||
| Oh, for a hundred reasons. | ||
| It's the right move anyway. | ||
| And what does Bisping typically do well with the fighters? | ||
| He handles wrestlers decently well. | ||
| He's a very good defensive wrestler. | ||
| His style is going to be fantastic. | ||
| He doesn't get tired, which is what GSP relied on a lot. | ||
| His conditioning was great. | ||
| But that stamina, like, is dependent upon activity. | ||
| Like, even if you're just physically fit, but you haven't fought in a long time, I don't necessarily know if it's applicable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's also going to be different, too, with... | ||
| We'll see what he does weight-wise. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But that's a real problem that he may or may not be ready for. | ||
| Yeah, if he's lugging around extra weight. | ||
| But he was always walking around somewhere around 185, 190. | ||
| He might just decide to compete at that weight. | ||
| That's what I mean. | ||
| Like, if he stays there, he's probably 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which he's not going to run out of gas because of that. | ||
| Like, having more muscle doesn't make you fatigue more. | ||
| It's the training that does it. | ||
| Now, do you have fighters use cardio machines? | ||
| Like, do you have them use versiclimbers or treadmills or anything along those lines? | ||
| I don't feel like those are super important differences in terms of... | ||
| We're generally trying to get most of their physical activity from training. | ||
| If you have an extra hour worth of training we could get in the week... | ||
| You mean by martial arts training? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's never going to come out of my mouth. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| That's not to say I would never use it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I'm not throwing anything out. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right, but we're not necessarily just talking about losing weight. | ||
| We're talking about increasing performance. | ||
| Do you believe in any of those machines? | ||
| It's not a believe in or not believe in. | ||
| I would go to it if I needed it. | ||
| 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... | ||
| When you're saying Durkin, you mean Pat Cummins? | ||
| Yeah, sorry. | ||
| It's okay for people that don't know. | ||
| But that's the big part of it is because he loves that. | ||
| That's like his real mental release. | ||
| Mountain biking? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a great workout too, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's fantastic. | ||
| He gets in the sun, he gets away from people, he gets to breathe, and we're not counting things, which can be a problem. | ||
| But if I had another athlete who was like, I absolutely hate jogging. | ||
| Like, it's the worst thing. | ||
| I got knee problems, hurts my back. | ||
| I'm never going to ask them, hey, go jog an hour. | ||
| What do you do with them? | ||
| If someone has knee problems and you want to get them to do cardio? | ||
| 45 minute, something like that, maybe in the pool. | ||
| A lot of pool work can be really helpful if they have access. | ||
| If they can't, no one has ever not loved the Airdyne or Aerosol bikes. | ||
| Those are fantastic. | ||
| Versaclimbers are great. | ||
| They've got no problem with those things. | ||
| Is there one machine that is your standby or go-to when it comes to a cardio machine? | ||
| Well, those are the rower. | ||
| The Versiclimber, the rower, and the Airdyne? | ||
| Yeah, Aerosalt, any of those things. | ||
| 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... | ||
| We're not going to add that. | ||
| We're not going to add a new skill. | ||
| I know a lot of Greg Jackson's work, a lot of his camp, they do these hill runs in Albuquerque. | ||
| Have you seen that stuff? | ||
| Yeah, going up a hill is a little different, though. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that helps. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, hills seem to reduce that anyway because you're really almost like doing squats. | ||
| It's almost like doing a lunge or something like that because you're just kind of running and pushing your body up instead of like the pounding. | ||
| The eccentric pounding is gone. | ||
| This is a very good, one of the most important things we stress during fight camp is you want to minimize the eccentric contractions. | ||
| Because that leads to more soreness. | ||
| And if you got really sore legs and you got to go to Muay Thai practice and somebody jacks you in the leg, that's a problem. | ||
| And so you have to be able to get work in without getting extremely sore. | ||
| So hills are a great example. | ||
| Aerodyne is like the same thing, right? | ||
| It's pushing the whole time. | ||
| It's not landing in impact. | ||
| Swimming, rowing, all these VersaClimber, that's why they're so good. | ||
| One of the reasons. | ||
| You can do a lot of work. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| That's why you need to do a combination. | ||
| Okay, so it's a bunch of different stuff. | ||
| Just like we talked with nutrition. | ||
| It's variability that gets, like, this is what we're looking for. | ||
| Especially when the goal is not that modality. | ||
| So, for example, if you're competing in a kettlebell swinging competition, like, you should be focusing on that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But when you're using that for another modality that doesn't transfer over, then you need to have a wide range of stresses. | ||
| Man, how do you know, like, what to tell them to do, though? | ||
| Well, so that's the thing is, I don't think that stress is necessary. | ||
| Like, who cares? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| So, the stress of worrying about which one to do is not important. | ||
| You shouldn't focus on being like, ah, should we pick first a climber today or should we, ah. | ||
| It should be, what's the training outcome we're looking for? | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Okay, that's the goal. | ||
| Now, what modality do we want to use today to introduce that insult? | ||
| 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? | ||
| Aerosol, aerodyne, yeah, there's a bunch. | ||
| Another day, do a verse climber. | ||
| As a general quick statement, yeah. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But I would say the smarter approach would be to step back and say, well, wait a minute, what's the goal of that workout? | ||
| What's the goal of today, this week, this camp, this fight? | ||
| Then that guides you to make that exercise choice. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you should never choose the exercise because you love the exercise. | ||
| That's a stupid reason. | ||
| You're getting angry. | ||
| Yeah, it really irritates me. | ||
| Now, do you measure resting heart rates, body fat, all that jazz? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| No? | ||
| No. | ||
| Some folks do it. | ||
| It's not super important for me. | ||
| You don't feel like it's important in terms of finding out whether or not a fighter's overtrained? | ||
| Oh, that's a little bit different question. | ||
| So, you can use things like HRV to track those things. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| Heart rate variability. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And how do you know how to plan the volume out? | ||
| 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. | ||
| How do you know how much work to give him? | ||
| Like, how do you schedule that? | ||
| So I would never have the arrogance to step in and go, okay, this is the volume you're at, Chris. | ||
| I've never met you. | ||
| Great to meet you, but here's your volume. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, that'd be stupid. | ||
| Would you have him come and do a test workout for you? | ||
| No. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Your other coach told me this. | ||
| You're telling me this is going on. | ||
| Blood work came back here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mmm. | |
| Don't know if we're in the right spot here. | ||
| And then the second or third camp around, then I can have a feel and I can go back at the previous notes and go, well, this is 10% higher. | ||
| This is far three more times here. | ||
| I think. | ||
| And then it almost always matches up with, yeah, I'm feeling terrible, etc., etc. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What are your thoughts on like plyometrics, box jumps, things along those lines? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Box jumps are generally misused. | ||
| So people don't understand, especially in CrossFit or in MMA or in wrestling. | ||
| People use CrossFit for conditioning for the most part, which is fine. | ||
| But they don't get the biggest benefit out of it, which is strength, speed, power, training the reactive part of the system, training muscle spindles. | ||
| So, absolutely fine as a modality. | ||
| What do you mean by they don't get that out? | ||
| Like, how do they not get that? | ||
| So, for example, someone does a box jump, and they're like, okay, box jumps, I want to get better power in my legs. | ||
| So they'll go and do like, alright, let's spar for five rounds, and then I'll go do 100 box jumps as fast as I can. | ||
| You're not getting any faster like that. | ||
| You're just getting more tired. | ||
| That will not improve your power at all. | ||
| It won't? | ||
| No, because you're not jumping fast. | ||
| You're actually jumping at a very sub-max speed the whole time because you're already fatigued. | ||
| Oh, I see what you're saying. | ||
| So if you want to use those for power... | ||
| Now, if you're using it for conditioning... | ||
| Fine. | ||
| No problem. | ||
| But if you're using it for the sake of improving your foot speed or your power or your strength or your explosiveness... | ||
| You should be well rested. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| One, two, three reps, take a break, etc. | ||
| What do you think of, like, that strong first protocol? | ||
| Do you know the Pavel Tatsulin idea that, you know, he feels that strength is... | ||
| It's along the same sort of lines of what you're talking about. | ||
| That strength is essentially a skill. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| And that you should not be doing things to failure. | ||
| That the best way to do it, in his estimation, is to do more sets with more break in between them. | ||
| That's like very strength 101. You'd have a hard time for a true strength person disagreeing with a lot of that. | ||
| It's hard to get stronger when you're tired. | ||
| So going to failure is not as... | ||
| 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? | ||
| This is classic. | ||
| What a fucking maniac that guy is He was awesome. | ||
| I love that guy. | ||
| I always tell my kids, my students to Google him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're not going to get bored. | ||
| Oh, listen to my podcast with him. | ||
| It's one of the most entertaining things I've ever heard in my life. | ||
| He's such a character. | ||
| The basic idea... | ||
| Well, we'll have to back up for a quick second. | ||
| It depends on the goal. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Strength. | ||
| If pure strength is the goal... | ||
| Failure also has to be defined. | ||
| So what do you mean by failure? | ||
| Now, am I failing because of fatigue? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Then he's totally right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Am I failing, though, because they're too heavy? | ||
| Well, you do want to go to that failure for strength. | ||
| How so, though? | ||
| So you need to, at some point, pick up something that you can't pick up or really close to can't pick up to get stronger. | ||
| Really close to it. | ||
| Like, you can do... | ||
| Right. | ||
| But you can't do a second one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, bingo. | |
| So put it down. | ||
| Or maybe you could do two, but you couldn't do three or something like that. | ||
| The very textbook answer is anything below five repetitions-ish is going to be good for strength. | ||
| Yeah, he believes anything more than five is bodybuilding. | ||
| That's what Pavel says. | ||
| That's pretty dead on. | ||
| I mean, he's not too wrong there. | ||
| And the reason I brought Louis up is he's classic for saying first reps. | ||
| So if you did three sets of ten, Right. | ||
| Well, you had three first repetitions, right? | ||
| So you had three reps that you did after rest. | ||
| But if you did ten sets at three, now you had ten first reps. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So now you did the same total repetitions, but ten of them were done after full rest, which means you're going to have more power and more force. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| That seems smarter. | ||
| That's basically it. | ||
| So you're better off doing ten threes than three tens. | ||
| For strength. | ||
| For strength. | ||
| Or power. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Or speed. | ||
| And then taking a big break in between them is sort of counterintuitive to a lot of people. | ||
| They feel like, oh, I don't want to be a pussy and then let myself get fully recovered. | ||
| I want to push while I'm still high. | ||
| Come on, bro. | ||
| Come on, bro. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We've got to go to failure. | |
| One more, one more. | ||
| And they'll help you up. | ||
| Come on, come on, come on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I see that all the time, meatheads in the gym, and they think that's the way to go, and I'm like, man, I don't know. | ||
| Well, it's the way to go if they want to get sore, if they want to maybe improve muscle mass. | ||
|
unidentified
|
People love to do that, though. | |
| They love to walk around sore. | ||
| You know what's funny? | ||
| This is like the number one reason I got into MMA was that. | ||
| That question like right there. | ||
| People kept coming to me with this and I'm like, you don't know basics of speed training or strength training? | ||
| And the MMA guys were so wrong and that's how I got into this for the most part is people were like, oh my god, this is changing like everything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm like... | |
| 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. | ||
| And like that they were just going to war. | ||
| But not even going to war with like good skills. | ||
| Like going to war while they were learning. | ||
| For the sake of war. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I'm watching them getting coached and they're beating the shit. | ||
| I'm like, you guys are professionals. | ||
| Like, this isn't like some idiots at the Y. Like, you guys are supposed to be pros. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, you're going to damage yourself. | ||
| You're going to take years off of your career. | ||
| The vast majority of, you know, me working with athletes... | ||
| Is doing these very, very basic things. | ||
| Like, I'm not, I'm absolutely not the guru who's like, oh, I know the 18-point blood test and we're gonna get these. | ||
| The vast majority of what I do is go, oh, okay, I see the problem here. | ||
| We need to do this basic thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You haven't eaten a vegetable in a week. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| Did you get that? | ||
| Not as much anymore, but I used to. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We get a lot of that stuff. | ||
| A pro athlete that doesn't eat vegetables. | ||
| You know what we get? | ||
| Honestly, it's probably because assholes like you and they watch your show or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just kidding. | |
| I tell people to eat vegetables all the time. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, you're sparring six times a week. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ooh, yeah. | |
| We've got a whole other conversation. | ||
| Like, oh, we don't do that? | ||
| No, that's not normal. | ||
| Really? | ||
| No, okay. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So you think people just get overwhelmed with options from the internet? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Because too many people... | ||
| Get on exposure, get on shows or platforms, and they try to make sure that they are known as the guy that knows something different. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| It's not very exciting if I come up here and say, yeah, Joe, that's pros and cons to everything. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Like, well, that's not fun. | ||
| But it's good. | ||
| I mean, I think what you're saying is very important for people to hear. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, you know, I always think about Dan Gable. | ||
| When Dan Gable was young, he pretty much outworked anybody. | ||
| And he was just an unbelievable savage when it came to his training. | ||
| And then that manifested itself in the competition. | ||
| He was just like, the momentum behind him because of his ruthless training was so intense. | ||
| But... | ||
| Now he can't even walk. | ||
| I mean, his hips are gone, his knees are gone, he's got artificial everything, you know, he's just fucked up because of it. | ||
| And some guys are willing to make that sacrifice. | ||
| Yeah, but is that, here's the question, is that sacrifice necessary? | ||
| Like, can you be too tough versus smart in your training? | ||
| It's impossible to say. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because, like you said, here's where it gets so tricky, is physiology versus psychology. | ||
| So if that gave him that extra mental confidence that he needed to perform better, well then it's hard to say that it wasn't necessary. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So who the hell knows, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, no one's gonna say that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Let me stop right there. | ||
| You don't think that sugar is bad for you? | ||
| No, it can't be. | ||
| It can't be. | ||
| Unless implementation-wise. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So process sugar. | |
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| What are you saying? | ||
| So now we've... | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Sugar in your diet. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| This is where it gets confusing. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You want to break down sugar? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, having sugar in your diet, like eating sugary foods and snacks, having an excess of sugar has dire health consequences. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Correct? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But there's a key word you said there, which was excess. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Excess. | |
| Excess. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, like, meaning a piece of fruit, like a nectarine, not bad for you at all? | ||
| No. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| It's good for you. | ||
| And plus fiber. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But processed sugar, whether it's removed from that fiber and put into a Coca-Cola... | ||
| That becomes an issue. | ||
| Yeah, because of concentration issue. | ||
| Because now you can consume it at a concentration that probably wouldn't happen normally. | ||
| Right, in quantities that would never happen normally. | ||
| Bingo. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They go, oh, okay. | ||
| I didn't know this. | ||
| Adding sugar to my stuff is not good. | ||
| Don't do it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which is a net good thing, although technically, individually, it's not true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| I see what you're saying. | ||
| So sugar in and of itself is not bad. | ||
| Excess sugar and processed sugar and added sugar in mass quantities is bad. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And that's what you're dealing with with the average American diet, whether it's through breads or pastas or actually sugar and soda itself. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or sucrose or sucralose or any of those things and added to it. | ||
| And so when people, like, the poor souls go on the internet and they're trying to figure out, like, wow, God, are carbs bad for me or not? | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's like, well... | ||
| We're fighting over stuff that's not important and we're missing the message because people want real answers and you're not helping them. | ||
| Give it to them in a way... | ||
| I don't care if it makes you look right on the internet. | ||
| We need to come together and say, oh, okay, well, here's good, here's bad about it, here are the pros and cons, etc. | ||
| Now, here's the information for you folks. | ||
| And it doesn't matter whose book it is or who wrote it. | ||
| Like, that's not the important part. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, and, you know, trust me, try to be my students. | ||
| They get irritated as shit when I do this to them. | ||
| But it's probably a good thing. | ||
| But when a fighter, in particular, is thinking about their career, they sort of exist in these six-week to eight-week lifespans. | ||
| Like, their whole life. | ||
| Unfortunately. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or fortunately, when it works out well. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That they go through these ruthless training camps, and to have any variability, to have any unknown, to have any... | ||
| So this is... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you bring up a good point. | ||
| This is not the kind of conversation I would have with a fighter. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Not during, not especially 10 weeks out from a fight. | ||
| Overload their brain with possibility. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Right. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It is very clear, like, what do you do? | ||
| What do you like to do? | ||
| What do you hate to do? | ||
| Right. | ||
| What have you done before? | ||
| What's worked well? | ||
| Et cetera. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, I have an analogy called the cook, the baker, and the chef. | ||
| I'll give you the very quick story of it. | ||
| You can listen to the whole episode on my podcast if you want. | ||
| What's the podcast called? | ||
| The Body of Knowledge. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, I like the- It's on iTunes, all that stuff? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| All that stuff. | ||
| Bodyknowledge.com. | ||
| It's actually, not to talk about that too much, but it's only nine episodes. | ||
| It's not like an on-running podcast. | ||
| It's like Radiolab, Dan Carlin, but for physiology, strength and conditioning. | ||
| Not to that extent, but you get that. | ||
| I like to look at people as either, the easy one is either a baker or a cook. | ||
| Right, so do you know what the difference between baking and cooking is? | ||
| No. | ||
| Cool, most people don't. | ||
| Baking is chemistry, basically. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Which would you like? | ||
| Man, I don't know. | ||
| What should I like? | ||
| It's not a should, it's a personal preference. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So some people would cook. | ||
| Just wants ideas. | ||
| Give me the concepts, like one or two things to work through. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| I get anxiety with all those rules, all that information. | ||
| I can't implement it. | ||
| It's too complicated. | ||
| I don't have that much time, etc. | ||
| I call those people cooks. | ||
| Other people get anxiety, like my wife Natasha, when I don't give her exact numbers. | ||
| She's like, well, is it six grams, or is it eight almonds, or is it nine almonds? | ||
| Like, what is it? | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Half a cup of this, a tablespoon of that. | ||
| Even if that system isn't perfect. | ||
| What about a chef? | ||
| So a chef is someone who knows the chemistry of baking, but has the years of experience of mixing it in different ways. | ||
| Now you can go ahead and break those rules. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Chefs break cooking rules all the time. | ||
| Baking rules. | ||
| So a chef is like Anderson Silva. | ||
| Well, of fighting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But a chef would be maybe where you're at in your nutrition where you go, you know what? | ||
| Like, I can do that. | ||
| I could follow a very specific diet, but I know the concept and I know these rules. | ||
| Let me experiment here. | ||
| And you have room to maneuver. | ||
| The problem is most people want to jump in and be chefs. | ||
| People want to fight like Anderson Silva their first day and get overwhelmed. | ||
| I see what you're saying. | ||
| So get a detailed understanding about how your body functions under very specific protocols and then start fucking around with it. | ||
| Or the opposite. | ||
| Start off with a cook approach, which is say, let me give you one or two concepts this week. | ||
| I want you to eat one fresh green every day, and I want you to make sure you have protein every time you eat. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| It's my only rule. | ||
| Okay, next week we add a rule, maybe. | ||
| We had another concept. | ||
| And as you get better and you get more confidence and you get more comfortable, you can go, okay, well, how much protein exactly? | ||
| Let's just try 100 grams. | ||
| All right, well, let's try 150. And we've slowly pushed you. | ||
| But generally being a baker, all those rules, weighing everything, generally that's not sustainable for most people. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| Now, do you coach them as far as their diet goes? | ||
| Do you actually tell them what they should and shouldn't eat? | ||
| Depends on if they're a cook or a baker. | ||
| So, a cook, I do not. | ||
| I tell them basic concepts. | ||
| So I talk to them what's going to be helpful for them. | ||
| They go, what do you think I should do? | ||
| Should I add more carbs? | ||
| Here's what I'm feeling. | ||
| I'll go, where are we at? | ||
| Here's our diet. | ||
| Yeah, let's add more carbs. | ||
| How should I do it? | ||
| This or this? | ||
| This one. | ||
| Do you generally tell people to avoid any specific foods? | ||
| Are there any things that interrupt training or get into the way? | ||
| Outside of the obvious, no. | ||
| I mean the basics, candy, pizza. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Not really. | ||
| Unless we have some very specific history with them that, hey, remember, you don't react well when this happens. | ||
| But generally... | ||
| I don't. | ||
| And then when you say like protein, do you specify fish or chicken or meat? | ||
| If it's a cook? | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| If it's a baker, absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And whether it's important that I chose fish or chicken almost doesn't matter as much as... | ||
| Telling them. | ||
| That the fact that they... | ||
| Oh, he's got it dialed for me. | ||
| Great. | ||
| I got a system. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You have eight ounces of halibut. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Bam. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because the vast majority of the ones I work with are already pretty good with their nutrition. | ||
| And it's really more concepts. | ||
| Some of them just want the stress relief, telling them what to eat. | ||
| And they want someone to come in, hey, do you know anyone that will come in and food prep, meal prep for me? | ||
| And yeah, okay, we can do that. | ||
| But some of them like it. | ||
| Some of it's their de-stress. | ||
| Some of them like that control. | ||
| So I try to help them. | ||
| Again, it's not about me. | ||
| I don't care if my system worked. | ||
| I don't have a system. | ||
| My system is, what do you want to do? | ||
| How can I help you and your team? | ||
| What can we do? | ||
| That's the approach. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Wow, God, that seems so... | ||
| There's so many variables, and it's so complex. | ||
| Yeah, which is why I get so irritated. | ||
| You're teasing me earlier about getting all fired up about it. | ||
| I can understand. | ||
| But I appreciate this intellectual honesty about these variables and about how there is not one approach. | ||
| Because, again, there's so many dickheads out there that are teaching their method, in air quotes. | ||
| So here we go. | ||
| Let's take those dickheads, right? | ||
| If you're a baker... | ||
| Landing on one of those systems is going to be fantastic for you. | ||
| And you're going to five-star review them, and you're going to tweet it out to everybody, because you're like, this is great. | ||
| Because you're a baker. | ||
| And you needed a 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? | ||
| Like, I'm so confused. | ||
| That's not the right question. | ||
| I think what irritates a lot of people is that some people are finding... | ||
| Like, this insecurity that people have, and they're exploiting it by telling them exactly what they think is right. | ||
| It's human nature, right? | ||
| We want the next solution. | ||
| We want all this stuff. | ||
| We want it all dialed into one. | ||
| I call it fallacy of unicorn. | ||
| Like, I'm just going to keep searching because there's this one thing and if I fix that one thing, everything else will line up. | ||
| It doesn't work like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, what about vegetables? | ||
| Like, do you specify the type of vegetables you like? | ||
| Do you prefer a dark, leafy, green vegetable? | ||
| General statement, the more color, the more texture, the better. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And like you said actually earlier, it's the variety that matters with these folks as sustainable. | ||
| Now, having said that, here's what I'll do. | ||
| Outside of camp, these are the conversations we're having. | ||
| I want as many different vegetables as you possibly can. | ||
| Different colors, different countries, different seasons. | ||
| All this stuff, right? | ||
| Let's cook them sometimes. | ||
| Let's steam them. | ||
| Let's eat them fresh. | ||
| Let's eat them raw. | ||
| There's pros and cons to all this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mix it up. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| Oh, now you've got to fight in four weeks and we're 25 pounds overweight? | ||
| Sometimes I will take those options away because it's easy then to control numbers. | ||
| If I say, okay, here's the approach. | ||
| You're going to have A, B, and C at these three meals every day. | ||
| Every other day will rotate. | ||
| Then I've just removed a bunch of variables from there, and they can just refocus and go, okay, boom. | ||
| And we can watch the weight. | ||
| We're down half a pound. | ||
| We're down half a pound, down a quarter pound. | ||
| We're great. | ||
| Let's maybe exchange out kale for spinach this time or something. | ||
| But the hard part about extreme variability is lack of control. | ||
| And so sometimes if you're like, well, I'm eating all everything you're telling me. | ||
| I'm eating a bunch of different stuff and I'm not losing weight. | ||
| Well, maybe they don't understand. | ||
| Yeah, but this type of vegetable has a lot more calories than this type of vegetable. | ||
| So we're getting really high up in your numbers. | ||
| Or when you eat this, the way you prep it, the way you like it is calorically dense. | ||
| So I will reduce... | ||
| I know. | ||
| What about water? | ||
| Now, I've always wanted to ask somebody this. | ||
| I hope you know the answer. | ||
| There's all these ways to treat water, alkaline water. | ||
| Nonsense. | ||
| Bullshit, right? | ||
| Mostly. | ||
| Yeah, I would assume so. | ||
| Yeah, we actually did a study on that. | ||
| Six weeks, alkaline. | ||
| What does it mean? | ||
| Like, what the fuck is alkaline water? | ||
| It's pH, right? | ||
| So it's the opposite of acid. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Alkaline's the base. | ||
| But I mean, how do they make the water that way? | ||
| Like, what are they doing to it? | ||
| Oh, so generally water comes probably a little bit acidic, especially our tap water. | ||
| And so I would imagine they just do some sort of combination of salt or desalting. | ||
| Pretty easy, chemistry-wise. | ||
| So they get it a little bit technically. | ||
| So just adding a little salt to your water. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, I would imagine. | ||
| They were not even close to alkaline. | ||
| Because you also have, like, remember, it's going to change when it sits on the shelf. | ||
| Right. | ||
| When it's exposed to sunlight, all that crap. | ||
| I call it holy water. | ||
| Yeah, it's kind of silly. | ||
| I mean, I always feel like, oh yeah, that's the blessed water. | ||
| Like, come on, man, it's fucking water. | ||
| I mean, dude, look, I'm open. | ||
| If studies came out and we kept doing it, we're like, oh shit, there's something here. | ||
| But there's no studies currently. | ||
| That's happened before. | ||
| With things I've been like, that's nonsense, that's stupid. | ||
| I mean, a bunch of things. | ||
| The training mask. | ||
| The training masks, yeah? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Is it good? | ||
| Well, it's not good or bad. | ||
| Depends on what you use it for. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I need an answer. | ||
| I'll give you an answer. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, what I like to do is give examples of when good, when bad. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And this is Brian McKenzie. | ||
| I keep bringing him up, but he taught me this lesson. | ||
| This is a great lesson in humility. | ||
| So, if you don't know him, he was really disruptive in the running community, in the movement. | ||
| He came up Kelly Starrett. | ||
| They came up together. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So I wasn't interested in him. | ||
| People kept getting at me like, hey, go look at his stuff. | ||
| And I'm like, oh, he's a CrossFit coach. | ||
| Out. | ||
| Like, not interested. | ||
| You don't like CrossFit coaches? | ||
| No, I have nothing against that. | ||
| But at the time, I was like, what does CrossFit coach know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, okay. | |
| Again, arrogance on my part, mistake. | ||
| And second, I'm like, you're a running coach. | ||
| Like, I'm doubling uninterested. | ||
| Again, this is me highlighting my mistakes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| And so I just didn't give him the time of day because I'm like, training mask doesn't work, elevation, etc., etc., etc. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Oh, that's not how you were using it. | ||
| And what's the benefit of breathing through your diaphragm with a mask on? | ||
| It's not the mask that's important. | ||
| It's the fact that it would use you. | ||
| It's a quick way to identify if you're breathing this. | ||
| So you figure it out. | ||
| It's like a weight belt. | ||
| Boss Rutten has some sort of a breathing device. | ||
| And he was telling me about some studies that they did with it. | ||
| That was me. | ||
| Was it you? | ||
| That was mine. | ||
| Oh, beautiful. | ||
| My lab. | ||
| Well, what he was saying is that what makes his better is that it's easy to breathe out, the valve opens, so you can exhale really good. | ||
| Dump your carbon dioxide. | ||
| Whereas other ones that have just smaller holes are not as good. | ||
| So we did that study. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Turns out it does. | ||
| But here's a good example. | ||
| So his device restricts airflow in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But you can change the setting. | ||
| So it can be a lot of restriction or a little bit of restriction. | ||
| Yeah, he has like filters that you put on it. | ||
| There it is right there. | ||
| Boss Rootin. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The O2 Trainer. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So all those little valves on the left and right hand side, they're thick. | ||
| They increase airflow or decrease airflow. | ||
| So what we did is we had people come in four times and they either got the high restriction, low restriction, medium restriction or no restriction. | ||
| And what we saw is in every person under one of those, sorry, let me back up. | ||
| They came in and either they did some breathing drills like blowing it out, inhaling as hard as they can, blowing it out. | ||
| And they did that 30 times. | ||
| And then they did basically a V2 max test. | ||
| So they ran into exhaustion, which took them 5 to 8 minutes kind of thing. | ||
| So we want to see, like, I was interested in performance. | ||
| Like, does this actually make me perform better? | ||
| And so they either got a lot of restriction, a little restriction, medium or none. | ||
| Every single person got substantially better, like 20 to 30% better, under one of the conditions. | ||
| But they also got worse under one of the conditions as well. | ||
| So what that told us was this. | ||
| If, for example, you went under the high restriction, so you're like... | ||
| And you can't get any air in. | ||
| It actually fatigued your intercostals, which are the muscles between your ribs that open up your ribs that allow airflow in. | ||
| The diaphragm in those got fatigued. | ||
| So when you did your performance, you got slower because you were already gassed. | ||
| But if you had really strong intercostals... | ||
| The lower, so the real open valve, wasn't enough resistance to actually cause those muscles to warm up. | ||
| So that didn't help your performance. | ||
| So what we found is, my point here basically is the individualization of the approach here is really, really important. | ||
| So there's something there for all of us, but you're going to have to titrate out. | ||
| You might need heavy, you might need light, you might need middle, and one of those situations might actually make it worse for you. | ||
| So the individual variability is the important point there. | ||
| How would you figure out which one you needed? | ||
| A performance test. | ||
| And what kind of performance test would you use? | ||
| You could do anything. | ||
| You could say, I'm going to run a mile and a half and record my time. | ||
| And put that thing in your mouth as you're running or after? | ||
| As your warm-up. | ||
| As your warm-up. | ||
| Yeah, so you sit there, you put it in your mouth, and you do... | ||
| So you only use it to do drills. | ||
| You don't necessarily use it to actually work out. | ||
| The vast majority of the time, that's what I recommend. | ||
| You could do it in your workout, but it would be for different reasons. | ||
| So when you do it, what would you recommend doing? | ||
| Like, say... | ||
| Say if I got an O2 trainer, I put it in, like what kind of workouts am I doing with this thing in my mouth? | ||
| Or breathing exercises? | ||
| Again, you're going to hate this. | ||
| Probably some of your fans are getting irritated by now, but it depends on the goal of the workout. | ||
| God damn it! | ||
| So, if the goal of the workout is to get the best score possible, then you do probably 30 or 40 breaths with the optimal resistance. | ||
| You feel great. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But if the point of the workout is to actually improve... | ||
| The strength of the diaphragm. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bingo. | |
| Right. | ||
| Then you put yourself in suboptimal positions. | ||
| It's right back to what I said at the beginning. | ||
| Adapting or optimizing. | ||
| Those are different things. | ||
| So you're talking about the muscles in between the ribs. | ||
| Can you actually strengthen those to the point where, I mean, that's a huge issue with guys getting injured. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| You can strengthen those with that O2 training thing? | ||
| That's one mechanism, but you can do it a bunch of different ways. | ||
| We have done... | ||
| You've had Wim Hof on, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, sure. | |
| 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. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And he has it all dialed in. | ||
| I go to a cryo chamber, a cryotherapy place, where you put a surgical mask on, earmuffs, and your whole body's immersed. | ||
| It's not just below the neck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Have you seen those? | ||
| And when I use the Wim Hof breathing method, it's almost like somebody made it 50 degrees warmer. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| It's way easier. | ||
| I just got back from Montauk. | ||
| I spent three days jumping in ice baths the whole time out there. | ||
| But we actually have multiple protocols, so that's more akin to what some would call the breath of fire. | ||
| Is this when you were with Dennis? | ||
| Yeah, we were at an event out there with Laird Hamilton and those folks. | ||
| Laird and Gabby and Brian, Gabby Reese and Laird Hamilton started a company. | ||
| Called XPT that kind of puts a lot of this lifestyle stuff into practice. | ||
| And so they put on these live events. | ||
| They also sent me some of their new superfood stuff that they add to coffee, the creamer stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's really good. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a little espresso-based powder plus a non-dairy creamer. | ||
| Super healthy stuff, too. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| It's fantastic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I've been working with that company for a couple of years since they got started. | ||
| But we go out there and we do these things. | ||
| And so we can say, okay... | ||
| We'll get you through the Breath of Fire protocol, and you'll feel like, wow, you get hot, you get warmed up. | ||
| There's other ways we can do it that'll bring you back down where you're like, yeah, I'm going to take a nap. | ||
| There's euphoria ones where you can get like, wow, I feel like I'm on psychedelics right now. | ||
| I'm super high. | ||
| Like holotropic breathing. | ||
| Bunch of apnea stuff, pranayama stuff. | ||
| All these things can have different outcomes depending on what you're looking for. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| So, Brian has got this system developed now where, like, that's what he did with John. | ||
| The first one he did, it was like 10 o'clock at night, and he's like, alright, let me relax you and kind of bring you down. | ||
| He's like, oh, this is amazing. | ||
| But then he's like, I actually got to go train right now. | ||
| He's like, can you get me back up? | ||
| It's like, all right. | ||
| Let's go back the other way. | ||
| Let's put him back up. | ||
| So is there any benefit to using those breathing techniques versus an O2 trainer? | ||
| Or is it different situations? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's situation-based. | ||
| There's things I like. | ||
| So you mentioned what Boss says. | ||
| The opening valve at the end of the O2 trainer allows you to dump out carbon dioxide. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The training mask, for example, wouldn't. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it's not right or wrong. | ||
| 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? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So carbon dioxide is what actually makes you feel like you want to breathe. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's not lack of oxygen. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Deal with it mentally? | ||
| Psychologically? | ||
| As well as physiologically. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| There's going to be adaptations. | ||
| So because of the fact that your body has more carbon dioxide in the system, your body adapts to process that carbon dioxide more efficiently? | ||
| 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 this is why when you... | ||
| Only when you breathe through your nose? | ||
| Not only, but especially when you breathe through your nose. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| Why does your body produce more nitric oxide when you breathe through your nose? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's weird because you would think that just breathing... | ||
| Wim Hof, I was asking him, like, breathe through the nose or breathe through the nose? | ||
| Just breathe! | ||
| Just breathe! | ||
| Yeah, he always says, like, any hole, I don't care. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, so, again, Wim's not wrong or anything like that, but Wim's style is great, but there's many styles is the point, I guess. | ||
| Like, he's great. | ||
| We've done some science stuff together, but... | ||
| How do you feel about saunas? | ||
| Same thing. | ||
| Amazing benefits there. | ||
| Potential, but... | ||
| There's no free passes in physiology. | ||
| So when you get something, you're probably coming at a compromise of something else. | ||
| What would the compromise be when you do a sauna? | ||
| Don't know. | ||
| We just don't have enough evidence on this stuff. | ||
| We know we focused on the heat shock proteins. | ||
| That's like everyone knows about those by now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The ability to deal with uncomfort and fatigue. | ||
| There's a lot of stuff. | ||
| The difficulty is when you run a scientific study, you get one or two or three variables. | ||
| You don't get a thousand. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There has to be consequences to it. | ||
| It just depends on implication. | ||
| But there's got to be some sort of benefits in terms of recovery, right? | ||
| So do you think that someone should do maybe like cryo one day, sauna the next? | ||
| Should they do them in the same day? | ||
| So for example, a fighter in camp, I generally don't go out of my way to recommend sauna because they already get really hot in training. | ||
| You're grappling, especially if they're doing ghee stuff. | ||
| They're getting heat shock protein. | ||
| I don't need to go out of my way. | ||
| Hot yoga in particular, right? | ||
| There's a study they're doing right now at Harvard, apparently. | ||
| Somebody was telling me about it the other day, where they're concentrating on hot yoga and the benefits of hot yoga and heat shock proteins. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure they're going to find a lot. | ||
| That's pretty... | ||
| I mean, that ship's sailed a little bit. | ||
| Like, we're confident something... | ||
| There's a lot of detail to work out, but something's going on there. | ||
| Probably something similar to sauna. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I generally say for people... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Emmanuel Stewart used to run the Kronk Gym. | ||
| He used to crank the temperature up in the gym over 100 degrees. | ||
| That was his thing. | ||
| He wanted guys to box in essentially a hot yoga room. | ||
| Well, there's a couple of things to that. | ||
| I've done a lot of that in my life and I used to hate it. | ||
| We used to just fight for the door, like, wait for the round to go over. | ||
| Wrestling. | ||
| Yeah, wrestling practice. | ||
| We used to have it really hot. | ||
| We used to do MMA with it all the time. | ||
| And, like, the problem was it was scary because the floor is water. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And you're like, I'm not kicking. | ||
| Like, you're terrified. | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| It was awful. | ||
| I hated it. | ||
| That's real bad for kicking. | ||
| I skip those practices a lot, Joe. | ||
| But, so, example... | ||
| I don't think that's particularly needed, with the exception. | ||
| One time when Pat Cummins fought in Brazil, it was like 110 outside, and it was 80% humidity or something. | ||
| Which fight was that? | ||
| It was... | ||
| Rafael Feijão? | ||
| Feijão. | ||
| Yeah, I remember that fight. | ||
| It was outdoors, I think? | ||
| No, it was indoors, but everything was open. | ||
| Oh, that's what it was. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it was super, super hot. | ||
| Now, we didn't train for that or anticipate that. | ||
| But you could see if you knew you were fighting at a venue like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like what they used to do in Bodog in Costa Rica. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| They would fight on the beach. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, my God. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Just whored outside. | ||
| So you could see, like, well, in that situation, maybe it's needed. | ||
| But you're fighting in, you know, Vegas or something, indoors. | ||
| And maybe you don't need it for that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But that doesn't mean you couldn't implement it once or twice. | ||
| I wouldn't go my way to do it, though. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it wouldn't be a daily thing. | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, but your pace for your 5 is way different than your pace for your 10. So you have to be careful there. | ||
| A lot of questions, man. | ||
| Physiology, dude. | ||
| That is part of the problem, right? | ||
| That there are so many variables, there are so many questions, that there is no real definitive protocol to follow. | ||
| No. | ||
| There's a bunch of different ones. | ||
| The pursuit, the way I always say it is, the truth is mostly a lack of perspective. | ||
| So when you think that you are on some unbreakable truth, it's because you haven't looked at it from a big enough perspective. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| For the most part. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And there's some... | ||
| We'll put it this way. | ||
| In biological truth, that's almost always true. | ||
| In physics truth, that's a lot less true. | ||
| Like, we're pretty sure gravity's real. | ||
| Like, we're pretty sure. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And we can mechanically prove... | ||
| Pretty sure water's good for you. | ||
| Pretty sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| No, quantum mechanics, physics, those get kind of weird, right? | ||
| But for the most part, that is true. | ||
| But science, in terms of biological or medical, is a lot less true. | ||
| I mean, how many times do we have to see that, where it's like, this is true, this is true for 50 years. | ||
| Oops, it's not. | ||
| Is this all fun for you? | ||
| 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. | ||
| I don't think stress is even close. | ||
| It's, I would say, 99% fun. | ||
| It's stress for me in terms of it would break my heart if I gave someone the wrong advice and it ruined their career. | ||
| That would be the stress. | ||
| Stress in terms of being right or saying a bunch of some stuff and being proof. | ||
| I don't care about that at all. | ||
| Yeah, that is an issue with a lot of trainers, right? | ||
| Where they're giving bad advice and you see it play out in a fight. | ||
| I mean, one of the reasons I... I used to do a lot of professional athletes in other sports, work with other ones. | ||
| I gave that almost up entirely. | ||
| I've done some actors and things like that, but I generally stay away from that, even though the money is far, far higher for me in those things. | ||
| But I did it because these MMA folks, I have a real passion for someone who's going to put all that on the line. | ||
| And they're going to risk everything. | ||
| And they're going to go out there. | ||
| And that is more exciting to me. | ||
| And I'm like, that's a really fun investment to me. | ||
| And it's worth me investing my emotion. | ||
| I mean, when Helen won a gold in Rio, I just lost it. | ||
| Emotionally, I was gone for weeks. | ||
| Just exhausted. | ||
| Because I invested so much into that. | ||
| I don't want to do that for somebody so they can make an extra million. | ||
| Right. | ||
| On top of their 30 million. | ||
| Like, it doesn't motivate me that much. | ||
| So I like working with these folks. | ||
| And so because of that, like, it breaks my heart if you're like, man, you gave up everything for this kind of a living. | ||
| And the best outcome for you was that you made 20k instead of 10k. | ||
| And then I lost that for you because I gave you really bad rehydration advice or something. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's a stress for me. | ||
| But the rest of the stuff, man, like... | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| It's invigorating for me to continue to be like, well, we answered that, but now we don't know this or this. | ||
| It's continual progress. | ||
| I take Karl Popper's stance on this one in terms of science is not about identifying truth. | ||
| It's reducing uncertainty. | ||
| Hmm, that's a good way to put it. | ||
| That's all it is, right? | ||
| I wish I could take credit for it. | ||
| It's a good way to put it. | ||
| So, we just, we get closer, and we know more, okay, we know this is now, this is now, but we're still... | ||
| Do you anticipate a day when we do, like, when it comes to biomechanics or physiology? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Muscle and strength, like the magazine. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You may recognize all this stuff. | ||
| But basically, there was a show. | ||
| And they said, bring in these weightlifters. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So they're like, well, I don't know. | ||
| Look at this study. | ||
| Look at this study. | ||
| Well, there used to be an issue with boxing, right? | ||
| They used to always say boxers should never strength train until Evander Holyfield came along with Mackie Shillstone. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And won the title as a heavyweight. | ||
| I just saw Evander yesterday. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| At the airport. | ||
| He looks great. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Huge. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| Which I don't blame him. | ||
| No, he looked fantastic. | ||
| I just signed a buddy of mine. | ||
| Do you know he's managing fighters now or something? | ||
| Is he? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Hopefully not financially. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| And Van just like, buy the biggest house that exists. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Remember he had that fucking stupendous mansion in Atlanta? | ||
| It was like 150 rooms or something like that. | ||
| Dude, you put that much money in front of people in a sport like that. | ||
| Especially when you're balling. | ||
| When you're balling and other people are balling and you're trying to ball harder, you gotta do what you gotta do. | ||
| I don't think MMA's ever caught up to that in terms of... | ||
| Financially? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's getting close with Conor McGregor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| But honestly, his biggest windfall right now is a boxing match, so who knows? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Um, the... | ||
| The thing about Evander that's weird is that he never got out of shape. | ||
| He looked fantastic. | ||
| Yeah, he's still fit. | ||
| He's got to be 50+. | ||
| He's one of the rare guys, and I think he had a fight as recently as a year ago. | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| We'll find out when Evander Holyfield's last fight was. | ||
| I really want to say he had a fight like a year ago. | ||
| Oh, that's terrifying. | ||
| Yeah, but he's okay. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| He's not like... | ||
| What's this dude? | ||
| Just retired or just got smashed really bad. | ||
| Hopkins. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Bernard. | ||
| That guy's amazing. | ||
| Yeah, that was a freak incident, man. | ||
| That's one of the things about, like, why don't they have paths around the ring in case guys fall through the ropes? | ||
| Like, I can't imagine that they didn't... | ||
| They've seen that happen before. | ||
| Guys are getting fucked up through that before. | ||
| That's all fight style, though, too, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, but that was like a fake charity boxing match. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| What does it say, though, in terms of when is his last fight? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's what popped up when I hit last fight. | |
| Yeah, but that's not real. | ||
| I think you're lying, Joe. | ||
| No, just pull up his record. | ||
| His Wikipedia record. | ||
| I'm sure there's a Wikipedia on Evander Holyfield. | ||
| Brian Nielsen. | ||
| This is 2011. Oh, okay. | ||
| So six years ago. | ||
| Yeah, that's pretty recently in consideration. | ||
| Oh, you know what it was? | ||
| I believe he was planning a comeback a few years ago, and he was having a really hard time getting licensed. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| I think that's what it was. | ||
| I would still say, if you would have asked me, I would have said 12 years ago. | ||
| I would have guessed way longer than that. | ||
| Well, how old is he now? | ||
| 60? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| No, he's not 62. He was born in 62. Oh, okay. | ||
| So 55? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So he essentially had his last fight when he was like, what, 48, 49? | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Makes sense. | ||
| That's the style he's... | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| I don't really remember his style that much. | ||
| He didn't take a lot of shots. | ||
| Did he take a lot of shots? | ||
| Oh, hell yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Bruiser? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, he took some... | ||
| He just had a tremendous chin. | ||
| He's just an unbelievably tough guy. | ||
| And unbelievably fit. | ||
| That was the thing about Holyfield, was that unbelievably fit, unbelievably game. | ||
| When he beat Mike Tyson in the first fight, I remember... | ||
| You know Kevin James. | ||
| Kevin was actually over at my house. | ||
| We were watching it together. | ||
| We were jumping around screaming like a bunch of schoolgirls. | ||
| Couldn't believe it. | ||
| It was insane. | ||
| Because nobody saw that coming. | ||
| I was like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah, that was amazing. | ||
| Yeah, he had a spectacular career, though. | ||
| Oh, he certainly did, yeah. | ||
| I hope he still got it together upstairs. | ||
| Like, that's just a tough one. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It certainly is. | ||
| Yeah, that has got to be weird. | ||
| I wonder what... | ||
| Do you ever have that conversation with a fighter? | ||
| I do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah? | |
| It's not my role, so I don't bring it up at all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But if they ask me on, like, a friendly advice thing, and we'll be very careful with names here... | ||
| But I generally tell them all to retire. | ||
| Like, regardless. | ||
| My approach is, no, this is a... | ||
| The risk is not worth the payout in the UFC. It's just not. | ||
| Like, there is the occasional Conor, but this is the anomaly that proves the rule, actually. | ||
| So my advice to all of them is, it's not a good investment. | ||
| Like, it is not worth the risk. | ||
| Because even if you get the win bonus and the fight of the night... | ||
| One fight like that is potentially years. | ||
| And how much income could you make in those 10 years of working? | ||
| Probably more than that $100K. Well, in terms of income, for sure. | ||
| But for a lot of them, it's not really what they're doing it for. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not even close. | |
| They're doing it for glory. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I'm taking it from a logical perspective. | ||
| I'm not telling you what to do. | ||
| I'm saying, though, like, me as your friend, I would love you to never fight because it's great. | ||
| But having said that, you do that, so let me help you as much as I can to get there. | ||
| But, I mean, you can kind of tell, too. | ||
| Like, if you're... | ||
| If you're not in that X factor, charisma-wise and stuff, you're never going to make that real life-changing money. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We're just talking about money, though. | ||
| In terms of damage, do you notice in terms of physical performance when you're seeing an athlete move around? | ||
| I haven't gotten anybody like that. | ||
| But if you had someone come to you and say, hey, I'm thinking about when I get out. | ||
| I'm not exactly sure when. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| Do you see a deterioration in physical skills from, like, punishment? | ||
| I don't know if I could really say that. | ||
| But that's just because I don't... | ||
| I don't have enough exposure to enough of those folks to make a qualified comment on that. | ||
| Over long periods of time? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I would need dozens and dozens of guys over years to really fairly... | ||
| What's the longest you've ever worked with a guy? | ||
| Five, six years probably. | ||
| Yeah, probably six years. | ||
| That's a lot of time. | ||
| It is. | ||
| And it's not like... | ||
| Some of them, it's not every single... | ||
| I'm not talking to them every day. | ||
| And sometimes it's like once a camp. | ||
| Generally, what my goal is, is to teach them how to think as much through the stuff as they can. | ||
| And so ideally they don't need me after more than a couple of camps other than a few check-ins. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I want to come to the lab, get this tested. | ||
| I got a hunch about this. | ||
| Or we did this type of training for six weeks. | ||
| We think we are addressing this problem. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, that's got to be really, as a scientist, got to be really an interesting opportunity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We had one fighter who was pretty crazy because he was a wrestler and a very, very... | ||
| He wins through attrition. | ||
| Like, that's his style. | ||
| He's not like a knockout artist or anything like that. | ||
| And he was almost 70, 75% fast twitch. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then we also looked at this other thing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You've heard of muscle memory? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So this is what's doing muscle memory. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| I always wondered if that was real. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, that makes sense. | ||
| Okay, so there's an actual scientific reason for muscle memory. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| Well, right. | ||
| The mononucleide would allow for the muscles to get bigger. | ||
| Yeah, so a little bit inverse, but basically the same thing. | ||
| Dude, this was really fascinating. | ||
| Anything else to add before we get out of here? | ||
| The book, man. | ||
| I got a book out on all this stuff called Unplugged. | ||
| Evolving from technology to upgrade your fitness, performance, and consciousness. | ||
| Is it on Amazon? | ||
| All that stuff, yeah. | ||
| Is there an audiobook available? | ||
| There is, but I'm going to tell you... | ||
| No, sorry. | ||
| There's a Kindle, but I would highly recommend you don't get it. | ||
| Don't get the Kindle? | ||
| No. | ||
| You mean that's the digital version? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Get the hard copy. | ||
| Why? | ||
| 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. | ||
| They don't have that in Kindle with photographs? | ||
| No, it's not even close. | ||
| It's all black and white. | ||
| The texture of the paper is different. | ||
| What if you have one of those Kindle HDs? | ||
| The ones that are digital and... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Color? | |
| Maybe. | ||
| Maybe? | ||
| Yeah, maybe that would be good. | ||
| That's what you're saying though. | ||
| But you recommend the hard copy. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I don't really care. | ||
| But for the experience of it? | ||
| Yeah, it's still cheap. | ||
| It's not expensive at all. | ||
| What's the physiological benefit of getting back to nature? | ||
| Oh, we have so much. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| It's pretty incredible in terms of Everything from visualization, or sorry, eyesight. | ||
| Did you listen to that amazing podcast? | ||
| Eyesight? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Radiolab did one on the color blue. | ||
| I didn't hear that one. | ||
| What's it called? | ||
| This is a teaser. | ||
| I'm not going to tell you the whole story. | ||
| What's it called? | ||
| The episode? | ||
| I don't know the episode name. | ||
| We'll find it. | ||
| If you Google the Radiolab episode on the color blue. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But basically, we as humans didn't really recognize the color blue until the Bible. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So we had the cones, like the physiology didn't change, but we didn't have a word for the color blue until the Bible came along. | ||
| So if you look at anything past or prior to that, yeah, that's probably... | ||
| Why isn't the sky blue on Radiolet? | ||
| Yep, exactly. | ||
| 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 things like that are important. | ||
| So what are we paying attention to? | ||
| What are we being conscious of? | ||
| What are we perceiving? | ||
| What are we focusing on? | ||
| Has a direct influence on our physiology. | ||
| It's very adaptable to those things. | ||
| So how does that make going to nature? | ||
| 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. | ||
| All right, dude. | ||
| One more time. | ||
| What's the name of the book? | ||
| Unplugged. | ||
| Evolve from technology to upgrade your fitness, performance, and consciousness. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| Thanks, man. | ||
| I really enjoyed it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
My pleasure. | |
| It was a great conversation. | ||
| Really appreciate it. | ||
| Andy Galpin, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
See ya! |
Export Selection