Ross Edgley’s 12-hour daily, five-month swim around Great Britain—2,000 miles—demanded crushing mental resilience and extreme physical adaptations like collapsed foot arches and 15,000-calorie diets. His preparation mirrored Soviet-era endurance principles, blending strength and stamina while navigating deadly currents like the Pentland Firth’s whirlpools. Edgley contrasts intrinsic motivation (Khabib Nurmagomedov’s family-driven focus) with extrinsic incentives (Mayweather’s wealth obsession), proving elite performance thrives on purpose—not just pain tolerance or strategy. [Automatically generated summary]
So if there's any influence from tides or currents and it's pulling you in one direction, I mean, I was basically going to miss Martinique.
So I don't know, I was heading to Cuba, you know, somewhere like that.
And then on the way back down, you know, they turned to me again and they said, like, you're going to miss St. Lucia.
You're going to end up in, I don't know, whatever's further south than St. Lucia.
And I think I realised as physically fit as you are, the ocean just doesn't care.
It doesn't care.
And so after that, this was last year, this was November last year, kind of felt I had unfinished business with the ocean.
Came back to England, rung up friends of mine at the Royal Marines.
I said, guys, look, this is going to sound so, so strange.
I said, but I just, I need to get out my system.
I just need to see how far I can swim in 48 hours.
So I swam 48 hours.
I can't remember what it was in there.
I think it was 160 kilometers, something like that.
And I finished and I had basically trench foot.
So where your feet and your hands are so kind of, I've got so much water in that it's almost going moldy.
Yeah, so I'm sort of sitting there nursing my feet and one of the officers, a good friend of mine, they came over and they just said, you know, real English Royal Marine, they said, you boy?
And I said, yes.
And they said, what are you training for?
And I said, oh, I'm training for potentially attempting the world's longest current neutral swim.
And then he just paused and he sipped his cup of tea and he looked me up and down and he just goes, That just sounds a bit lame.
Once the idea stuck with me, I mean, we've got this real history and heritage of British eccentric explorers.
And for me, growing up, there was a story of Captain Webb, the first guy to swim across the English Channel.
And for those who don't know, English Channel, the tides, they believed, were too strong.
The water was too cold.
They said, you just can't make it across the English Channel.
It's impossible.
But Captain Webb refused to listen and 1875 August crossed the English Channel, and this is the part I love, on a diet of beef broth and brandy in a woolen wetsuit.
He swam, I think it was 23 hours, breaststroke with his head out the water because, and I quote, front crawl was ungentlemanly like.
And there was that element that I just thought, that's amazing.
And I think, you know, people don't understand that it's taken, you know, people like Captain Webb, maybe me to a smaller extent, to just raise the bar, push the boundaries.
And, you know, you've seen that.
I think our generation have seen that with the UFC, with mixed martial arts that has evolved so fast.
I always remember Forrest Griffin used to kind of liken himself to the basketball players just shooting three-pointers with the ball between the legs.
And that always resonated with me because I was like, yeah, the evolution that we've seen and what sort of Bruce Lee had the foresight to predict.
It's amazing.
And I think in a much, much, much smaller way, again, to go back to sort of British athletes and adventurers, Roger Bannister, you know, first guy to run a four-minute mile.
And people said couldn't be done.
And he was a medical student at the time.
Leading physician said, you can't do it.
Your lungs will explode.
Your legs will fall off.
All sorts.
But no, he said, you know, Oxford laced up his trainers and ran a four-minute mile.
Similar right now to what I think we're seeing with Kipchoge, you know, and the two-hour marathon.
And so that's why, and again, in a much, much smaller way, when I had that conversation about swimming around Great Britain, everybody said, it can't be done.
Yes, it's 2,000 miles, but there's giant whirlpools in Scotland called the Coriovecan, Penland Firth, renowned around the world.
If you get that wrong, you're disappearing backwards at 10 knots.
And when you get, but actually you made a good point in terms of when you get wind over tide, so if you've got 10 knots going this way, but you've even got a little bit of wind and waves going this way, It can get choppy.
And again, sort of looking at West Scotland, wind over tide, you can get 40 knots coming straight down the barrel, but you're trying to swim with the tide.
Yeah, I mean it's in completely in theory and this is what I realized when I when I sat down and we started Sort of plotting the great what is it called again?
Yeah, yeah, and that's that like I said renowned around the world, but but equally If you imagine the shape of Great Britain, there's all sorts of kind of compression where the water will just come rushing through.
And as well as the Penland Firth, you can get, you know, six knots around Wales.
There's an island called Skoma.
And if you get that right, you are disappearing up, you know, and you're winning.
You get it wrong.
Again, you're going backwards.
And for me to do a continuous stage swim, if I'm going backwards, I've got to start where I was going backwards.
So for me, getting every single tide right, and that's why I was so...
The team were amazing.
The captain, Matt, was just incredible that every night the homework began.
Alright, folks, if you're listening or watching, we had a little technical difficulty, so this is not streaming live.
It will be uploaded later.
We were just going over how you predicted you had to, and your team had to predict how the tide was coming, because if it went wrong, you'd get pushed backwards at like 10 miles an hour.
And this is the thing, I think, with the Great British Swim, we were kind of taking swimming as most people understand it, and we were removing it and putting it in an arena that was so different.
And I think that's why it was it did so well kind of online as well, the community around it, because obviously swimmers were interested.
But, you know, surfers started to get involved because they understood the waves, sailors, fishermen, you know, all sorts of people started to say, you know, sometimes in Great Britain, it's not safe to take a boat around the top of Scotland.
You know, for instance, never mind a swimmer.
So that's that's why it was amazing that on the entire series, it became a melting pot, an exchange of ideas, because nobody knew how to get a human body around the coast of Great Britain.
So in theory, when we sat down and we looked, we know that if you do six hours on, six hours off, For 157 days, you'll make it around the coast of Great Britain.
And that was the theory.
So you do this biphasic sleep and you swim for 12 hours a day.
But that's all theory.
There's times when, as I mentioned, giant whirlpools or the tides might not necessarily...
If you imagine, that's Great Britain there.
The tides don't necessarily go always like this, so they're not that predictable.
Sometimes, if there's kind of like this, like that's kind of whales there, the tides will do this.
It was at that point that I collapsed, exhausted, faced, now a different shape to when I started that particular swim.
And the team looked at me and they saw how bad I was, how beaten up I was.
But they also knew that the sea just doesn't care.
And in six hours, the tide was going to change and I'm going to have to do that all over again.
And it was that kind of...
Brutal lesson from nature that from a sports science background, I'm interested in, you know, rehab, rest, recovery, nutrition strategies, all of this.
But with swimming around Great Britain, it very quickly became apparent that the sea just doesn't care.
It just doesn't care that you need to rehab your shoulders.
It doesn't care that the ligaments and tendons in your shoulders are hurting.
You might get impingement from swimming too much.
None of this.
That's why it went from swimming as I understood it and how a lot of people understand it to something completely like surviving basically in the water.
Because again, going back to what we were talking about with the Pendulum Firth, you could get out and you could get on the boat, but sometimes in a really good tide, if you are just in the water, you could be making four knots.
You don't have to swim, but if you get in the freezing cold water of Scotland and you are quite happy getting hit in the face by tentacles, you can still make four knots.
And so that's why so often it became about...
Something different than swimming.
It was just mental fortitude.
It was physical fortitude.
I always remember, actually, the first day of autumn, I got up, it was 2 o'clock, so it was a night swim, 2 o'clock in the morning, and I left my wetsuit out to dry, and I had to scrape just a thin layer of ice off the wetsuit before I could put it on.
But if I didn't get in and I didn't scrape that wear seat, then that would have been 15 miles potentially that we would have missed out on.
And if you miss those 15 miles, the window of opportunity to swim around Great Britain because of the British summer being notoriously unpredictable and quite short...
We wouldn't have made it round because even towards the end, there was two storms, Storm Allum and Storm Allie and Callum, who kind of stopped us for those two days where we couldn't swim because you just couldn't swim in a storm.
If someone said that guy's going to swim around Great Britain, I'd be like, that guy's going to swim for half an hour and he's going to have a fucking heart attack.
Yeah, and I'd probably be inclined to agree with you.
But what I find interesting is when you start looking at strength and stamina, for so often people believe the two couldn't coexist.
And Robert Hickson and his sort of research around concurrent training, they're basically saying if you train for strength and stamina, You dilute the potency of the stimuli.
So what I mean by that is if we went into the gym just now and me, you and Jamie walked into the gym and we were like, okay, let's go and see what we're doing in the squat rack.
That's strength, your body's ability to generate force.
And we trained that and then all of a sudden I was like, okay, no, no, no, now let's go over to the rowing machine or let's go for a swim.
Let's go and swim 10K. Then all of a sudden our bodies are going to go, well, hang on, which one do you want us to adapt to?
Looking at molecular biology, which one Do you want us to adapt to strength or stamina?
And again, you dilute the potency of that stimuli.
However, there's the theory that if you separate them within the laws...
Looking at Verkashansky, one of the greatest strength and conditioning coaches to ever exist, he talks about this idea of adaptive energy, saying that in any given day, you have a certain amount of adaptive energy.
And if you are able to fit...
A training session that, like I said, causes your body to adapt to both strength and stamina and you separate them.
So yeah, if we did, and this is what I find fascinating about MMA, because you're essentially saying to an MMA athlete, I need you to be strong, fast, quick.
I need you to be muscally endured, but I also need you to have plyometric speed strength.
And their body's going, you want us to be all of those things.
You know, and that's why quite often it's the athlete with a higher work capacity who can, you know, adapt to those.
Looking at like, you know, the Diaz brothers who just do triathlons for fun.
You know, they have this insane work capacity, you know, so that's kind of your body's ability to perform and positively tolerate training of a given intensity or duration.
So if you have the Diaz brothers and you say, okay, we're going to now do weight training in the morning, but by the afternoon I also need to go and swim a 10K, their bodies could tolerate that.
So that's essentially how I would approach anything like this.
But what I found really interesting when you were talking with C.T. Fletcher was...
When you look at strength and stamina, it's so specific.
So, you know, said principle, specific adaptation to imposed demands, you know, you get good at whatever you continually practice.
And when you look at endurance in weight-bearing sports, absolutely, you know, you can argue that running, for instance, is just, you know, power-to-weight ratio.
It's a series of successive jumps.
And when you start looking at that, there's research that will show adding, and we did this with the Royal Marines back in England, when you just add one kilo of extra weight in a backpack, its effect on pulmonary ventilation, lactic threshold, time to fatigue, all of those things.
Just one kilogram, that's it.
And so that's why when you see Tour de France and people like Chris Froome, Bradley Wiggins, you know, from Team Sky, they are just looking at the body saying, okay, your VO2 is what it is, your power to weight ratio, that's what we need to improve.
We need to treat you like a Formula One car.
We need to take away anything, you know, so when you look at Chris Froome, you know, an unbelievable athlete, and they say, well, look, you don't need biceps, you don't need triceps, so they will remove those.
And so looking at that, and sorry, going back to strength and stamina, when you look at running, you could argue that, you know, being jacked and being heavier, yes, absolutely, your power to weight ratio is going to impact you.
So for instance, I like to run, but I don't stand a chance against some of my friends who are, you know, fell runners and they weigh, you know, 30 kilos less than me.
Yeah, you look at an unbelievable specimen of a man.
You go, yes, you were built for endurance.
But as soon as you go in the water, things might start to change a little bit because now it's non-weight bearing.
So the power to weight ratio is a little bit different.
So then you could, and this is all theory for the moment, but looking at the body shape to swim around Great Britain, because no one's ever done it before.
So you can say, okay, what does that body type look like?
And when writing down a checklist, you say, we need someone who can swim in, you know, 40 knots of wind, wind over tide that we're talking about, so you're not going to break.
On top of that as well, you can start to look at, all of a sudden, we need someone who's never going to take a day off.
So I wasn't sick throughout those 157 days.
So there you start looking at adaptive energy and work capacity that we just spoke about.
And then all of a sudden, you can start getting real into the detail of looking at, okay, someone with a higher muscle mass, If they're able to effectively swim and their biomechanics are on point, so that's not, you know, this muscle mass isn't interfering with their biomechanics, could it be argued that that stored muscle glycogen can almost turn them into a human whale?
You know, that, yeah, you're right.
You put me into the pool with Michael Phelps and he laps me.
But when it comes to something like swimming around in Great Britain, it's just an eating competition, you know, with a little bit of swimming involved.
And you just need to make sure you don't break.
And that goes back to the tides as well, your body working with tides.
If you can just keep getting in the water for 157 days, 12 hours a day, and not break, you'll make it around Great Britain.
I mean, this is purely anecdotal, and I'd love to actually do more research into this, but certainly with a lot of athletes that I train with, it's almost like a bell curve.
So if you can imagine, you know, for those listening, like a bell curve like that, how would you describe that?
So you can argue that here around endurance, so if you've got somebody who's, you know, to use Rich Roll as an example, an amazing swimmer, that over 10k, he's going to be amazing because his efficiency and everything.
But then past this point, so when we start looking at the mileage that we were covering, so sort of English Channel Swimmers, 20 miles plus a day, At this point, this leaner swimmer is going to start running out of muscle glycogen.
His biomechanics might break down because he doesn't have the strength to hold that position continually.
All of those things, the waves start crashing and he's starting to swim into 40 knots of wind.
What's going to happen?
Would you favour the leaner, quicker, more streamlined swimmer?
Or would you argue that the guy with more muscle mass here is going to continue to swim?
Not necessarily at the same pace, but would continue not to break.
I think it depends on who the man with the muscle mass is, because a lot of guys with muscle mass, they got that muscle mass from doing very low reps, high weight.
I mean, what kind of exercise do you do that gives you a build like that?
And I think when you start looking at the three mechanisms to build muscular hypertrophy, you start looking at Metabolic stress.
So metabolic stress being exactly what you just said.
Lots and lots of reps.
Dorian Yates has been a great example of that.
That is more muscular hypertrophy.
Bodybuilding-centric work.
That's metabolic stress.
Lots and lots of reps.
But then you can also look at mechanical tension.
So that's more your power lifters.
Really, really high weight, lower volume, just real strength, your body's ability to generate force.
That is what I do.
And yes, it's shown to induce muscular hypertrophy, so to increase muscle mass, but arguably more functional than when you'd be looking at a bodybuilder, Mr. Olympia, something like that.
And then you have muscle damage, which is more eccentric contraction, so more arguably sort of CrossFit.
And that's not to say, you know, when you look at, you know, to use you as an example, so if we had you in the sports lab, we would say, okay, what is your strength deficit?
So your strength deficit is, you know, say we had you on, you know, the leg press, and we said, Joe, we want to look at how much force your legs can generate with you just using...
Basically, your training strength.
Your training strength is defined as the strength that you would use just leg pressing.
Not getting you all pre-workouts, smelling salts, none of that.
We would just say, Joe, go and leg press.
And you just leg press.
And that's what you can generate there.
But then, in the sports app back at Loughborough University, we would start using basically...
Basically using electrical impulses to make the muscles contract beyond what you could generate yourself.
So that is what your body could generate without you trying to send those impulses to the body.
It's you, the actual potential muscle, the strength of the muscles themselves.
So the difference between that, so all of a sudden they'll say, okay, this over here, your training strength, is what you could do, Joe, when I was just saying, okay, lift that.
It means if there's a large deficit between the two, it means that you have muscle mass, but you're not fully using it.
So you might see a large deficit between the two if you had a bodybuilder, for instance, because they've got a lot of muscle mass, but they're not using it.
So the reason being is when you start looking at mechanical tension, that might produce an athlete who has a smaller strength deficit.
So when, again, using you as an example, if there was a smaller strength deficit between what you could voluntarily...
Leg press, you know, leg extension, hamstring extension, and then involuntary, there's a smaller deficit.
I would liken it to, okay, Joe, you have this much muscle mass, but you're using a lot of your potential.
You're using it already.
It's almost like you've got a Formula One car with a huge engine, but you're using it to its full extent.
You know, and this is why, I'm going off on a slight tangent here, but this is why when you start looking at bodybuilding-centric work, so this idea of increasing muscular hypertrophy, it can be a good thing when you understand that strength deficit.
So you might have an athlete who you go, okay, you have a small strength deficit, it's very small, so for the muscle mass that you have, you're using it to its absolute full potential.
It's like you have a very small car, But you are just pushing down the accelerator so hard and it can't go anymore.
So this goes back to something I almost call, you know, horsepower programming, which I think is so often lost now.
I think training is very specific.
When you go into the gym, are you training for strength, speed, stamina?
Whereas horsepower programming, I almost borrowed from Soviet Union principles.
You start looking at general physical preparedness, as it was known.
And this is this just idea of you take an athlete, certainly a younger athlete, And you're trying to increase their work capacity by non-specific movements.
So you'll get an athlete, you're handed, imagine, okay, you're a young kid just growing up and your parents hand you to me, I'm your coach.
And I say, okay, I don't know if Joe's going to be big, strong.
I don't know if he's going to be able to run far or fast.
I don't know.
So what we're going to do is just increase your sort of neuromuscular efficiency and work capacity.
And so by doing that, it's kind of jumps, throws, non-specific, these natural movement patterns.
And we get you to do lots and lots of this.
What that's doing is work capacity, your body's ability to positively tolerate training and give intensity or duration.
And I think from the Great British Swim, when a lot of people will say, how was it that you were able to tolerate those 12 hours a day, the jellyfish stings and everything?
For me, one of the biggest things was going back to, and this is going to sound so odd, but I ran a marathon pulling a car three years ago, I think now.
And so that is almost the perfect embodiment of horsepower programming in that sheer stress on the body, but it's not a specific skill.
I've had this conversation with a few people because they said something similar.
And I think it's, I mean, you know, to slightly go off on another tangent here, because I think we've covered the physical aspect and work capacity, which I've addressed.
But I think, and this is one thing I genuinely just wanted to almost quiz you on and get your thoughts on this, is certainly throughout the Great British Swim, It subjected my body to a fatigue like I've never experienced before.
It was just, yeah, sleep deprivation, just ligaments, tendons in my shoulders just wondering what was going on.
And for me, you almost develop a split personality in that There's times when I'd quite often say you need to swim with a smile because it's 157 days.
If you're stressed or it's like a marathon where you grit your teeth and you try and get through it, I think we're very aware that the body is this complex biochemical organism and if you're stressed, cortisol levels spike, inflammation, your immune system, everything's affected.
So for me, I was treating it not like a marathon.
I had to treat it Swim with a smile, you know, think this is life now.
Right.
But then equally, there were times when, you know, I wouldn't swim with a smile.
It was just, you know, Corey Beckham being a great example.
You know, I certainly wasn't all that happy then.
And for me...
It's those times when I say, you've got to just get feral.
You've really just got to...
And a good friend of mine, back in England, SAS trained, and he said to me, Ross, you're a really nice guy and everything, but there's going to be times when you just need to, you know, no smiles and just get feral, which I... Thinking about it, and because I had 12 hours to think a day, I was mulling this over in my head.
For me, it goes back to Tim Noakes' Central Governor Theory, looking at how fatigue is an emotionally driven state that we use to pull that physiological handbrake.
So, you know, for those listening, sort of 16 miles into a marathon, you might be saying, no way, I can't keep putting one foot in front of the other.
There's no way.
And then all of a sudden, 25 miles in, your family and friends are clapping you, and you get that second wind, and you start sprinting.
And for me, looking at the sort of central governor theory, I found that in complete exhaustion, like when you absolutely have nothing left, you almost go into this feral state, you know, so like an injured dog, you know, where a lot of people will say, oh, you know, remember why you started, think of your family and friends.
And I was like, no, no, no, I was at a level of fatigue where Where I wasn't thinking about, you know, family and friends.
I was thinking almost, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where it starts with just food, shelter, oxygen.
I was at that sort of level where there was sea ulcers.
I mean, my neck's kind of healed now, but, you know, there was times when Chafing on my neck.
And I remember just thinking like now I'm not thinking, you know, family and friends.
To talk about those, as you just said, those darker moments.
I think now it's very easy for me to be very grateful.
I'm warm, sitting in the studio with you.
There's no jellyfish.
But there's times there where, you know, it was dark on my neck as well.
I mean my neck was bad but we didn't actually catch the moment.
It was probably the worst on that.
I went to bed with this open wound from the wetsuit chafing, basically, and as I woke up, the bedsheet had fused to my neck, so I just had to rip it off.
It was so strange because when we left in June, we came back obviously to the same point and we left in the British summer and everyone was on the beach and then I came back round, people were putting up Christmas decorations and I was like, I'd been gone for so long at sea.
Because I was reading on the internet and I found out about it and I sent it to all my friends after Sober October to show what pussies we were.
I was like, you guys think what we did was hard?
What we did ain't shit.
I sent it to Tom and Bert and Ari and we were all just like, fuck!
Because whenever you hear about someone doing something crazy, there's always someone who does something far crazier to just one-up the crazy person and it keeps going and going and going.
There's a race that Courtney Dilwalter, who's been a guest on the show before, she won the Moab 240, which is a 238 mile race through the Moab Mountains.
And it's just an insane race.
Not only did she win it, she won it by more than 10 hours ahead of the second place guy.
She's just a fucking straight savage.
So she recently entered a race, and she came in second place.
In this race, they would run for four miles in an hour, and then they would stop.
When the hour was over, they would stop, and then when the next hour started, they would run another four miles, like four point something miles, and they would do it for six days.
But what you just said there, like, do you think...
And this is, again, because I had 12 hours to think every day...
Do you think it is unusual or do you think that we now think it's unusual because society has got real comfortable?
You know, and I maintained that stuff that I was doing with Salt Tongue and everything, our ancestors, do you not think they would have just thought, you know, that's just Monday?
Persistence hunting is, and you see it in a lot of these African men who go on to be phenomenal endurance runners.
I mean, they win marathons left and right in these particular parts of Africa that produce incredible runners.
And they think a lot, there was a really, there was a cut and run, is a fantastic episode of Radiolab that details these men from this one certain part in Africa, I forget where it is, but see if you can pull that up.
But this episode detailed the horrific circumcision rituals that these men had to endure.
And the idea was that not only are these guys physically gifted...
but they also have unbelievable pain tolerance and mental endurance and just mental toughness.
And this is one of the reasons why they become so successful, is that the ability to push a pace for two-plus miles or whatever it is, their marathon time, is not just dependent upon their physical ability, but also dependent upon their ability to endure pain.
To force themselves past...
You know, anyone can kind of trot along at a really leisurely pace.
It's not painful.
But if you're going hard, you know, you're really going hard.
And that almost crosses over to, I mean, again, I'm not advocating what you just, you know, Genitalia mutilation.
I'm not advocating that.
But there's that idea of adversity training that if you're ever in the gym, it's like, what are you training?
And it's just like strength.
What are you training?
Speed.
And this is why I'm a huge fan of Wim Hof because so often what he's doing when he's submerged in ice cold, it's like, well, I'm training my capillaries.
And it's like, what do you mean you're training your capillaries?
And it's these, we're atrophying these age-old inbuilt mechanisms.
You know, Berkman's got a hell of a guillotine and John Fitz shot in on him and Berkman caught him in the guillotine and just put him to sleep in the first round.
You're supposed to do two on one, and then you drop down.
Like, look at this.
See what he's doing there?
He's tapping.
But see where his left arm is?
That left arm should not...
You can't do that.
See, that is a perfect example of the fulcrum choke.
See how he's doing that?
Pressing his forearm against the back, squeezing the head.
It's a neck crank.
It's a choke.
There's a lot of shit going on there.
It doesn't have to be under the chin.
It could just be on your face, and you're going to get fucked up.
So all those folks out there that were saying that it wasn't a choke need to go have someone apply that to them.
And they need to start training jujitsu and stop fucking talking about MMA submissions because they don't.
Right.
You're going to tap, bitch.
Don't say you're not going to tap.
Right.
like Conor are gonna be better at defending that.
They're gonna, like, you get a hold of a world-class Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt who's also an MMA fighter like Vinnie Magalese.
He's gonna grab a hold of that, he's gonna defend properly, he's gonna adjust, he's gonna try to get out of that. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - He might have to tap if someone gets him in it.
I mean, people tap, but he's not going to just have one arm posted.
Well, I was about to ask, so that's all technical.
So you think, so there's that, almost as a...
I don't know, like a continuum.
There's technical, which you've just...
And again, I should point out, again, I'm a complete layman when it comes to all mixed martial arts, but I find it fascinating, this adversity training aspect.
So you were just saying he was eating bombs before that.
Would it have helped, you know, that if he wasn't?
So, like, if that choke was applied during the first few seconds or minutes of the first round, I think he probably would have had a good chance to survive.
And Josh Barnett, he's a catch wrestling specialist.
Yeah, go to the very end of it here.
Josh Barnett gets a hold of Dean's...
See, in this position right here, he's in side control.
Which is just impressive enough that Josh is able to do this with a guy like Dean Lister.
But then he gets him in what's...
He probably has a different name for it.
But it's...
We used to call it Judo Side Control.
It's quite a bit further down on this.
You gotta keep going.
Keep going.
All the way to the end.
So he gets a hold of his...
He's got a head and arm choke.
Here it is.
Here it is.
So he's got his head and his arm trapped together, and Josh, who's an enormously powerful person, is really neck-cranking him as much as anything, and then Dean was forced to tap.
But this is at the end of a long match, and it could have been exhaustion might have played a part in it.
It most certainly was Josh's skill and his ability to apply that technique.
But the point is, a guy like Dean Lister, you're not going to tap that guy easy.
But this is, and again, with sort of holding my hands up saying I'm so sort of naive, a huge fan of MMA, but not necessarily any of the technical aspects.
But what I love is when you look at someone like Nick Diaz or Michael Bisping.
People don't understand his conditioning, and he will just wear people down.
If you look at his eyes, one of his eyes actually, and I hope he can get surgery on it now because he is retired, he has oil Like, embedded in his eye to protect his retina.
Because it's been torn so many times.
It's been torn.
He had surgery on it.
He had a repair.
Torn again.
His right eye is fucked up, man.
And one of the reasons why he retired is he started to see some irregularities in his vision in his left eye.
So his good eye was fucking up, too.
But I mean, Michael Bisping is a fucking animal.
I mean, he's about as tough as it gets.
And he's not like a spectacularly, physically talented guy like a Jon Jones or a Yoel Romero who's just this unbelievable specimen.
Michael's a really good athlete, unquestionably, but he's just tough.
Just fucking tough.
So to answer your question, there's this...
And you could speak to this because...
What you're talking about, the ability to overcome adversity, like some people, when you were talking about that fatigue is an emotionally driven thing, that there's this feeling that you get and you can give in to that feeling where you're like, oh my god, I fucking can't do this anymore.
And some people are more susceptible to that than others.
And they give in to it quickly.
I mean, for a person, here's where you can experience this.
Whether or not your mindset...
Can affect your endurance.
Get on a treadmill or a stationary bike or whatever you want to do for cardio.
And then listen to a really kick-ass song.
And put on headphones and that song comes on and you just can't fucking, yeah.
You can just go.
There's something about that.
And even if you're tired, even if you're tired and you've put on a good song, you're like, fuck that, we're going to keep going.
Nothing has happened.
You haven't taken in any kind of a supplement or any kind of a stimulant.
You haven't gotten an injection in your body or you're not sucking on some kind of new gas.
Your body's exactly the same.
But through the motivation that you're getting from this music, the emotional stimulation, you're just like, fuck that, we're going to keep going.
And that's true that I think people don't understand you are the alchemist of your own body that, you know, in terms of neurotransmitters, chemical signals in the brain, you can impact those.
Sometimes, yeah, you need external influences.
Music, as you spoke about.
Sometimes, you know, caffeine.
But when you start to control them, Yeah, it can be so powerful.
Some people do it naturally, I suppose, and they've just got it inbuilt.
But when you start to train, and I think it's only now that we're going down that route and looking at that as a, you know, until previously, it was one of those intangibles, you know, that you kind of underappreciate it in any sport.
And now we're going, oh, okay, yeah, you know, that person over there is, you know, that mental fortitude or what you're talking about there is maybe their ability to alter their own chemistry, biochemical reactions to the body.
Like when you hear a song and you get excited, like whatever that, yeah, whatever that burst is, it seems like a real, like if that was a pill and you took it, you'd be like, oh, this works.
When you look at like, you know, Marcus Aurelius' meditations or Stoic philosophy, and they're talking about, you know, dialogue being both external and internal.
So the conversations that go on inside your own head are just as important as the conversations you have with other people.
So we've understood this for years.
But it's only just now that we're trying to kind of apply a little bit of science to it, looking at the psychology and this mind-body connection.
But the fact is, yeah, some of the greatest ancient Stoics, they were trying to figure out as well.
You're basically saying to your body, recruit every single muscle fiber possible and work in conjunctions with ligaments and tensors and let's get half a ton off the floor.
Exactly, right?
But when you look, and certainly with Andy Bolton's 1,000 pound lift, he had his friend in his face and he's there going, come on, come on.
And he's hitting him in the face.
When we were talking earlier about, again, strength deficit is that sort of deficit between what you can voluntarily contract and involuntary contract.
That was him obviously voluntarily contract.
No one was electrocuting him in that particular one.
But they're there and you do anything that you can before you actually step out onto that platform.
And now, I mean, he would have just been, you know, completely written off after that, that sort of adrenal dump afterwards and fatigue, you know, emotionally.
And so you have to think about that.
I've forgotten who said it now.
It might have been Pavel, but they said, you know, save fatigue for competition.
So, you know, I mean, this goes back to sell you sort of 1936, a Hungarian physician who found, you know, you give, you know, took some lab rats, give them a lethal dose of poison, they kill over and die.
But he found by giving them a little bit of poison, a little bit more, a little bit more, that they built up this intolerance to it.
That was the general adaptation syndrome.
But it was from that that we discovered stress and stimuli is the key to any adaptation.
And it wasn't until the strength and conditioning community caught on to that and we started to think, okay, how can we apply stress and stimuli to the body to bring about a desired result?
Certainly now, I think that's kind of overlooked in sport, but certainly the wider fitness industry that, you know, it's easy now and very sort of marketing driven to say, get fit in, you know, five easy steps or, you know, whereas the reality is, you know, it's get fit in eight months after a lot of stress and stimuli.
And even with the Sober October and stuff, I mean, I'm a huge fan of Bert, but people, and I know he's so funny, and everyone loves Bert, but he's a beast as well.
I mean, to rock up and just do a marathon, and again, going back to power-to-weight ratio, what he did was amazing.
And people, and I know he was very entertaining when he did the marathon and stuff, but I was actually watching that as the sports scientist in me was like, that's amazing, and no one's talking about that.
His power to weight ratio, and he's still running that marathon.
Something that, and yeah, so for as funny and as entertaining as it was to watch, I honestly was like, Bert, that's amazing.
But what's interesting, to go back to what we were talking about there, you've just perfectly described that idea of giving a clear cellular signal to the body.
So polarised training, you're familiar with that 80-20 that you do, 80% of your work, your training in that aerobic realm where you can keep doing that.
You're not going to overtrain there.
You're going to avoid that exhaustion phase.
Sell your indestructible rats.
You're not going to keel over and die from a lethal dose of stress and stimuli.
But then, over here, that 20%, it was powerful.
It was kickboxing.
So there, you're working technique, but you're fresh.
So you're drilling motor patterns that are completely fresh and not fatigued because you're doing this 80% on an elliptical trainer while watching a movie.
So you're keeping the two completely separate, but considering the body in its entirety, that when it comes together, you've created a more powerful version of yourself.
And I think it was interesting what you just said there about recovery between bouts as well.
So when you start looking at strongman training, you know, Some of the strongest guys, and one of these strongest guys in the world, all understood the benefits of cardiorespiratory training.
You look at, again, Jeff Capes, two-time World's Strongest Man, was running fell races and marathons at 25 stone.
A fell race is, yeah, it's quite specific to England, so it's kind of trail running, but we call them fell running because you're kind of going through bogs and marshes and...
Not necessarily felled trees, but just kind of the terrain's a little bit different from a trail run.
So he was doing that.
When you look at Bill Kazmaier, again, well, strongest man, a powerlifter, but understood the benefits of cardiorespiratory training to improve his recovery between sets.
Brian Shaw as well, one of the sort of...
You know, the newest sort of strongman and former basketball player.
You know, so he had that cardiorespiratory endurance, that base, that aerobic base.
And then he built this incredible strength on top of that aerobic foundation.
Goes back again to...
Whether, you know, they knew it or not, they were almost creating an athlete like they were creating athletes back in the sort of Soviet Union era when they were taking athletes going, right, you're giving me a kid and I don't know if he's strong, quick, good at running, running fast or running far, I don't know.
So we're going to build this aerobic neuromuscular base and when they show any sort of genetic potential to be strong, quick, whatever, we're going to hone in on that and that's only when we're going to get specific.
And you're almost doing that now.
And certainly Brian Shaw did it.
Again, you look long through all of the best athletes in the world.
They've all followed this blueprint.
But it's only now that we're kind of dissecting that and saying, oh, okay, I'm making it a bit more purposeful.
But I mean, even now, I tell you what, Jamie, if it's possible, actually, I mean, Brian Shaw, he accidentally, you must have seen this clip, set the indoor rowing record.
So it's that base that I think so often I've heard you speak about, and certainly Eddie as well, talking about break dancers making great, you know, BJJ. And again, whether you know it or not, they had that neuromuscular foundation.
They understood proprioception, where their ligaments, tensors, everything should work.
Whereas if you had someone with a similar work capacity or someone of the same age, everything was the same, but they didn't have that neuromuscular efficiency.
You'd say, okay, and again, this is me so naively, again, I certainly don't claim to know anything about BJJ, but you go, okay, this is an arm bar, and they kind of go, okay, let me try and figure this out, and you can see them, it's like a Rubik's Cube, they're trying to piece it together, but you get someone, again, like Brian, and you go, okay, this is BJJ, or something quite complex that requires you, and he, I'm not saying, well, he wouldn't even fight, he's too heavy.
But there's like, again, if you put in, you know, Thor versus CrossFit, then it will probably come up and you get to see an amazing crisp technique.
And then equally, Thor is basically doing what Brian was doing just there.
I'll say, here you go.
So this is, they keep putting on weight until one of them, I believe the competition here is you keep putting on, yeah, there you go, CrossFit versus the mountain.
It's an amazing technique, disappears under the bar.
You know, incredible.
And then I think, you know, Thor will eventually come in and give it a go and basically just upright rose.
Here we go.
So you saw that, you know, disappears under the bus.
I mean, you could do that too if you just had an empty bar.
You know what I mean?
Like that kind of person, the kind of person that can do that.
When you think about him deadlifting a thousand pounds or any of these guys that can deadlift in insane numbers, just the whole machine can generate so much force.
And I think, again, that's sort of been lost a little bit along the way that, you know, getting the joints, ligaments, muscles, everything to work cohesively.
And when you do that through your training, you can pretty much apply to anything.
So I think that's why, I mean, again, I used to swim ages, ages ago, way back in the day, but I was never going to make sort of an elite standard.
I'm You know, 5'9 on a good day, maybe.
I'm built like a hobbit, so everyone else is just great.
You know, it's interesting what you were talking about earlier in terms of mental fortitude and your ability to adapt and your ability to overcome.
I wonder if we're ever going to figure out a way to measure that, like to measure mental endurance or measure mental capacity or mental stimulation.
You know, you can measure your VO2 max and you know what the body's capable of.
But I wonder if there's a way, like, when someone does hear a great song and it kicks in, whether it's through fMRI or any other type of detection device, where they can figure out a way, oh, this part of your brain is firing, let's concentrate on building up the activation of that part of that brain, of the brain, like a muscle.
Think of that endurance or think of that motivation as like maybe even a mantra that you can call upon because you call upon it all the time and you can recreate that state.
I mean, I think on that point, certainly over in Britain at the moment, so basically women for the first time can actually apply and be in the special forces.
So at the moment, it's really, really interesting because speaking to certainly the Royal Marines, they were saying, We've got hundreds of years that if you hand us 500 young fit men, we can say they need to be this weight, this tall, and if you give us them, we've got years and years of experience of putting them through this training system of mental and physical fortitude, everything down in Limstone, it's the training centre of the Royal Marines.
We go on this endurance course, we go on a 30-mile yomp with a backpack, everything, and by the end of 32 weeks, that's what it takes to be a Royal Marine, to get your Green Beret, after 32 weeks we can take you from being Completely, not sedentary, but unfit to being a Royal Marine.
And that's one thing they pride themselves on.
But now, what they're saying is obviously, you know, females can now apply to the Special Forces.
And what they find so interesting is, and I certainly do as well, is what does that look like for a female Royal Marine?
You know, what does that look like for a female?
And again, to go back, I mean, I wrote an article ages ago, Run Like a Girl.
And I was saying, I want to run like a girl.
You know, some of my best training partners are female and their perception to fatigue is unbelievable.
That's purely anecdotal, but also as well, when you look at the top tier of ultramarathon runners and swimming as well, Diana Naid first to go from Cuba to Florida, you know, incredible.
Like she was getting stung by Portuguese manawars and just unbelievable.
So it's purely outdated, but now they're saying, you know, why is it that certain female athletes have a greater tolerancy to pain?
And I think, to your point, if we can start to quantify that, because there are biological differences.
If you take men, you know, high testosterone can have an impact on high hemoglobin, generate muscle force, all of these things.
But I think if we could quantify why it is that certain female athletes are dominating the top 10% of ultramarathons and open water swimming, what is it that they're doing?
I think the ability to endure pain, and this is not my thought, honestly, I should just say this has been theorized before, has to do with their ability to endure the pain of childbirth.
Child labor and childbirth.
I mean, just the fact that they're forcing a baby out of their vagina.
But they also don't have the extra muscle that a man has.
So men, when they're strong, will try to just force things and muscle things.
Where women will try to follow what's being described to them, what's the proper technique.
and they do it properly all the time, and then they develop this pattern of proper technique.
I noticed this with Taekwondo, and I think my friend John said he noticed this with archery.
I think this benefits them in sports because if you learn jujitsu, really the best people to learn from are smaller men or women because the smaller people, they don't have the physical strength to pull it off on a big guy.
So what they have to rely on is correct technique.
But if you learn jujitsu from a big guy, man, big guy jujitsu is weird.
Because they can just grab your wrist, and you can't let go, and they can get away with things.
Like, okay, you go wrist control and throw the legs up.
Wrist control?
Okay.
Wrist control on who?
Try wrist control on that big motherfucker that was rowing the world record.
You ain't getting shit, man.
You're going to go flying through the air.
That wrist control ain't going to work.
You're going to have to go against his strength.
You're going to have to figure out a way to move around it.
You're not going to go through it.
That big guy, if he was teaching jujitsu, just grab the neck and then you'll squeeze.
He's got the kind of horsepower that a man like a normal man can't imagine.
Do you think that's changing again, to bring it back to the UFC, I suppose, because now, I mean, with what Cormier's doing, and, you know, Jon Jones coming back, you know, the lightweights are all moving up to heavyweight.
Do you think, you know, gone are the days of the huge dude who was just a physical phenom, and now the smaller technical dude?
Well, there's a thought with the 265-pound weight class, and the consensus thought seems to be that somewhere around 240 pounds is the magic number.
That's what they think.
They think that 240 pounds is the amount of weight that you have where you're strong enough that you can knock out any man, but you have more endurance than a man that maybe weighs 265 or heavier and cuts down to 265. Now, this has not been substantiated.
The problem is, there hasn't been a really super powerful world championship athlete that weighed 265 pounds.
There's been Brock Lesnar, but...
Brock Lesnar's enhanced, right?
You're dealing with a guy who tested positive for steroids.
He probably has had things.
And this is a new world.
He's also 40 years old now, so it's impossible to tell what he would have been like at 30 if he was clean.
And then you have guys like Francis Ngannou, who's 265 pounds, massive knockout artist, natural 265 pounds.
But...
Doesn't have the wrestling base.
Got exposed in his fight with Stipe Miocic.
If he can't knock you out, he's kind of doomed.
And he tired out after the first round.
So it's hard to say because there's never been a 265-pound version of Cain Velasquez.
But Cain Velasquez, in my humble opinion...
When I look at all of the different heavyweights that I've personally seen fight, Kane stands out as the best.
The reason why Kane stands out as the best is because he has superhuman endurance.
And his ability to put a pace on guys, you would see these guys just wilt under the pressure.
And I think with Kane, this is where it gets really interesting.
What did him in is probably what also brought him to the top is his mental toughness because his body started breaking down.
He started having all these back injuries.
multiple back surgeries, shoulder surgery, knee surgery, everything was getting fucked up.
And I think it was getting fucked up because he was working through pain and because he has the ability to tolerate pain that most people don't have.
He's just a fucking animal.
But that's also probably what led to him having this insane endurance is the same kind of mental toughness.
I'm sure there's some genetic advantages as well because they would talk about how he would take months off and come back in and still fuck everybody up because he's just that good.
But that also could be attributed to the cardio base that he had from competing for many, many, many, many years at a high level and being known for that insane endurance.
Cormier, for sure, has tremendous fatigue, ability to tolerate fatigue, and tremendous endurance, and he breaks people.
They call him the king of the grind.
But on top of that, what they both have is tremendous wrestling technique.
The wrestling technique, as well as the endurance, Everything plays a factor.
Jon Jones fits into that camp as well.
Jon Jones has tremendous wrestling technique as well, striking technique, massive physical skills, but also mental toughness.
His mental toughness is unchallengeable.
You absolutely have to give it up to him.
He's had his arm fucked up by Vitor Belfort, completely hyperextended, refused to tap, and then wound up tapping Vitor with an Americana, I believe it was, the next round.
I mean, if he wound up going into the next round, if he didn't stop Chael Sonnen, and his toe was that fucked up, and he wound up losing to Chael Sonnen because his toe was bad, that's insane.
He also went through that fight with Alexander Gustafson, where he wasn't really training very hard for that fight, and Gustafson won the first couple rounds, and then Jon Jones won the last two to take it away.
And I watched that back, obviously, with all the promotion at the moment, and I think it was Winkle John Jackson when he started shouting, heart, heart, you know, shout out, and that was the deciding factor, that you come out and you...
I think that is a factor, because I think that there's mental toughness that comes from being around that kind of combat in the household all the time.
I don't believe that mental toughness is something you either have or you don't have.
I don't believe that.
I think you can teach it.
But you gotta want it.
And you gotta be willing to learn.
You gotta be able to bring yourself to a state of mind where you're unbreakable.
I think it's possible.
I really do.
And some people just have that.
And I think they've developed it over a long period of time, and once they finally got to, whether it's wrestling or jiu-jitsu or MMA, they already had it, and then they accentuated it and added on to it, and then it got stronger, and then they become known for it.
Like, that guy is just an animal.
He's just mentally strong.
But I think that mental strength comes from many life experiences and probably...
Probably the guidance of their parents or some other role model in their life that also showed them incredible endurance and incredible discipline and this mental fortitude.
I think you can teach it, though.
I don't believe that it's something that's just either have or you don't have.
I think you either have it or you don't have it, but you can get it.
And I can't wait to catch up with Dan about that and sort of exchange notes on this idea of mental fortitude because how he survived that, I mean, it was...
No, he's a sweetheart until you're locked in a cage with him and he's going to fuck you up.
The difference between him and Dan Hardy, though, is that he's a world-class wrestler.
I mean, he was a two-time Olympic team member and just one of the best wrestlers to ever compete in MMA. And you really see that in a lot of his fights, like the Derrick Lewis fight.
Derrick had no chance.
Like, no chance.
You know, and Derrick just knocked out Alexander Volkov, who, in a lot of people's eyes, including mine, was one of the dark horses in the heavyweight division.
But Derek just did not belong in there with Cormier, who was the light heavyweight champion.
I mean, he carries a lot of fat on him.
And I think if he wanted to, if Daniel Cormier really dedicated himself, he could drop down to 185 pounds.
But I find that with wrestling, and this is on a complete tangent here, but when you talk about that mind-body connection, like, so often they're seen as separate.
You're either an intellect or you're just a physical phenom.
Like, it's rare that you see the two, but when, again, ancient Greek philosophy, you look at Plato, like, Plato was an accomplished, celebrated wrestler.
I think he said something along the lines of, you know, you should wrestle to find the answers that philosophers seek.
It was something like that.
He was such an advocate of it.
And I think, and again, this is coming from, you know, sort of my limited background, because obviously in Britain we don't have wrestling like over here and stuff, but there's something about wrestling, it seems, or I suppose my question to you is like that it just teaches that mental fortitude.
You know, yeah, physically, yeah, neuromuscular efficiency and stuff, but...
It seems to have just produced this breed of humans that, you know, did you think?
There's something about being face down in a mat as somebody's just trying to contort your limbs, you know, so that to go back to stress and stimuli, you know, it's also building up.
I think there's the strength that they have, the intellectual strength, and when I say intellectual strength, they're actually solving puzzles.
Whether people understand it or not, you look at wrestling and you think it's always brute force and strength and endurance, but they're solving puzzles.
They're setting traps, they're trying to set up techniques, and they're doing this under heavy workload.
They're exhausted, their heart's pounding, and they're resisting 100% with another person who's resisting 100%.
When you see guys tie up and they're throwing each other around and they're fucking digging their toes into the mat and they're yanking and wrenching, that is a tremendous amount of force that they have to keep up for minutes and minutes at a time.
And I think a lot of that has to do with your ability to maintain intensity.
And a lot of that has to do with your ability to tolerate being exhausted and tolerate fatigue and to force yourself into a highly aggressive and efficient mindset.
And to be able to maintain proper technique under fatigue.
You're in a 30-mile yacht with 50 kg on your backpack and somebody asks you some really complex question and you're just like...
I don't know.
And I think, certainly going back to the swim, there's times where I said to the team, I was like, please, when I'm six hours into a swim through the night, I need just really clear instructions.
Just like, Ross swim this way, Ross swim that direction.
And again, purely anecdotal for the moment, but I love Cowboy Cerrone and there's times when he's just in his corner and he's just having a full-on conversation.
But you mentioned there as well with Cerrone talking about his son.
It was such an emotional post that he posted on Instagram and I loved it.
And going back to what you said about finding something that alters your biochemistry, you know, and now that he's fighting for something and he's got his kid.
Did you think that's...
We were talking about music before.
We were talking about getting his mindset.
Maybe you use caffeine, like whatever it is.
But something do you think is now different in Cerrone?
It was like, I think, the best performance of his career.
And, you know, maybe Mike Perry is not as good as Darren Till or as Rafael dos Anjos or some of the other people that he's fought in the past, but he's fucking dangerous and he's a legit welterweight, where Donald's not.
Donald could fight at 155 pounds.
That's one of the things Donald said after the fight.
See, Askren's 70, and Khabib's 55. If Khabib and Askren agreed to a catchweight fight, that is absolutely a possibility.
And absolutely a possibility that Askren could best him.
Because if someone's going to beat Khabib, it's going to be someone who's a superior wrestler.
And Askren is a motherfucker of a wrestler.
But is he better than Khabib?
We really don't know and we will not know until they fight.
But I do have to say that Khabib in the training camp at AKA, this is coming straight from Cormier and a bunch of other people that train with him, say that he trains with Olympic caliber wrestlers and fucks them up.
That's how good Khabib is.
Khabib is, he's so goddamned good on the ground.
When he gets a hold of guys, they look perplexed.
And I always bring up the Edson-Barboza fight, because the moment in the Barboza fight in the first round, where he had that thousand-yard stare, where Khabib had taken him down, and he was mauling him, and he looked over in the distance like, how the fuck am I going to get through three rounds of this shit?
See, the thing, what you've done, in my eyes, what you've done is so difficult.
I think you could do anything.
I really do.
I think what you did by forcing yourself to do that shit for six hours a day, take a break, six hours again, to do 12 hours of swimming every day for five fucking months, that kind of mental fortitude, if someone just taught you I mean, obviously you're very physically strong and fit.
If someone just taught you technique and taught you how to grapple and taught you kickboxing, you would be a motherfucker at it because your mind is so strong.
There's a different mindset to have that same kind of mind strength with the adversity of another human being trying to kill you.
See, that's the thing.
How well do people deal with other people's...
Like, there's something about a person breathing down your neck that's trying to choke you that's very disconcerting.
But if you can get past that, and I think you could, you would be a motherfucker at anything you did.
So I almost, but then even intrinsically or something, my body's used to working hard for 12 hours a day and just getting battered by waves.
So at the moment, you know, I'm sort of sitting here and, you know, I've been doing media all week and it's been amazing, but there's an element of me just kind of going, I need to use this work capacity.
And so I am sort of training at the moment.
The first session I did, I was in there for like six hours, and they were like, the gym's shutting, Ross.
One of the things that we all talked about after Sober October was that none of us had ever done anything like this before, but we're worried now that we're going to go back to our sedentary ways, and then we're going to lose all this work that we put in.
Because at the end of the month, Ari, who had never worked out before, ran 15 miles, rode 5 kilometers, and then got on the bike for a while.
I forget what he did on the bike, but I think he did at least a mile on the bike.
And this was a 4 plus hour workout, but he had never done anything before.
I mean, he did jiu-jitsu.
I bought him some jiu-jitsu lessons.
I bought him a year at 10th Planet Jiu-Jitsu, like...
Like, 10 years ago.
He went for a while and then he hurt his knee and stopped going.
I mean, we're so, like, the human body, I found, is so lazy.
Like, we love homeostasis, our habitual level, what we're used to doing.
You know, that status quo.
And then, so when you do shift that, and it's all relative, because, you know, it can be, you know, Swimming for 12 hours a day and stuff, but it's relative.
And I think when you do shift that, it is hard.
And I think you have to be so conscious of that.
So even now, for instance, my legs at the moment shrunk, but not just my legs.
I mean, I essentially skipped leg day for 157 days.
So we went into the gym the other day and because of ligaments, tendons, but not only just generating force like a bench press, but if you imagine like 40 knots of wind, you know, wind over tide that we're talking, my shoulders are used to being contorted in ways that they shouldn't.
Yeah, and the amount of times I would take a stroke and then a wind.
I mean, there's times when the waves hit me so hard, I thought I've just hit a boat.
You know, I hit something and that would be poor.
So it was that resistance as well.
So on the bench press, it was just kind of like took, you know, 160. You know, I'm not saying it's necessary just as a sort of sports science experiment.
I kind of unlifted and then just took 160 kilos just for a ride.
And that would be a really sort of good point to make there.
I always think when people say, I'm too old now to train and stuff, I'm like, absolutely not.
Yes, granted, when you're younger, elasticity in your ligaments, yeah, higher testosterone, muscle mass, ability to increase muscle mass and stuff.
Absolutely.
But when you're older...
And to your point there, Joe, when you look at these, you know, back in England, fell running, which we were talking about, you get these guys who just look like they live in the mountains, you know, weathered faces, you know, their calves are just like this, just thick calves.
And they have that...
Capillary density, that like mitochondrial efficiency, movement efficiency.
So their cardiorespiratory endurance has just been built up from years and years.
And these sorts of people as well, they almost, they love the mountains and running so much that they don't care that they're overtraining or like they need a rest.
But actually, to this point, I mean, if it's possible, James, it's called the Bob Graham.
So there's a famous fell race, going back to sort of the Barclay Mountains, there's a famous fell race back in England called the Bob Graham.
And, you know, legend has it, there was a guy, Bob Graham, and he sort of said, you know, I think I can do 44 peaks in the Lake District in under 24 hours.
And they were like, no, no, no, that's not possible.
That's not possible.
He said, yeah.
So it was like a bet in a pub.
And they were like, yeah.
And sure enough, that's what he did.
And so there's this race now called the Bob Graham.
And it's amazing in that it's steeped in history and heritage.
There's a hall in Keswick, which is a small town.
It's called Moot Hall.
And if you were standing there, Joe, and you're in your running gear with those shorts on...
But you were running there with your running gear and you had your hand on Moot Hall and you were looking at your watch like that.
Runners would walk past you and just be like, oh, he's about to do his Bob Graham.
You know, they'd come over.
There's that real solidarity that, you know, like, good luck, good luck.
And then you have to do it in 24 hours.
And Billy Bland, who was the one who set the record, which has only just been beaten by Killian Jornet, who recently ran up Everest.
as well but i think he um yeah so many savages out there it's so this and what i love about this is um oh there you go is that yeah yeah there you go killian jornette so the guy behind in the blue um set the record and it says there i needed to suffer says killian jornette after breaking the record that has stood for 36 years 36 years wow i needed to suffer but but these guys and it and it goes back to you know Too often it's sports science, sports nutrition.
Let's look at your gait analysis, running biomechanics.
What footwear are you using?
Minimalist shoes or not?
Go back to that photo.
Whereas with this, with fell running, it took 36 years for somebody to get close to that record.
So it's like, wow, what were they doing so far back?
Granted, you need to know the terrain.
Like you could, on this descent, on this picture, for instance, you could be running down there, struggling down the rocks, and you might not know that just, you know, 50 metres to your right, there's a perfect sheep trail that you can run.
So, yeah, the Bob Graham is something completely different, and that goes back to what we were talking about, about power-to-weight ratio in a weight-bearing sport.
Over a certain difference, going back to the belt That somebody like that and in my experience when I've raced or swum with you know guys who are doing you know 10 kilometre they will be quicker than me over 10 kilometres but then it gets to a point when we're like you know 30 kilometres in where their biomechanics just because of muscular endurance that starts to break down maybe as well and this is so often overlooked actually but you've got to train your digestive system so Again,
this is mainly anecdotal, but in strength-based sports, a lot of guys won't think anything about putting away 15,000 calories a day, which is what I was doing.
It was so intuitive, so it was kind of strange because the diet was calorie dense, so you have to make up your calorie requirements of the day.
Also looking at nutrient dense, because you've got to care for your immune system, but equally palatability, so when my tongue was falling apart, you know, I needed to look at that.
And even seasickness, which we've not really spoke about as well, which is kind of like you need something that hits those four points.
And that's 15,000 calories a day.
So for me, that was quite often just like porridge oats, you know, mixed with honey, mixed with almond butter.
Like, even the mass, because the giant jellyfish of Scotland, and there'll be a picture on there somewhere, they're kind of like six feet long.
So when you're swimming at night and you can't see them, the tentacles, they'll just kind of, they'll get you.
And so I got, like, they go in your mouth and your ear.
I got one in my ear.
I got, like, wet-willied by a jellyfish.
It just kind of, like, got me there.
So it's like that...
That, yeah, they're trying to find and adapt the same way with the mass, but nutritionally as well.
But also looking at, as a framework, you're having your protein, which is pretty stable, you know, 1.7 grams per kg of body weight per day.
You know, that kind of stays the same.
So then for the rest of the 15,000 calories, you basically need to make it up with your two energy-yielding macronutrients, so carbs and fats.
And so for me, it was very carb-dependent because when you are swimming through a giant whirlpool, you can't say, can I have some fats, which the body has to go a certain process, it's going to take longer.
No, you just need fast-acting carbohydrates.
But then equally, looking at MCTs, so median chain triglycerides as well, which are a fat, so they have the calorie density of a fat.
But they're treated more like a carbohydrate rather than long-chain triglycerides.
So there was a certain amount of science to it.
A lot of people would say, you know, 15,000 calories, does that mean pizza and everything?
It was like, well, you know, yes, to an extent, but then place too much emphasis on that and you're not caring for your immune system as well.
To get 15,000 calories, I think, yeah, I always point out that it's using things like MCTs, which you'll find in coconut oil, and certainly, again, not to get too much on the science, but capric and caprylic acid, which are converted to ATP, adenosine triphosphate, it's the molecular energy of the muscles.
When you understand how to use MCTs like that, It can be quite easy to make up 15,000 calories, but you try and make up 15,000 calories of vegetables, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Especially you like have like protein and then fruit and it requires a different digestive enzyme.
And then you're going to tell me to go and swim through a giant whirlpool and roll on my stomach for 12 hours a day.
It's just like with seasickness, it's not going to happen.
And that's the thing that it goes back to, again, this bell curve that I've spoke about, but, you know, quite often a lot of endurance athletes that I've trained with who are amazing, they're unbelievable, they're sub-three-hour marathoners, they're incredible, you know, they're the guys that will go and run the Bob Graham...
But quite often they say, but Ross can just eat.
And it's just like, yeah, that's often overlooked.
You know, that my body, you know, I didn't have a sick day throughout the whole swim.
You know, when you look at the pictures from the start to the finish, I just look.
Like just like hairier.
Yeah, but just also just bulk because you are asking your body to swim around Great Britain.
So it's not just the fact that you are you don't want to be in a calorie deficit.
Can you imagine how much micro trauma the body's going to go through?
So you're essentially just trying to nurse the body saying, look, I know this is horrible.
I know it's cold.
I know I'm asking you to swim for 12 hours a day.
I know there's going to be jellyfish, toxins.
I mean, I've stung like 20 times in one night in a single tide.
So it got to the point where I talked about my face sort of changing shape, but equally the toxins in your body, your heart would start beating faster.
So there was just this idea that just eat just to look after the body.
Just anything that you were thinking, well, this is even to glutamine, to a higher turnover of amino acids.
So after...
For instance, after training as well, you can have...
All the protein in the world, but if it has a low biological value, so I'm going to try and keep this quite short, but if you look at, you know, immediately after a workout, you know, your body's basically saying, look, we need protein to repair and regrow.
Protein synthesis.
And your muscles are saying, please.
But if you don't have a high concentration of leucine specifically, so branched chain amino acids, leucine within that is what will trigger to your motor receptors to basically repair and regrow.
So quite often you can have all the protein in the world, but if it's of a low biological value, if it's not very Good quality protein.
Yeah, when we could stop in a harbour, you know, the team would go out.
I never touched land, but they could go and quickly provision from land and bring it back.
But ultimately, yeah, it was trying to find a way that was sustainable as possible, but within the parameters that we had, you know, and that was what was tricky.
I suppose this goes back, and I was trying to rich roll about this actually, where once you developed that sort of horsepower program, that work capacity that I was talking about before from when I ran the marathon pulling a car, it was...
This is such a strange story, but I then, again, to raise money for the Teenage Cancer Trust, I climbed a rope.
I think it was a 10-meter rope, but I repeatedly climbed it until I climbed the height of Everest.
So it was 8,848 meters.
And it was that that actually taught me that movement efficiency plays such an important role in terms of endurance, because you could have the best muscular endurance in the world, cardio-spiritual endurance, but if you can imagine with a rope climb, If you're solely relying on your muscles, your arms, like your bicep tendon is just, you know, and then you can be the fittest guy in the world, but within that kinetic chain, something's going to give, like the weakest part.
So you're right, from that, I had the work capacity from the marathon, then from the rope climb, I certainly understood movement efficiency, and so sort of transferring those skills over to swimming, I knew that You couldn't swim like a conventional swimmer.
Everything that I taught you, especially in waves and everything.
So I ended up developing quite a weird technique that looked really slow and cumbersome.
I almost looked asleep, but, you know, it was really rolling.
And that's why I asked you about swimming.
And even looking at Bert, again, to use him as a...
I know he did his triathlon.
But for everything that is taught about swimming, it's probably for someone who looks like, you know, Michael Phelps or, you know, an amazing specimen at swimming.
But it would be the same with you, that if we were looking at your swimming technique, there'd be certain everything that you'd probably learned probably wouldn't be applicable to you because of how broad you are, how things that you could actually use.
So I was basically really engaging the lats, the traps, the larger muscles of the back.
Going back to the video with Brian Shaw, when he was just ripping that...
So everything that I'd learned, and certainly, you know, great friends of mine who are, you know, Liam Tank got 50-meter world record, backstroke, you know, Kerryon Payne, double world champion, 10K. These were amazing athletes.
I mean, you had to, at any given time, any tide, you had to think of something that was going to be more powerful than the thought of stopping or fatigue or sea ulcers, like getting deeper into your skin.
And so sometimes it was real easy because you were swimming with dolphins, minke whales.
Yeah, there was a video of it ages ago with the Minky Whale.
I was swimming 12 hours across the Bristol Channel, so that's kind of England to Wales.
This was, without doubt, for all the hardship that I spoke about, I just want to say that there were some amazing moments.
This one particular moment, swimming across the Bristol Channel, and all of a sudden, Minky Whale, kind of about as big as this table, breaches right next to me.
I was like, whoa!
I turned to Matt, the captain, and I was like, Matt...
Am I safe?
Like, what's going on?
Like, shall I get out of the water?
And he said, no, no, no, no.
You're absolutely fine.
And I was like, okay, because it's a minky whale.
They're fine.
They're friendly.
I was like, okay, fair enough.
So I keep swimming.
And then for the next five miles, the minky whale was circling me.
And so, to your point about asking what you think about...
It's very easy to swim when, you know, there's dolphins and everything, but there's times when you are lost in this moving meditation, but then you see something like that and you very quickly got to get your wits about you.
Because there were killer whales as well up, you know, coming from sort of Iceland around the top of Scotland.
So they just said, look, all you need to do is make sure that you don't look like a seal because they might mistake you for a seal, but they might bite you.
But then they will go, oh, well, they're that intelligent.
They'll be like, oh, that doesn't taste like a seal.
So they might, you know, so I was just trying my best not to look like a seal.
So there was that element, but I think having swum with the minky whale around the Bristol Channel, I was very aware that in the hierarchy of the sea, I was very low down the pecking order.
And if it's comforting in any strange way, I was like, look, if I was going to be eaten, I'll be eaten in the day just as much as I'll be eaten at night.
Like the Moray Firth, for instance, we were like 40 miles away from land and this kind of cutting across this huge bay across the top of Scotland and it was clouded over so there was not, you couldn't even see anything because there was no moonlight or no stars and everything.
It was you, in that complete sensory deprivation, you can hear everything.
And it's just, if you hear a noise, a ripple, you're like, I really hope that's not a killer whale.
But then you've then got six hours to contemplate.
So it's this, and again, like I said, Marcus Aurelius, meditation, stoic philosophy, that the conversations you have in your own head are just as powerful as other people.
And I certainly found that all the way around, that you just...
There was times when you were just like, what am I doing out here?
Like, seriously?
And that comes from, I think, you know, this idea of you have to be doing it for the right reasons.
And again, to bring it back to MMA, I suppose, it's really fascinated me.
You know, some fighters, you know, Liddell coming out of retirement with Ortiz and certainly, you know, You know, McGregor's made so much money.
You know, what would get him back out of retirement to come and fight?
Mayweather!
And, you know, again, I've been out at sea, so I didn't quite understand what was going on there with his kind of going over towards Japan and fighting.
I found it so interesting when, you know, McGregor and Diaz...
And I was just...
I'm a huge fan of Ido Portal, so, you know, all the movement that he was doing.
But I was just like, look...
And I think it was...
I think McGregor was on...
I want to say Kimmel, but I don't think it was.
He was on a chat show, and he was talking about that spinning capoeira crescent kick, and he actually did it.
He performed it, and I was like, look, if he lands that, you know, the same way with Aldo, he'd be like, that is it.
Movement is it.
You know, you can forget cardiorespiratory endurance, strength, everything that we talked about there, the metric saying, you know, heavyweight, you've got to be 2-4-5, you know, whatever the matter.
So if you said, if at the start of the, you know, Barbosa and Etten fight, you said, you know, knock out by timing or creativity, you'd say like, what?
What would you mean?
You know, but if you could foresee that the same way that you could quantify that sort of mental fortitude, I think you start opening the door in sports performance into something that's just this whole other realm that you don't talk about weight as a metric strength, cardiorespiratory endurance, you can start talking.
Yeah, with creativity, especially in regards to striking technique, yeah, that's a crazy intangible, because you're essentially deciding when to move and what to do, right?
Like, you can throw a jab, you can throw a front kick, you can throw a roundhouse kick, you can throw a wheel kick.
You can throw a turning side kick.
You can throw an axe kick if you're crazy.
There's a lot of different things you can do.
So what do you decide to do and why do you decide to do it?
Is it because you have a style?
Some people's style is like Connor likes to hop in and out and he throws a little front leg side kick.
He throws like that for movement.
He likes to keep his arms wide.
He likes to stand in a sideways stance.
Some guys like to hole up like this in a Muay Thai shell, and they move forward lifting that front leg up, and they move forward and challenge with leg kicks and striking technique.
Some guys just like to wrestle.
They'll paw at you, and they look to shoot like Ben Askren.
He's not looking to stand up and strike with anybody.
He's looking to take you to the ground, beat the fuck out of you.
That's what he does.
So it's all, what do you decide to do, and why do you decide to do it, and when do you decide to do it?
When do you engage?
You're throwing some feints.
You don't want to be the guy who makes it obvious that you're moving forward, because then, like Connor clipped Aldo, you get rocked.
But if you enter into that realm and even start applying more, so again, we talked about that sort of strength deficit as well, that if you get someone, you know, trying to, like John Jones, who's going to move up to heavyweight, is it going to be, will it benefit him when he was strength training, for instance?
I can't remember his deadlift, but it was pretty Pretty impressive.
I think he'll be way better off at 185 pounds, but I think many of them will.
I think there's a point of diminishing returns where they're significantly depleting themselves to make that weight, and then when they don't have to do that, they have more energy.
No, and I think there's just that element now that I think...
As much as MMA has evolved, and again, this is someone who doesn't understand the technical aspects, but as someone who loves sports history, and I've watched it, and I'm just like, that is amazing, but it's still got so far to go.
Again, we were talking earlier about football or soccer, as known here back in England, and the warming up of the brandy in the changing rooms.
I think even now, it's crazy when you have someone so gifted like that, but they are...
You know, rehydrating and re-carb loading on cupcakes.
It was, he got in, it was like he sent, he'd weigh in, and then it would be like he sent his older brother in, like, they were unrecognisable.
Yeah.
And I think it's really interesting that that physiological puppetry, if you know how to do it intelligently, it can be so powerful, but you do it for the wrong reasons.
And this was the thought behind Max Holloway's last weight-cutting fail, is that when he was trying to cut down on short notice to fight Khabib Nurmagomedov, he was cutting down only to 155 and he couldn't make it.
And they think that when he was getting ready for Ortega, what was going on was his body was reacting to the fact that he was trying to cut weight again, and it was like, fuck you.
Frankie, although was the 155-pound champion, and now competes at 145 pounds, really, he should be fighting at 135. And 135 is where he could be at his best.
Especially, you get a guy like a George Lockhart who really knows how to do it and put that weight back on you and how to do it correctly, scientifically.
But we're seeing that now across all sports, I think, this evolution that we're understanding.
Carlin Iles is one of my favorites.
So he was a good American sprinter.
He was, I believe, top 50. He was amazing, but wasn't quite making it.
He's not a Usain Bolt.
He's not a Justin Gatlin.
So they just said, hey, Carlin, here's a rugby ball.
And again, Jamie, it'll be on YouTube some ways, like, you know, widely regarded as the fastest rugby player.
They just handed him, you know, a ball.
And now, there's one of my favourite clips, because he, it was one of his first games or something, and I think it was an Australian commentator, and he just ran, like, rings around everybody.
Like, scored a try, and then the commentator was like, oh my god, he goes, I cannot believe this.
I think you spoke about this not too long ago, but I think you might have mentioned LeBron James saying if someone like that was taught MMA... Oh my God.
And I think we're seeing that now, that sports, now there's more money in MMA and it's evolved to what it is now.
It's amazing that if you get some unbelievable phenom as a kid, you go into MMA. Yeah, but it's not as popular as basketball, and it doesn't pay as much money as LeBron James makes.
$35 million just from basketball, and then sponsorships.
Unless you're Conor McGregor or Floyd Mayweather, you're not going to make that much money from fighting.
They can make that much money from fighting, but they're so rare.
And then Conor could only make that much money from fighting if he boxed Floyd.
Even though the fight with Khabib was the number one MMA pay-per-view of all time, the number two pay-per-view in the history of pay-per-views, just behind Floyd Mayweather versus Manny Pacquiao, right?
It got more pay-per-view buys than Floyd Mayweather versus Conor McGregor, I believe.
But with that amount of money, it's so interesting that...
You know, with that thrown around, this kind of extrinsic motivation, money, media, fame, versus intrinsic motivation.
And in a strange way with the swim, you know, when we got around John O'Groats at the top, everyone was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you just set the Land's End to John O'Groats record.
Well done.
And there was cameras and it was amazing.
And then I was just swimming across the Moray Firth, getting hit by jellyfish in, you know, six degree waters.
It was horrible.
And I think right now as well, and Khabib fascinates me, That, you know, and I don't know the logistics.
Again, you know, I've been out at sea, so I'm still trying to catch up.
But it was a while ago now, again, it might have been UFC Embedded, when, and I think it was when Khabib, years ago now, met George St. Pierre.
And Khabib, you know, said, oh, lovely to meet you.
And then Khabib was smiling and he said, oh...
You know, my dad has always said that he'd love to see me fight, you know, George St. Pierre.
And for me, that was really interesting because Khabib's motivation seems to be intrinsic and putting his skills against the best people in the world.
You could offer him all the money in the world, but he just wants to do something.
And when he talks about his dad, his family, it's a different beast.
And that's what I find really interesting.
But I'm not saying different as in better, worse, good or bad, because ultimately Mayweather's never lost.
But when you see someone like Mayweather, you think, is he just extrinsically motivated when he's saying, you know, if it doesn't make money, it doesn't make sense?
You kind of look at him going, well, you're extrinsically motivated, arguably, and I don't know, I've never met the guy and stuff, but you're extrinsically motivated, but you've never lost.
There has to be some deep emotional connection to his work.
There's got to be some connection to his legacy, what he's been able to do, the way he's been able to retire undefeated as a professional boxer, which is almost unheard of.
The way he's artistically taking guys apart, like, you go to the Canelo Alvarez fight, the way he was, like, Slipping away from Canelo's big shots and then popping him with the jabs.
Like, bitch!
Not today!
Not today!
You ain't good enough for this!
And it was intelligent in his approach to that fight, too, because he made Canelo drain himself to get down to 150 pounds.
There was a different element of danger there because there was a greed upon rule set where Conor wasn't going to kick, wasn't going to take him down, wasn't going to strangle him.
And the whole way around, and again, this is me not understanding all that much about MMA, but being fascinated with the mental aspect.
And again, Georges St-Pierre, when he fought Nick Diaz, and they were saying, you know, he's going to talk to you.
He's going to talk to you.
He's going to walk you down.
Don't be affected.
And Georges St-Pierre was like, of course, yeah, I won't be.
And then he was talking so much that Georges St-Pierre even said it just invoked, again, actually, going back to what we were talking about, you know, our bodies, as much as we like to think about it as black and white, the consequences.
I'm not saying that the Diaz brothers necessarily think like that, but they're like, I'm going to talk to you and I'm going to mess with your biomechanics.
The chemical reactions within your body, neurotransmitters making you...
When Nick's doing that to you, he's like, what, bitch?
What you gonna do, bitch?
He's fucking with your head, man.
I remember the first time he did that to Robbie Lawler.
Robbie was like 20, 21 years old, and Nick was young, too, and they moved into the cage, and they closed it, and Nick Diaz just started saying, Stockton, motherfucker!
And Robbie Lawler was like, what?
He's like standing in front of him.
That's against Carlos Condit.
He drops his...
The best one was against Anderson Silva.
He fell to the ground and pretended he was sleeping.
He put his hands together like he was taking a nap.