Henry Cejudo and Eric Albarracin join Joe Rogan on Halloween, detailing Cejudo’s emotional UFC title win over Demetrius Johnson after a brutal first-round loss two years prior. His science-backed training—vector-based strength, velocity sensors, and cortisol-reducing recovery—replaced extreme weight cuts like 16-pound drops in two hours, inspired by Bernard Hopkins’ discipline. Cejudo’s resilience, from overcoming burns to fighting through a low ankle sprain, showcases how mental composure and data-driven methods now dominate elite MMA prep. The episode ends with Rogan thanking the guests, underscoring their impact on fans beyond just combat sports. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, I've been with him since 2004 and recently became his coach right before the first Demetrius Johnson fight, and I'm his head coach for MMA. And you're in disguise in case some other athletes try to swipe you.
Well, I mean, he is widely considered to be the best pound-for-pound fighter ever, and you're the first guy not only to beat him, but the first guy who, not just to beat him, but beat him in like 11 years, but the first guy to win an Olympic gold medal in wrestling and a UFC championship.
I mean, if he's not the greatest of all time, I think he is, but the argument is that he didn't face people as good as Jon Jones faced, and then Fedor and Anderson Silva are the other people that are in consideration for the greatest of all time.
I mean, it's just a subjective argument.
I mean, who knows who's right, but obviously you beat, without a doubt, one of the best ever.
They assume you see you fighting for the title, not once, but twice, that you've probably been doing MMA for a long-ass time.
But when you fought him for the first time, that's a very short amount of time to be fighting in MMA. Especially against a caliber athlete like Demetrius.
Yeah, it was there's a nerve that you have behind like the bone.
It's a per I think it's the perineal nerve P-E-R Yeah, and I got hit there so I put my foot to sleep Just like when Michael Chandler happened to him and Bellator same thing exactly stepping on it and it's just not working and And the reason why everybody kind of got scared,
I mean, because I was hurt, but I remember before the fight, I remember I saw my quarterman, like, kind of, before I fought Demetrius, I remember I saw him all nervous.
And I remember grabbing my quarterman and putting him right in front of me.
I remember telling him, I was like, hey guys, I've been here before.
Like, I was ranked 31st in the world.
I know, I became a world champion in wrestling.
Guys, I want you guys to have a little faith in me, but I'm going to ask you guys one thing, and I'm going to ask you guys to be composed.
I said the key to winning this fight is for me to be composed.
And then pretty much, six hours later, right before we walk on, they start playing my song.
I looked back at my corner, and I said, guys, the key to this fight, remember, is going to be composure.
So when Demetrius Johnson kicked me, I believed in my own philosophy.
I went back to, all right, my composure.
Because I was hurt, Joe.
He could have stopped me that first round.
I was forced to switch southpaw, which I never fight in southpaw.
You know, so now I'm kind of...
Me and Demetria Johnson are playing poker.
My whole philosophy and the key to this victory was the composure part.
And when he hit me, I really did.
I was like, oh my God, dude, not again, dude, not again.
I'm not going to last two minutes and 36 seconds, not again.
But again, the motivator was not to feel the pain to lose again.
Like it wasn't a desire to win.
I was like, I just don't want to feel that pain anymore.
As a competitor, as somebody that's on a mission, dude, that sacrifices life.
The spirit is that, you know, you've watched somebody become a world champion.
You want to be, hey, I want to be just like that guy.
Your confidence, your self-esteem, that's your spirit, and we also have a spirit of award.
That's like the manhood side of it.
And what happens when I got stopped with Demetrius Johnson, I almost felt like, and I've never gone through this, not even in wrestling in my life, like my spirit was shot.
And I had to kind of pick up my pieces to kind of start healing myself, like mentally.
And I feel like, and if you look at it, Joe, somebody like Roy Jones Jr., he got knocked out one time, and it became a domino effect.
But the thing is, there's a lot of factors involved in that loss because I think Roy was also coming off of the John Ruiz fight where he gained a lot of weight to get up to heavyweight and then he had to lose that weight to get down to light heavyweight again.
So he was lean at heavyweight and then all of a sudden he's dropping down to 175 pounds again.
And he just looked like shit.
He looked smooth.
It looked like his body was all sucked in.
And I just think it was a bad, bad weight cut.
And, you know, I think whatever he took to get himself up to 200 pounds, too, was probably out of his system.
And now his body was, you know, his hormones were probably all fucked up.
He just wasn't the same guy.
I mean, let's be real, right?
You don't just...
Grow to 200 pounds without some Mexican supplements.
You know what I'm saying?
It'll take a long fucking time for a 168 pound fighter to get up to 200 pounds.
It takes a long time.
If you want to really get up to 200 pounds, like an actual 200 pound body, not just like fill yourself up with water and fat No, to actually be 200 pounds the way he was, your body's got to say, hey man, we need to fucking grow.
We got resources that need to be allocated towards muscle.
We got to gain all this weight because we're lifting weights all the time.
We're doing things.
You have to do something to get your body that heavy.
So then all of a sudden to shut that shit off and say, all right, now we're getting down to 175 and you got to do it in a few months.
Neither do MMA fighters, particularly back in the day, which is really interesting about the approach that you guys took to this camp that you wanted to talk about, which is a very, very scientific approach towards your recovery, towards your training methods, towards everything.
I mean, you really had it dialed in as opposed to just trying to wing it, which for many, many years was how almost every fighter did it.
I remember as soon as that happened, I did remember the Michael Chandler fight, and I remember he went on a show and said exactly what happened.
So I told our other coroner, Santino DeFranco, when we get in, put ice on his knee, not his ankle, because it was the knee where it happened, because I watched that show.
And I remember watching it for that reason, to wonder why...
Yeah, reading biographies or watching stuff on YouTube.
Even watching other sports.
I'll watch Michael Johnson's at times.
Watching him win the 96 Olympics.
Things like that.
And watching people's celebrations and trying to embrace the feeling of what they're feeling, you know, because it becomes like an addiction, like a drug, like going through these feelings of like, dude, I accomplished what I set out to do.
There's been talks, but I don't think Ali, my manager, has really, truly actually sat down and talked with the UFC. I think everybody wants to do it, though.
Well, it's one of two things that's going to happen there, right?
It's either, I mean, now the DJ has gone to one.
Demetrius Johnson just left the UFC and went over to One FC. One FC, for people who have no idea what we're talking about, is a gigantic organization in Asia.
They are literally the equivalent to the UFC in Asia.
And although many people in America are not aware of them, they don't know who they are, they're a huge organization overseas.
Absolutely gigantic.
And they do a fantastic job.
They have real high-level fighters.
Ben Askren was their champion.
He was undefeated over there.
And he had, I think, at least one fight, maybe two fights left in his contract.
I forget how many.
And they made a deal.
And the deal was they take Mighty Mouse and we get Ben Askren.
And so that's where it's at right now.
I love it.
I love the idea of it.
I mean, I feel like Mighty Mouse...
You know, he loves the idea of starting new and a new organization and, you know, they're gonna pay that motherfucker.
And he also likes the mentality that that organization is operated with, which is respect for the martial arts.
They're not into this.
You know, what we saw with the Conor McGregor, Khabib Nurmagomedov fight, all the trash talking and all the stuff that you're seeing that is becoming more and more prevalent in the UFC, you don't see that at all at 1FC. And that's something that Mighty Mouse is very happy about.
Yeah, Ben Askren's one of those guys that he's very, he's a very confident, he's a very dangerous human being because he knows that, he's going to be very confident about it.
And I've always told people, I said, hey dude, maybe the best in the world is on the UFC, man.
There's some dude by the name of Ben Askren that will take you down.
We've been saying his praises for years.
Yeah.
People think Khabib's control is good up top.
You wait until you get a four-time NCAA finalist, two-time NCAA champ on top of you.
No, Ben Askren, I mean, there's a reason why he's undefeated, and he hasn't been hit in several fights.
He was detailing when the last time he got hit.
You know, I had him on the podcast because I wanted to let people know about him.
I mean, I've been a big fan of Ben Askren's from back when he was the Bellator champion, and if you watch his fights in Bellator against Koroskov and Lima...
Lima's a beast, man.
And he just dominated him.
Lima fucks people up, man.
Lima's a dangerous, dangerous cat.
And Ben Askren just, whoop, oh, you're on your back again.
Look at that.
You can't get up, and you're taking punches.
It's just a different caliber of wrestling.
And I've said it many, many times, and I'm sure you believe it as well.
It's the most important skill for MMA, is wrestling.
It dictates where the fight takes place.
If you want to stand up, the guy can take you down, Chuck Liddell style.
And if you want to go to the ground, you're the one who gets to dictate where the fight takes place.
If you're the superior wrestler, I mean, it's the best base for MMA. I really believe that.
So he just relies on, this is what I know, I do it better than anybody, and I'm going to control this, and you're going to know how I'm going to do it.
Well, they are going to open up eventually that 165-pound division, which is what Ben is shooting for.
Ben would like that division, and he said that if he had 165 and Tyron kept the welterweight title, that would be great for him.
I just don't see the UFC doing a 5-pound weight difference when all the other weight differences are so huge.
I feel like the smart move would be 10 pounds every spot.
35, 45, 55, 65, 75. Move 70 to 75. When the UFC had a light heavyweight division initially, the division was a 200-pound division.
When Tito Ortiz first won it, I believe, it was a 200-pound division.
And then they raised it up to 205. And they needed a 195 too, I really believe, and probably a 225. I think that would round it all out, which probably will all happen eventually.
Like, his wrestling is just, you see guys that are used to defending takedowns, and then they find themselves on their back, and you say, holy shit, man.
I think my whole philosophy at first when I got into MMA was kind of like in wrestling we would never get the same recovery.
I know it's stupid as stupid as heck but we would never get the recovery that a fighter gets.
So to me, it was like, dude, I can stretch this as long as I can, and I can suffer the day of wins, but I'm going to recover within 24, 28 hours sometimes.
So to me, I was looking at it just in an odd way, and it finally started catching up to me.
So you just had confidence in your body's ability to bounce back, even though you're putting it through an extraordinary amount of stress and losing massive amounts of weight really quickly.
You know, I had George Lockhart on, and he was explaining to me that a lot of people think that when you cut weight that, you know, like you're cutting out fat.
He's like, you're not cutting out fat, you're cutting out water.
And it actually helps to have more muscle.
Because muscle is mostly water.
So you're just draining out your muscles, then replenishing them.
You know, when he was explaining that to me, I was like, I never really thought about it that way.
That like a guy like a Yoel Romero who's very muscular can actually cut more weight.
I think he started using a lot of those neural stems, hyperbaric chambers, things of that matter, and just more scientific-based, just his whole training all around.
Right, but how, like say if you know you have a fight in July, when would you start preparing for that and when do you sit down and map everything out?
I think the first month leading up to the next eight weeks would be a lot of it would be technical and tactical, just working on those particular areas that we believe we're going to be in.
When a guy gets injured like that and you're still going through camp, how do you work around that injury?
You just say, okay, there's nothing squeezing, nothing where you're putting any strain in those tendons, nothing where you're doing anything with that hand that's going to re-injure it?
So what we really focus on, which a lot of companies aren't talking about, is the role of the gut and the mind in conjunction with your physical training.
So essentially what we do is we start off with a really comprehensive baseline assessment.
We want to run them through everything.
So the traditional...
Functional threshold powers, autonomic nervous system, DC brain potentials.
And really what you want to do is you want to put somebody on a normal curve.
We all want to be a little bit like DC. But basically it's an objective measurement of your central nervous system.
So you can actually, your central nervous system is basically the data aggregator, if you will.
So it has to take information from your metabolic systems, your autonomics, Kind of coordinate things like neuromuscular and metabolic efficiency.
That's kind of the data center, if you will.
So this is a measurement of potential, basically how much energy you have in the central nervous system to go coordinate neuromuscular and metabolic efficiencies, which is really what we focus on.
Specifically for DCs, it's going to be in millivolts.
And then you just compare that to normative ranges.
But most importantly, what it is is trending data over time.
This is an assessment that we would do on Henry every single morning.
It's a home test kit.
We really believe in just collecting as much data as possible and trending data.
That way, when you see a change, essentially you get predictability in terms of, you know, today's a no-go day because central nervous system is diminished.
We're just going to be going through the motions.
We're not going to make physiological adaptations and your inflammation is really high.
No-go because we're not going to go risk injury when we can't make adaptations.
So this is a measurement we would do every single morning where we can look at autonomic nervous system, which is basically things like recovery, sympathetic, parasympathetic balance, DC brain potentials, and metabolic systems.
We actually got it from the UFC Performance Institute.
Shout out to those guys, Clint, Bo, and Roman over there.
Set us up with this technology.
It's basically a chest strap that does heart rate variability, so time and frequency domain analysis.
And it does DC brain potential, so a little sticker right here on your forehead.
Basically four minutes, you just kind of relax and we collect pretty amazing data and it breaks it down into four different categories, what's called windows of trainability.
So it says today we should focus on strength and power or skill acquisition based on metabolic readiness, autonomic readiness and DC brain potentials.
So what is our body primed to go do today?
Because if you're not primed, your nervous system doesn't have the energy, you're just going to be going through the motions.
It almost takes a while to kind of adapt, but as I started recognizing my body change and how I felt in sparring and how I just felt recovered, I was like, God, this is crazy.
So would you do a baseline on this before you get started and then you as before camp get started and then when camp starts ramping up, then you start measuring all the various details?
So we do a comprehensive baseline assessment, including the Omega Wave, as well as six or eight hours of other testing, everything that you could think of under the sun.
And we put together basically columns of this is what you're suboptimal at, this is what you're average at, this is what you're really damn good at.
So basically what we want to do is exploit your functional strengths, it's what you're good at, but then we also want to focus on your functional deficiencies.
In a sport like MMA, we also sometimes have the advantage of looking at your opponent and making certain assumptions in terms of their weaknesses, their strengths.
Going against somebody like DJ, you don't really have that advantage.
So what we really needed to focus on is what Henry's really good at, his ground game.
You look, you know, we're doing nervous system assessments while he's on the ground.
His sparring partners, their stress systems are going like crazy.
He's calming down because this guy likes to be on the floor rolling around.
So we pinpoint these little strategic strengths and deficiencies, and then we target all of his nutrition, supplementation, A big thing that we focus on is nutrient timing, something that's not really talked about as well.
When you're talking about gut health and recovery, managing the hormones associated with exercise, you've got to be getting in the right nutrients in your energy, anabolic, and growth phases.
You know, we have our own supplement line right now.
Frankly, not because the world needed another supplement line.
It's not really what our goal was.
In sports like this, you have to be so careful what you put in these guys' body.
So we just went the route of going GMP certified.
WADA, USADA approved on everything we do.
Eventually, we want to try and work with a badass company because we don't want to be in the supplement game.
For us, it was just quality control.
So, being a nervous system based company, obviously we're doing things like Omega-3, DHAs, BCAAs, you know, to maintain, put on a little bit of muscle.
We do a lot of, big one I believe is the Generation UCAN, the Superstarch.
Very good without a big glycemic, you know, big insulin response, but very good at replenishing your glycogen stores following to minimize cortisol and inflammatory responses and things like that.
So, every day it's a little bit different, but yeah, we ended up going with our own line and One of the biggest things that we never really talk about in the fight as well is the role that gut health plays.
So that's something Henry does year-round, regardless of when we're fighting, is take our line, which is called Freedom Cleanse Restore.
This is world-renowned, utilized by university researchers all around the world right now.
And basically, it's all just about restoring good gut bacteria, prebiotics, probiotics, and lymphatic cleansing.
And this is going to be something that really played a big role in his weight cut as well.
It's kind of a missing link that athletes aren't talking about.
But good gut health is going to help with serotonin production, so recovery, relaxation, mood, you know, production of brain-derived neurotropic factors so our nervous system can make these adaptations and learn new skills and things along these lines.
So this is something, you know, in my opinion, a big reason why He had the issue with DJ the first time around.
Henry will tell the story, he had gut inflammation so bad that people would say, good luck before the fight, tap his gut, and that hurt him.
That's not normal, and that all goes back to the issues associated with weight cutting, as we were talking about a little bit.
But getting that gut health right, no inflammation, and that goes a long way.
I opened the first mobile medical grade diagnostic testing company in Arizona.
So basically, I would have these diagnostics, and largely it was trying to fix the healthcare system a little bit.
You know, we want individualized solutions.
We want data-driven outcomes, right?
You want quantifiable progress.
So people want to feel good about what they're doing, but maybe a doctor can't afford this big-ass metabolic cart, or they don't know how to use it.
So what I did is I purchased this equipment, hired technicians, and we would bring it mobile.
You know, technology's getting smaller, more mobile.
So this was my idea of how I would go make my little dent in the healthcare system.
You know, there were issues with scalability in terms of finding good technicians, but the goal is just to go out there and provide data-driven solutions, right?
We live in a world of subjectivity, guesswork.
A very punishment-oriented fitness system where it sucks to start working out.
You typically gain weight if you're doing the right stuff because you're getting hydrated.
You go get injured.
The goal is to redefine how we assess people so that we can find these little tweaks for positive reinforcement.
And that goes a long way with healthcare as well as fitness.
Right now we're in the research and development phase, so we're really only working with guys like Henry, Victoria, Anthony, a very badass wrestler we're working with right now as well.
Just some amazing people, largely for research and development.
I do feel honored and blessed to be able to work with somebody like Henry.
He's the hardest working guy out there.
Of course, the hard work goes a long ways, but man, this guy's a genetic freak as well.
I've had the ability to test Olympic athletes, many other sports as well.
This guy makes adaptations faster than anybody.
He came off a 12 weeks, 16 weeks maybe of not training, VO2s already in the high 60s, functional threshold powers that would go compete with the world-class Ironmen that I'm training in things as well.
We did some amazing stuff.
If you looked at the body composition changes that we did in 7 weeks, it wasn't even a full 8-week camp, he put on 4.2 pounds of skeletal muscle mass, like good mass, which as a physiologist I would call bullshit on if I didn't see it with my own two eyes.
I mean, wrestling is, you know, largely a torsional sport.
So when it comes to wrestling, we do things like Kaiser, like pneumatic compressions and things like that.
So instead of using weights, we use air pressure, basically.
It's very smooth, very low risk of injury.
And they live in this torsional plane.
So you do a lot of transverse plane.
And we do a lot of velocity-based training as well.
Actually, really interesting, a study that was published recently, they had a lot of guys working on it for a full year.
Some only did velocity, never actually picked up a weight.
The other ones did traditional strength training.
The people who did velocity-based training, no actual weight training, got stronger with less muscular hypertrophy.
I mean, they didn't get as big, but they were stronger at the end of the day.
So when you look at something like wrestling and MMA, where you got to make a low weight, but you want to be as strong as possible, you know, velocity-based training is kind of the way of the future.
So this is kind of our general gym concept that we're building right now is the gym of the future may not need weights.
We're going to be next door to these CrossFit gyms where they're throwing all these weights over their head, getting injured.
We're next door, empty gym, and people are getting stronger.
That's kind of the gym of the future the way we see it.
I mean, very rarely we'll throw Indian clubs and things like that in there as well.
So it all depends on the sport and what we're focusing on that day, metabolic readiness, things along those lines.
But it's all just about training in the right vectors and being able to not only put out force, but absorb force as well, which nobody really talks about.
And if you look at largely other professional sports, All these injuries are happening in the deceleration phase.
So when people are trying to slow down, this is absorbing force.
This is kind of similar to some of the pieces that just aren't trained in MMA as well.
You've got to be able to absorb force just like you put it out.
Would it be possible instead of time syncing it, you have a left and a right computer, like two different computers that are reading data, one off the left, one off the right, so you don't have to coordinate them?
So what we're doing right now, which will be a little bit of a lengthy process, is defining a library of perfect form for everything that you could think of.
And then this is going to unlock telehealth and teletraining.
When you have something like that, we can do remote programming and be monitoring people's neuromuscular function, their biomechanics completely remotely.
There's always been several aspects to getting a fighter ready for camp.
There's always been their skill set, what they're good at, specific training for that one individual opponent that they're going to face, and then all the strength and conditioning.
And, you know, it's usually thought of as, you know, weights and sprints and plyos and all these different things.
But I feel like this is probably the next step.
The next step, measuring all of your, all these variables that you're talking about and seeing how your body is at any given time so that you're not just guessing whether you're peaking.
To the general public, say the average girl or guy who does, say, jujitsu tournaments and wants to get in the best shape of their life, are you going to have products for them and a service where they can sign up for something like that?
Right now we are already open in terms of diagnostic testing.
So you can come in based on your sport, your goal, whatever it may be.
We do have customized diagnostic packages.
Because some assessments just aren't applicable to some people.
So we customize your assessment.
We basically tell you what you're good at, what you're bad at.
Then if you want to, you know, develop a program, that's a little bit of an upcharge.
The real goal there is to be able to do completely remote training, completely in-house training, and then any level of hybrid training as well.
So right now, what the world needs is the diagnostic testing, the data.
We're already ready to do that.
What we're building now is the processes of being able to use data, put it into recommendations, and then scale that.
It's hard to teach somebody everything that I do, so we're building the softwares to essentially replicate ourselves.
My buddy in the other room, Andre Hicks, one of the best strength and conditioning coaches in the world, these guys will attest to it.
You can't teach people what he knows, so we have to code this into a software, a lot of if-then type stuff.
And then this is able to be scalable to everybody.
We want to provide this training to people, you know, the average Joe trying to lose weight, you know, the weekend warrior, the jujitsu, everything, man.
We want to be able to provide this to everybody.
Everybody deserves this type of training.
That's minimal risk of injury, high yield return, efficient.
That's what everyone's looking for.
And that's why, you know, the people are getting fatter.
There's no good positive reinforcement out there and there's no clear roadmap of how to get to where you want to be.
You know, we put together like, you know, comparing it to Google Maps.
Everybody knows their endpoint.
They know where they want to be, but it can't tell you where you're at unless you know exactly where you're starting from.
You have to do this baseline assessment.
You know, sometimes it sucks to really understand how fat, you know, your body fat percentage and your metabolics and your risk of, you know, your insulin resistance and things like that.
But you have to figure out where you're starting from, where you want to be, and that's how we develop a roadmap.
So getting people, you know, and we believe this is the way of kind of making our way into the healthcare system as well.
That's our end goal as a company.
To be able to provide, you know, integrative fitness is what we're calling it.
Taking little pieces from all the different methodologies of fitness.
Like, you know, we bring meditation and yoga into our practice as well.
So little pieces of just about everything.
And be able to, you know, provide this to everybody.
Would someone have to come to you for the first initial assessments and then possibly be able to do the consulting either online or through the application?
There's badass stuff you can do on your iPad, like biomechanical assessments that can find your joints and things like that.
We can send this to you.
There's a lot of things that we want to be able to do 100% remote.
For the most complex assessment, you got to come in.
You got to do a VO2 max assessment.
We can't send you a metabolic cart and shit, obviously.
So the goal is to get people to just come into the facility and then do remote programming from there.
And this is, you know, our concept is to put these diagnostic centers and possibly the attached training centers as well and just start providing these everywhere.
Because frankly, if we just went, you know, the diagnostic gym of the future route, it could be five, six hundred square feet, low, you know, low overhead facilities that are just really efficient, you know, just putting people out, collecting data left and right.
We took in the Ivan Drago approach probably more than the Rocky approach, which I think Russians kind of tend to use science a little bit more in their training.
So to me, at first, it was almost like, man, I'm going all in on this, especially this camp against Demetrius.
I'm like, God, I'm going all in, man.
I'm going to have faith in the science, like 100%.
I'm going to do everything according to, even if I don't want to.
And I think it just, as I started seeing my body change, I started seeing like the coaches kind of adapt with like, okay, man, science is in the center of this whole camp.
And I saw the change, Joe, and I've never felt so recovered the night that I fought Demetrius Johnson.
I've never felt so good, and I'm 31 years old, and I've been cutting weight since I've been a kid.
The day that I wake up, the day that I train, nobody knows what's going on until the data's gone in the hands of Kevin and Neuroforce 1. And then, okay, they determine this is how many rounds, this is how we're going to kind of peak you for your fight.
If you could imagine standing on the sideline when he's sparring in rounds and stuff and we're like, slow down, pace your...
Coach is like, you can't do that.
This is fighting.
You can't try and control your heart rate while training.
No, this is training for fighting, right?
So we're constantly telling him to train less, slow himself down.
There was a little bit of clashing there at the beginning and then they started to see the body composition come around and started to feel his power and everyone kind of bought into the process but it takes a while.
We're redefining it and we understand that there's Give me some pushback.
This is such a universal concept when it comes to strength and conditioning coaches.
It's being discussed over and over again nowadays.
People are doing too much.
They're doing too much and your body just doesn't have a chance to recover.
And even though you're getting in better shape, ultimately, you're not getting in as good a shape as you could have gotten if you did less, which is so counterintuitive for most people.
Well, that's the crazy contrast, right, is between this championship mentality that just wants to do more than anybody, push harder, train while everybody else is asleep, put your body through more than anybody else is willing to do because that's what makes a champion.
And then someone like you comes along and goes, no, that's what fucks you up.
You need to slow down, you need to do less, less rounds, move slower.
I mean, that was one of the biggest things I told him.
If you're not sleeping eight to ten hours a night when you're putting your body through something like that, you're doing your body an injustice and you're not going to make adaptations.
When we're out there training, we're breaking our body down.
It needs this repair.
We need to, you know, activate our glymphatic system, our brain's waste removal system as well, so we can go learn some new things the next day as well.
So if you're not sleeping, you're suboptimal, just like you're not properly hydrated and things as well.
This all comes down to the cellular level, you know, nervous system based approach.
Even at times, according to when I would go to sleep, because at times, you know how you train late and sometimes you come back and it just takes you a while to go to sleep.
So even then, it would be like, alright, when Henry's ready to wake up, obviously if I don't hear my alarm and I snooze it, I'm more likely they're going to allow me to sleep an extra two hours.
That's the only time it's really good, that little 45 window of insulin sensitivity.
So I do believe that.
One technology while we're on the sleep thing, one that we're utilizing for Henry, just a little light microcurrent here to your temporal lobes and it's proven to increase serotonin and melatonin and decrease cortisol.
So we're like manipulating biochemicals and it's a very natural way of making you feel drowsy.
Actually, they did a presentation on me in Russia with Roman, with the scientists that they have at the USCPI. Like, they tracked everything according to the Omega wave, the device that we were using.
And he was able to kind of show, he was like, hey, look, my system, you know, this system does work.
You know, it's just like people were kind of just tripping out.
So I went out there, did the whole presentation in Moscow.
And everybody was kind of like, wow, amazing.
Some of them were kind of scratching their head and some of them were like, damn, that's cool.
You're able to kind of see how I peaked for this fight and how I was able to kind of survive five rounds.
The Russians have really been pioneering this type of training for quite a while, especially.
Specifically, the type of training that Pavel Tatsulin Where you're using way less energy, you're working out way less, but you're getting better results from it.
There's a lot of thought processes that have been leaning in this direction from a lot of really high-level top coaches for quite a while now.
Yeah, I also think that there's something to be said for that, though, in terms of mental strength.
Because one of the things that wrestlers have, that it's not just that they have a great skill in being able to manipulate bodies, but they also have mental toughness that's at a level that I don't think you get from any other sport.
I mean, I think there's a lot of pro athletes, even tennis players, that are just mentally tough.
They're just tough.
People just know how to win, they know how to push themselves, but I feel like wrestlers are on another level because they're always tired, they're always over-trained, they're always dehydrated, and they're always working out with a bunch of fucking savages that are all the same way, and everybody takes pleasure in being miserable.
There's something to that.
You see it.
Man, I've seen thousands of fights.
There's something about wrestlers.
They have just like an extra gear.
Like a high-level wrestler in particular has an extra gear that a lot of other fighters just never develop.
It's like you're just, you're in the culture of wrestling, and once you have that, it's almost a, there's an honor to it.
There's a warrior to it.
Like, and it's, it's, it's, I was just at the World Championships, Joe, and I can tell you, Man, the best athletes in the world.
I was just in Budapest, Hungary, and I saw Kyle Snyder and all these guys compete.
And I'm just like, man, these are the best athletes in the world.
This is the hardest shit a human being could ever do.
If you're to see the finesse and the strength and the power and what's involved in becoming a world champion and watching these guys go through this freaking tough, just the toughest tournament in the world.
I think what we do in MMA is fun compared to wrestling.
I really do.
I believe you do.
That stuff is hard.
What these guys go through to win a tournament, the weight cuts, they don't get paid a lot of money.
But it's just interesting to me that I think you kind of need both in some weird way.
Your mind needs to develop this layer of toughness that wrestlers have.
And then I think once you've developed that, then maybe I think your approach, Kevin, is applicable.
But I think that until an athlete has that indomitable spirit, until they have that sort of iron will that a wrestler possesses, to make a champion I think you need many, many things.
But I don't think you can ever discount that ability to work through discomfort the way wrestlers have.
I just don't think it's wise as a professional athlete at a championship level to compete compromised.
Like, in order for you to see and believe in science, you have to go through hell to understand, like, hey, man, the hard way probably isn't the best way.
But when you were talking about the feeling that you had in not wanting to ever feel the pain of losing again, that feeling that you had when your ankle was going out, and that, like, fuck this.
No, no, no.
I'm not doing this.
I'm gonna find a way out of this.
Like, you almost have to experience lows in order to have that.
And I feel like one of the things about wrestling, That makes it a sport that creates so many fucking savages is because you go through so much shit, so much hardship, so much difficulty that, you know, if you had Science-based wrestling programs, the way you're doing a science-based camp, and you went in and said, everybody, you gotta slow down.
Slow down.
You're going too hard.
Slow down.
Can't run up hills today.
Your DC brainwaves are off.
Your wrestling coach would be like, shut the fuck up and sit down.
Who is this asshole?
If Dan Gable brought you into camp and you guys were running around doing all this stuff, he'd be like, what?
Yeah, but like I said, I think you hit the nail on the head.
I think it's, to me, the way I would see it is like you have to kind of go through hell in order to understand it because you have to go through that callus, through that burn.
But I feel like, especially in MMA, a lot of athletes or even athletes just in general, everybody busts their butts almost.
If you're an elite athlete, you'll always train maybe not the smartest way.
I guess you could add more to your training or take away less.
One of the things that I love about MMA is that it's so broad, there are so many skills, that the approach to success is different with every individual, and you have to find what that approach is.
The approach to you, for you to achieve success, is going to be different than the approach for a different athlete.
It doesn't have the same skills that you have.
But like Anderson Silva, perfect example.
He's not a wrestler.
He's gonna have a different approach.
There's going to be different things that they work on in training.
Just like when you see, like, you know, the Wim Hof guy, he's always breathing from his gut here.
And that's like...
Engaging your core as opposed to just like your chest.
So you're actually getting deeper breaths.
You're encouraging like core stability and things as well.
It's better for metabolic efficiency.
So when you're actually exercising, it's better for delaying anaerobic threshold, buffering lactate, things like that, as well as keeping the nervous system calm as well.
I think the best thing is to not think about your breathing.
When you start thinking about it, it can kind of get fucked up.
So if we encourage diaphragmatic breathing without this, this technology we utilize is actually, even though when you're utilizing the technology, you're just breathing in and out through your mouth, it actually encourages in through the nose, out through the mouth when you're training.
So I mean, I'm not an expert specifically on that, but I think there's definitely some performance advantage to it.
That T.J. fight might happen if, you know, if it's going to be a done way with the flyweight division.
You know, I think the cat's out the bag and, you know, Dana had mentioned that to me and said, hey, you know, we want to take you up on that offer if you are challenging to go up against T.J., but this is where the company's been...
But now that Demetrius has left the division and gone off to 1FC to get...
Where do you think the division is right now?
Is that one reason, like, if you won at 35 and won the title at 35, would you consider dropping the 25-pound title and competing at 35, or would you rather stay at 25?
The only other thing, you really are in this rare space where you have the possibility of being considered one of the greatest combat sport athletes of all time.
You're already in the mix, right?
Olympic gold medalist, UFC champion.
I mean, you have this very rare opportunity for incredible greatness.
That companies have the mindset of bringing in champions and people that are extraordinary at whatever they do and speaking to these people that work for them and explaining.
Motivation is gigantic.
Motivation is such a huge...
Source of fuel for people in all walks of life.
You know, to have a guy like you come in and talk to a company could have a really big impact on their creativity, on how they pursue goals, on all kinds of different things.
Well, Eric, for a guy like you, you get across a guy like Henry, you hit the goldmine.
But you could get across a guy who is a really talented guy that's a flake.
And those, to me personally, there's plenty of those.
But to me, as an analyst, as someone who watches fights, they're the most frustrating.
Because there's some guys that I see and I go, God damn, that motherfucker's good.
He's got the potential.
Like, they can do things inside the octagon.
They do things...
Like, I'll see guys in the gym.
Like, I'll go to a gym and watch guys train and see the guy and I go, if this motherfucker could put it together like this, in the cage...
The way you see when he's sparring.
Some people are just artists, but the anxiety of competition and all the factors that come involved, the discipline, the consistency, all the things that make someone a great fighter sometimes.
There's so many different things that make someone a great fighter that wind up fucking them up when they actually go to compete.
The recklessness, impulsiveness that actually makes them good.
Also can wind up tanking them if they don't sort of forge it with some sort of severe discipline.
One of the things that I did that was kind of unconventional for this camp, I had them video edit.
Obviously, we scouted Demetrius Johnson, but then I went back and got every one-minute clip of Matt Hume's Interval between rounds so 25 fights I have the one minute what he tells him how he adapts and changes and one of the things I noticed is that he always went to wrestling and when he always went to wrestling he sounded like it was automatic alright so this round we're gonna take him down and we're gonna work it was always automatic and when it went into the fifth round it wasn't automatic you can hear him
say You can try to take him down if you want.
It was kind of like that the way he said it.
And when I went back and watched, I was like, we got him.
And going into that fifth round, one of the things that we talked about subliminally and mentally training was...
When we went, Henry was just put in the Hall of Fame, you know, which has never been done at such a young age.
And when I was at the Wrestling Hall of Fame, Nate Carr, who's also one of the greatest wrestlers ever, he told me, he said, you know what, Eric?
When I wrestled Kenny Monday and I lost him in the Big Tens, I knew that when I went out two weeks later to fight him in the NCAA Finals that it might come up that, man, this guy just beat me.
So I had a book.
Actually, I think he said his wife made his book.
And he put all the positive things that Nate Carr had done and all the articles, and she made quotes from that and put it in this book.
So he gave me that idea, and then I did that.
So Henry was put in the Hall of Fame.
That night, they had a video highlight.
They had Terry Brands, his coach.
They had Sergey Belaglazov, Kenny, Kevin Jackson, some of the greatest, all his coaches, saying stuff about him.
And I took that and I put it in this book, and it kind of like...
I read it to him every day, and it kind of like happened in the fight.
One of his own quotes was that, I've got to go in there and kill and be ready to die.
And you know, when he got that leg injury, you know, he was ready to die.
He was ready to keep going forward.
Yes, we adapted and went southpaw, but some of that stuff in the book came exactly true.
Anyways, I mean, I guess this is where people kind of share their stories, right?
But it's...
Yeah, so this was about a year ago now.
So this was, yeah, about a year ago now.
And I got invited to this event with, you know, raising money for kids and cancer.
And everybody in there, every big celebrity gets invited, like Jerry Rice, like Barry Bonds, like the big A-list celebrities, and everybody was there.
And we had a fundraiser that night in, you know, Wine Country in Santa Rosa, California.
You know, and everybody had their drinks and whatnot.
You know, I had a couple glasses.
Maybe I had a few glasses of wine, but I don't drink wine.
But I had a few glasses, and I remember I told everybody, hey, I'm going to sleep, guys.
And it was close to about midnight.
I was like, I ain't trying to stay up with these people.
And I'm trying to sleep because I never drink wine.
So I go to my room and I shower and get into bed.
And I remember right before I went to bed, I remember I saw like the flickering of lights.
And I just thought it was weird.
Roughly by the time I got to my hotel, I showered, I saw the flickering of lights and I didn't think anything of it.
And I pass out, 2.30 hits, 2.30 in the morning hits, and I'm just, you know, I wake up because I hear the alarm, you know, kind of pop off at the hotel.
So now I'm hearing these alarms starting to go off, and I've, you know, I checked out.
I checked out in front.
I checked out through the window, and I checked out at the lobby.
Nobody was moving, so I was like, it's a false alarm.
So I got the pillow put all over my head and I freaking slept through the alarm.
That happened about 2.30.
Now 4.30 comes about and this time I don't wake up because of the alarm.
I wake up because of the smoke.
I'm like coughing on the smoke and at first I thought I was dreaming.
So I wake up and at that time I slept in my towel.
That's how tired I was.
And I got up, and I'm going to turn on the lights, and the lights ain't turning on.
And then I go through the window, and I check the window, and next, you know, I see the car right in front of me on fire.
Three-fourths of the hotel.
Like, I was probably about five rooms away from, like, getting hit hard.
Like, I'm talking about, like, fire coming out the window.
Like that, and I'm waking up to this.
Like, thinking I'm dreaming.
You know, in a towel.
And the lights, everything was dark, but I could see everything, like the room started getting hot.
And I couldn't hold my breath no more.
I started looking for my shoes.
I couldn't find my shoes.
And I bumped into my slacks and I left them on the ironing board the night before and I put them on.
And I grabbed my phone and I jumped out the window.
I jumped out the window.
As I jumped out the window, my right foot catches on fire.
My right foot catches on fire fast and I'm trying to put it out.
I can see how people can catch on fire real quick because my right leg was like, boom!
And I think the reason why, because I think people had time to get out, and I think the reason why 50 people died is because they didn't take the alarm like me serious.
And next you know it was too late because that smoke will blind you.
So you think you're going into the right direction, and next you know you're walking into the biggest fire in history.