Oct. 31, 2018 - The Joe Rogan Experience
01:49:11
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
- - Boom, and we're live. | |
| Henry motherfucking Cejudo. | ||
| World champ. | ||
| And, sir, introduce yourself to everybody. | ||
| Captain America. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Captain Eric Albaracin. | ||
| Henry's coach. | ||
| What do you do with him specifically? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And it's Halloween. | ||
| Happy Halloween, everybody. | ||
| Happy Halloween, folks. | ||
| So, first of all, man, congratulations on your victory. | ||
| What does it feel like? | ||
| Oh man, it feels good. | ||
| It feels good. | ||
| Try to keep this fist away from your face. | ||
| Yeah, it feels good because it's... | ||
| God, it's... | ||
| I think as a competitor, you live for these moments. | ||
| You live for these fulfillments, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think somebody like... | ||
| And I told people since the beginning, it wasn't so much... | ||
| You know, the UFC belt, but it was because I made it about Demetrius, and it was about Demetrius. | ||
| 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, those are two gigantic accomplishments. | ||
| Yeah, no, for sure. | ||
| It's almost like, God, I beat the greatest, to me, the greatest of all time. | ||
| And then on top of that, I can make the run for who's the greatest combat athlete of all time. | ||
| I'm a two-sport world champion. | ||
| I'm just like... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you're absolutely in the running now. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And like I would tell people, there's a bit of admiration that I had for Demetrius Johnson. | ||
| Like I was... | ||
| It was like, you know, you're fighting a dude that almost seems untouchable. | ||
| A guy that makes you question yourself. | ||
| Like, whoa, this is... | ||
| This guy is that good. | ||
| Well, what's crazy is you beat him after he had stopped you. | ||
| How long? | ||
| Was it two years? | ||
| Close to about two and a half years ago now. | ||
| I think two years and four months. | ||
| That's an amazing turnaround between getting stopped in the first round and then coming back and beating him. | ||
| And then beating him in the championship rounds is really where you pulled it off. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I had studied Demetrius Johnson. | ||
| As soon as I lost him the first time, what I pretty much did is I got rid of a lot of people, including my MMA head coach. | ||
| My whole philosophy was if I can't be the best, then there's something wrong. | ||
| You know, emotionally, physically, everything else, just invested. | ||
| And when I lost, I'm just like, man, I need a... | ||
| I'm looking for a better leader, you know? | ||
| And that's kind of what I did. | ||
| I ended up, you know, letting go a lot of my cornermen. | ||
| You know, I started traveling the world. | ||
| Went out to Singapore, went out to Thailand, went out to the Netherlands, spent months and months at a time out in Brazil. | ||
| Like, I was on a quest. | ||
| It was like the... | ||
| I kind of remind myself a little bit like Ash Ketchum from Pokemon. | ||
| Like, I was just on a venture dude. | ||
| I have no idea who that is, but... | ||
| Vision Quest. | ||
| Vision Quest. | ||
| The Matthew Modine movie. | ||
| Every wrestler has to watch that movie. | ||
| And that's... | ||
| Like I said, it became an exception. | ||
| I knew that if anybody could do it, it'd be Henry Sehudo. | ||
| Like, I really did. | ||
| Even after the first time, Joe, when he beat me... | ||
| I still, when they asked me, it's like, Henry, you know, like, I was like, guys, I don't know, but I still know that I could beat him. | ||
| Even being knocked out, like, two minutes and 36 seconds. | ||
| Like, I still knew in my heart, and you'll see when I sat at their press conference, I know I'm still the one to beat him. | ||
| What was it about him that made you think that you could beat him? | ||
| What was it about you, specifically, in relation to him and his skill set? | ||
| It was... | ||
| If you're asking me what the difference was... | ||
| Yeah, well, what was it that made you think, even after he stopped you in the first round? | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| I think it was more so just believing in my abilities. | ||
| I think me just believing more, okay, Henry, you need time. | ||
| Like, I was only doing MMA for three years when I fought him the first time. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of people don't know that. | ||
| Yeah, three years. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What year did you win the Olympics? | ||
| In 2008. Yeah, see, that is... | ||
| I mean, when you're doing that, you're 100% dedicated to wrestling. | ||
| You have to be, right? | ||
| So were you doing any striking training at all back then? | ||
| I did, I did. | ||
| What happened was, once I won the Olympics, I almost kind of... | ||
| I fell out of love with the sport. | ||
| I fell out of love with wrestling. | ||
| I remember being at the Olympics. | ||
| And being like, man, I don't know if I have it in me no more. | ||
| Just because you're burnt out? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| My whole childhood was gone because of the sport. | ||
| Take that crazy mask off, brother. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What are you doing? | |
| Anyway, I've been waiting for you to say that. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| We'll do it in stages. | ||
| So you fell out of love with it. | ||
| I fell out of love with it. | ||
| But is it just because your whole life had been dedicated to wrestling and you finally achieved the greatest of great goals? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Olympic gold medalist is the top of the mountain. | ||
| No, but check this out, Joe. | ||
| In the year of 2007, man, I went through the worst year ever. | ||
| I was ready to become a world champion, and I went out to the world championships in 2007, and I didn't even score a point in the first round. | ||
| I got put out by Iran, and for some reason that whole year, man, I was just going through freaking struggles left and right. | ||
| You're talking about just adversity. | ||
| I couldn't win a tournament to save my life. | ||
| What was it? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I truly, truly don't know. | ||
| I think I was... | ||
| I think I probably began kind of falling out of love with it. | ||
| And I remember there was... | ||
| To me, there was only two tournaments that I really wanted to win. | ||
| And that was the Olympic trials and eventually the Olympic Games. | ||
| And somehow, like... | ||
| Because I'm correlating this with the fight with Demetrius Johnson. | ||
| And I remember, you know, just almost being in tears. | ||
| Like, I just don't know if this is for me. | ||
| But I just stuck with it. | ||
| I stuck with it. | ||
| I ended up winning the Olympic trials. | ||
| I ended up going to the Olympic Games. | ||
| I ended up pretty much falling behind in every single match that I was wrestling in. | ||
| So these are kind of the adversities that I was going through, leading up to becoming an Olympic champion. | ||
| You know, it's interesting, when you were fighting Demetrius for the second time, Daniel Cormier said something very interesting. | ||
| He said, most guys, he goes, I would never give a chance. | ||
| You get stopped by DJ, and then a couple years later, you're fighting him again? | ||
| Like, he's going to have your number, he's going to be better in the rematch. | ||
| And he goes, but Henry Cejudo is a different kind of athlete. | ||
| And he talked about you competing, and then coming back a year later, and being... | ||
| He goes, he was many times better. | ||
| He goes, the amount of improvement that he got in just one year was just unbelievable. | ||
| Yeah, and I think, you know, I guess you can owe that to genetics. | ||
| I think you can talk a lot about desire, too, just having the... | ||
| Genetics only get you so far. | ||
| Yeah, but it's also... | ||
| Everybody at the Olympics has great genetics. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| But it almost becomes a mentality. | ||
| It becomes a philosophy. | ||
| You almost start doing things to not feel the pain of losing. | ||
| That's a motivator. | ||
| To not feel the pain of losing. | ||
| I remember when Demetrius Johnson hit me in the leg. | ||
| I don't think he pointed out how severe it was. | ||
| I literally sprained a severe low ankle sprain in those first 30 seconds. | ||
| In the second fight, yeah. | ||
| So I fought Demetrius Johnson like that. | ||
| But to me, the motivator was like, man, I don't want to feel that pain of losing no more. | ||
| I hate it, man. | ||
| I hate feeling second place. | ||
| I hate feeling kind of somebody's looking over me. | ||
| Someone's almost like a manhood challenge. | ||
| And I hate that. | ||
| Was it a low leg kick that... | ||
| They made your your ankle go like what was it? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Explain to someone who's never experienced that before. | ||
| What is that pain like? | ||
| Like you train for how many weeks and then you fight Mighty Mouse with a title, you get stopped in the first round. | ||
| What is that pain like? | ||
| Oh man, I think every fighter has a spirit. | ||
| Like, what is a spirit? | ||
| The spirit is your dream. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because he never picked up those pieces. | ||
| He never started healing that spirit. | ||
| Well, he got knocked out again real bad right afterwards by Glenn Johnson, too. | ||
| Remember, there's two knockouts in a row. | ||
| Tarver. | ||
| Yeah, Tarver KO'd him. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I think his body was just wrecked. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Boxers don't always cut weight the right way either. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, and I think it's... | ||
| Oh, we got a video. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| I found that part where he got kicked and you can see the leg. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let me see it. | |
| So it was right there, just the back of the leg like that? | ||
| That is so crazy. | ||
| Just one shin to the back of your leg. | ||
| But I'm still flopping. | ||
| I'm still flopping. | ||
| So I'm going back to that philosophy, composure. | ||
| Look, I'm still flopping. | ||
| But it doesn't seem like he understands what's happened to you yet. | ||
| You played poker so well. | ||
| Really interesting. | ||
| Yeah, look, I'm still... | ||
| 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... | ||
| What happened to him? | ||
| It's crazy when you watch it because it's just the foot hit the back of your knee. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| You can see it again. | ||
| I mean, it wasn't even the hardest kick in the world. | ||
| He kind of caught you at the very end with his foot. | ||
| And immediately that nerve just went boing-oing-oing. | ||
| Right here. | ||
| Swap. | ||
| Right there. | ||
| Barely flicked it. | ||
| That shit is just like boing-oing-oing. | ||
| You know who it also happened to was Scott Jorgensen. | ||
| Did it? | ||
| What fight was that? | ||
| Man, you know what? | ||
| I can't remember, but he didn't win the fight, I can tell you that. | ||
| Yeah, anyways, it was a terrible feeling. | ||
| Terrible, terrible feeling. | ||
| Wow, you poker-faced your way through it. | ||
| But again, Joe, it goes back to philosophy. | ||
| You got to believe in your... | ||
| You got to be up here. | ||
| There has to be a philosophy up here. | ||
| Against a guy like Demetrius, it's beyond the physical and the technical stuff. | ||
| You got to be just kind of hypnotized up here. | ||
| You have to have everything, right? | ||
| You have to have the physical skills, but you also have to have this unstoppable mindset. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, what kind of mind training do you do? | ||
| Do you do any visualization training or do you work with a sports psychologist? | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I like reading up on a lot of people's stories. | ||
| I think people's stories are the ones that intrigue me. | ||
| You know, how Michael Jordan rolls to the top or athletes like that. | ||
| I think that's the stuff that I got like a human interest. | ||
| That's kind of my motivation. | ||
| Like reading biographies? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you're like seeing them accomplish these fantastic goals and visualizing yourself experiencing that exact same thing. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| As corny as that sounds, yeah. | ||
| Doesn't sound corny at all. | ||
| Especially not coming from the champ. | ||
| You know, once you're the champ, all that corny shit's out the window. | ||
| Obviously, it works. | ||
| People start believing it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All of a sudden, it became a 10. Yeah, they believe the fuck out of it. | |
| Now, they're talking about you possibly fighting TJ Dillshaw for the bantamweight title. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, there's talk. | ||
| There's talk. | ||
| You know, you just hesitated and you're like, yeah, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's negotiations. | |
| There's beef behind that. | ||
| It's not just talk. | ||
| He wants it. | ||
| We want it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I'm sure. | ||
| Where's that at right now? | ||
| Because there's going to be a card in January out here. | ||
| It was just announced. | ||
| Oh, what date was that? | ||
| It's the same night as the Fedor-Ryan Bader fight, which pisses me off because I wanted to go see that fight. | ||
| It's January 26th. | ||
| Yeah, that fight's going to be at the Forum, and the UFC fight, I think, is at the Staples Center. | ||
| Or maybe Anaheim. | ||
| Anaheim? | ||
| Anaheim. | ||
| Anaheim and the Pond. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Both here. | ||
| Both here in California. | ||
| Well, there's 20 million motherfuckers in California. | ||
| Plenty of people to go around in terms of audience. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| All these flyweights need to get paid. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| 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, I think first, I think congratulations too to Ben Askren. | ||
| I think he's... | ||
| Everybody's in trouble. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A lot of motherfuckers are in trouble when Ben Askren gets ahold of you. | ||
| You're like, why can't I get up? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And 2008 Olympian, his teammate. | ||
| And Olympian. | ||
| He's a bad matchup for anybody, Joe. | ||
| Anybody. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And especially a guy like Ben, because I think Ben knows that his striking's not that good. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So that's what makes Ben Askren dangerous. | ||
| He's so dangerous. | ||
| I mean, a real bad fight for him would be someone that can figure out how to keep it standing. | ||
| Like Jay Heron gave him a real tough fight in Bellator. | ||
| Because Jay Heron is a good wrestler and kept the fight standing. | ||
| I forget what his take on that fight was. | ||
| We talked about it on the podcast, but I don't think he was too happy with his training for that fight. | ||
| But... | ||
| Someone like Tyron Woodley, who's also a very good wrestler, who's a very dangerous striker, would be a tough matchup for him. | ||
| But they're really close friends and training partners. | ||
| Yeah, well, this is another thing, too. | ||
| On the flip side, Tyron's been wrestling him for years, I think. | ||
| So he knows what the Ben Ashkin experience is, and that's scary. | ||
| I mean, people would be lucky to kind of take him down. | ||
| If you really want to give no takedowns, he just wouldn't let people take him down. | ||
| Yeah, Pettis was talking about it. | ||
| You know, he's saying, listen, it was back when Pettis was the champ. | ||
| He said, if I was forced to fight Ben Askren, he goes, it would be a fucking terrible fight for me. | ||
| He's like, that guy would just take me down and beat the shit out of me. | ||
| He's like, that's what he does. | ||
| If Ben was to win a belt, the 2008 Olympic team would have five belts. | ||
| Henry gets two, DC has two, and Ben Askren would have one. | ||
| That's five UFC belts if he came into the UFC and won a belt, his teammates. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, that's interesting to see how that unfolds. | ||
| But as of now, it's... | ||
| Man, Ashton... | ||
| She's a beast. | ||
| Ashton's going to be fighting for the belt pretty soon. | ||
| Well, he's calling out Darren Till. | ||
| He wants to fight Darren Till. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Which I love. | ||
| I love that fight. | ||
| That is a classic striker versus grappler matchup. | ||
| Especially after Tyron just smashed him. | ||
| I mean, Tyron in the hype train. | ||
| For Darren Till, we learned a lot about Darren. | ||
| Darren is a sensational striker. | ||
| Very, very dangerous striker. | ||
| But keeps his hands low, keeps his chin up high. | ||
| Tyron has proven himself to be really dangerous even against elite strikers. | ||
| You look at the Wonderboy fights. | ||
| I've said this time and time again. | ||
| You look at those two fights. | ||
| Wonderboy is known as being one of the best strikers to ever compete in the UFC. I think it was 57-0 as a kickboxer. | ||
| Something fucking spectacular like that. | ||
| Amazing striking skills, but yet Tyron hurt him in both fights. | ||
| Both fights Tyron was the one who landed big shots and had Wonderboy badly hurt. | ||
| And then you look at the same thing with Darren Till. | ||
| Darren Till is known as being this unbelievable striker. | ||
| Tyron clips him, drops him, and then strangles him. | ||
| It all changes with MMA. These guys can be even the best wrestlers. | ||
| Sometimes it doesn't translate to the sport. | ||
| It takes a special somebody to adapt to the sport of MMA, not just a wrestler. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And I think Tyron has adapted to his timing to his right hand. | ||
| You know, man, if you're able to take out two strikers like that, man, you're the real deal. | ||
| He's unquestionably the real deal. | ||
| I'm fascinating to see whether or not Nurmagomedov and Ben Askren go at it. | ||
| That, to me, if I had a fight that I really... | ||
| What are you saying? | ||
| Floyd Mayweather what? | ||
| Floyd Mayweather's next. | ||
| Stop with all that nonsense. | ||
| That's just what we were talking about. | ||
| That's not going to happen. | ||
| He has the same agent. | ||
| Listen, that ain't going to happen. | ||
| But Khabib is much more of a grappler than he is a striker. | ||
| I mean, Conor is a striker. | ||
| That sort of made sense. | ||
| If you want to talk about levels, I think Ben's probably the better grappler. | ||
| Who the fuck knows? | ||
| That's what I want to see. | ||
| I want to see that fight. | ||
| There's levels. | ||
| Even though they don't give black belts in wrestling, there's levels to that. | ||
| Yeah, there's levels. | ||
| And I think Ben Ashkin was one of the greatest folk style riders of all time. | ||
| That's how dangerous he is. | ||
| He was putting the best kids in the world in pretzels and submissions. | ||
| They just wouldn't get out of his... | ||
| He's like a bull constrictor. | ||
| He's stunning in his ability to control guys. | ||
| You're like, what the fuck, man? | ||
| Koreshkov and Lima are two great examples because you look at those guys in Bellator and they just smash people. | ||
| Koreshkov has one of the craziest spinning back kick knockouts I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| He sent this dude flying through the air. | ||
| Did you see that a couple of fights ago? | ||
| The Grand Prix. | ||
| It's fucking nasty! | ||
| He hits this dude with a spinning back kick and literally launches him into space and then smashes him when he goes down to the ground. | ||
| I mean, you look at what Liam has been able to do to people. | ||
| The Roy McDonald fight was a very close fight. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| Watch this. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
|
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Boom! | |
| I mean, he launched that dude. | ||
| Is that in Boise? | ||
| I don't know where that was. | ||
| So, Koreshkov, you know, if you watch the Koreshkov fight with Ben Askren, and it's a mauling. | ||
| It's just a guy just getting fucked up. | ||
| That's what that fight is. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| Ben Askren just dominated him. | ||
| Like, absolutely dominated him. | ||
| See, the dude tried to jump back and landed... | ||
| It landed right as he was in the air. | ||
| Ouchie, Wawa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And this guy never got a punch off of Ben Askren. | ||
| It was a total domination. | ||
| Same as the Lima fight. | ||
| Lima crushes people, man. | ||
| Lima's one of the scariest strikers. | ||
| I mean, he knocked out Korshkov. | ||
| I mean, Lima smashes people. | ||
| But you see Lima against Ben Askren. | ||
| I mean, obviously it was a younger Lima. | ||
| I mean, he's got more experience now. | ||
| But the difference was so stunning. | ||
| What is this? | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| No, those are two Chinese guys, bro. | ||
| This is not Askren and Lima. | ||
| You gotta trust me. | ||
| This is not Askren and Lima either. | ||
| I'm sure the video's titled that. | ||
| I said, is Joe being a bully? | ||
| You gotta trust me. | ||
| Those dudes are not the same guy. | ||
| Joe, you're losing your patience, man. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Man. | ||
| I mean, just the way he manhandled them. | ||
| 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 he did get upkicked here, and his nose got broken. | ||
| Oh yeah, he got cracked. | ||
| I mean, Lima's a fucking monster, man. | ||
| He's a super dangerous striker, and he's huge for the weight class. | ||
| You stand next to Lima, you're like, Jesus, how do you make 170? | ||
| He does it in a jacuzzi at the hotel. | ||
| I've seen him. | ||
| Yeah, no, he's struggling to make that weight. | ||
| He's a big guy. | ||
| But anyway, point being, Ben Askren at 170. Super, super interesting fight. | ||
| Personally, the fight that I would like to see, I'd like to see him and Kobe. | ||
| Kobe Covington. | ||
| Ben and Kobe? | ||
| Yeah, that would be really interesting. | ||
| But isn't Kobe next in line for the title? | ||
| I think he's got the interim belt. | ||
| If he has the interim belt... | ||
| I'm surprised it still has the interim belt. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, maybe I guess. | ||
| It's in the White House. | ||
| He doesn't have it anymore. | ||
| It's in the White House. | ||
| But I mean, they didn't strip him, did they? | ||
| Because there was some talk of stripping him because he was supposed to... | ||
| Not that I know of. | ||
| I don't think there was ever a strip. | ||
| So I think they're trying to market it. | ||
| I think as soon as you get the champ... | ||
| Wikipedia here says he was the interim from June 9th to September 8th. | ||
| Oh, so they did strip him. | ||
| Oh, so they did strip him. | ||
| So the stripping was because they wanted him to fight on the Darren Till card. | ||
| When Darren Till fought Tyron, they wanted him to fight... | ||
| Tyrant and apparently he had gone through, you know, hard training camp. | ||
| He was all busted up. | ||
| He needed time to recover. | ||
| So I guess they stripped him. | ||
| That whole, man, interim titles. | ||
| Interim titles are like attached with Velcro. | ||
| They just disappear. | ||
|
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They get yanked off you. | |
| They're not really like... | ||
| Especially at UFC 229. They all had belts. | ||
| Tony Ferguson had a belt. | ||
| Conor had a belt. | ||
| Obviously Khabib had his belts. | ||
| He had three people walking around with belts. | ||
| The Tony Ferguson one to me is a shame. | ||
| It's a shame that a guy gets injured and then they strip him like that. | ||
| That doesn't make any sense to me. | ||
| I didn't like that one. | ||
| That one bothered me. | ||
| I feel like Tony should still have the interim title. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| Yeah, but that was like the third time that fight had fallen, right? | ||
|
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I know. | |
| It sucks. | ||
| But the other one wasn't his fault. | ||
| The other one was Khabib. | ||
| Khabib, right? | ||
| Khabib was supposed to make the weight and he got medically pulled out. | ||
| 2-1. | ||
| That's a good argument. | ||
| How many times did Khabib pull out and how many times did Tony pull out? | ||
| Tony pulled out once for sure because he was injured, the last one, when his knee blew apart. | ||
| And then Khabib definitely got yanked off the card once with the weight cut, remember? | ||
| The weight cut was so bad that his kidneys were failing. | ||
| Either way. | ||
| We've been there. | ||
| Yeah, that's the fight. | ||
|
unidentified
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Now, do you like fighting at 35? | |
| Because I know you fought at 35 for a while when you were struggling to make flyweight. | ||
| You had some issues early on in your career where you really didn't make the weight very well. | ||
| Yeah, I was... | ||
| God, I was... | ||
| I was getting older, I think, in my career. | ||
| I think the reason why I started having weight problems was because I was just getting older and I was doing some crazy stuff. | ||
| I used to cut about 16 pounds in two two-hour sessions. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah, as a flyweight or supposed to be flyweight. | ||
| Why were you doing that? | ||
| Because I'm a wrestler. | ||
| 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 just felt like your body could handle it. | ||
| You're tough. | ||
| You're used to it. | ||
| Yeah, it was the whole... | ||
| Because in wrestling, we would make weight every week sometimes. | ||
| We would wrestle so much that we're used to that whole struggle side of things. | ||
| And then, okay, we wrestle again, we do it again. | ||
| What kind of weight cut were you talking about when you were wrestling? | ||
| How much were you cutting? | ||
| I was a lot more disciplined then, but I was probably doing about 12 pounds, but I had no fat. | ||
| At that time, I was eating just as healthy and as clean as possible because I would make weight every three weeks I had a tournament. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now you're a pretty muscular guy for a flyweight. | ||
| So you were walking around how many pounds over? | ||
| Oh man, I was probably cutting for like maybe 20, 25. Wow. | ||
| So you're walking around like 150 and getting down to 25. Yeah. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| I just had loss. | ||
| A lot of it too, because you fight three times a year, you're not always honest with your diet either. | ||
| Coming from Mexican descent, we like to, we love to eat. | ||
| You go to my mom's house and it's going to be laid down. | ||
| But when you're in camp, how do you organize your nutrition? | ||
| I'm disciplined. | ||
| I have a meal prep company. | ||
| They deliver my food like every three days. | ||
| And is your meal prep based on your suggestions to them or your recommendations and directions to them? | ||
| Yeah, no, a lot of it's based on kind of, well, my diet's just according to kind of like my training schedule. | ||
| So my training is very, very organized. | ||
| Like now, Joe, I'm like a pretty much, I'm a professional now, I guess you could say. | ||
| Like I do things, you know, the right way. | ||
| I use the whole scientific route, the nutrition route. | ||
| Almost like how Bernard Hopkins, as he got older, he kind of changed his whole philosophy and started using science more. | ||
| So I think everything now in my life when I get ready for fights is all based on science. | ||
| How did Bernard change his training? | ||
| Do you know? | ||
| He just started recovering more. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And did you incorporate any of those methods? | ||
| I did, I did, actually. | ||
| I ended up connecting with this company called Neuroforce One, a science-based company. | ||
| And I actually wanted to bring them in to kind of talk about it, Joe, because this right here just changed my whole philosophy. | ||
| We're talking about the whole weight cuts, how I struggled, to how my whole training has changed because of science. | ||
| And a science that's very... | ||
| A science that's very, I guess, complex you could say. | ||
| You gotta have like the right people, man, like dictating your schedule. | ||
| So when you set up a training camp like this, how far in advance do you sit down and work out all the details? | ||
| It's almost like the morning that we wake up is what we know we're gonna do. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Well, we try to map things out maybe about three months in advance, kind of like a preparation to leading to the camp. | ||
| And that's kind of like the phase that we're on now. | ||
| Like now we're on, you know, if it is that I fight in January, it's almost like our schedule, it's like there's a pre-test to the big test. | ||
| So tomorrow's November 1st. | ||
| So if you were getting ready for a fight in January, you would start ramping up somewhere around now? | ||
| Yeah, but it would be more of a... | ||
| 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. | ||
| So you're not doing anything crazy strength and conditioning-wise? | ||
| You're not trying to break your body down? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Because it's all a learning phase at that point. | ||
| You know, working the body, preparing the body with a lot of body motion, movements, and things of that matter. | ||
| Kind of just bringing more circulation to certain parts of my body. | ||
| Rather than, you know, somebody picking up a kettlebell and throwing it and crazy things like that. | ||
| It's all sports specific. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Range of motion. | ||
| So how do you organize this? | ||
| What is the team of people that you use and who's responsible for what? | ||
| Yeah, well, like I said, I think... | ||
| Because you've got a whole crew in the back. | ||
| People don't know. | ||
| Captain America's with you, but you get the rest of the Avengers are all waiting in the waiting room. | ||
| I was going to say, we first found him when he hurt his hand and he had to rehab it. | ||
| Hold on, let me get this off. | ||
| See, it's going in layers. | ||
| It's going in layers. | ||
| So he had hurt his hand before his first fight with Sergio Pettis. | ||
| And I was trying to find any way for him to still compete. | ||
| And we found somebody using this machine, which led us to actually Neuro Force One and Kareem and all these guys. | ||
| And we tried to force it for him to get back in time. | ||
| And I have video of him just screaming in pain, trying to get there. | ||
| And we thought we stayed off it for a couple of weeks. | ||
| And then the day of the face off, he went to cut weight and he said his wrist kept slipping out. | ||
| And we had to pull him from the fight. | ||
| We went to see the doctor. | ||
| The doctor said, no way, shouldn't fight. | ||
| So what was the injury? | ||
| I think it was a it ended up being something with a sprained ligament. | ||
| I had sprained one of my ligaments in my hand, so there was nothing I could do. | ||
| I would open the cap bottle to brush my teeth. | ||
| When it hurt to that point, I'm just like, man, I can't do anything. | ||
| Eric here ended up connecting me with Neural Force and found out that they had these certain machines that help you heal faster. | ||
| What did the machines do? | ||
| Accelerated recovery, so it was like NeuroStem, and they have about a thousand programs on it, and it just forced him to recover a lot faster. | ||
| The best example was UFC fighter Pantoja. | ||
| He was on the Ultimate Fighter 24 with us, our number one seed that we picked, Alexander Pantoja. | ||
| I saw him blow three ligaments out of his elbow, and he started crying because he had a fight in eight weeks in Iron, no, Scotland. | ||
| And, um... | ||
| I said, no, no, no, don't go home tomorrow. | ||
| He's supposed to be going back home to Brazil. | ||
| And I said, no, no, no, let's try this. | ||
| You got to try it. | ||
| And they did it twice, two sessions a day for 10 days. | ||
| And he went back and he fought. | ||
| He fought that guy and beat him. | ||
| He ran naked choking that guy, Neil Seary, and put that guy in retirement. | ||
| So after that, I was like, we need these guys. | ||
| Henry. | ||
| Whatever these guys did to Pantoja, we need to do it for you. | ||
| And that's how it started. | ||
| 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? | ||
| I think you just have to hope for somebody to wrap it very well. | ||
| Like, you're screwed. | ||
| Having a hand injury is probably the worst injury you could have. | ||
| I mean, we eat with these hands, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| This is how we survive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And when you have an injury like that, you're going to be fighting with the other. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Do you remember when Uriah Faber fought Mike Brown and broke both hands? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And just started throwing elbows? | ||
| And slapping them. | ||
| It just didn't give in for a second. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's how tough that motherfucker is. | ||
| Two broken hands just trying to find a way to win. | ||
| Yeah, it's miserable. | ||
| It was a title fight, too. | ||
| You do amazing things for title fights. | ||
| No, but I wanted to bring in Joe, if you allow me, because I'm honored, man. | ||
| And I think I brought them in, Joe, because I want to kind of share the new age stuff, like something that's just taken over the top. | ||
| So, Kevin, if you can hear me, come on. | ||
| Oh, you can't. | ||
| There's a bit long delay. | ||
| There's like a 30-second delay. | ||
| You can go grab him. | ||
| Okay, I'll grab him. | ||
| Yeah, go grab him, Captain. | ||
| He's going to come back with a new layer removed. | ||
| He's going to come back with a cape. | ||
| He's going to come back naked. | ||
| We don't have another microphone, though, unfortunately. | ||
| So he's going to have to take your spot because there's not another microphone. | ||
| Who do you think of Captain America, man? | ||
| When we use a fourth microphone, we actually have to set it up, and it's not up right now. | ||
| Joe, what do you think of Captain America? | ||
| He's hilarious. | ||
| I think that we got to him. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, man. | |
| You know how you are with Eddie? | ||
| That's kind of how I am with him, you know? | ||
| No, it's that certain relationship. | ||
| Hey, man, that helps. | ||
| How are you, sir? | ||
| Good. | ||
| How you doing, Joe? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Push up. | |
| Tell everybody who you are. | ||
| I'm Kevin Longoria. | ||
| I am the Chief Science Officer for Neuroforce One. | ||
| And then I'm a neurophysiologist as well. | ||
| Keep this about like a fist from your face. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So tell us what your role was in camp and what you did to help him get ready. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cool. | |
| Yeah, so Neuroforce One is a neuroscience-based training company and a medical-grade diagnostic testing company as well. | ||
| Where are you guys at? | ||
| We're out of Scottsdale, Arizona. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What is a DC brain potential? | ||
| DC brain potential is a... | ||
| It's like you want to be like Daniel Cormier. | ||
| Yeah, sounds like... | ||
| You got to get that DC brain potential. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So is this on like a chart? | ||
| Is there a number reading that you're getting? | ||
| What is it that... | ||
| Correct. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And what is measuring all these things? | ||
| Is there a device? | ||
| Is it a... | ||
| Yeah, this is a pretty amazing device. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So you're sort of there to dictate when it's going to be a hard day, when it's going to be an easy day? | ||
| Correct, yeah. | ||
| And that's something, as I'm sure you guys know, in wrestling, it's always hard, always let's go. | ||
| So this was a little bit of an issue in the camp at the very beginning, if you could imagine. | ||
| Henry wakes up, it's a sparring day, we're maybe even supposed to do two-a-days. | ||
| He wakes up feeling really good, and nervous system is out of whack. | ||
| It's like, sorry man, I know you feel good, but you're not, you know... | ||
| Wow! | ||
| Yeah, so we would go a no-go that day and, you know, as you can see, it all worked out in the long run. | ||
| Well, it worked out fantastic, but was that weird for you to feel good and then to be told you got to chill out? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I didn't run at all this whole camp. | ||
| So do you get a baseline off of this? | ||
| Eric, you've got to stop moving around. | ||
| You're freaking me out. | ||
| He's doing hand signals back there. | ||
| He's translating for the deaf people. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Correct, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So for nutrient timing, you're talking about when you're actually eating and what you're eating, so you're planning that out as well? | ||
| A hundred percent, yes. | ||
| We put together a nutrition program and because training varies every morning, we're deciding what we're going to do for the day. | ||
| It's completely dynamic. | ||
| So we're kind of reinventing the game of periodization and programming because you can't give somebody an eight-week plan. | ||
| You have to check every single day. | ||
| This is how you stay very dynamic and you avoid plateaus and just the issues. | ||
| It's always going to lead to suboptimal performance if you're programming out. | ||
| So every day we adjust. | ||
| We're doing... | ||
| This intensity of training. | ||
| We did a VO2 max assessment. | ||
| So we know exactly how much glycogen you're burning at various levels of intensity. | ||
| We do heart rate tracking during your training. | ||
| Alright, this is exactly what you have to replace following. | ||
| So I'm standing on the sidelines, you know, after every practice mixing up custom supplements for him as well. | ||
| So this is something... | ||
| What kind of stuff? | ||
| 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. | ||
| How long have you guys been in business for? | ||
| We've only been in business for about eight months. | ||
| We're still very new. | ||
| Been working with Henry a little bit longer than that. | ||
| But yeah, this company's just getting off the ground. | ||
| We kind of rebranded a few months ago. | ||
| Just opened our first facility as well out in Scottsdale. | ||
| What is your background in? | ||
| I'm a physiologist. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So you guys mostly working with civilians? | ||
| Are you working with pro athletes? | ||
| 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. | ||
| We trade them the training for the data. | ||
| And how'd you guys get together? | ||
| We've been working with Henry about a year. | ||
| He knew our CEO, Kareem Amin, a great guy. | ||
| We kind of all circle around Kareem. | ||
| He brought us all together. | ||
| He came in probably about eight months ago, a little bit before the first camp, and we met, talked, and No, Henry was straight up. | ||
| He's like, man, you know your stuff, but you don't know MMA. So I took that, you know, personally, we, you know, spent a lot of time together. | ||
| I had to learn the sport. | ||
| I'm a physiologist, not an MMA physiologist. | ||
| So we really took the time to get to know each other, you know, hang out a lot now. | ||
| I got to go to his house and wake him up every day for eight weeks. | ||
| So that was, we got to know each other pretty well. | ||
| I do his meal preps and stuff. | ||
| Too much. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| That's a fantastic combination, though. | ||
| A guy like you who knows so much about the body and recovery and a real super high-level Olympic gold medalist athlete. | ||
| I mean, when you get that combination, that's really a dream for a guy like you and for a guy like you. | ||
| For both of you guys to come together like this, I understand why you wanted to bring him on as well. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| If you understand half of it. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| I can pretend. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, the DC mind thing. | ||
| That shit's important. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's pretty incredible. | ||
| Yeah, incredible. | ||
| And, you know, Henry will tell you he may be picked up weights like three or four times. | ||
| We don't really do traditional strength training because, you know, a lot of people just... | ||
| It's called vector-based training. | ||
| So a lot of people do things like squats and deadlifts. | ||
| This is an axial plane. | ||
| Like, we don't live in this up-and-down plane. | ||
| So we break it down by vector. | ||
| What angles does he need to exert and absorb force in very effectively? | ||
| And very rarely does that come down to actually utilizing weights. | ||
| We do things like positional isometrics and eccentric training and things along these lines. | ||
| Number one, they integrate with the nervous system very effectively. | ||
| Isometrics? | ||
| Yeah, positional isometrics. | ||
| Like what kind of, like planks? | ||
| I mean, that's kind of a low level of it, yeah. | ||
| Largely what you would want to do is like a biomechanical assessment and look at overactive and underactive muscles. | ||
| And you put them in very specific positions and you leverage what's called reciprocal inhibition. | ||
| So basically, and then the most basic term, like when I'm flexing my bicep, my tricep is relaxing. | ||
| So you'd hold certain positions so that you want to turn on certain muscles and kind of turn off other ones. | ||
| It's kind of a high level of PNF stretching, proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation. | ||
| So this is what would be done in like a PT office. | ||
| So for wrestling, what kind of exercises would you do that would incorporate those methods? | ||
| 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. | ||
| How would you define velocity-based training? | ||
| So basically what you want to do is, it's kind of like the new one rep max. | ||
| We all know one rep maxes aren't the safest thing to perform, right? | ||
| So there's different assessments. | ||
| Actually what I'm wearing here on my wrist right now. | ||
| This is the wearable tech of the future. | ||
| This is something we're testing right now. | ||
| This does velocity. | ||
| So I could stand in any position. | ||
| I could do a push press or I could do a punch. | ||
| This is going to measure my velocity. | ||
| Your max velocity at no weight would be your one rep max velocity basically. | ||
| And then you're going and you're doing your training. | ||
| So max velocity every single rep. | ||
| When you hit 20% dampening, so say I was at 10 meters per second, as soon as I hit 8 meters per second, I stop. | ||
| So this is kind of what they call fatigue. | ||
| So you stop that. | ||
| So instead of doing, you know, you're going to do 8 reps. | ||
| You do as many reps as you can until you reach a certain dampening of velocity. | ||
| And what are you doing them with? | ||
| Largely things like the Kaiser, the functional trainer, if you're familiar with that. | ||
| So you're just blasting. | ||
| Band work, yeah, things like that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Now, this wrist thing that you're wearing, it measures velocity. | ||
| So how is it doing that? | ||
| So basically I have one here and then I have one on my shoe as well. | ||
| So it can do it by using two sensors, it can measure relative velocity. | ||
| So it's reading one relative to the other. | ||
| This is also doing everything that a badass traditional wearable would do as well. | ||
| So it's doing my heart rate, heart rate variability, which is actually clinical grade. | ||
| Everything we do has got to be clinical grade because what's the point of collecting data if it's shit, right? | ||
| And then it does pulse oxometry. | ||
| So I'm looking at my oxygen saturation. | ||
| The next version is going to be able to do hydration, all kinds of badass stuff. | ||
| What's really cool about it as well is it can measure form. | ||
| Any exercise that you're doing, we can compare you essentially to an ideal form. | ||
| And because we have two, you don't even have to tell it you're doing a power clean. | ||
| It can read your motions and things like that. | ||
| And it gives you like a consistency number as well. | ||
| So one thing we really talk about is not building muscle on top of dysfunction. | ||
| We have to get your biomechanical patterns right first, and then we start putting muscle on. | ||
| If you just put muscle on top of dysfunction, you're facilitating further dysfunction. | ||
| Would you have to wear one of those on each hand? | ||
| I mean, I'd say ideally for someone like a fighter, you obviously are thrown with both hands. | ||
| I think it would be ideal. | ||
| It's really difficult to time sync multiple devices to be on the same timeline. | ||
| So that's something we're working with this company, an amazing company actually out of here out of LA to develop this thing right now. | ||
| So I would say that would be the goal. | ||
| It's not something that's going to be applicable to the average guy though as well. | ||
| We're trying to bring this type of training to everybody. | ||
| 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? | ||
| You just look at the various data? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, at the end of the day, you still would have to sync them. | ||
| So the thing there, you'd be collecting it in two different sets of hardware. | ||
| You'd want an API connectivity, put it up in the cloud, and then you'd still, at the end of the day, have to find the same time axis. | ||
| So it sounds simpler than it really would be. | ||
| That's why this is the only wearable in the world right now that has even one in the foot. | ||
| And so this also allows you to track your gait while you're running and things as well. | ||
| But the more devices, the more complex. | ||
| And, you know, that's something I think would be great, but maybe not applicable to everybody. | ||
| Is it going to be able to track martial arts moves? | ||
| Like will it be able to track a double leg takedown or a roundhouse kick or anything like that? | ||
| Right now you can program it to do anything. | ||
| You put it into kind of like a learning mode on your app. | ||
| You do a few motions, you name it, and then it can basically compare you to yourself in that mode. | ||
| So you can try and do perfect form and measure your form relative to yourself. | ||
| But if you have shitty form, you're comparing yourself to shitty form. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So it doesn't know any better. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So that's really what we're going towards. | ||
| Wow, this is fascinating stuff, man. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You're scientifically peaking. | ||
| Exactly, man. | ||
| I mean, there's just no room for guesswork and subjectivity at this level. | ||
| And technology, there's no need for it anymore. | ||
| So we're just trying to let people know shit like this is available, right? | ||
| So we're developing it, and then the end goal is just to make it extremely user-friendly, right? | ||
| So you're doing your velocity-based training, and it says stop. | ||
| And then you rest, and we're using your heart rate variability to tell you when to go again. | ||
| So it's easy to stop and go for your periodization and things like that. | ||
| The technology's here, now making it actionable recommendations for the individual that can understand is kind of what we're moving towards. | ||
| This is awesome stuff, man. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah, we're really passionate about what we're doing. | ||
| It's crazy that you've only been around for such a short amount of time, too, and yet you already have a world champion. | ||
| Oh, I know, man. | ||
| I mean, I feel, you know, there's times where you feel like you didn't deserve the opportunity because I'm new to the field. | ||
| You know, we obviously work our asses off and everything, but for Henry to put the faith into us, you know, this was a world champion camp. | ||
| We're a company... | ||
| Honestly, we're not even open yet. | ||
| This is probably one of the best acceleration for a company that's never seen the light of day ever. | ||
| We also are in a few other sports as well. | ||
| But yeah, for him to give us this opportunity, we felt like we owed him something. | ||
| So we worked extra hard, essentially put our entire company on hold for eight weeks to go help him out. | ||
| And it's paying dividends, obviously. | ||
| We're here right now. | ||
| Now, are you guys going to be open tomorrow? | ||
| 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? | ||
| Certainly. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's what we're doing. | ||
| So in the future, when you guys are open, you're not totally open to the general public yet, right? | ||
| Correct, yeah. | ||
| About six or eight months. | ||
| 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? | ||
| I mean, there's totally different degrees. | ||
| We have 100% remote kits right now. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's amazing, man. | ||
| What has it been like for you to make this gigantic change and to basically be like Ivan Drago? | ||
| Yeah, pretty much. | ||
| That's pretty much how it's kind of been. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So you felt a big difference through the entire camp doing this kind of method? | ||
| Yeah, through the entire camp. | ||
| People would trip out and be like, people were like, man, you're committing suicide. | ||
| How come you're not doing this? | ||
| How come you're not doing that? | ||
| What were they saying, how come you're not doing? | ||
| What specifically? | ||
| Oh no, just more work, more pad work, more sparring rounds, things of that matter, kind of like the gladiator stuff. | ||
| They're like, no, no, no, it's going to go according to my heart rate. | ||
| It's going to go according to what my windows of opportunity of training are. | ||
| And people are like, what kind of mumbo jumbo are you talking about? | ||
| You're supposed to be fighting. | ||
| Yeah, nobody knows. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, and that's kind of how... | ||
| I used to train so hard, but I used to get hurt. | ||
| I mean, I used to have back spasms kicking. | ||
| Like, that's how hard I would train. | ||
| Like, my back would literally go out just kicking. | ||
| I'd throw one kick, and they had to pull me off the gym in a stretcher. | ||
| You know, and I had those problems because I had just... | ||
| I really... | ||
| I didn't... | ||
| You almost train according to how... | ||
| How the schedule is rather than, okay, this is the approach today because this is how your stress levels are. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like relax, dude. | ||
| And then at times you're going to go hard and it'll spike you at times. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Now, are you taking melatonin or anything to ensure that you go to sleep at a specific time? | ||
| Do you time your sleep schedule? | ||
| How are you organizing that? | ||
| Yeah, and that's another thing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Which is important. | ||
| Yeah, so it's kind of like what Floyd does. | ||
| Floyd will be like, hey, we'll wake everybody up at 3 in the morning. | ||
| But there's no scientific to what Floyd's doing. | ||
| To us, it's like, hey, dude, we have to peak today. | ||
| I've always wondered if there is science behind it and he just doesn't talk about it. | ||
| You know, with Floyd, like, you don't know. | ||
| Yeah, like when he drinks a Pepsi after a workout. | ||
| I was like, I wonder if someone told him to do that to replenish his body with a ton of sugar. | ||
| I mean, high glycemic carbs right after. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What time do you do that at? | ||
| We would do that immediately following every rigorous training session to kind of like negate inflammatory responses and things like that. | ||
| You know, get you back into that anabolic phase as quickly as possible and then ideally right before bed every single night. | ||
| Did you feel like a science project while all this shit was going on? | ||
| I did. | ||
| I did. | ||
| 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 know. | ||
| And it's cool to see it because I come from a traditional sport where you put your head down and you go. | ||
| That's how wrestling is. | ||
| Wrestling and Muay Thai, I think they're very alike in that sense. | ||
| They're very traditional. | ||
| The harder you go, the more you push through injury, the better you will become. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, it's almost like I tell people, wrestling's not, it's almost like not a sport, man. | ||
| It's like a culture, man. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| These dudes are literally out for the glory. | ||
| Each and every one of them. | ||
| It's all glory. | ||
| There's no financial reward at all. | ||
| That's what's fascinating about it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, agreed. | ||
| Yeah, you know, there's the intangibles, the stuff that you just can't teach. | ||
| You can't quantify, you know. | ||
| So we do our best to quantify as much as we can, but yeah, I mean, I completely agree. | ||
| You gotta put in the time and the work to learn the skill at some point, and then once, you know, it's autonomic, the skill's mastered. | ||
| That's when you can kind of kick it back into our method. | ||
| I'm gonna agree with you, Joe. | ||
| I think I'm gonna agree with you. | ||
| And I think the reason why this works for pretty much every MMA fighter is because we've all been through hell. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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? | ||
| What are you saying? | ||
| This is how we make champions. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But there's a fine line to it. | ||
| Yeah, the fine line is what's fascinating to me. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's gonna be a different mindset. | ||
| There's gonna be a different way of preparing. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And it's all according to everybody. | ||
| I think a lot of things are cookie cutter. | ||
| Looking at it the way now, it's like a lot of things have stayed even in wrestling just over tradition. | ||
| You know, like bridging. | ||
| Every time I see people bridging, the way they stretch their neck, I'm just like, dude, that ain't good for us, man. | ||
| That shit's so bad for your neck. | ||
| And then they be doing these springs on their head. | ||
| Kevin, how bad is that? | ||
| How bad is bridging for you? | ||
| I mean, I wouldn't recommend it. | ||
| But Mike Tyson always looked badass when he was doing it back in the day. | ||
| I was going to say, it looks pretty badass. | ||
| Have you ever fucked around with the iron neck? | ||
| With the iron neck? | ||
| You don't know about that? | ||
| Oh, I got one back there. | ||
| Those things are badass. | ||
| You gotta try this, man. | ||
| I saw some of your videos. | ||
| That's definitely one of the missing links why a lot of these wrestlers get hurt. | ||
| The neck instability, the postural issues that come associated with it as well. | ||
| These guys need to strengthen their necks. | ||
| It's a halo. | ||
| You put it on, you pump it up like a Reebok pump. | ||
| Remember the Reebok pump? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You pump this sucker up so it tightens up on your head. | ||
| You put a chin strap on. | ||
| It's got a bungee cable on that's set to 50 pounds. | ||
| You back up and then there's resistance on the halo. | ||
| So it spins. | ||
| The halo has like, you could tighten up or clamp down or loosen up the resistance. | ||
| And you do these exercises like... | ||
| You go sideways, you do like loops back and forth. | ||
| It's fucking badass. | ||
| Damn, that's crazy. | ||
| I'm excited, man. | ||
| Yeah, you gotta try it. | ||
| Is that why I signed that waiver? | ||
| No, you signed a waiver because you've got to get a hold of some of that weed. | ||
| You're running through walls. | ||
| And then the float tank. | ||
| If you want to try the float tank, that's what the waiver's for, too. | ||
| I don't want you to lose your mind. | ||
| Yeah, the sensory immersion, those float tanks are pretty badass. | ||
| We study those quite a bit for the nervous system-based stuff. | ||
| We're building kind of our own sensory immersion, like mindfulness room of the future as well. | ||
| All the walls, LED screens, so you can put yourself fully immersed in any environment. | ||
| It's going to be pretty badass. | ||
| Mindfulness is so overlooked in these sports. | ||
| How important. | ||
| I know you're a meditation guy as well. | ||
| Getting your mind right is invaluable. | ||
| Yeah, and you were saying that meditation and yoga is also a part of the preparation that you guys employ? | ||
| Oh, 100%. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it all comes down to, you know, when we're doing our warm-up, training, and recovery, it's all mind and body. | ||
| So his warm-up is going to include, like, somatosensory reaction testing. | ||
| So imagine, like, a wall, and it has different lights on it. | ||
| You react as quickly as you can as soon as they light up. | ||
| Then I say, alright, if the light comes up red, use your right hand, and blue, use your left hand. | ||
| So we're invoking cognitive decision-making processes. | ||
| Then we have you stand on one of these shake plates, a proprio-receptive plate. | ||
| Now your vision, your neuromuscular, your proprio-receptive, everything is warmed up. | ||
| Everything, every part of your brain that's going to equate to, you know, force output, absorption, and so on. | ||
| Then we go do a more traditional warm-up, whatever that may be. | ||
| We do cognitive training, we do physical training more from a functional aspect. | ||
| And then as soon as you're done, we get you into a mind-based recovery as well. | ||
| So we get you into yoga, meditation, that technology we're playing with right now that manipulates your biochemicals. | ||
| Just about everything, man. | ||
| It's mind and body every step along the way. | ||
| And when you're doing yoga, are you doing yoga to increase mobility? | ||
| Are you doing it for the mental training, for both? | ||
| Definitely a little bit of both. | ||
| We believe Andre more leads the yoga, what we're doing over there, so he'd be better to ask specifically. | ||
| But we believe it largely for nervous system and for breathing. | ||
| One thing we really talk about is the diaphragmatic breathing, and yoga is really a calm environment to be able to focus on your breathing. | ||
| What does that mean, diaphragmatic breathing? | ||
| Diaphragmatic breathing, yeah. | ||
| Breathing from your diaphragm. | ||
| This is how we're all born, breathing from our diaphragm. | ||
| And just, you know, eventually we end up breathing from our chest, which is very ineffective for metabolic efficiency. | ||
| What's the difference? | ||
| Explain, like, what is it? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Do you think there's any benefit to breathing through your nose and out through your mouth? | ||
| I'd say it's on an individualized basis. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I want to talk MMA now, Joe. | ||
| Thank you, Kevin. | ||
| I appreciate it, man. | ||
| This guy will go on all day. | ||
| I love it, Kevin. | ||
| Thank you so much, man. | ||
| That was amazing, really. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| And tell people where they could find out about your company and what your website is. | ||
| Our company is in Scottsdale, Arizona. | ||
| The website is neuroforce1one.com. | ||
| Check us out. | ||
|
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All right. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Thanks, Joe. | ||
| That was very informative. | ||
| Intense shit, son. | ||
| Henry's now become the standard because, like he said, that Roman from the Performance Institute did that PowerPoint presentation for UFC Moscow. | ||
| He told us he's the first athlete that ever did eight weeks, that they have eight weeks collection of data. | ||
| So Henry's now become the standard of the system that Roman had Neuroforce 1 and all the data put together. | ||
| It's the first time ever that an athlete actually... | ||
| Stuck to the program for eight weeks. | ||
| That's fantastic. | ||
| So for you now, you got the title, and there is talk about you fighting for the bantamweight title against champion TJ Dillashaw. | ||
| What are your thoughts? | ||
| Where are you at right now? | ||
| What are your goals? | ||
| It's a beautiful time to be the champ. | ||
| There's tons of options, Joe. | ||
| Where's your contract at right now? | ||
| Well, I still have about seven fights left, you know, but we're going to renegotiate because I think more likely that T.J. fight might happen. | ||
| It's got to happen. | ||
| 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... | ||
| I've been thinking about it for a while. | ||
| And TJ's down for it too? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I think TJ wants to come down to 25. I think that's kind of like the delay a little bit. | ||
| Now, would you rather fight him at 35 so that you can get an additional title? | ||
| Or would you rather fight him at 35 because you don't have to cut weight? | ||
| I like both ideas. | ||
| I actually kind of left it off to him. | ||
| I said, I don't know, but I want to fight you, man. | ||
| I said, I want to fight TJ. I want to go out to the next best thing. | ||
| And I think that's him. | ||
| So you don't mind fighting him at 25 or 35? | ||
| Yeah, I don't. | ||
| That makes it easier. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That definitely makes it easy. | ||
| Yeah, I'm just like, hey, let's do that 25, let's do that 35, but let's fight, man. | ||
| That's where your mind is right now. | ||
| That's your number one goal. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And I believe TJ wants to fight me, too. | ||
| I think beating Demetrius, I think that's going to help his name. | ||
| I guess for both, you can say. | ||
| 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? | ||
| I wouldn't mind dabbling in both. | ||
| I know that's kind of broad, but at one point you do get tired of cutting weight. | ||
| What do you weigh right now? | ||
| I'm probably about 50. Losing 15 pounds is way better than losing 25 pounds. | ||
| Yeah, I'm a little bigger now because of that reason. | ||
| I might have to fight at Bantam. | ||
| I think more likely it might happen at Bantam way. | ||
| What people don't know is that, actually, Henry almost fought TJ when he was the champ. | ||
| When Hennon Baral didn't make weight, his first fight in the UFC, he didn't make weight. | ||
| But two hours later, Hennon Baral didn't make weight and they were looking. | ||
| For somebody to go up and fight TJ. When Joe Soto fought him? | ||
| When Joe Soto fought him, Henry was the number one option. | ||
| But Henry had already declined. | ||
| He said he wasn't fighting Jorgensen. | ||
| But now here we are, three years later. | ||
| Back now, he's got the belt. | ||
| TJ came back and won the belt. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| These guys have been beefing for a long time, so that's ever since the first day he ever came into the UFC. Him and TJ have been at it. | ||
| And then on Ultimate Fighter 24, Dwayne Bang was the coach. | ||
| There was a little beef with Henry, and Benavidez's team, Benavidez's coach. | ||
| So it kind of goes way back. | ||
| There's a bit of animosity too on top of everything. | ||
| Now you're a very goal-oriented guy. | ||
| Do you have your career mapped out in terms of like when you would like to get out of the game? | ||
| I do. | ||
| I do. | ||
| And I think about it a lot. | ||
| Because, man, I'll be honest with you, Joe. | ||
| I've accomplished everything I've ever wanted to, you know, in my career. | ||
| Like, I've always... | ||
| I had three goals, and that was just, you know... | ||
| My number one goal was just to be a good person, a good father, a good husband. | ||
| And then after that was to be an Olympic champ, and then eventually UFC champ. | ||
| So everything's kind of... | ||
| I've done everything that I've ever kind of set my mind to. | ||
| Those are the two biggest things, the two manliest things anybody could ever do. | ||
| And I don't see myself fighting for more than maybe three to four years. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I think for the most part, I mean, I like to eventually, I mean, I do a lot of motivational speaking. | ||
| I've been doing that for a while, Joe. | ||
| I've spoken in front of like the biggest companies in the world. | ||
| I mean, the Coca-Cola, like the TD Ameritrade, Procter& Gamble, a billion dollar company. | ||
| I just got signed by Kroger. | ||
| And they kind of, you know, they use me for that reason. | ||
| And I really enjoy doing that. | ||
| And plus, you get paid! | ||
| And you don't have to get leg kicked. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, you don't have to get leg kicked and hit that nerve and do the drunken monkey. | |
| You don't got to do all that. | ||
| And it's just cool to kind of share the whole underdog story. | ||
| I love that people do do that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, so anyways, that's kind of where I can see my life kind of heading to. | ||
| I think I'll always be a fan of the sport, but I don't think I'll be involved in either wrestling or fighting as much as I think I would. | ||
| Not as a coach, not as... | ||
| No, no. | ||
| It's too hard, Joe. | ||
| Like, look at all these coaches. | ||
| It's a relationship. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, being a coach, you're in a relationship with your athletes. | ||
| Sometimes you go through these breakups, and sometimes the athletes don't give you what they want to give you, and then it's just a headache at times. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I see that with a lot of, you know, I see that with him, and I'm just like, man, I don't know if I want those stress levels. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's it. | |
| That's a lot of stress. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, there has to be a training of the mind, too. | ||
| And I think that's where people are skipping. | ||
| And, you know, I think that's where you have to understand, like, the philosophy up here. | ||
| Like, you have to be right up top. | ||
| You have to be right. | ||
| You have to be literally, you have to understand and know who you are as a fighter, as a person. | ||
| And, you know, to kind of... | ||
| To be stable enough to perform when it really matters. | ||
| And if you don't have that, you can be as talented and as gifted as you want. | ||
| You'll never make it. | ||
| And we see those all the time. | ||
| I'd see guys in practice, man, they would tear me up. | ||
| They came to competition, they would just roll over like fish. | ||
| It's weird, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| I'm like, huh? | ||
| Yeah, it's weird as you're coming up and you see those guys and you realize, like, man, there's something missing. | ||
| And then you're terrified you're going to see that in yourself. | ||
| And I think it's the embracement of embracing pressure. | ||
| It's something that you don't neglect. | ||
| It's something that you don't shy away from. | ||
| It's something that you don't allow to damage you. | ||
| But it's an embracement. | ||
| It's like, hey, bring it, man, bring it. | ||
| Because that's what it is, Joe. | ||
| It's the pressure that people feel, the reason why they can't perform. | ||
| It's what makes champions. | ||
| I remember when T.J. Dillshaw first fought Hennen Burrell. | ||
| When he got into that octagon, dude, he looked like he was sparring. | ||
| He was loose as a goose. | ||
| And I saw him, I'm like, damn, look how loose T.J. is. | ||
| Like, this is a world title fight, and he's switching stances and giving them looks, and he looks fantastic. | ||
| He just looked loose, and then BOOM! He hits him with that big overhand right, and the next thing you know, Henneporell's getting fucked up. | ||
| I mean, and that was what TJ thrives on that kind of pressure. | ||
| He lives for that kind of pressure, just like you do. | ||
|
unidentified
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Which is why I want to see that fight. | |
| Let's do it. | ||
| I want his head on a spike. | ||
| We both do. | ||
| I want to make some snake shoes out of TJ, man. | ||
| Snake skin, baby. | ||
| I want snake skin shoes. | ||
| Maybe suit. | ||
| I think he might be big enough for me. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| What a fight that would be for fans, too. | ||
| I mean, those champion versus champion encounters are always so fantastic. | ||
| No, and the reason why it's cool, too, is because we're both in our prime, too. | ||
| Like, TJ's probably a couple years older than me, but even with, like, Demetrius, like, dude, I beat Demetrius in his prime. | ||
| Like, yeah, it was a close fight. | ||
| But man, I can say, dude, I beat him. | ||
| In his prime. | ||
| In his prime. | ||
| It's almost like there's no doubt, but it was because of the game planning. | ||
| And you ended the greatest winning streak in the history of the sport. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, the greatest championship defense streak in the history of the sport. | ||
| And then on top, I mean... | ||
| Nurmagomedov has the greatest winning streak in the sport because he's still undefeated. | ||
| But as far as defending the title, DJ was number one. | ||
| And again, you did it to him in his prime. | ||
| If you look at the way he destroyed Wilson Hayes, if you look at, like, I mean, fucking... | ||
|
unidentified
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Everybody. | |
| Everybody, man. | ||
| Moraga. | ||
| Everybody. | ||
| He's a monster, man. | ||
| Ray Borg, the greatest submission in... | ||
| That was the craziest shit of all time. | ||
| He fucking suplexes him and then catches an arm bar on the way down. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| He told me he does that in training all the time. | ||
| Yeah, Matt Hume is a wizard. | ||
| 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. | ||
| As a wrestler. | ||
| As a wrestler. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Start fast and finish even stronger. | ||
| Compete with passion and purpose. | ||
| And this is what I said to him right here. | ||
| He's been waiting all day to show you this shit. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Because this is what I told him going into the fifth round when we was 2-2. | ||
| Let's hear it. | ||
| Shit, let me see. | ||
| I said, let's throw Henry. | ||
| Burn the ships. | ||
| Take the fucking castle. | ||
| Let's take him down. | ||
| Hurt him on the ground. | ||
| If he gets back up, knock his ass out. | ||
| And that's what I told him going into the fifth round to shake him. | ||
| Are you selling that shirt? | ||
| I think we only had one or two, but we should, says the messenger. | ||
| So, you know, it's just something that I was ingraining into him every sparring session. | ||
| I had something said for him. | ||
| But this time, going into the fifth round against DJ, I wasn't sure if it was 2-2 or if he needed a knockout. | ||
| How did you feel? | ||
| I thought it was 2-2. | ||
| I thought it was 2-2. | ||
| And I think DJ, from the interviews that I've heard, I think he felt like it was 2-2 going to the 5th. | ||
| Yeah, we thought it was 2-2. | ||
| When we were watching the fight, we were like, damn, this is as close as it gets. | ||
| Yeah, and again, Joe, I wouldn't, like I said, because it was such a close fight, dude. | ||
| I'd clap for Demetrius too if they would have gave them the fight. | ||
| I know it was close, you know. | ||
| What did you weigh? | ||
| I was actually a pound lighter than Demetrius. | ||
| I don't know if you knew that. | ||
| Wow, you looked bigger. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You really did. | ||
| But that's, again, that's kind of where they, the way they placed my muscle, like it was... | ||
| That's why I look bigger, but no, I was a pound lighter than Demetrius Johnson. | ||
| What did you weigh? | ||
| 141. Oh, wow. | ||
| That's because when you saw you guys standing together in the octagon, you really did look bigger than him. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| It's really interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so I was lighter than Demetrius, people, FYI. And he kept on saying. | ||
| He said it twice. | ||
| He's so big, he's so strong. | ||
| He said it twice in his post-interview. | ||
| Well, that's wrestling strength, right? | ||
| Wrestling strength is just a different kind of strength. | ||
| Well, sometimes it's not even strength, it's leverage. | ||
| It's learning how to use, how to tippy-toe things and how to use your weight to pressure your opponent or to take them down. | ||
| For sure, yeah. | ||
| But there's also strength. | ||
| I mean, there's some creepy strength that wrestlers have. | ||
| Anybody's ever rolled with a wrestler knows that. | ||
| Yeah, I guess you're right. | ||
| If you could see the transformation that he had from the eight weeks, from the beginning to the end. | ||
| There's a documentary. | ||
| These guys filmed the whole entire thing. | ||
| Are you guys going to put it out? | ||
| You're putting the documentary out? | ||
| Yeah, I think we're going to put it out sometime, I think in the spring. | ||
| But it's going to come out. | ||
| It's going to be nice. | ||
| We're going to try to pitch it to Netflix. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| The whole process. | ||
|
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The messenger. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| The messenger. | ||
| And don't forget, not only was he fighting for the title, this guy was fighting for his life only eight months before in the Santa Rosa fires. | ||
| So his story is very inspirational. | ||
| That's a crazy fucking story in and of itself. | ||
| You actually burn the bottom of your feet running, escaping a fire that snuck up on you like lightning speed, huh? | ||
| Yeah, it was the craziest thing that's probably ever happened to me. | ||
| And I've done some crazy things. | ||
| Yeah, they documented it in the UFC pre-show. | ||
| Like, when they showed all the damage to the area where you were living. | ||
| It's fucking terrifying. | ||
| Yeah, it was crazy. | ||
| 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! | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So I jump out and I start walking. | ||
| As I'm walking, I'm seeing the whole town in front of us was all in sticks. | ||
| The whole thing was just in sticks. | ||
| The fire had just ate that thing up. | ||
| There's a building in front of me on fire. | ||
| I'm just walking through the streets, going up the hill. | ||
| I'm just thinking, God, it's going to be a horrible way to die. | ||
| Horrible way to die. | ||
|
unidentified
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Fuck. | |
| And I got a bird's eye view when I was on top of the hill, and then I saw there's a cop down there. | ||
| There's a cop down in the middle of the freeway. | ||
| I'm just like, you know, that's where I got to go. | ||
| So now I'm running fast, and I'm seeing this brush fire kind of come along. | ||
| I'm seeing California just catch on fire completely through my eyes. | ||
| I jump over the first fence to get to the freeway, no problem. | ||
| I jump over the second fence, and then the third fence, it was a very flimsy kind of fence. | ||
| And I remember as I jumped out, I remember it snagged part of my slacks. | ||
| Keep in mind, the only thing I had on was slacks. | ||
| I was commando, slacks, no shirt, no shoes, out in the cold in California. | ||
| And as that flimsy fence, as I jumped off that last fence, it like cut. | ||
| And like a part of the fence, I grabbed my butt and it just, it cut me open hard. | ||
| And it tore like half the leg. | ||
| So now, I'm full of smoke. | ||
| My right foot's burned. | ||
| And I'm pretty much half naked in the middle of the freeway. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus Christ. | |
| So I see the cop car and I go up to the cop car. | ||
| And as I'm going up to it, I'm sorry, the freaking cop car leaves. | ||
| Like, fucking just scrambles. | ||
| I'm just like, oh my god. | ||
| And as soon as that cop car left, I remember seeing, like, this big-ass diesel, like, coming towards me. | ||
| And ever getting into the middle of the freeway and kind of, you know, waving my hands, like, dude, you're gonna take me out? | ||
| I ain't dying like this. | ||
| Like, hit me, dude. | ||
| And as it got closer, I saw it was a firetruck. | ||
| And I get rescued by the firemen. | ||
| They put me in the firetruck, and they're just kind of like looking at me like, damn, dude, you just survived death. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| You just survived death because I was black, dude. | ||
| I already smelled like a marshmallow. | ||
| Did anybody die in the hotel? | ||
| Fifty. | ||
| Fifty people died in the hotel. | ||
| I'm not sure if anybody died at the hotel. | ||
| I hope not, but I could see how. | ||
| 50 people died in the town? | ||
| Yeah, it was the worst. | ||
| No, yeah. | ||
| 50 people died. | ||
| 50 families. | ||
| It was sad to hear, man. | ||
| So it just happened quick. | ||
| Those fires come so quick, people don't realize before it's too late, and then there's no escape route. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| So that had happened like two months before I fought Sergio Pettis. | ||
| And I still fought him. | ||
| I trained with two socks, with a wrestling shoe. | ||
| And I just stuck it out because I pulled out the first fight with him. | ||
| I said, I gotta make it up to you. | ||
| And I told him, I said, I owe you one. | ||
| And then he kind of called me out on it. | ||
| I was like, dude, I'm gonna fight you regardless now, man. | ||
| With first degree burns on my foot. | ||
| I'm sorry, third degree burns on my foot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Well, I'm glad you made it, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, here I am, 2018, USC champ. | |
| I'm glad you made it, and I'm glad we could do this podcast. | ||
| Thanks for doing this, man. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| Yeah, no, for sure. | ||
| Thank you, Joe. | ||
| I've been a big fan of your show, and I hope you guys got some good insight on the messenger and Captain America over here. | ||
| We certainly did. | ||
| We definitely did. | ||
| And Kevin as well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Thank you, Eric. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Bye, everybody. |
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