Nov. 12, 2018 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:52:02
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Four, three, two, one. | ||
| Dude. | ||
| First of all, what possessed you to want to swim around the entire UK? How many thousands of miles is that? | ||
| Yeah, 2,000 miles altogether. | ||
| 2,000 miles of swimming. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it seemed like a good idea at the time and then halfway around I realized how big Great Britain was. | ||
| You've done some long swims before. | ||
| But, not like, nothing even remotely. | ||
| Like, what's the longest swim you did before this? | ||
| Yeah, I did... | ||
| Oh, this is a bit of a strange story. | ||
| I did... | ||
| I tried to swim between St. Lucia and Martinique, two Caribbean islands. | ||
| It's only 40 kilometers from point to point. | ||
| And for charity, I was trying to swim from point to point with a 100-pound tree attached to my trunks. | ||
| So I was pulling the 100-pound tree, six-foot waves crashing down, and I actually didn't make it from point to point. | ||
| I was like, five kilometers from the end. | ||
| And when I didn't make it, I decided to swim back the other way. | ||
| So I ended up swimming over a hundred kilometers with a hundred pound tree. | ||
| It took me 32 hours, but still didn't make it. | ||
| What went wrong where you didn't make it? | ||
| Tides, currents, you know. | ||
| Oh, you just got swept away? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Especially attached to a tree, right? | ||
| How big was this tree? | ||
| So a hundred pounds, but I mean it floats, but it was more the drag. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| 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. | ||
|
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I was like, okay, what do you want me to do? | |
| And he pauses and he says, you just need to man up. | ||
| You need to man up and swim around Great Britain. | ||
| And I was like... | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| And I can't... | ||
| I couldn't say no once the idea... | ||
| You should have said, why don't you swim with me, bitch? | ||
| I'll do it if you do it, motherfucker. | ||
| That's a crazy thing for somebody to be asking you to do. | ||
| I know, right? | ||
| So I said, fine. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Front crawl. | ||
| What is the front crawl? | ||
| So basically, that's front crawl. | ||
| The regular one. | ||
| Yeah, but way back in 1875, it was like, no, that's... | ||
| He thought it was ungentlemanly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The movements themselves. | ||
| Yeah, it was still being developed as a technique, whereas, you know, if you were a gentleman and you were a swimmer, You swim breaststroke. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Head out of the water the whole time? | ||
| The whole way. | ||
| 23 hours. | ||
| And again, the support boat was saying, you know, get out. | ||
| You're not going to make it. | ||
| You're not going to make it. | ||
| And he just refused. | ||
| And 23 hours. | ||
| So, you know, that's part of a night swim as well. | ||
| Head out of the water just all the way. | ||
| Why brandy? | ||
| Is he getting fucked up or just a little bit of brandy? | ||
| You know, I don't know, maybe. | ||
| It might have been a bit of Dutch courage, but I think there was, you know, certainly back then, sports nutrition isn't what it is today. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I think there was an element. | ||
| He was even, like, lubing himself up in goose fat. | ||
| You know, this is way back. | ||
| To make himself slicker? | ||
| Slicker, and I think there was an element of warmth, or that was certainly the belief. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The Tour de France guys, didn't they drink wine? | ||
| That was, like, a big thing back in the day? | ||
| Way back, yeah. | ||
| I mean, it wasn't until long ago. | ||
| Me and Jamie were just talking now about football back in England, and it wasn't until... | ||
| You know, too long ago, I think maybe a hundred years ago, they used to just keep brandy in the dressing room in case you needed to warm yourself up. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Wow, so they would play soccer drunk. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, kind of, just like with a little bit in there, but like you said, just warm yourself up. | |
| Just a little bit of something. | ||
|
unidentified
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Exactly. | |
| Get the old engine turning over. | ||
|
unidentified
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Exactly. | |
| Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| 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. | ||
| There's no way you're swimming against that. | ||
| And 10 knots, that's a dolphin speed. | ||
|
unidentified
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Jeez. | |
| What is 10 knots in miles per hour? | ||
| Basically 10 miles per hour. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| 10 miles per hour backwards as you're trying to go forwards. | ||
| Basically, yeah. | ||
| Penland First, at the top of Scotland, the currents that go across there. | ||
| So it's running in a good clip. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh yeah. | |
| Backwards. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, we got it good. | ||
| We managed to basically predict it so well that I think that was probably my top speed, which I did 8.7 knots to 8.7 miles per hour. | ||
| I was basically cruising along the top, which is like a dolphin. | ||
| So you were having the waves behind you, pushing you almost. | ||
| And see, now that's what's interesting because I had the tides and currents with me, not necessarily the waves. | ||
| Yeah, I said it wrong. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the wind is coming at you, but the tide is going the opposite way. | ||
| And as you can imagine, that just... | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So how do you predict this tide that you have to get right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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? | ||
| What is the the issue that'll push you back? | ||
| Oh, just the title. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What is it called that area? | ||
| Oh, you say you got to get right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, so Penland Firth Pend in Firth at the Penland for Pendland Firth. | |
| 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. | ||
| Jim, are we okay here? | ||
| No? | ||
| Did we crash? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It wasn't just about swimming. | ||
| And that was what was really cool. | ||
| How do they know when the tides are going one way or the other? | ||
| How do they predict that? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, tides are so predictable. | ||
| So in theory, they change every six hours. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You're doing all these different things that people are not going to see if they're listening to it on audio, so just try to describe it. | ||
| Right, so basically, rather than the tides just going up and down and working with you... | ||
| Sometimes they cross. | ||
| Yeah, so you're just kind of getting slapped across the face by tides, essentially. | ||
| And it's not just helping you. | ||
| You're going to basically zigzag all the way up the coast of Great Britain. | ||
| So as predictable as tides are, we found there was so much stuff that when we were out there, we were like, oh, it wasn't meant to do that. | ||
| Or a giant whirlpool wasn't meant to be there. | ||
| But it is. | ||
| And that was what was... | ||
| Pretty sketchy sometimes. | ||
| When we're out there, if a whirlpool just decides to appear, there's not really enough time to say, hang on, that wasn't on the map. | ||
| Can we look at that? | ||
| Can we speak to the Met Office and talk about weather reports? | ||
| No, you either had to swim through it or try and get out there as quick as you could. | ||
| So when you encounter something like that and you get stuck, do you pull out of the water and try back again later at the same location? | ||
| You do, but quite often, if it was there, it's still going to be there. | ||
| Oh, it is what it is. | ||
| Yeah, so sometimes there's no option. | ||
| And perhaps the best example of this, I mentioned it before, it's called the Corrie of Econ, so sort of west coast of Scotland. | ||
| And it's a giant whirlpool. | ||
| And Matt, the captain, turned to me and said, look, Ross, you know, I need you to swim and I need you to swim hard. | ||
| You need to swim six hours. | ||
| You just need to be clear of this whirlpool. | ||
| So as we were swimming past it, I set my watch, I swam hard for six hours, but about three hours in, I got stung by a jellyfish. | ||
| And I'd been stung by jellyfish a lot before. | ||
| It's painful, but it was bearable. | ||
| But this one particular jellyfish, it was searing into my skin. | ||
| It wouldn't stop throbbing. | ||
| And so I carried on swimming, three hours passed, and it was just unbearable. | ||
| So I popped my head up and I looked at Matt, the captain from the boat. | ||
| I said, Matt, I'm so sorry. | ||
| I've been stung. | ||
| I'm going to have to stop. | ||
| I've been stung by a jellyfish, but the pain's just not going away. | ||
| And as I said that to him, he looked down at me and he said, yeah, I know, because the tentacles still wrapped around your face. | ||
| So I'd basically been swimming for three hours. | ||
| With a jellyfish on your face. | ||
| Wearing a jellyfish. | ||
| So it wrapped into my goggles. | ||
| So I took my goggles off, unpeeled this fat tentacle, threw it away. | ||
| And then, like I said, I'll show you in a minute. | ||
| There was a picture where my face sort of changed shape and the goggles wouldn't fit on my face anymore because my eye sockets were so swelled. | ||
| But I knew that, again, for all of this happening, the Cori Ovec and the Giant Walpole was still to my left. | ||
| So Matt was like, you still need to swim. | ||
| You still need to swim. | ||
| So I ended up putting the goggles over my face. | ||
| And to try and get them to seal, I just punched them into my face. | ||
| So you just had these perfect rings. | ||
| Because you were so swollen. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you had to push them through the swelling. | ||
| Basically. | ||
| Exactly, yeah. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| So you swim. | ||
| I made another hour. | ||
| We got clear of the Corrie of Ekans. | ||
| We managed to clear this giant whirlpool. | ||
| I collapse onto the boat. | ||
| And this is the thing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So your swimming schedule would be six hours on and then you would try to rest. | ||
| When would you eat? | ||
| During the swims or between. | ||
| During the swims? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So quite often just throwing bananas at me. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Salty bananas? | ||
| Basically, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, just salty bananas. | ||
| And you eat them while you're in the water? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It wasn't safe. | ||
| So when you were swimming, this was all during the summer? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, through the autumn. | ||
| And then we finished November the 4th, which was going into the winter as well. | ||
| And you started what month? | ||
| June the 1st. | ||
| So since June, you've been swimming? | ||
| Yeah, basically. | ||
| God damn, man. | ||
| That's so crazy. | ||
| You know what's interesting, too? | ||
| You're not built like a guy I'd expect to be doing this. | ||
| You're built like a tank. | ||
| That's not normal. | ||
| You're a big jack guy. | ||
| You look more like an MMA fighter or a powerlifter, even. | ||
| You don't look like an endurance athlete. | ||
| Yeah, and we were speaking about this because I love the episode with you and C.T. Fletcher. | ||
| I love that guy. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| And I was a big fan of... | ||
| There you are. | ||
| Look at this fucking picture. | ||
| Yo, dude. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| 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. | ||
| No, you're right. | ||
| There was a lot. | ||
| 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... | ||
| I'm going off on a little bit of a tangent here. | ||
| No, please. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It's good. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Under those conditions, they can coexist. | ||
| You separate them by how much time? | ||
| As much as is needed for optimal recovery. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Whereas if you have another athlete who perhaps doesn't have that work capacity, their body's not going to positively tolerate it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| A person who's used to working out maybe only an hour a day. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Controlled muscular atrophy. | ||
| How do they approach that? | ||
| Intelligently, I suppose, looking at anything from, you know, a calorie deficit... | ||
| Just tell them not to pick anything up, ever? | ||
| Kinda, yeah! | ||
| And it's just... | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| That's crazy! | ||
| There it is! | ||
| There you go! | ||
| Got no triceps! | ||
| They don't... | ||
| They went away! | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| But, I mean, that is... | ||
| That is the perfect example of, you know, said principle. | ||
| Specific adaptation to imposed demands. | ||
| That all he does is he lives on a bike. | ||
| So, as a result, his body is a byproduct of what he continually practices. | ||
| Just got bike muscles. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like Rich. | ||
| Rich Roll. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Thin, lean, long guy. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know, to look at him swim, it's unbelievable. | ||
| He looks like a dolphin. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| 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. | ||
| So you think the muscle mass aids you in that way? | ||
| I would argue, yes, yeah. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Just like a horseshoe. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| 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? | ||
| See, and that's a good point. | ||
| I mean, I loved what you did with Dorian Yates. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So, a bodybuilder, to achieve that physique, besides using steroids, they have to use lots of repetitions? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Is that the idea? | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| So, when you say, what do I specifically use? | ||
| It's more mechanical tension. | ||
| So, it's more powerlifting, cleans, deadlifts, things along those lines? | ||
| It's exactly it, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, because you're not built like a bodybuilder, but you're built like someone who's very strong. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that's it, where you start. | ||
| 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. | ||
| How do you determine that? | ||
| Like I said, basically, electrocuting the muscles and stimulating it involuntarily. | ||
| And through that, do they measure it how? | ||
| So that measures your maximal output with you not trying to use it yourself. | ||
| It's involuntary. | ||
| So that is something that you wouldn't have control over. | ||
| So how do they do that? | ||
| Like, essentially, electrocuting you. | ||
| But what kind of, what is it, like electrodes that slap on your legs and they force you to extend your legs? | ||
| Yeah, you would have seen it. | ||
| Yeah, exactly that. | ||
| But that, you lift a weight with that? | ||
| Yeah, you can do. | ||
| So that's what they do? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I've never heard of such a thing. | ||
| So you would be sitting in a leg press? | ||
| Oh, or anything, so quad extensions. | ||
| And it would make your legs extend? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So they would monitor your strength. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's what you were going, okay, I'll lift it. | ||
| And then over here, when it's involuntary, That is what you could actually do. | ||
| That's the potential of the muscles. | ||
| What's usually the higher number? | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| Well, so it's always involuntary. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Always. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| But how much? | ||
| And that's the strength deficit. | ||
| So do you see what I mean? | ||
| Okay, so over here, this is what you could generate when you're just going, okay, one, two, three, and I'm lifting it myself. | ||
| Ah, okay, that done. | ||
| And over here is what we do when it's involuntary. | ||
| Now, if there's a big deficit, okay, so if there's a huge deficit between the two... | ||
| That means you're a pussy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| Why aren't they using it? | ||
| Because strength is functional. | ||
| So they've got all this muscle mass, but they're not recruiting it. | ||
| They've not actually trained strength because strength is neuromuscular. | ||
| So when a bodybuilder does like high repetitions, and what was the type of load that you were calling that? | ||
| How that was... | ||
| Causing hypertrophy. | ||
| So that's metabolic stress. | ||
| Metabolic stress. | ||
| So just a sheer number of sets. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just constant repetitions over and over and over again with not that high a weight. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And that's metabolic. | ||
| But then mechanical tension is when it's more powerlifting-esque. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So there's your difference between the two. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's just redlined. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So the option that we have is to increase the size of the car. | ||
| The option we have is to increase the size of your muscle mass. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| It does. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It does. | ||
| What kind of training were you doing to increase your capacity for work? | ||
| While maintaining the mass. | ||
| Yeah, and this goes... | ||
| It's a bit of a strange story. | ||
| 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. | ||
| When you say you ran a marathon behind a car, you mean pulling a car. | ||
| So in front of a car, not behind a car. | ||
| No, yeah. | ||
| You pulled a car and ran a marathon? | ||
| What the fuck, dude? | ||
| Look at you. | ||
| You seem so normal. | ||
| That's what's so confusing to me. | ||
| Like, if I met you, there's something about a lot of these endurance people. | ||
| Well, I guess not Courtney. | ||
| Courtney Dolwalter, she's so carefree and silly. | ||
| But you're very loose and relaxed. | ||
| I always consider those people dark. | ||
| There's some darkness to those extreme endurance athletes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's darkness. | ||
| They're running from some darkness. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know what I mean? | ||
| No, I do. | ||
| 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. | ||
| My tongue was falling apart. | ||
| It's fine now, by the way. | ||
| Your tongue was falling apart? | ||
| From the salt water? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Falling apart, like how so? | ||
| It's called salt tongue. | ||
| And after 12 hours in the water every single day, your tongue would essentially start to disintegrate. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| So I woke up and there was parts of my tongue on my pillow. | ||
| Is there any concern that this is permanent or it was permanent at the time? | ||
| Were you concerned? | ||
| Absolutely! | ||
| That's what goes back to that hierarchy of needs where you're not thinking about family and friends or what motivates you. | ||
| No, you're thinking, I want to keep my tongue. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| People have gone on long swims before, but has anybody done six months? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| There's Ben Lecomte at the moment who's going across the Pacific, but he is using a snorkel. | ||
| So he kind of cleverly thought about that. | ||
| Whereas for me, I thought, no, this has to be done without... | ||
| Properly. | ||
| Were you thinking about the guy who was just doing the breaststroke and saying, well, if he did it, fuck. | ||
| Captain Wern, then this is it. | ||
| Yeah, it was. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So yeah, and it was at that point that I think you are feral. | ||
| You're just thinking... | ||
| Survive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One arm in front of the other, keep going, keep moving. | ||
| Exactly that. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So here, there's pieces of your tongue. | ||
| This is a video that you made where pieces of your tongue were falling apart. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Defective salt buildup on the tongue. | ||
| And this is on Ross's Instagram, which is Ross E. D-G-L-E-Y. I put it up on my Instagram too. | ||
| I retweeted or reposted one of your things to let people know about this. | ||
| Oh, that is so nasty, dude. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That was bad. | |
| You can see the taste buds on it. | ||
| That's how thick... | ||
| So was it fucking with your taste buds? | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| The way you tasted things? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And that started to have an impact on, you know, the food as well. | ||
| Because, I mean, like granola. | ||
| I was eating so much granola. | ||
| But when that happened, it's like rubbing sandpaper on an open wound. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah, right? | |
| The grit and the oats. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And that was how we had to just adapt. | ||
| So it's during that. | ||
| That video is great actually. | ||
| I mean that was in the cabin. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, from the pus on your neck? | ||
| Oh, Jesus Christ, son. | ||
| And then you had to get in that salt water, which must have felt great. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What was it like when you finished? | ||
| What did it feel like when the last stroke, and then you got out of the water, and you're like, holy shit, I just swam for six months. | ||
| It was, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It was just... | ||
| That's so crazy! | ||
| How many days was it total? | ||
| 157. Oh my god. | ||
| That is so insane. | ||
| It's just so much change. | ||
| And oh, yeah, here we go. | ||
| That was the finish. | ||
| So this is swimming back then. | ||
| So this is you. | ||
| Who are all these people, these fucking hangers on, following you around, pretending they did it too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, this is Ross. | |
| No, no, no. | ||
| Ross is my friend. | ||
| So I felt that it was such a team effort. | ||
| Look at all those people waiting for you. | ||
| My legs were so shaky, Joe. | ||
| At this point, I'm thinking, don't fall over. | ||
| Don't fall over. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Because it has. | ||
| I mean, this is the thing. | ||
| I think I stumble in a little minute. | ||
| That is such madness, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That is such madness. | ||
| And you crossed the Red Bull finish line. | ||
| I got a Trident. | ||
| That was pretty cool. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| That's at home at the moment. | ||
| Oh, they hooked you up? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's that made out of? | ||
| It was really sturdy. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think it feels like a bronze type thing, but this... | ||
| Who are all these fucking phonies? | ||
| You can do it with them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Get out of the water, you fucking posers. | |
| But I said, I was like, I feel that the way that it captured everyone's mind, it just only felt right. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| Do you swim? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You do? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just in a pool. | ||
| Why didn't you come and get involved? | ||
| I didn't even know about it. | ||
| You know how I found out about you? | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| It's like a last man standing. | ||
| And then at the very end, one person won. | ||
| It's like, who's going to drop out last? | ||
| So they just kept doing it. | ||
| So the guy who created this race, see if you can find anything on this guy. | ||
| He's apparently very sadistic. | ||
| And his idea was that people run these 100-mile races or a 50-mile race, and if you just finish, you feel like a winner. | ||
| And he's like, well, bullshit. | ||
| He goes, there can't be a winner if somebody comes in first place, and then you're second place. | ||
| You're not the winner. | ||
| It's like, there's one winner. | ||
| Oh, Berkeley Marathons. | ||
| Yeah, he's apparently Chainsmokes too. | ||
| He's amazing. | ||
| So this is the Berkeley Marathons. | ||
| You know about this. | ||
| It's the same guy. | ||
| He created that race and this is another race he created. | ||
| He's amazing. | ||
| So did you see, I think it was last year. | ||
| Jeremy, is it right? | ||
| What's the Berkeley Marathon? | ||
| Is it the Berkeley or Barclay Marathon? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Barclay. | ||
| Berkeley or Barkley? | ||
| Is the Barkley the one that nobody could figure out how to... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Barkley. | ||
| It's Barkley. | ||
| That's the weird one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think it was, if you search this, Jamie, as well, I think it was last year or the year before. | ||
| I believe it's the 24-hour race or 48 hours? | ||
| But the guy missed out on finishing it by, I think it was a minute. | ||
| So he ran. | ||
| And then at the end, and you see him on the floor, he's absolutely devastated. | ||
| And didn't he take a wrong turn somewhere along the line? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it's really difficult to follow that path. | ||
| But admirably, he just got up and he shook his hand and just said, I just want to thank you for that. | ||
| He said, sometimes the Barclay Marathon wins, but that takes something different, right? | ||
| Well, definitely take something different. | ||
| Find out if I'm correct in how they do it. | ||
| I retweeted the Courtney Dillwalter one. | ||
| I retweeted it from Courtney where it says it's like getting punched in the face very softly over and over and over again. | ||
| Yep, that's exactly it. | ||
| I compare it to being punched in the face. | ||
| Can you put it up though? | ||
| Can you put the article up? | ||
| Wow, this is a version of the article. | ||
| I don't know if that's the exact one you have. | ||
| Yeah, that's exactly it. | ||
| So if you scroll down, you'll see the specifications. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And this is what I find amazing because then it becomes about something completely different. | ||
| I mean, we were just talking now about Kipchoge and the two-hour marathon, but it's like if you put Kipchoge into this, you know, who's going to win? | ||
| It says they had an hour to complete the 4.1667 mile loop. | ||
| And then they finish within 15 minutes to spare. | ||
| The bell clangs again. | ||
| At 7.40 a.m., they run it again. | ||
| And then at 8.40 a.m., they run it again. | ||
| At 9.40, they run it again. | ||
| So every hour, you run this 4.1667-mile loop, and then the bell just keeps clanging forever! | ||
| Why do you think there's more people doing these events now as well? | ||
| Well, I think it's the same thing as everything else. | ||
| The same thing as if you buy a car today, you want it to accelerate from zero to 60 in two and a half seconds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| A few years ago, that was unheard of. | ||
| If you buy a computer today, you want it to be 3.8 gigahertz and 5 terabyte hard drive. | ||
| It's the same every year. | ||
| We want improvements. | ||
| And I think when you hear someone's going to run a 100-mile race, you go, yeah, that's cute. | ||
| But I'm going to run 200 miles. | ||
| And they're like, that's not even possible. | ||
| It's the same as the four-minute mile. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Someone runs the 200 miles, they're like, holy shit, I can't believe a guy ran for three days, he ran 200 miles. | ||
| And then someone like Courtney comes along and goes, I'm going to do it in two days. | ||
| And they're like, what? | ||
| And then she runs it in two days. | ||
| They're talking about now doing a 500 mile ultra marathon. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And what I find amazing, what's the athlete look like? | ||
| Who completes that? | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Well, Courtney's very thin. | ||
| She's very light and very thin. | ||
| And, you know, she's not the type of person that would win a regular marathon. | ||
| This is what was interesting. | ||
| My friend Cam Haynes, who also runs these, he ran the... | ||
| And he's quite big. | ||
| He's pretty jacked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He works, he lifts a lot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| But he cuts a lot of body weight when he does those. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But the way he does it is, he's a hard man. | ||
| He's what I was talking about, like these people have darkness. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| He's got some darkness. | ||
| He just, like, he'll burn 3,000 calories, eat 2,000. | ||
| And so he'll force his body to eat itself. | ||
| And so he drops down to the 160-something pound range, and that's what he likes to weigh. | ||
| When he normally walks around like 185, he's pretty built. | ||
| But then he drops way down. | ||
| He'll lose like 20 pounds of muscle, because he's always lean. | ||
| He's not losing body fat. | ||
| He's just forcing his body to literally eat itself, just through mental toughness. | ||
| But he's still quite big. | ||
| Even when he's turning up on the start line and he's lost that, he's still... | ||
| He's big for an endurance athlete. | ||
| He's amazing. | ||
| But maybe that's one of the reasons why he doesn't win these things. | ||
| He comes in like third, fourth. | ||
| I mean, and also, you know, he hasn't been doing it as long as them, and he's 51 years old now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| But he's an animal, man. | ||
| And this is just that kind of mental fortitude that it takes to do one of those things or to do what you did. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's a very unusual kind of drive. | ||
| And people are very excited by that drive. | ||
| And they're very intrigued by it. | ||
| And it's very attractive. | ||
| It's very attractive to attempt to do. | ||
| It's very attractive to pay attention to and watch. | ||
| Because everyone knows how difficult... | ||
| It's undeniably difficult. | ||
| Like if someone says... | ||
| If you talk to someone who doesn't know how to run at all, they don't do anything. | ||
| They just sit on the couch. | ||
| They go, hey man, get up. | ||
| Get up. | ||
| We're going to run three miles. | ||
| Like, fuck. | ||
| At the end of that three miles, they will collapse. | ||
| They'll lay down their back. | ||
| Their heart will be pounding. | ||
| Their chest will be heaving. | ||
| So they know that's hard. | ||
| Everybody knows that's hard. | ||
| Everybody at one point in their life has run until they're exhausted. | ||
| Whether it's 500 yards or 5 miles or whatever. | ||
| Everybody From when you were a kid, there's always been a moment where we tested ourselves. | ||
| So we're familiar with that feeling of not being able to go on. | ||
| So when they see a guy like you who went through that feeling for six fucking months, or was it five months total? | ||
| Five months. | ||
| Five months, man. | ||
| Five months is an insane amount of time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It is now upon the... | ||
| June, July, August, September, October, November. | ||
| You're into the sixth fucking month when you stop. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| 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? | ||
| I don't think anybody ever thought that was just Monday. | ||
| No. | ||
| I don't think they would have forced themselves to do that because there's no biological or evolutionary need to do that. | ||
| It's not like you could swim for 12 hours a day and get across the channel and get to a place where there's better fruit. | ||
| I don't think our ancestors ever did that. | ||
| I definitely think they did. | ||
| What is that type of hunting? | ||
| There's actually a term for it. | ||
| Jaren's hunting. | ||
| Well, they run an animal down. | ||
| I don't think it's called endurance hunting. | ||
| I think there's another term for it. | ||
| But they will literally, like if you take an antelope, they don't have sweat glands. | ||
| And so they can run far faster than us, but it comes a point in time when they overheat. | ||
| So if you just stay on them. | ||
| Persistence hunting? | ||
| Oh, that was it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Okay, I named it right when you pulled it up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Damn. | |
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Where they cut their dick, and they stick a stick through it, and then they make them crawl through thorns naked. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So I saw that there's a guy back in, I think it's Bruce Parry, so he's an adventurer. | ||
| He has done everything you can think of, every tribal initiation, and that's the one that he refused to do. | ||
| Good for him. | ||
| Keep your dick intact. | ||
| Don't let those crazy guys cut your dick. | ||
| The San are the oldest inhabitants of Southern Africa where they have lived for almost 20,000 years. | ||
| The term San is commonly used to refer to a diverse group of hunter-gatherers living in South Africa who share historical linguistic connections. | ||
| Many now accept the term Bushman or San. | ||
| That's Bushman hunting. | ||
| Is that from the Radiolab thing? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's what they call themselves? | ||
| BBC article here, which I would imagine... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But is that the same with the horrible circumcision ritual? | ||
| I'll double check. | ||
| Oh, it's fucking horrible. | ||
| But they were arguing when they were discussing it, and one of the guys who was on it, who had actually been through it, and now I believe he lives... | ||
| Maybe he lives in America. | ||
| But he was saying he would never have his children go through that, but it made him who he is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| It's the radio lab. | ||
| Kenya. | ||
| Yeah, it's the... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Kapogi, I think, is... | ||
| Ah, there we go. | ||
| Where is it? | ||
| So, before you, I mean, I've kind of described it, but they describe it in even more horrific detail in the podcast. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So again, I'm not advocating... | ||
| Right, I know what you're saying. | ||
| You're advocating tolerance, training tolerance. | ||
| Yeah, and do you think that's maybe missing? | ||
| I mean, again, looking at MMA, like maybe that you see, you know, whether it's, you know, Muay Thai and they're like kicking trees and stuff. | ||
| Yeah, granted, that's, you know, making denser bones and stuff. | ||
| But do you think there's that element as well? | ||
| When you look at, what was it? | ||
| I've forgotten what it was now, but you just start looking at just putting people in high stress situations just to see how they're going to cope. | ||
| Like John Fitch, he was like notorious for letting people almost try and submit him and then they'd tie themselves out. | ||
| He was just completely calm. | ||
| I maintain that that really depends on who's choking you. | ||
| Because Josh Berkman choked him completely unconscious. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think... | ||
| There's guys that can just put you to sleep. | ||
| If you think that you can get away with that shit with a Marcelo Garcia, you're going to wake up going, what happened? | ||
| But most guys won't be able to choke you. | ||
| So to that point, and again, I'm catching up on 157 days of UFC. So I was actually at UFC with McGregor and Khabib. | ||
| But on that note, do you think he tapped premature? | ||
| Oh, he went to sleep. | ||
| McGregor went to sleep. | ||
| Oh, that and that fight. | ||
| I thought you meant John Fish and Josh Birkman. | ||
| Yeah, no, no. | ||
| I mean, it was a neck crank, right? | ||
| No, he did not tap premature. | ||
| He did not defend it, though. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Here's the deal. | ||
| He was done. | ||
| He was beaten down. | ||
| Khabib fucked him up. | ||
| Khabib smashed him. | ||
| But there was a lot of people that don't train. | ||
| And this was very frustrating to me. | ||
| There was many people that don't train that think that that was something that you shouldn't tap to. | ||
| They're out of their fucking mind. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| That is what's called a fulcrum choke. | ||
| It's not necessarily a choke, but it chokes you, but it really feels like your fucking head's going to pop off. | ||
| What he's doing is he's wrapping around the face, and you don't have to even go under the jaw. | ||
| You can get it on the chin, especially if you're as strong as Khabib. | ||
| Then you clamp your hands together, and you're pressing your forearm against his back. | ||
| So you've got this, and you've got the forearm against his back, and you're doing this. | ||
| It's just levers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And your fucking head is just like... | |
| And Khabib is so strong. | ||
| He's been grappling since he was a baby. | ||
| All of his muscles are designed to squeeze and crush and smash. | ||
| And he gets a hold of your neck in that position and he's got that forearm pressed against your back. | ||
| See if you can find an image of the actual submission. | ||
| You could really clearly see what he's doing. | ||
| And then there was a video where Dean Lister and my friend Hans Molenkamp described it. | ||
| I was pulling that up and it's been taken off Instagram for some reason. | ||
| That video? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The Hans Molenkamp Dean Lister video? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know why. | ||
| Maybe someone reposted it and that link is gone, but yeah. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| Did you check Dean Lister's? | ||
| That's so weird. | ||
| I wonder why anybody would take that down. | ||
| Anyway, there's guys who could fuck your face up without even going under the neck. | ||
| A good example, here's another good example. | ||
| Just pull this up. | ||
| I got it. | ||
| You got it? | ||
| It's not the one from right after the fight, but he's still describing it. | ||
| Oh, this is perfect. | ||
| This is perfect. | ||
| So Dean Lister, who's a world champion, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, black belt, as legit as it gets, and this is my friend Hans Molenkamp. | ||
| He's also Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt. | ||
| And see, this is exactly what Khabib did. | ||
| See how his forearm is pressed against the back and the arm is under the chin? | ||
| See, the difference is what Dean is doing, he can't even help himself. | ||
| He's immediately putting his arms, his hands on the arm that's choking him. | ||
| That's what you're supposed to do. | ||
| Now, if you look at what Conor did, Conor just waited until he couldn't take it anymore and tapped. | ||
| When you see Conor... | ||
| Both of his arms are down, he's getting his neck cranked, and he doesn't do this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That's what you're supposed to do. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's just not the right way to handle it. | ||
| But I think that's because Conor had eaten bombs. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Where does it cross over from being technical? | ||
| It would help if he wasn't as tired. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Put on Dean Lister, it's an Ezekiel choke, and he's not being done well. | ||
| Oh, but this is not an Ezekiel choke. | ||
| This is, this is, uh, what this is, is, I mean, it's kind of an Ezekiel, but see where his hand is? | ||
| You gotta really get underneath, see his left hand? | ||
| That left hand's gotta go not just there, it's gotta go under the chin. | ||
| That's not good enough. | ||
| For a guy like Dean, you go, okay, now it's pretty fucking tight. | ||
| Now it's tight. | ||
| And he's got to get further and further in. | ||
| The further that left arm gets into Dean's neck, the more there's going to be a possibility of him choking. | ||
| But Dean has been fucking choked his whole life. | ||
| But I do have to say that Josh Barnett made him tap. | ||
| And Josh Barnett is like one of the few guys that's made Dean Lister tap, and I think the first time he tapped in a decade. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And Josh Barnett got him in a scarf hold. | ||
| That was in Metamorris. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Massive mental toughness, too. | ||
| What Bisping has is just insane mental toughness. | ||
| You know, Bisping basically has one eye. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| And you can keep going. | ||
| Not only can you keep going, you can go faster, you can push harder, you can find these reserves. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So the idea is that these reserves are always there. | ||
| You have to be able to achieve the state of mind that you achieve when you hear a really good song. | ||
| You know? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, there's something real that happens, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And the thing is, is it's been around years. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, that can become... | ||
| And it might be a particular song. | ||
| You know, it might be a particular something. | ||
| You know, if you get into... | ||
| You go into a gym or you've got a friend that can bring that out of you. | ||
| Again, you know, my training back home. | ||
| So, you know, Andy Bolton, who was the first guy to deadlift a thousand pounds. | ||
| I mean, Jesus. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| A thousand pounds. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the clip when you see it and he pulls a thousand pounds. | ||
| It's since been beaten by Eddie Hall, who did Half a Ton. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What the fuck, Eddie? | |
| Isn't half a ton a thousand pounds? | ||
| A little bit less. | ||
| So I think a thousand pounds, I don't know, what's that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Four? | |
| I thought a ton was two thousand pounds, isn't it? | ||
| So yeah, Eddie, what's a thousand pounds in kilos? | ||
| Oh, you're trying to do kilos. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, sorry, the two. | ||
| So yeah, there was two metrics there. | ||
| So Andy Bolton, which was a little bit... | ||
| 2.2 kilos per pound? | ||
| No, 2.2 pounds per kilo. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then, yeah, and when you see him, I mean, this is what I love when you start looking. | ||
| Oh, Jesus Christ! | ||
| So this is Eddie. | ||
| That's his half the time. | ||
| How the fuck are his knees staying together right there? | ||
| Look, that is obscene. | ||
| If you look at how big his body is and how normal size his knees are, that's like, look at the bones in his knees. | ||
| They look so normal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that is... | ||
| Look at all these fucking people. | ||
| I know, it's unbelievable. | ||
| Like, pick it up! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pick it up! | |
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| So when those guys retire, how fucked up are their bodies? | ||
| What's brilliant about Eddie? | ||
| This is the beast tattooed inside of his arms. | ||
| Who's going to argue with him? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, bro. | |
| Yeah, you're a fucking beast. | ||
| His nose is bleeding. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, that's right, right? | ||
| His nose started spraying blood while he was... | ||
| Was that him or another guy? | ||
| I think you... | ||
| There was another video. | ||
| Yeah, it was the Arnold classic. | ||
| I've forgotten his name. | ||
| He was Russian. | ||
| Yeah, that shit was wild. | ||
| But I mean, Eddie, again, so strength, especially with the deadlift, such a simple movement. | ||
| And, you know, the deadlift is just... | ||
| Strength is your body's ability to generate force. | ||
| You know, so it's neuromuscular. | ||
| It's like what your brain is telling your body. | ||
| So that goes back to that strength deficit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That we were talking about. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And I know you've spoken about that before. | ||
| Stop. | ||
| I can't remember who you're speaking to. | ||
| Pavel's a fascinating guy with his concepts. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So ahead of the curve. | ||
| And I know you were talking to... | ||
| I can't remember if it was now. | ||
| Talking about farmer's strength and that ability to stop short every single day. | ||
| So never necessarily going to complete failure. | ||
| I think it was for us. | ||
| For us a hobby. | ||
| I think it was. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Talking about continually... | ||
| Kind of avoiding that exhaustion phase and solely existing in the adaptation phase. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, but that get fit in five easy steps is really just for, it's just a gimmick to get people who don't actually work out to get involved. | ||
| It is, and that's why I love what you broadcast. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You're saying he's really fat, right? | ||
| That's what you're saying? | ||
| No, I'm not saying anything. | ||
| That's what you're saying, power-to-weight. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| Wink, wink. | ||
| I gotcha. | ||
| You're not saying that. | ||
| I get it, bro. | ||
| He's a burly guy. | ||
| He's a well-built... | ||
| That's a nice way of saying fat. | ||
| He is a well-built male. | ||
| Somebody took a picture of my face on Bird's body and I fucking threw up. | ||
| I'm like, oh my god, but what if? | ||
| But what if? | ||
| I'm like, no! | ||
| Yeah, he likes to drink. | ||
| And he still, he is a beast, because he, despite the fact that he doesn't look like Rich Roll, he still can keep going. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What's more amazing is Ari, honestly, because Ari really didn't work out. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| And Ari came in second place, and he came in second place by only 1,000 points, which is... | ||
| One day I got 1,000 points in a day, so he was really only 1,000 points behind me. | ||
| But it's a crazy day. | ||
| That's like seven hours of work in a day or at least six and a half hours of work in a day and a lot of it at 80% of your max heart rate. | ||
| But he still – he wasn't doing anything before this thing started. | ||
| And he was the first one to figure out that you get the same amount of points for 80% of your max heart rate as you do for 90. | ||
| I thought you get more for 90. | ||
| So I was just trying to kill myself every day. | ||
| And then I was only being able to come up with like 230 points and somewhere along those lines because I would max out. | ||
| I was doing like 90% of my max heart rate for like 30-35 minutes. | ||
| I was like exhausted. | ||
| And then Ari figured out that 80 points pays just as much. | ||
| And so he started watching movies while he was on an elliptical machine. | ||
| And that just turned the whole thing into this sort of steady, not fast marathon. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It was really fascinating because I never exercised like that before and it changed my endurance radically over a month. | ||
| What's interesting is it changed my endurance in things that are explosive, like kickboxing. | ||
| So having that aerobic base helps with something explosive. | ||
| How did you find that? | ||
| It helped a lot. | ||
| Because I would mix that in. | ||
| After a while we were doing so much exercise that I had to do different things or I would get bored. | ||
| So I would do a circuit of the elliptical machine and then I would follow the elliptical machine. | ||
| On some days I'd run, elliptical machine, kickbox. | ||
| And on other days, I would do the Echo Bike, which is an Airdyne machine that Rogue makes. | ||
| And then I would do the Rowing machine. | ||
| And then I would do the VersaClimber. | ||
| And then I added in that Air Runner treadmill, which is, what is it called? | ||
| Air Assault, I think. | ||
| Air Assault treadmill, yeah. | ||
| Which is a treadmill that you power yourself. | ||
| Your feet pushing on it and pulling it is what makes it go fast. | ||
| It's not like a treadmill that you keep up with. | ||
| It's actually more difficult than actual running. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| It's 13% more difficult than actual running on the street. | ||
| So, I was going crazy. | ||
| I couldn't do the same things over and over again, so I kept mixing them up. | ||
| And when I would mix them up, by the end of the month, my kickboxing was... | ||
| I had way more endurance. | ||
| Like, I could do ten hard rounds, going three minutes each round, and then I would recover in between rounds. | ||
| The one minute in between rounds, I'd recover quick. | ||
| Because I'm wearing a heart rate monitor. | ||
| I'm watching my heart rate dip. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It was dipping really quickly, and then I had all this energy and madness. | ||
| Like, everything was changing. | ||
| Like, my capacity for work changed. | ||
| Everything adapted. | ||
| I got a little dehydrated one time, and I pissed it looked like iced tea, which is not good. | ||
| So I started panicking and wondering about things like rhabdomyelosis and kidney failure, but I didn't have anything wrong with that. | ||
| It was just a little bit of... | ||
| 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. | ||
| What's a fell race? | ||
| 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... | ||
| Felled trees? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| Who's this gentleman? | ||
| There we go. | ||
| There's Brian Shaw. | ||
| What's wrong with his legs? | ||
| They're all swollen. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I think it was for a... | ||
| Look at the size of this motherfucker. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| And he rocks Converse All-Stars. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| He set the... | ||
| There's a clip on YouTube. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at that. | |
| Man, my man's wearing chucks. | ||
| There's a clip on YouTube where he sets the indoor rowing record, and it was just because... | ||
| Yeah, there we go. | ||
| He didn't know he was setting it? | ||
| No, so he's basically down there. | ||
| He's rowing, and it sounds like someone's started an engine. | ||
| And it's there to go... | ||
| Like this. | ||
| Here you go. | ||
| Let me hear this. | ||
| So this, they've just looked... | ||
| He rows with a mouthpiece. | ||
| Look, the whole thing, they have to hold it down in the end because it's coming out of the floor. | ||
| Jesus Christ, these guys are standing on it. | ||
| It sounds like just a... | ||
| That's a jet engine, right? | ||
| For all that power from his legs, man. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Well, no, and he's better. | ||
| I mean, that technique as well. | ||
| I mean, I hope Brian doesn't mind me saying. | ||
| It's not necessarily... | ||
| You know, Olympic rowing technique, but he doesn't need it because he's just got silly power. | ||
| What is the correct technique? | ||
| So the hundred... | ||
| Well, there's a catch phase and it's more... | ||
| You're almost treating it more like a deadlift where you're using your larger leg muscles where... | ||
| Oh Jesus, look at him go. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| And they had to put weights on it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my God, this guy's a fucking savage. | |
| This is so crazy to watch. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| The amount of force he can generate. | ||
| He looks like a very tall man too. | ||
| He's huge. | ||
| How big is this guy? | ||
| 6'8", 6'9". | ||
| So that helps too, right? | ||
| Because the long stroke? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It's just pure power. | ||
| But anyway, so they found out. | ||
| During this session, I believe what happened is they said, well, you know, a rower shouldn't make that sort of noise. | ||
| He's basically two people put together. | ||
| He's 6' what? | ||
| 400 and what? | ||
| 6'8", 425 pounds. | ||
| That's two big guys strapped together in one body. | ||
| He's almost 200 pounds above the UFC heavyweight limit. | ||
| Do you know how insane that is? | ||
| UFC heavyweight limit is 265. He's almost 200 pounds too heavy to fight in the heavyweight division of the UFC. Motherfucker. | ||
| Basketball. | ||
| Basketball background. | ||
| And he still, look, he didn't know that he was going to set the world record for rowing. | ||
| So the rowing record, there you go, his one was 12.8. | ||
| I believe it was 1308. Jesus. | ||
| So he's just broke the rowing record. | ||
| But because he had that neuromuscular background that they said, Hey, Brian, you're big and powerful. | ||
| This is a rowing machine. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He went, oh, okay. | ||
| And it's like, oh, there you go. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| There's a world record. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They'd have to open up the super heavyweight division. | ||
| But he's doing a similar movement to deadlifts, which is very common. | ||
| It is. | ||
| He's used to that movement. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| But I suppose where you saw him, you know, that wasn't actually... | ||
| There was no extension of the back. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He was bent over, just ripping. | ||
| There's another one, again, even to use Brian as an example, where he does... | ||
| I believe... | ||
| I can't remember the name of the wad now. | ||
| But he went up and Thor, as well, another strongman, did a... | ||
| I think it was a... | ||
| Am I a clean and jerk? | ||
| There was a wad that was predominantly clean and jerk and there was this amazing crossfitter. | ||
| Technique was beautiful, disappearing under the bar, bang, over his head. | ||
| It was amazing to watch. | ||
| And I think it was Thor or Brian Shaw went in and just instead of a clean and jerk and Joe, honestly, he just basically upright rose the whole thing. | ||
| And complete. | ||
| And they were like, well, that's not a cleaning jug, but you've just set a record again. | ||
| So there's that element. | ||
| To use an example as well with that. | ||
| Oh, here we go. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| But wait, hopefully there's a crossfitter. | ||
| That is insane. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh no. | |
| Okay. | ||
| There's another strong one. | ||
| But there is, there's another one of those where you see the crossfitter with this amazing, beautiful technique. | ||
| He's so far from his chest, it's crazy that he's doing it like that. | ||
| And what is that? | ||
| 225 pounds? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is that what that is? | |
| I don't actually know what that particular weight is. | ||
| What in the fucking shit? | ||
| That is so crazy that he could do that. | ||
| Look at how he's doing so many reps! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right? | |
| That is insane. | ||
| He doesn't have a pause. | ||
| No, but okay, so that's meant to be a clean and jerk. | ||
| I know. | ||
| So that's what I mean about that neuromuscular efficiency that he's gone, okay, here's a new sport. | ||
| Come get involved. | ||
| And he's gone, okay, I see the rules of your sport, but I'm going to do it my way. | ||
| But does it count? | ||
| Well, yeah, I suppose. | ||
| I mean, if that what is just put the weight above your head. | ||
| Like that guy did it normal that time right there. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's a normal one. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Speed of movement. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| And then Thor, come and have a go at this. | ||
| And this is what he produces. | ||
| So, there's that neuromuscular efficiency. | ||
| Well, it's just mad strength. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It is. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's it though. | ||
| They're able to do that again because of that foundation. | ||
| Their body can generate that force. | ||
| And then you say, here's a new movement. | ||
| And you can see them look at, you know, like for that example, okay, so that's a cleaning jerk. | ||
| Okay, I can't figure that out, but I think I've found a way. | ||
| It also lends credence to the concept that deadlifts is like the mother of all exercises because it really does work all your muscle groups. | ||
| And if you can get really strong at deadlifts, I mean, it really does enhance almost any single athletic endeavor you participate in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They're long and graceful. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| So I ended up, again, almost accidentally going into strength training. | ||
| I played water polo in the end to a fairly good level. | ||
| So I was doing that, but again, I just got beaten up. | ||
| I was 16 playing in the seniors league and, you know, just big guys with beards just beating me up. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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? | ||
| That would be amazing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that is insane. | ||
| I mean, you talk to... | ||
| Have you ever seen the machine they do? | ||
| They've taken these electrodes, they put it on men, and recreate the pain of childbirth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And watch these men fucking fall apart. | ||
| Like, fucking turn it off! | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| That would be tough. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, obviously I haven't given birth, but it's supposed to be unbelievably painful. | ||
| And women are biologically suited to this. | ||
| So I think their ability to endure that pain is just, it's probably just, there's an evolutionary advantage to having this higher capacity. | ||
| But I also think one of the things that I learned from teaching martial arts is that women, they learn technique better many times than men do. | ||
| Because one, they listen. | ||
| And two, they don't try to muscle things. | ||
| So women have less of a problem with learning something from a person. | ||
| And this is also true about archery. | ||
| My friend John Dudley, who's an archery coach, says his favorite students are always women. | ||
| Because they listen better. | ||
| They don't have as much of an ego. | ||
| They don't have to pretend they already know something. | ||
| They don't want to just try it without... | ||
| They follow it to a T better, like generally. | ||
| Obviously, we're speaking in generalities. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| And perception to fatigue. | ||
| Going back to what you said, if you could quantify that, you'd put Kane up there with one of those people and you'd go, he has that in abundance. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Anyone else in the heavyweights then, would you say? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Even his toe against Chael Sonnen. | ||
| Oh, his toe was fucked up. | ||
| I didn't even notice it until I was interviewing him. | ||
| I was interviewing him, he looked down, he was like, oh shit, look at my toe, and he started going into shock. | ||
| Was it as bad as it looked? | ||
| Oh, it was turned upside down. | ||
| It was completely turned upside down. | ||
| I mean, imagine that. | ||
| 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... | ||
| Produce that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Also in John Jones' favor, I believe, he has two fucking super-athlete brothers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they used to apparently beat the shit out of each other all the time, and his brothers are bigger than him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's a bunch of different... | ||
| But it's... | ||
| I don't know... | ||
| I think you can teach that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's what I think. | ||
| And, you know, I'm a huge fan of Dan Hardy. | ||
| We've been chatting since the swim. | ||
| And I always go back to that armbar with George St. Pierre. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| And I was like, everybody would have tapped. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And I couldn't get my head... | ||
| 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... | ||
| It was horrendous. | ||
| I was cringing watching. | ||
| Well, Dan's a savage. | ||
| And he's an intelligent savage. | ||
| And, you know, he's not like a thug or a brutish guy. | ||
| He's a very well-read, intelligent, thoughtful guy. | ||
| But he's also a guy that knows how to dig deep, you know? | ||
| When he fought George St. Pierre, that was his big shot. | ||
| His big shot was against a guy who, at the time, was in his prime and was the greatest welterweight, arguably, of all time. | ||
| The argument is between him, Matt Hughes, and I believe now Tyron Woodley is in that camp as well. | ||
| It was the greatest welterweights ever. | ||
| What you get out of Dan Hardy is a guy who's thought things through. | ||
| It really comes through in his commentary. | ||
| He's a very, very intelligent guy. | ||
| Would you say he's cut from the same cloth as Cormier then? | ||
| I know Brendan spoke about this recently, saying he's the most intelligent fighter on the UFC roster at the moment. | ||
| Cormier? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In his approach, yeah. | ||
| In his approach and how he will break people. | ||
| But again, you know, when you watch, you know, UFC in bedding and stuff, you can't help but love Cormier. | ||
| He's such a nice guy. | ||
| And this goes back to what I suppose you said about the swim, you know, when it was like, oh, you're very smiling and stuff. | ||
| But I see that in Cormier. | ||
| He's the nicest guy, but I would never get in the octagon with him. | ||
| He's not fooling anyone. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I really believe that. | ||
| But he's just... | ||
| Why would he? | ||
| He's a fucking heavyweight champion. | ||
| That's the difference between him and... | ||
| There's many differences between him and Dan. | ||
| The success ratio is very different. | ||
| Cormier's been extremely successful. | ||
| The only guy he's lost to is Jon Jones. | ||
| But... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That progressive overload in your own head. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And what you just said there about experiences that quite often now when I go swimming, I'm like, it's not the curry of Ekin. | ||
| I'm not wearing a jellyfish tentacle on my face. | ||
| You know, it's not that bad. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I think... | ||
| Do you think it's the same with wrestling, that you're like, I've been in a worse position than this? | ||
| I think for sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| Technique and intelligence, I believe. | ||
| Again, with the Royal Marines, we can be... | ||
| When training with them, I find that it's crazy how you'll have the cognitive functioning of a five-year-old. | ||
| You know, you are complete. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He's so relaxed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, and it's just like that. | ||
| You could see somebody probably fatigued and they're panicking and he's just sitting on the stool. | ||
| He's got great endurance too. | ||
| That helps. | ||
| That certainly helps. | ||
| His ability to recover between rounds. | ||
| Did you see his fight this weekend? | ||
| I've got to catch up on it with Perry. | ||
| Sensational. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Sensational. | ||
| The best he's ever looked. | ||
| But he was on the bottom when Perry... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, Perry took him down, but he said to me, he goes, he's trying to take me down. | ||
| I was like, shit, I'm going to let him. | ||
| He said, I'll let him take me down. | ||
| And then he reversed him immediately and got him in an arm bar and then broke his arm. | ||
| He snapped his forearm in half. | ||
| He sent me the x-rays. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I'll show you two. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no. | |
| I don't think anybody's seen this. | ||
| Sorry, Donald. | ||
| This is an exclusive. | ||
| I'm sending this. | ||
| If I'm not supposed to send this, I gotta send this shit. | ||
| Yeah, we've been going back and forth. | ||
| And, you know, for him, I think it was a matter of rekindling his excitement. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| Yeah, it was pretty emotional. | ||
| Oh, that hurts, right? | ||
| Can you see that? | ||
| You want me to send it to you? | ||
| Here, I'll send it to you, Jamie. | ||
| Also, I think with Donald, when we're talking about stimulation and motivation, he has a son now. | ||
| He has a little baby son, and he brought his son into the octagon with him and was celebrating with his son. | ||
| He just seemed different to me. | ||
| He seemed different in his poise, completely in control. | ||
| The guy who's fighting, Mike Perry, is fucking dangerous. | ||
| He's fucking dangerous. | ||
| He hits really hard. | ||
| He's very aggressive. | ||
| And Donald just handled him. | ||
| And Perry took him down, I think, because he didn't like what was going on stand-up-wise. | ||
| He just snapped that shit. | ||
| 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's love. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| Yeah, the love of his children. | ||
| He has something that... | ||
| What he said was, I never knew what I was fighting for. | ||
| He said, now I have something to fight for. | ||
| I think he was fighting for excitement before. | ||
| For thrills, because he's a thrill-seeker. | ||
| He's a wild motherfucker. | ||
| He likes jet skiing and jumping snowmobiles off the side of mountains. | ||
| He's an animal. | ||
| A week before a fight. | ||
| Yeah, he doesn't give a fuck. | ||
| He does not. | ||
| But this is a different thing. | ||
| What he's doing in this fight in particular, I think, this is a different thing because he's fighting for his son. | ||
| I mean, he's got this family now, and it means the world to him. | ||
| And he looks over at this guy like this guy's trying to take food from his family. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And he just was an efficient assassin. | ||
| It was beautiful to watch. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He said, Khabib, he goes, I'm back. | ||
| I'm coming for you. | ||
| So he wants to drop down to 155 and fight Khabib. | ||
| Do you think he might now? | ||
| Something's different, do you think? | ||
| Do you think he can make a tire run? | ||
| Listen, man, Khabib is the motherfucker of all motherfuckers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Agreed. | |
| You know, I mean, I don't know who's going to beat that dude, but that dude, Molly Watt. | ||
| Askren? | ||
| Maybe, but Askren is a different weight class. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And that's the thing with Barboza. | ||
| I mean, Terrietta, that kick, he just won. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ooh! | |
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So to see that, it was just... | ||
| I mean, it felt like if I was to do mixed martial arts and jiu-jitsu, I know you spoke about it before. | ||
| You said if somebody doesn't know what they're doing, like me, it's like drowning. | ||
| And that's exactly how I would feel, I think. | ||
| It was just... | ||
| But it's something that you could learn. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that's actually the thing. | ||
| I mean, even at the moment now, I'm used to just training for 12 hours a day. | ||
| So right now, I'm still sort of in biphasic sleep. | ||
| So I've only been on land, really, a week. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Were you sleeping in a boat this whole time? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Six hours off. | ||
| What is it like to have the ground not move? | ||
| Just standing. | ||
| Honestly, when I got on, I was doing media interviews and everything was swaying. | ||
| Even that night, my first night, the bed, it sounds so weird, but the bed was just a bit too stable, it was a bit too comfy. | ||
| I woke up in the middle of the night, I was with my girlfriend, and I'm looking for my goggles, thinking the tide's about to change. | ||
| You're about to jump back in? | ||
| Yeah, and she was just like, go back to bed. | ||
| Honestly, I say it now like sort of joking, but there was a real element of, you know, just that you'd been conditioned. | ||
| And all I really cared about, as soon as I woke up, I wanted to know what the tides were doing. | ||
| You know, where's it running? | ||
| When does it start? | ||
| Have we got good tide or bad tide? | ||
| Is it spring tides or neat tides? | ||
| So spring tides being stronger, neat tides being stronger. | ||
| And that was my currency. | ||
| That's all I cared about. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it was really strange to try now and integrate back into society. | ||
| Even just walking through LA, the cars, everything moves very fast now. | ||
| And you kind of come back and it's a bit of a shock. | ||
| It's a real shock. | ||
| You must feel like you're in an alternate universe or something. | ||
| To go through five months of one reality and then to come out on the other end. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It does. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And I was just like, oh, okay. | ||
| You probably can't get tired. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| There is that element. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But he was 10 years of nothing. | ||
| And he's fucking 40-something years old. | ||
| And he forced himself through mental fortitude. | ||
| So he's shifted. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But your arms must be jacked. | ||
| It's kind of it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So your shoulders are resisting the wind as it's coming towards me. | ||
| So you're pushing with your shoulders. | ||
| 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 It just kind of felt okay. | ||
| What's 160 kilos? | ||
| 160 kilos in... | ||
| Sorry, Jamie. | ||
| But then, equally, my legs, you know, in the squat, I'm barely lifting my own body weight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
350. 350, yeah, for, you know, eight reps. | |
| It's that sort of strength. | ||
| And so you had lifted weights in five months, and yet you're like, upper body, but please... | ||
| But lower body, no! | ||
| You know, and it's not even that, though. | ||
| Like, you know, my legs, it's my feet as well. | ||
| So right now, genuinely, and a lot of people afterwards are like, what are you going to do next? | ||
| You know, what's the next adventure? | ||
| And I said, I've got to learn to walk again. | ||
| And everyone laughed, and I was like, no, no, no. | ||
| Like, the arches in my foot have collapsed, those ligaments and tendons. | ||
| So it's, I mean, I think a lot of... | ||
| Yeah, you've got to think, 12 hours in the water every day, but even when I was on the boat, I was probably eating or sleeping. | ||
| Whoa, I didn't even think about that. | ||
| So your load capacity, your ability to hold your body weight up is diminished. | ||
| Yeah, I almost entered into this small group of people, like astronauts, where you've been in a non-weight-bearing environment for so long. | ||
| So I joke, and when we watched that video back, and I was saying, try not to fall over there. | ||
| Genuinely, I was thinking, please don't just fall over with all the characters I'm clapping. | ||
| Another thing that intrigues me is you're a young guy. | ||
| A lot of these endurance guys are old, angry people. | ||
| They get older and they develop this ability to just fucking fuck the world and push through things. | ||
| How old are you? | ||
| Yeah, 33. Yeah, that's very young to do what you did, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah, and I think you're right, actually. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Look at that old motherfucker. | ||
| There we go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Honestly. | |
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| So when I'm Fel Runner, I am getting lapped, you know, by guys like... | ||
| Fel Runner Josh Naylor. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Those are all fell runners. | ||
| That's fell runners. | ||
| Look at those guys. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Run into a gay bathhouse. | ||
| All of them. | ||
| Why don't they wear such short shorts? | ||
| So this is it. | ||
| Put some clothes on, boys. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's up with those shorts? | |
| They're the fell running shorts. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You have to wear those shorts? | ||
| They're not compulsory. | ||
| Seems like it is. | ||
| And you've got numbers next to your dick. | ||
| That's weird, too. | ||
| I would have brought you a pair if I didn't. | ||
| I wouldn't wear them. | ||
| Come on, bro. | ||
| Those are shorts that a girl would wear in a porno movie. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| They're in a legitimate uniform! | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| And that's kind of the concept of fell running, too. | ||
| So it's just a matter of getting up and above and over it, no matter what path you take? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, but certainly efficient, if you know of something. | ||
| And so that guy in the front there is pacing him, basically, because it's very easy to get lost on themselves. | ||
| There's no specific path that you have to take? | ||
| You just have to get over it? | ||
| There's certain points that you have to get to, but then in terms of the terrain and the path to it, no, not really. | ||
| So it's just point to point to point to point? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How do they mark those points? | ||
| Do they have, like, cones or something? | ||
| I mean, this, yeah, will be long established that to do the Bob Graham, you need to do that point, that point. | ||
| And then you come back to Moot Hall, you know, within hopefully 24 hours. | ||
| And if you do it, then you have your Bob Graham. | ||
| These guys look like a guy that would do that, whereas you don't. | ||
| This is my point about you and endurance. | ||
| Like, your physique, you don't see a guy with your physique doing this kind of stuff. | ||
| Do you think that you could do this kind of stuff? | ||
| Running, I mean, no. | ||
| And I always say I'm not self-deprecating at all. | ||
| How much do you weigh? | ||
| I think at the moment about 100 kilos, which is a lot. | ||
| 220? | ||
| Yeah, so that's about the year. | ||
| 220 pounds? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So with something like running... | ||
| Because you're so heavy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And even though you have a lot of power... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think it would be possible if you put... | ||
| If you added more power to... | ||
| Obviously not now, because you're getting off for five months on a boat. | ||
| But if you... | ||
| You built your legs and your feet back up. | ||
| Do you think you could do this? | ||
| Possibly, but nowhere near. | ||
| I mean, Killian Jornette, he's amazing. | ||
| I mean, with Killian, he, I believe, he's almost sort of semi-nomadic. | ||
| He grew up in the hills. | ||
| Semi-nomadic. | ||
| Yeah, no, so for him, he would run a marathon to go and get his carton of milk in the morning. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| You know, so when you are lining up on a start line, I mean, if you're racing against Killian, you look over and you've got a guy like that. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| You just go like, I'm out, I'm out. | ||
| You can't beat that guy, but he is built for that. | ||
| But you don't think that guy's built for swimming. | ||
| If that guy had to do what you did swimming-wise, he would be at a disadvantage. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You were doing that while you were swimming? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 15,000? | ||
| Yeah, 15,000 calories. | ||
| What was it in? | ||
| A lot of it, you were sitting down once you got inside the boat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And what were you eating? | ||
| Just... | ||
| 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. | ||
| And then even looking, oh, here we go. | ||
| Yeah, so... | ||
| Was this you eating? | ||
| What's that? | ||
| It was. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, there might be one there somewhere. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What is that in that bowl? | ||
| Beans, mostly? | ||
| Yeah, and this is why it just got to the point where it was like, what can you just eat? | ||
| Like, what is going to... | ||
| So I was just eating out of the pan. | ||
| Just trying to shove it in your face. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So, like, what would you eat? | ||
| Like, what were the foods? | ||
| Oh, this is probably quite a good one. | ||
| Yeah, it'll play. | ||
| So, yeah, there you go. | ||
| Like, in terms of... | ||
| So, essentially, as a nutritional sort of, in theory, the framework, you get... | ||
| What was that mask? | ||
| Oh, so that was to stop the jellyfish. | ||
| Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
| Yeah, no... | ||
| No, but it doesn't matter. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You just, you must need a lot of like really dense foods. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's crazy. | |
| And I started at 92 kilos. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So when it comes to nutrition, were you taking any supplements? | ||
| Were you taking vitamins? | ||
| Yeah, lots. | ||
| And that goes to, like I said, that calorie density, but also to make sure that you're making the immune system. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| What are you taking? | ||
| Everything from super green shakes, you know, to multivitamins, to protein shakes, just to make sure that you were supplementing that calorie density. | ||
| I think it's so often overlooked, the higher turnover of... | ||
| Like phytochemicals, enzymes, micronutrients. | ||
| What about fish oil? | ||
| Anything along those lines? | ||
| Yeah, omega-3s, yeah. | ||
| And that's what... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Your body's not going to assimilate it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it's not about the protein that you eat. | ||
| It's about the protein you assimilate. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you would take branched-chain amino acids post-workout? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And specifically, like I said, leucine, just to make sure that I was kick-starting that whole recovery process. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Because as soon as you got out of the water after six hours, there's always the temptation. | ||
| Just, I want to pass out. | ||
| I want to just go to bed. | ||
| And it's just like, no, you've got six hours to think before you're back in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Now, what about your protein? | ||
| What were you getting it mostly from? | ||
| A lot of whey protein, just because of efficiency. | ||
| And also, as well, you've got to think in terms of the boat and stocking food, like perishable food. | ||
| So, as much as I love my barbecue ribs and everything like that, that wasn't going to happen on this small galley that we had on the boat. | ||
| Did you get any fresh food, eggs, anything along those lines? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We did, yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| What about your joints? | ||
| I would imagine repetitive stress of swimming would wreak havoc on your shoulders. | ||
| Yeah, and that's why this goes back to... | ||
| 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. | ||
| So... | ||
| You're saying Burt's fat? | ||
| Is that what you're saying? | ||
| Is that what you're saying? | ||
| I'm saying that Burt, for the record... | ||
| Jamie heard that? | ||
| Jamie, for the record... | ||
| I've heard it as a repeated... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is it like a hashtag? | |
| Hashtag Burt is fat? | ||
| For the record, on record, I think Burt is a specimen of a male. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What I was saying... | |
| But you're getting... | ||
| Well, listen, we have photographic evidence. | ||
| Pull up that photo of him with his belly hanging out. | ||
| This is after he ran a marathon. | ||
| Is this pre or post Sober October? | ||
| Because he lost a lot now, though. | ||
| Yes, he lost 18 pounds during Sober October. | ||
| He's the only one that lost weight. | ||
| I gained weight. | ||
| But there was that video, because he was dancing in his bathroom recently, wasn't he? | ||
| Look at this photo. | ||
| Denim pants? | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| That's not even the worst one. | ||
| I love him. | ||
| Why is Burt Chrysler so fat? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That is a fine specimen of a man. | |
| That's the one! | ||
| That's one. | ||
| Because he wore those for the weigh-in. | ||
| That's pretty sober. | ||
| He's got a bunch of those. | ||
| He's got more than one pair of denim. | ||
| That's what he wears. | ||
| I love him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's an animal. | |
| The fact that he ran a marathon with that body. | ||
| It's amazing! | ||
| It's like running Le Mans in a Pinto. | ||
| He doesn't get enough credit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think that's amazing. | |
| You're right. | ||
| He doesn't get enough credit. | ||
| Call him up. | ||
| But everything that... | ||
| That's not real. | ||
| It's not that big. | ||
| That's Photoshop or something. | ||
| 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... | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Pure ripping it out of the floor. | ||
| And I knew that I couldn't necessarily do that looking at delts, high catch, high elbows. | ||
| It's like, well, you're going to do high elbows for 157 days for 12 hours? | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, no. | |
| 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'm not one of them. | ||
| So you developed a more efficient, slower... | ||
| A style that you could continue for five months. | ||
| Yeah, and you just end up... | ||
| It's like moving meditation. | ||
| It just became like... | ||
| The limiting factor was just like... | ||
| I was just getting bored. | ||
| I wasn't actually breathing heavy. | ||
| What were you thinking of? | ||
| This is the thing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I swam with a basking shark. | ||
| Did they come over to you going, what the fuck is this dude doing? | ||
| Yeah, like one point. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| 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. | ||
| It was breaching over the top. | ||
| It was coming under me and swimming like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| And I turned to Mal. | ||
| I said, like, Mal, what's going on? | ||
| And he said, I've never seen this. | ||
| He's been sailing, like, 40 years. | ||
| He says, I've never seen this. | ||
| He said, but what I think is happening is I think it's a female. | ||
| She's trying to fuck you. | ||
| Well... | ||
| I said, it's not mating season, is it? | ||
| He was like, no, no, no, it's fine, it's fine. | ||
| He goes, what are things happening? | ||
| Saving you for later. | ||
| This motherfucker can go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at him. | |
| I've seen him for four months in this water. | ||
| I'm going to fuck him. | ||
| Mating season is probably right around the corner. | ||
| She's like, if he sticks around... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was getting a move on. | |
| So I was like, you know, that was a concern of mine. | ||
| Yeah, I would imagine. | ||
| Yeah, and it was. | ||
| But no, Matt said, no, no, no. | ||
| I think it's a female. | ||
| I think that she thinks that you're an injured seal. | ||
| And so for the next five miles, she basically guided me all the way to the shallower water. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And as I got there, it was literally the depth of the water. | ||
| Matt said, yeah, yeah, much shallower water. | ||
| And we turned. | ||
| Whale breached one more time. | ||
| And then swam off as if to say, you know, you're safe now. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So for all of the hardship and everything that I've described, there were moments and sunsets and swimming with seals. | ||
| And it was amazing. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| So that's the basking shark. | ||
| Is that what you encountered? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, so that was in the... | ||
| That's the actual one you encountered? | ||
| I don't know if... | ||
| I can't... | ||
| I mean, I was swimming behind him. | ||
| Seems like you could swim in that. | ||
| I was concerned about that one. | ||
| But no, so that's a basking shot. | ||
| So they're friendly. | ||
| But can you imagine seeing that? | ||
| Like, you're swimming through Scotland. | ||
| Mountains either side of you. | ||
| 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 that was a concern. | ||
| Were they interested in you? | ||
| Thankfully, we didn't see any. | ||
| But they wouldn't attack you, right? | ||
| Well, so this is it. | ||
| So we were speaking with marine biologists at the time saying, look, like, what's the situation here? | ||
| And they said, well, you know, what's really interesting, they're so intelligent. | ||
| You know, killer whales are so, so intelligent. | ||
| And they've never been known, this was what they said to me, they've never been known in the wild to attack a human. | ||
| And I said, okay, fantastic. | ||
| And they said, however... | ||
| If they're going to attack a human, it's probably going to be you because no one's ever spent that amount of time in the water as well. | ||
| You know, so I was like, right. | ||
| They said, all you need to do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was like, all right, comforting. | |
| 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. | ||
| Well, I think when they've attacked people in the wild, though, or in captivity, it's always been trainers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's always been anger and frustration. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And that was my experience with the minky and everything. | ||
| People said, like, how do you swim at night? | ||
| Because certainly around west of Scotland, it was a depth of 200 meters. | ||
| So you just, you don't know what's under you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh! | |
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, it's just one of those things. | ||
| It's just darkness. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, just like you can't see the hand in front of your face. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| 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. | ||
| It's like, what does he need? | ||
| He's got so much money. | ||
| Oh, Mayweather? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Mayweather spends money. | ||
| He spends money like crazy. | ||
| He was going to fight tension. | ||
| Tension, how do you pronounce his last name correctly? | ||
| Nasukawa? | ||
| No, so I've been out at sea, so I didn't really see what was going on here. | ||
| Yeah, let me see if you find that on my Instagram. | ||
| He's out of his fucking mind. | ||
| Would that have been a bad idea? | ||
| Terrible! | ||
| He would have got head kicked into a coma. | ||
| But you kind of asked, what are the reasons? | ||
| I think he spends a shit ton of money. | ||
| You think? | ||
| They're trying to get it back on track. | ||
| He said Floyd had been duped into agreeing to the contest. | ||
| Look, they will dupe him. | ||
| By the way, they are very different. | ||
| If this happens, believe you me, he's going to get kicked in the head. | ||
| They might say, no, no kicky, no kicky. | ||
| Listen, man, you get in the ring with tension, he's going to try to roundhouse kick you into another fucking dimension. | ||
| So it was a special bout, so there was going to be no kicking? | ||
| I don't know if they agreed to the rules. | ||
| Wow, okay. | ||
| But Tenshin Nasuka was, I think he's 20? | ||
| I think he's 20 years old. | ||
| He's a really fantastic talent. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he really is. | ||
| But it fascinates me. | ||
| So I'm catching up on all this, like I said. | ||
| So I've missed all of this for 157 days. | ||
| Like I said, I even missed the McGregor and Kapiba fight and stuff. | ||
| Go to Striking Breakdowns on Instagram. | ||
| Lawrence Kenshin, he's done a bunch of breakdowns, as has Brandon Dorman's done a bunch of breakdowns, too, on Tension. | ||
| But Lawrence Kenshin has this really fascinating video of him fighting this world Muay Thai champion, and he wheel kicks him in the head. | ||
| It was more like a jump, spinning back kick to the chin, but the way he did it, It was like a really weird angle and you could see him setting it up. | ||
| He's really creative. | ||
| And he just found a weird opening for this guy and just kicked this guy into oblivion. | ||
| He's nasty. | ||
| And he's really sneaky. | ||
| Like the kind of techniques that he lands. | ||
| He's very clever with his reads and his understanding of distance and what's possible. | ||
| Do you see it? | ||
| Striking breakdowns on Instagram? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It might not be the name of it. | |
| Huh? | ||
| But yeah, it's with this. | ||
| You know, how much money does he need? | ||
| He can't spend that much. | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| I think he can. | ||
| And this is what I love. | ||
| Again, I'm only just catching up on this. | ||
| Like I said, I should point out, I have been at sea for 157 days. | ||
| But with everything that happened... | ||
| Yeah, striking breakdowns. | ||
| I just got to it. | ||
| Striking breakdowns. | ||
| That's when I typed it, man. | ||
| It's not coming up? | ||
| No. | ||
| Maybe there's something wrong with Instagram. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I got it right here. | ||
| Here, I'll send you the link so we can see. | ||
| Yeah, here we go. | ||
| I'll send you this. | ||
| Copy link. | ||
| Sorry, folks. | ||
| But this is a... | ||
| I don't know how much they were offering him. | ||
| So I don't know how much... | ||
| Okay, I just sent it to you. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, it has to be millions of dollars. | ||
| That's the only way he'd be willing to do it. | ||
| But if they offer... | ||
| Also, tension is quite a bit smaller. | ||
| I think he weighs 130 and Floyd walks around. | ||
| I mean, he's fought at 154, 150-ish. | ||
| And McGregor was at 55. This kid is fucking nasty, man. | ||
| But he does a lot of wild shit. | ||
| Like, there's a video here where you see him fight this Muay Thai guy, and he hits him with this crazy... | ||
| That's when he was a little kid. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| Like, see how he does shit like that? | ||
| Like, sneaky shit. | ||
| Under the armpit. | ||
| Like, look at this. | ||
| Sip, sip. | ||
| And then... | ||
| He was young there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Watch this. | |
| Look at this. | ||
| Crank. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| This is the one with the world Muay Thai champion. | ||
| Boom! | ||
| Puts that dude asleep. | ||
| But the way he set it up, that's a weird angle for that kick. | ||
| It's very tight. | ||
| Yeah, very tight. | ||
| Real close. | ||
| And it wasn't a round, it was straight. | ||
| So it was basically like a jump-spinning back kick to the chin. | ||
| Which is hard to generate force from that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, no. | |
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| It's tremendous power. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, no, as long as he can get extension on his legs. | ||
| It's just he had to jump and tuck and spin. | ||
| But the fact that he chose that angle, it's like he realized that the guy was going to see things that were coming around. | ||
| So instead of coming around, he had it come up and through the middle, which made it much sneakier. | ||
| But what we're describing now is another intangible, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Creativity. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I mean, and what... | ||
| 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. | ||
| No, it's just movement. | ||
| He would have reinvented the game. | ||
| And he... | ||
| Karim is wrong. | ||
| I think with Diaz, he did try it, didn't he? | ||
| And it missed, I think. | ||
| I believe he did. | ||
| He threw it. | ||
| I think he threw it. | ||
| The thing, you know, that technique is a legit technique, obviously. | ||
| Wheel kicks most certainly work. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But... | ||
| It's not a high percentage technique. | ||
| There's only been a few wheel kick knockouts in the UFC. The first one was Edson Barboza over Terry Edom. | ||
| That was number one. | ||
| There's been a few since then. | ||
| Vitor Belfort shocked Luke Rockhold with a wheel kick. | ||
| It's happened before. | ||
| But it's just not a high percentage kick and it's usually a kick that's You know, it comes out of nowhere. | ||
| You don't expect it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But can you tell when someone has it and doesn't? | ||
| Because it's an intangible. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Is that hard to see? | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know, it's a crazy, crazy sport. | ||
| 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 it was 600 pounds. | ||
| Big deadlift, yeah. | ||
| So when you look at that strength deficit, John Jones, very lean, was using neuromuscularly. | ||
| He was recruiting voluntarily all of those muscle fibres. | ||
| It was unbelievable. | ||
| But if he moves up to hebrew, would any more muscle mass be functional? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| When should he do that? | ||
| That's another good question because you're beating your body up to do that. | ||
| And is that conducive with high aerobic capacity training, like multiple rounds of sparring and bag work and pad work? | ||
| And all the lower back muscles that are getting stressed, and does that lead to potential injuries? | ||
| Is he potentially damaging his discs, his knees? | ||
| Like, there's a lot of things to be considered, and when should you do that? | ||
| A lot of people think you should do that when you're nowhere near a camp. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Like, you win a fight, and then you decide to build up in between camps. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that's so awful. | ||
| Even Darren Till, you know, who's a huge, huge, you know. | ||
| Exactly, but he's moving to middleweight now. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He missed weight in his title shot against Tyron Woodley. | ||
| And then he got rocked and put away. | ||
| So if you're moving up, how do you do it? | ||
| Do you do it intelligently? | ||
| But then there are guys who are just... | ||
| They say training is the realization of one's genetic potential. | ||
| And when you get someone like Rumble Johnson, it's just... | ||
| No, he made weight. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| He made weight against Tyron Woodley. | ||
| Didn't he? | ||
| Yes, he made weight against Woodley. | ||
| He didn't make weight against Donald Cerrone. | ||
| That's what it was. | ||
| He came in very heavy against Donald Cerrone. | ||
| He's a big motherfucker, is what he is. | ||
| You know, he's so big for welterweight. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We've seen that time and time again. | ||
| Exactly, but when you... | ||
| Did Rumble Johnson, he fought at welterweight, right? | ||
| Yes, he's so big. | ||
| And then, you know, was it Noguera? | ||
| Noguera, yeah. | ||
| He could fight heavyweight. | ||
| He did fight heavyweight successfully in the PFL. He broke Andrei Orlovsky's jaw. | ||
| He fucked Andrei Orlovsky up as a heavyweight. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's what always fascinates me, is that... | ||
| God-given kind of... | ||
| Power. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For all of the training, it seems, you know, with someone like Johnson... | ||
| Because he said, am I right in thinking, he said he's going to come back for heavyweight if DC and Jones go up. | ||
| He's thought about it. | ||
| You know, I think he's in the weed game right now. | ||
| He's making some money selling weed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Which is legal now in a lot of places. | ||
| So he's doing that. | ||
| What? | ||
| Jesus Christ! | ||
| Look at the size of him now! | ||
| But he fought Hardy, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He fought Hardy and he took him down, which was interesting. | ||
| He didn't want to stand with Dan. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Back in the day, it was a different thing. | ||
| I mean, they kind of made an agreement to stand with each other, and then he was like, psh, bitch, and he took him down, and he won by decision. | ||
| But that was a different Rumble Johnson. | ||
| I think the Rumble Johnson at 170, he had no fucking energy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| He was on death's door. | ||
| He was just always exhausted. | ||
| He would lose fights. | ||
| He got choked out by Josh Koscheck. | ||
| He was just too tired. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think weight cutting as well, obviously, you know, there's been certain changes now. | ||
| But even now, and I love Max Holloway, but I think it was UFC Embedded where they flew his favorite cupcakes over from Hawaii. | ||
| And he was like, yeah, I love cupcakes, I've made weight. | ||
| And then he was just, you know, nailing cupcakes. | ||
| Not smart. | ||
| 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's like, yeah, there are better. | ||
| There's way better ways. | ||
| You've cut weight. | ||
| Your body is basically in fight or flight. | ||
| You know, you've subjected it to a form of microtrauma. | ||
| You know, body's kind of sitting there going, whoa, what is going on? | ||
| And then you're going to get, here you go, here's loads of cupcakes. | ||
| You made weight. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Terrible. | ||
| So I find that really interesting that you see some of the guys who, you know, was it Gleason Tabao, wasn't it? | ||
| Who just, like, it was... | ||
| So big. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But even if you know how to do it intelligently, there's still a demand that it places on your organs. | ||
| There's consequences. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| And over time, your body resists it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they pulled him out of that, and then he started suffering some significant problems when he was getting ready for Brian Ortega. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| 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. | ||
| We just got through this, man. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And he was really messed up because of it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And he had to go through a battery of tests before they approved him to fight again. | ||
| So his body had to fully, fully recover months off and then get back to training and now he's okay again. | ||
| But I think it's changing. | ||
| Frankie Edgar was almost the first. | ||
| He wouldn't even cut weight. | ||
| He wouldn't cut any weight. | ||
| Yeah, that was his weight. | ||
| Well, this is what they say. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's what everybody says. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Especially people that know weight cutting, and they look at what he walks around at, and they're like, look, 20 pounds from 55 ain't shit. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Those guys do it all the time. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Can you believe? | ||
| Here we go, look. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Here's the ball. | ||
| Oh my god, look at him go! | ||
| Good boy! | ||
| That is insane! | ||
| Look at this, this is rugby 7. Look how fast he is! | ||
| Oh my god, they're all quitting. | ||
| They're like, fuck this. | ||
| Look at him! | ||
| Look at the guy chasing gave up! | ||
| He passed that guy. | ||
| There's more, this is, I love Connals. | ||
| And he ran past him. | ||
| Like the guy was ahead of him. | ||
| But there's no, I'm not even going to sidestep you because I don't, it's like he doesn't even respect their speed. | ||
| Look how much faster he is than those guys. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Well, that's in many ways, right? | ||
| Isn't it like that other guy who broke the world record by rowing? | ||
| He had been doing something else and gotten so much power and energy in his body that he could translate that to rowing. | ||
| We're seeing that now. | ||
| And that was what was amazing there. | ||
| With Carl and I, like I said, he scored a try. | ||
| And then the commentator, there was two commentators talking. | ||
| They said, I cannot believe he's only been playing, you know, a number of months. | ||
| And they were like, yeah, no, that's amazing. | ||
| And then the other commentator said, no, no, no, I can believe it. | ||
| He's just tried to give the referee the ball. | ||
| And he didn't know what to do. | ||
| He'd scored a try. | ||
| And he was walking around and he gave it to him. | ||
| And the referee went, no, no, no, you now kick it. | ||
| You know, and it was amazing. | ||
| They didn't even bother teaching him. | ||
| They're like, just listen, man, just run. | ||
| But what do I do when I get to the end? | ||
| Just get to the end, and then we'll talk. | ||
| I'll tell you what to do. | ||
| It'll take about three minutes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They do. | |
| They do. | ||
| Just fucking run, baby! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Woo! | |
| You're seeing it. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Everybody would be dead. | ||
| What would happen? | ||
| 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. | ||
| LeBron James, what does he make, like $100 million a year? | ||
| Something crazy? | ||
| Just from basketball, it's like $35 million or so. | ||
| $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. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I believe that's true. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Look that up. | ||
| I think it was $2.2 million for Floyd Mayweather versus Conor McGregor, and then $2.4 million for Floyd Mayweather versus Conor McGregor. | ||
| Khabib Nurmagomedov. | ||
| I think it was number two of all time. | ||
| Just behind the Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao fight. | ||
| Which is just incredible. | ||
| So they must have made a shit ton of money from that. | ||
| But how many times can Conor do that? | ||
| I mean, look, the Irish support him. | ||
| But people thought he had a chance of winning that fight. | ||
| And then once he gets smashed like that... | ||
| I don't think they're going to think he has a chance of winning again unless he does something significant. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He has to beat somebody. | ||
| He has to fight like Kevin Lee and fuck him up. | ||
| If he fought Kevin Lee or Tony Ferguson and fucked him up and then said, look, I had two years off. | ||
| I wasn't ready for Khabib, but I'm ready now. | ||
| Fuck the Mayweathers. | ||
| And he says something like that. | ||
| He's got to have some success, though. | ||
| Floyd Conner was 6.7 million. | ||
| Floyd Manny was 4.4 million. | ||
| And then it would have been right around the next one, which would have been Oscar and Floyd, which is 2.4. | ||
| So yeah, it's like 2.5, 2.4. | ||
| So it would have been right around number two. | ||
| So it was number three then? | ||
| Number three overall, number one MMA. Number one MMA, but number three overall. | ||
| It could be tied. | ||
| So what were the boxing numbers again? | ||
| What was it? | ||
| 6.7 for the Floyd Conner, 4.4 for Floyd Manny. | ||
| That is so crazy. | ||
| 6.7 for Floyd Conner. | ||
| Wow, I had my numbers off big time. | ||
| 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 he was offered so much money for the rematch. | ||
| But I believe he turned it down. | ||
| Khabib? | ||
| No. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There was talk of a rematch, but the UFC did not offer him a financial sum. | ||
| That was rumors. | ||
| They hadn't even talked. | ||
| They were trying to figure out what to do next. | ||
| And in fact, the UFC said that most likely next was Tony Ferguson. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| So that's the current, the last time they talked about someone fighting for the title again. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So which one's more powerful? | ||
| I don't think he's completely extrinsically motivated. | ||
| I think that's a lot of it as an act. | ||
| Do you think? | ||
| Yeah, he's too good. | ||
| He's too good. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right, because I want to believe that, and I hope that's true, because you're almost taught, like, intrinsic motivation. | ||
| Do it for the love, you know, and sort of, you know, the sweet science. | ||
| I want to believe that Mayweather's there and he's studying, you know, but maybe he doesn't want you to see that side. | ||
| Oh, no, he's too good. | ||
| He's too good. | ||
| He's got to have a love of boxing. | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| He's too good. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| That was a different thing, because he forced Canelo to cut a lot of weight to get down to his weight class. | ||
| But Floyd, really, realistically, is a 147-pound fighter. | ||
| I mean, he's only fighting in these higher weight classes because the money's there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He's a fucking wizard, man. | ||
| He's a wizard. | ||
| But that's what I mean about that. | ||
| That all starts. | ||
| You know, he's playing with everybody's head. | ||
| You talk about, like, psychological warfare, you know, the art of war and everything like that. | ||
| And he's doing it on a mass scale like we've probably never experienced before. | ||
| Well, what was fascinating was Connor was doing it to him. | ||
| He was screaming in his face with a hard-on, by the way, at the weigh-ins. | ||
| I don't know how he generated a hard-on. | ||
| But, you know, he must have played with his dick before he got out there or took some Viagra or something. | ||
| I really think that might have been part of the psychological motivation. | ||
| Just screaming in his face, I'm gonna fucking kill you, you little puke, you piece of shit. | ||
| And Floyd was just like this, just dead face, staring at him, didn't scream back, dead face, stayed calm, was like, tomorrow I'm gonna fuck you up. | ||
| And there ain't a goddamn thing in the world that's going to change there. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Well, Conor was like the first guy that Floyd ever fought that could fuck him up in a real fight, though. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| 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. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| So because of that, Floyd knew he could win. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| But he also knew, without a doubt, that if they were just going to fight fight... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| If there was no gloves, if they just put the gloves aside and just had a street fight, Conor would fucking kill him. | ||
| I mean, there's not a question on my mind. | ||
| There's not a doubt to be had. | ||
| Conor would kick him from a distance. | ||
| He would probe him with front kicks, kick his legs. | ||
| Floyd would start to limp, Conor would step in, tie him up, elbow him, take him down, smash his face into a bloody pulp, do whatever he wanted to him. | ||
| Strangle him, rip his knees apart with leg locks, do whatever he wanted to him. | ||
| If they were gonna just fight fight. | ||
| You know, and he said that to him. | ||
| He's like, if this was a fight, I'd fucking kill you. | ||
| He just looked right at him and he's saying that to him. | ||
| Floyd had to just eat it. | ||
| But it didn't matter because it wasn't a fight. | ||
| It was a boxing match and he didn't have a chance. | ||
| But do you think that worked with Aldo, for instance? | ||
| Because, and again, this is me kind of just talking more on the mental warfare side and not really understanding the technical aspect. | ||
| But that world tour was fascinating to watch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| 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... | ||
| Emotions, mindfuck you. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| They're doing it for sure. | ||
| They're not stupid. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He laid down and I couldn't stop laughing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was like, this motherfucker is so crazy. | |
| He just, like, right there. | ||
| Dropped down and started relaxing. | ||
| Go to the back. | ||
| Go back. | ||
| That one's better. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That one you see him. | ||
| Lay down. | ||
| Leaned on his head. | ||
| Like, I'm just going to take a nap here. | ||
| Like, what are you doing, bitch? | ||
| He was doing what Anderson Silva did to Forrest Griffin and has done all his career. | ||
| But he's doing this to a guy who's the 187, 85 pound, rather, best ever. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And he's not even a 185 pounder. | ||
| He's really a 155-pounder. | ||
| I mean, Nick Diaz, when he was a champion in Strikeforce or Elite XC, Elite XC, right? | ||
| He was a 155-pound champion. | ||
| But what's amazing here is everything that we talk about, in terms of intangibles, mind-body connection... | ||
| Nick is imposing his mind-body connection on Anderson in that I'm gonna mess with yours. | ||
| He's fucking with his head, for sure. | ||
| Was he the champion? | ||
| Why am I not remembering it? | ||
| Was it Elite XC or Strikeforce that Nick Diaz was the champion of? | ||
| It might have been Strikeforce. | ||
| Why can't I remember? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But why did I think Elite XC? No. | ||
| I don't even think he fought Elite XC, did he? | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Now I remember. | ||
| Because... | ||
| That was because Mayhem Miller and Jake Shields had a brawl in Elite XC. And Nick Diaz was a part of the brawl. | ||
| They all piled on each other and that was chaos. | ||
| But that was him, Paul Daly as well. | ||
| The knockout, but also just kind of fell. | ||
| So it's... | ||
| It's so strange that this intangible, this thing that I'm now fascinated with, like, mentally... | ||
| Yeah, KJ Nunes, Elite XC. So he did fight him in Elite XC. That's right. | ||
| So he fought in Elite XC and then became Strikeforce champion. | ||
| That's why I'm confused. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Whatever Mayweather did differently to Aldo might have been, granted, different sports, granted. | ||
| But there was something that McGregor was like, it's not working. | ||
| The way that when he pinched... | ||
| You know, Aldo's neck and Aldo turned around. | ||
| And, you know, again, without understanding the technical element, for me, it was so fascinating watching the two. | ||
| And like you said, Mayweather stood there completely stoic. | ||
| Yeah, Aldo was not comfortable with it. | ||
| And he lost his composure. | ||
| And he attacked Connor in a way that exposed him. | ||
| He got exposed to a counter shot. | ||
| He wasn't patient. | ||
| He was very emotional. | ||
| And he just wanted to fuck that dude up. | ||
| And he just got clipped. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And look, Connor played him perfectly. | ||
| Played him like a fiddle. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Hey man, I gotta wrap this up. | ||
| It's already 5 o'clock. | ||
| We just went for three hours, believe it or not. | ||
| It's a time warp in here. | ||
| I'm so sorry! | ||
| No, don't be sorry. | ||
| It was awesome. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| And what you did is... | ||
| Beyond impressive, man. | ||
| I mean, it's fascinating stuff. | ||
| And I feel like we could do a hundred of these kind of conversations, though. | ||
| I'm so sorry. | ||
| How often are you in Los Angeles? | ||
| No, this is my first time. | ||
| Oh, well, come back. | ||
| Come back and visit again, man. | ||
| I'd love to. | ||
| Next time you're going to swim to the moon, let me know. | ||
| No, this is it. | ||
| Honestly, next time, we'll get Bert in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Again, for the record, he's an amazing physical specimen of a guy. | |
| For a fat guy, right? | ||
| No! | ||
|
unidentified
|
No? | |
| No, seriously, we'll go swimming. | ||
| Okay, we'll do something. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Let's definitely do another podcast, though. | ||
| This has been amazing. | ||
| Either way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you so much. | |
| Really, really appreciate it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| All right. | ||
| Oh, tell people your social media how to get to you. | ||
| Oh, bless you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| Instagram, just Ross Edgley. | ||
| Spell, please. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| It gets difficult. | ||
| R-O-S-S-E-D-G-L-E-Y. Same on Twitter and same on Facebook. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Beautiful. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right, folks. | ||
| That's it for today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bye. |
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