May 27, 2021 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:58:33
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
|
The Joe Rogan Experience. | |
| Train by day. | ||
| Joe Rogan Podcast by night. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All day. | |
| And we're up with the baddest motherfucker in the 145-pound division on the planet Earth, Alexander the Great Volkanovski! | ||
| And by default, the number one grappler on the planet because he poisoned his teammate. | ||
| Yeah, but you're breaking secrets there. | ||
| Oh, it's a lie. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| Craig Jones, you bad motherfucker. | ||
| What were you about to say? | ||
| I'm just glad to be present right now because last time we had our podcast, I don't even remember it. | ||
| How do you not remember it? | ||
| Well, Vegas got me. | ||
| I remember coming in. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, man. | ||
| And I was in a weird bubble. | ||
| Maybe nerves and that included in it. | ||
| I don't know what it was, but I literally don't even remember it because I had big nights over there. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Big, big nights. | ||
| And then I barely remember it. | ||
| So I'm like, man, what did I say? | ||
| I literally thought like... | ||
| The boys are in the green room and they're like, oh no, you talked about this. | ||
| I go, I talked about that? | ||
| Like, I honestly couldn't remember nothing. | ||
| Welcome to my life. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I leave here and people are mad at me. | ||
| And I'm like, what the fuck did I say? | ||
| And they're like, you said that thing about the guy. | ||
| And I'm like, did I? I don't remember. | ||
| I don't know what the fuck I said. | ||
| Yeah, if you're in a good conversation, it just goes down the hole. | ||
| Speaking of good conversations, you were on the Great and Powerful Alex Jones Show yesterday. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What the fuck was that like? | ||
| A great experience. | ||
| Alex is just as funny in real life as he is on the show. | ||
| He's hilarious. | ||
| I could listen to that guy talk all day. | ||
| Yeah, he easily could be a stand-up comedian. | ||
| Easily. | ||
| I think I'm actually trying to convince him. | ||
| I believe he's going to come to the grappling show this Friday night, and I'm going to persuade him to jump in the corner, so I'm going to have Alex Jones and John Danahoe. | ||
| Joe, what do you reckon? | ||
| Are you going to jump in there too, maybe? | ||
| No, I just might have to separate John from Alex. | ||
| I don't know if those personalities will work so well. | ||
| I imagine that as a podcast. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't. | |
| There's certain things you don't want to mix. | ||
| I don't think I'd mix those two together. | ||
| I think, you know, you want to listen to John talk. | ||
| I'll get John to whisper things to Alex, and Alex can give me that energy he brings to the show. | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| Like, have John whisper certain instructions. | ||
| It would be like one step. | ||
| He'd fuck it up, though. | ||
| Like, he wouldn't really know. | ||
| Step on his leg! | ||
| No, over. | ||
| Over the leg. | ||
| You know? | ||
| So he's going to be there. | ||
| Yeah, he's coming. | ||
| I think he got very excited when I said Eddie Bravo would be there. | ||
| John's going to be there as well, doesn't he? | ||
| Yep, John flies in. | ||
| I think he might have landed already. | ||
| Yeah, John's here tomorrow. | ||
| He's on the podcast tomorrow. | ||
| You're his number one guy right now, so you know what I mean? | ||
| We'll give it a bit of time before I claim it. | ||
| Well, we're hoping we can fix Gordon whatever his stomach issue is. | ||
| So, are you done filming The Ultimate Fighter? | ||
| Finished. | ||
| Finished filming, yeah. | ||
| How many weeks, all told, did you do? | ||
| We did a little four and a half weeks, I think it was. | ||
| Four and a half weeks, but yeah, all done now. | ||
| And this is the return of the Ultimate Fighter for the last, how many years it's been off the air? | ||
| Three? | ||
| Yeah, two or three. | ||
| Two or three years? | ||
| Yeah, but that's what it's called, the return of the Ultimate Fighter. | ||
| How was it? | ||
| How was it for you? | ||
| It was good. | ||
| You know, obviously we can't give too much away, but it was good. | ||
| It was a great experience for all of us, and it's pretty interesting as well. | ||
| How is the talent level of the upcoming guys, the guys that are on the show? | ||
| Yeah, they're good. | ||
| They're great. | ||
| Cool dudes. | ||
| They're all actually pretty good dudes from both shows. | ||
| Obviously, a little bit gets heated here and there, but some good fights as well. | ||
| If you look back at The Ultimate Fighter and you see over the years, it's amazing the level of talent just keeps getting better and better and better. | ||
| You know, in the beginning days, the guys were, you know, you had guys from, like, smaller circuits and, you know, guys who are maybe some were veterans, maybe some were beginners. | ||
| But now, like, if you watch Dana White's Tuesday Night Contender Series, it's like so many of those guys are really talented. | ||
| It's pretty amazing. | ||
| Like, you see guys that have UFC debuts and you watch them and you go, wow, these guys are good. | ||
| Like, really smooth, good flow, you know, great transitions, great overall, you know, octagon IQ. I'm noticing that as well. | ||
| As you said, Dana White Contender Series. | ||
| You did watch it back in the day. | ||
| Obviously, it was a little bit different, I guess, but obviously the knowledge is more out there now and everyone's sharing that knowledge in big gyms and all that type of stuff. | ||
| I feel like I've noticed that a lot, the level in this. | ||
| Even though they're all entertaining, they know exactly what they're doing in there as well. | ||
| It only makes sense that you bring in a fellow Aussie to be a grappling coach. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, when Alex gave me the call to come in... | ||
| Talk up to this thing. | ||
| Bring that sucker up to your face. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| When Alex gave me the call to jump in, yeah, I was very excited. | ||
| Obviously, big MMA fan. | ||
| Too scared to do MMA myself. | ||
| But I really had a lot of fun jumping in with the guys, and the level of grappling was awesome. | ||
| Did you... | ||
| We've got a kickboxing session in as well. | ||
| I saw that. | ||
| He fucked me up on the wall and grappled for ten minutes each, but then I've got five minutes to bash him up a bit. | ||
| Push it out so that it's like, you don't have to do that, but just get it right in front of your face. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right there? | |
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| Like there. | ||
| But you can move so you don't... | ||
| I don't want you doing this. | ||
| Cramped up. | ||
| It's a little uncomfortable. | ||
| Had you done a lot of striking training before? | ||
| I mean 10 years ago when I was sort of getting into Jiu Jitsu I would just put on the MMA gloves and me and my buddies would just beat the shit out of each other. | ||
| We'd go home with headaches and stuff but really I would say no formal training. | ||
| I wouldn't have put gloves on for 10 years but really I created an OnlyFans account for a bit of a laugh and I wanted to put Alex on but I figured it would only be fair so we do 10 minutes of grappling Ten minutes of wool work, because I guess wool work is sort of like the intermediary, but then five minutes of kickboxing. | ||
| I was only meant to do kickboxing, but he beat the shit out of me so bad, I had to shoot a takedown. | ||
| I'm like, that's not the rules. | ||
| What's going on here? | ||
| He stood it up. | ||
| He got the cameraman to give a fucking referee stand-up. | ||
| I was like, this is unfair. | ||
| Let me survive a little longer. | ||
| I think it was very fair, because it was just kickboxing. | ||
| You've never had any itch at all to do MMA? A little bit, but I used to go to university and study psychology, and I remember all it took was one section on traumatic brain injury, and I was like, what do they get paid? | ||
| That's probably not enough. | ||
| That's not enough for me. | ||
| I've got footage of him hitting pads with Joe Lopez, so I might put that up. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, give the people a laugh. | |
| It wasn't bad, actually. | ||
| It wasn't bad. | ||
| He had some technique in there. | ||
| I mean, people will be entertained by it. | ||
| They'll get a good laugh out of it for sure. | ||
| It wasn't that bad. | ||
| Well, when you see him, world champion, obviously fine. | ||
| Does it give you pause? | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| I mean, so obviously we were talking before the show about the Gabby Garcia thing, and I always say I would definitely take an MMA fight with Gabby Garcia because obviously we both can't fight either. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It'd be a fair fight there. | ||
| So if that happened in Japan, I would probably jump in and keep doing it if the money was right. | ||
| Probably come back and train with Alex for it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Dude, she's beat the shit out of some- I don't want to be a part of that one. | |
| She has beat the shit out of some ladies. | ||
| Have you seen some of those fights? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, they're entertaining. | ||
| I remember she- What are they doing over there? | ||
| In Japan, they go, what do you do? | ||
| You work in a laundromat? | ||
| Come here. | ||
| Want to fight Gabby Garcia? | ||
| Like, they take some lady that looks like she's 100 pounds lighter than her. | ||
| And she was 55. She was 55 years old. | ||
| That's so crazy. | ||
| I would take that contract. | ||
| If they're like, hey, you want to beat up some old women? | ||
| I mean, if the price was right, I'd jump in for that, for sure. | ||
| You wouldn't do it just for the hate that you would get online. | ||
| That's true. | ||
|
unidentified
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Come on, man. | |
| You didn't want to post an Alex Jones clip and you're worried about beating up old ladies? | ||
| I'm worried about getting banned, though. | ||
| I can't lose the Instagram account. | ||
| Explain to me that you guys were saying that you're shadow banned. | ||
| I couldn't tell you exactly why I'm shadow banned, but I am. | ||
| I've noticed that there's a few UFC fighters as well that are shadow banned. | ||
| I don't know if it's... | ||
| Because of the sport or what, I don't think it's anything that I've put up. | ||
| The content, you can understand with Craig Jones. | ||
| You can understand with Craig Jones. | ||
| But I've got a children's book, so I'm a family man. | ||
| Obviously, I like to have a bit of fun, but I ain't putting anything out there that I should be shadow banned for, but I am. | ||
| Now, when you say you're shadow banned, what makes you say that? | ||
| Because say if you were to look me up, that's what Shadowband is like. | ||
| If you try and look us up, you literally need to have to write our full name to get us popping up. | ||
| I'll get all my fan pages coming up before me. | ||
| Let me see. | ||
| I'm going to do that right now. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So let's go right now. | ||
| We'll go to Instagram. | ||
| Is that the case if they're following you as well? | ||
| If they're following you already, I believe it should pop up. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But I definitely know. | ||
| Right away you pop up. | ||
| Comes up straight away. | ||
| I definitely know why I got shot up. | ||
| You pop up first. | ||
| I typed in Alex and you popped up first. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Maybe the band's off for you. | ||
| Maybe the band's off. | ||
| Now I'm doing a podcast with Craig Jones. | ||
| He's going to ban me again, I reckon. | ||
| I think if somebody doesn't know who you are, like if, you know, you think about how many Alex's there are out there in the world. | ||
| If someone's just searching for you, it's probably just a flaw in their algorithm. | ||
| A lot of people think, the reason why I'm asking this is there are definitely people that are shadow banned. | ||
| But there's a lot more people that think they're shadow banned. | ||
| And usually when people think they're shadow banned, I'm like, bro, you gotta stop paying attention to your numbers. | ||
| You're getting wacky. | ||
| Because you're just like... | ||
| Why am I not getting more interactions? | ||
| Why are more people not paying attention to my posts? | ||
| I don't think they would shadowban you. | ||
| If they're not shadowban Derek Lewis, Derek Lewis has legitimate homicides on his Instagram. | ||
| He's got people getting hit by trucks, falling off of trees. | ||
| If you want to watch fucked up shit, you go to Derek and it's always, he's okay. | ||
| That's the best Instagram page, for sure. | ||
| He's the best! | ||
| Derek Lewis is the best. | ||
| He's the best. | ||
| He knows how to use Instagram better than anybody. | ||
| He's a funny dude, too. | ||
| It's funny, because you say that, but I know, because I remember we looked into it, and someone said that, oh, you must be, because they explained it to me. | ||
| I didn't even know what shadow banning was. | ||
| And then I ended up going, what? | ||
| I told them to type in a couple of other names from UFC, and there was a lot of them that were. | ||
| They wouldn't come up. | ||
| And all our fan pages and all that would come up first before us, but hopefully it's changed. | ||
| And hopefully you don't fuck that up. | ||
| Jamie, you're skeptical about that stuff, right? | ||
| Aren't you? | ||
| You know more about it than I do. | ||
| Maybe, but there could be reasons. | ||
| I think Joe's saying the right thing, though. | ||
| You're probably not posting anything negative that would require any sort of shadow banning. | ||
| I mean, I checked myself. | ||
| It's really based off of what you do on the site. | ||
| So I typed in Alex, it's not coming up, but if I hit V, it shows itself. | ||
| But there's someone with an Alex V, that's their account name. | ||
| You would think that would show up before yours because that's his actual account. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, it's complicated. | ||
| Can you check me? | ||
| I'm pretty confident. | ||
| Yours was a little harder to find because... | ||
| I got shadow banned for something I did in Texas. | ||
| I messed up. | ||
| What'd you do? | ||
| So we're in a porn store, like a used goods store, right? | ||
| It's like a famous... | ||
| A used good porn store? | ||
| I can't even say the right word. | ||
| P-A-W-M. Oh, porn stars. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Porn stars. | |
| I was like, what the f... | ||
| A used goods porn store? | ||
| I'm like, that sounds disgusting. | ||
| That would be literally the most disgusting store on earth. | ||
| A used goods porn store. | ||
| Okay, so you're at a pawn shop. | ||
| Yeah, so a pawn shop. | ||
| Yeah, my accent kills it. | ||
| But we went in. | ||
| It's a famous place that sells a lot of messed up stuff, right? | ||
| Like they even had a mummified dead body in there for $15,000. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| So I'm in there and the guy was like, you can film whatever you want. | ||
| So I'm filming in the store. | ||
| I'm walking around and we get to the World War II section. | ||
| And they have a lot of, obviously, Nazi stuff in there. | ||
| So I'm seeing all these Nazi helmets and symbols for sale, and I just start filming. | ||
| That is why I'm like, look at everything. | ||
| This place is selling. | ||
| And that just freaked out. | ||
| People reported me, because you can't... | ||
| Even in the context, if you went to a museum, you cannot show the Nazi symbol. | ||
| Which I was like, I just showed a dead body, but I'm now in trouble with Instagram for showing Nazi symbols. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's interesting. | ||
| What if you had a photo of Himmler and Hitler or something like that? | ||
| You can't do that? | ||
| Context doesn't matter. | ||
| That seems crazy, doesn't it? | ||
| I mean, it's a historical photograph. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it was a learning experience for me. | ||
| I had a connection, a guy that worked at Facebook. | ||
| I had to get him to go in and do a request to give me back some privileges and stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Just from filming something that's for sale in a store. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That seems kind of crazy. | ||
| It seems like when you do stuff like that, you give that symbol even more power. | ||
| Right? | ||
| If you make it, like, forbidden, where you can't even post it? | ||
| Yeah, for sure, I would agree with that. | ||
| Yeah, then crazy Nazis, it's like, almost like you're giving them more juice. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's just World War II stuff. | ||
| It's not like modern day Nazis, you know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah, no, I do know what you mean. | ||
| That doesn't make any sense to me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's... | |
| What's up, you looking up? | ||
| I'm looking at their web, their Instagram account. | ||
| They have a ring with... | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| They sell some crazy shit in there. | ||
| They had like an old cowboy that was selling his trigger finger in there. | ||
| Literally, the finger off his gun from back in the Wild West days. | ||
|
unidentified
|
His finger. | |
| His finger is mummified sort of finger. | ||
| Which way does the Nazi one go? | ||
| Does it go the other way? | ||
| Because there's a left one and a right one, right? | ||
| Yeah, this has mentioned the Buddhism and Hinduism use of it, but I personally don't. | ||
| Although it says on the top right here, it's distinguished left-facing and right-facing. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| The term swastika is often used to distinguish the left-facing from the right-facing swastika symbols, a meaning which developed in 19th century scholarship. | ||
| Both the right-facing and the left-facing variants are employed in Hinduism and Buddhism. | ||
| However, the left-facing is more commonly used in Buddhism than Hinduism and the right-facing is more commonly used in Hinduism than Buddhism. | ||
| Okay, that doesn't help. | ||
| So you reckon the algorithm can tell which direction the symbol does? | ||
| How the fuck could it possibly? | ||
| I think somebody must have reported you. | ||
| That's the only thing that makes sense to me. | ||
| Yeah, it happened real quick. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wasn't that? | |
| It was an Okinawan symbol too. | ||
| Back in the day, I remember when I was a kid, there was a Shotokan school that had like a swastika as one of their patches. | ||
| I'm trying to remember this correctly. | ||
| Because I remember saying, what the fuck is that? | ||
| And they were like, no, it's the wrong way. | ||
| But it was basically a swastika. | ||
| And it was some emblem for this Okinawan karate school. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Let me see what that looks like. | ||
| Same thing? | ||
| Yeah, there it is. | ||
| And there's actually a Hindu temple near my house, my old house in California, that had all these swastikas with the dots like that all around the outside of it, and they had explained. | ||
| There were signs all over the place. | ||
| This does not have anything to do with Nazi Germany. | ||
| This building was made in the 1920s, and this is the whole reason why it's here, and la-la-la. | ||
| You guys are definitely giving me a shout-out Bandai. | ||
| Oh my god, there's fucking swastikas all over the map. | ||
| Oh my god! | ||
| That's crazy! | ||
| So if it's inverted, if it's facing the other direction, that becomes a Nazi symbol? | ||
| It's just nuts that a weird design that's been around for thousands of years has become connected so horribly to this one point in history with the Nazis that all these people that had it forever can't use it anymore. | ||
| Manji symbol. | ||
| Japan has decided to update the manji symbol as well as a number of others to be more tourist friendly with the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow! | |
| Buddhist temples will be represented by a tiered pagoda. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| So they changed it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They gave into it? | ||
| Yeah, I guess it's just it's problematic as they say. | ||
| So you filmed this for five weeks? | ||
| You were filming it for five weeks? | ||
| Just under five weeks. | ||
| And how many episodes will air? | ||
| I think there will be 13 or 12. 12 or 13 episodes, I think. | ||
| And they'll all be on ESPN? Yeah. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| ESPN. This is the first time they've aired on ESPN. So the return of the Ultimate Fighter will be on ESPN. I don't think they've ever had the Ultimate Fighter. | ||
| How was it working with Brian Ortega? | ||
| To be honest, mate, he doesn't say much. | ||
| He doesn't say much. | ||
| Look, I don't know. | ||
| I'm a bit over him, to be honest. | ||
| A bit over him? | ||
| Yeah, just a couple of things, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, I just think he's fake. | ||
| I think he's fake and I don't believe his shit, so that's just sort of how it is with me. | ||
| That's what I think. | ||
| When you say fake, in what way is he fake? | ||
| Oh man, just, yeah. | ||
| I just think he plays a nice guy and some of the shit he says, I just think it's all bullshit. | ||
| But yeah, I guess you can watch the show and sort of see with little things. | ||
| But even with a couple of things, I don't think he's that bad of a guy. | ||
| Maybe I'm just looking for things to hate on him for. | ||
| I'm sure you are. | ||
| Yeah, probably. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So I'm just sitting there being like, nah, fuck, Brian will take it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I'm going to find something to hate him for. | ||
| But, you know, maybe that's what it was. | ||
| But I mean, like still, yeah. | ||
| Little things I was just like, yeah. | ||
| But I mean, like I said, it's not hard to get under his skin. | ||
| Even me just saying that, I guarantee he's boiling up. | ||
| So maybe that's going to be strategy for my next fight because I know how easily he's triggered. | ||
| So I'm just going to be like, hey, Brian, fuck you. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| When are you guys scheduled to fight? | ||
| At the end of the series? | ||
| Well, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So when it is, yeah. | ||
| So from what I'm told, I don't know if I'm going to get in trouble saying this. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| But I think it's like September, early September. | ||
| So you'll be fighting him sometime in September. | ||
| And that will be in the United States? | ||
| Yeah, I'm guessing. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| It's a great fight. | ||
| If you look at the fight on paper, especially after his fight with the Korean Zombie, it's a fun fight to watch. | ||
| Yeah, he definitely looked good in that fight. | ||
| He surprised me in that fight too. | ||
| He definitely changed his game a little bit and fought a different fight that I wasn't expecting. | ||
| But again, I'm confident in my abilities. | ||
| I just believe I'll be too much. | ||
| The beautiful thing about it, I can say what I want, but I get to prove it soon. | ||
| I wish I got to prove it March when I was scheduled to fight, but obviously that didn't happen. | ||
| I'll prove that very soon anyway. | ||
| It's a special division, man. | ||
| That 145 is a really special division because there's so much talent, man. | ||
| It's hard to say. | ||
| I think it's between 55 and 45, the most amount of real top-level talent. | ||
| But 45 is just so filled. | ||
| So filled with guys. | ||
| There is, man. | ||
| There's a lot of guys that are coming. | ||
| Even some of the guys that are higher in the rankings, just starting to come up. | ||
| There's a lot of dangerous guys. | ||
| And that's the beautiful thing about it. | ||
| That motivates me. | ||
| I'm looking forward to it. | ||
| These are the guys I want. | ||
| I want these guys that are people. | ||
| I love being the underdog as well. | ||
| Even though I'm champ, you're still going to have the doubters and all that, and I love that. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I want to be the underdog, and I want them doubters, and I love proving people wrong. | ||
| You like being the underdog? | ||
| Yeah, I do. | ||
| I do, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I really do. | |
| It's got to be hard to be the underdog when you're the fucking champ. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, it's true. | ||
| I know. | ||
| But, I mean, I guess I wouldn't say underdog, but, I mean, the doubters maybe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Maybe, yeah, and I use the doubters as fuel. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, again, I love proving them wrong. | ||
| Mate, if I was an underdog for this fight, you know, I don't know if I would be, but I mean, if I was, I would not care one bit. | ||
| I'd be like, alright, at least I get to make my boys or whoever's betting on me more money. | ||
| Let's go, you know what I mean? | ||
| So I'm all good. | ||
| Now, you guys were supposed to, you were scheduled to fight, but then you got COVID. And when you got COVID, when you got tested, initially, when you got tested, you didn't feel sick, right? | ||
| Man, before, because we got tested a fair bit. | ||
| So I'm guessing before we went into the bubble, I must have got it from someone or whatever. | ||
| And then, you know, a few days later, we got tested a couple of times. | ||
| It didn't pop up. | ||
| But then we got tested, yeah, one of the days. | ||
| And that was like right at the end of my camp because I went there a bit early for Brad Riddell to corner or be with him because he fought the week before me. | ||
| So I did my last week of training, hard training, in Vegas after traveling and doing all that. | ||
| And then I got COVID. I must have had it trained like hard. | ||
| You know, we get stuck into it. | ||
| So I did back-to-back because the schedule got tightened up because we arrived a bit later in the week. | ||
| So back-to-back really, really solid sessions while I probably had COVID. But I mean, I sort of had started getting headaches and that before. | ||
| I was like, man, I'm getting headaches. | ||
| It's Vegas, maybe, you know, just dehydrated and whatnot. | ||
| But yeah, then I tested positive and then I started getting the symptoms after that. | ||
| And when you say, like, your schedule tightened up, so you guys have a very rigid program that you follow no matter what? | ||
| Like, this day you're doing this? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So we've got, you know, we've got a few hard sessions. | ||
| And when I say hard sessions, you know, they're, you know, they're mind-blowing type of sessions. | ||
| Like, for some people, that will watch it. | ||
| But, you know, that's just our schedule. | ||
| And usually you have good rest in between them. | ||
| And, like, that's, you know, you need to have the rest. | ||
| You want good recovery so you're able to do them, you know, and... | ||
| This camp was beautiful. | ||
| We did it. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| We nailed the camp. | ||
| I was doing some of the hardest sessions, but I was recovering on point. | ||
| My recovery was on point. | ||
| I was like, man, I'm getting older, but I feel like the camp's getting easier. | ||
| How's that happening right now? | ||
| But that week got tightened up, so I ended up doing a couple of these really, really high-loaded sessions. | ||
| They ended up being back-to-back, where usually I would have high-low session, high-low session. | ||
| What was the decision? | ||
| What made the decision to do high-back-to-back? | ||
| Again, it was just more the fact that we just need to do a couple. | ||
| I still don't think it was that, but I felt fine while I was doing that. | ||
| I didn't think nothing of it, but because I end up getting pretty rattled from the COVID, that's why I was like, man, maybe my immune system was down at the end of camp, obviously dieting and all that type of stuff. | ||
| I felt fine, but I'm pretty sure I started feeling some of the symptoms before I was getting into them hard sessions as well. | ||
| Yeah, all the fighters that I know that got it bad, it was all the same sort of situation when they were in camp, really beaten up. | ||
| Like Cody Garbrandt, same thing. | ||
| Cody had COVID for probably weeks and was training with it before he even got tested. | ||
| And then they're like, bro, you got COVID. And he's like, oh, well, that explains a lot. | ||
| And then, you know, he was pretty fucked up for a few months. | ||
| But he had trained, like, real hard. | ||
| Well, that's obviously going to, you know, play a big factor. | ||
| And the thing is, like, you hear, and then you hear, like, the... | ||
| Hazmat, you know, sort of situations, Codogarbrant. | ||
| So, like, we wanted to keep an eye on it, you know what I mean? | ||
| And that's why we got it. | ||
| And then they end up finding, oh, you got the pneumonia. | ||
| And then, you know, then the symptoms, yeah, I felt the symptoms a fair bit. | ||
| But then I got that pneumonia and then, like, the sort of the infection just started getting a little bit worser. | ||
| So I end up getting, you know, coughing up like pinky bloody sort of stuff. | ||
| And then the blood just got more and more. | ||
| So then we went back and that's when they got me on the medication. | ||
| And, yeah, because I was coughing up blood. | ||
| And all told, how long were you sick for? | ||
| Probably, what would it be, maybe... | ||
|
unidentified
|
10 days or something maybe like seven or ten days did they do ivy vitamins or anything like that uh yeah once once i was in the hospital they were doing that you know but i mean as soon as i got on the medication um you know for dexamethasone like my largest improvements like straight away yeah yeah and you got it a while ago right you got covered a while back yeah so i had it probably august last year so we were training obviously during the lockdown in new york and uh I believe one of the Gracies, | |
| I won't say which one, had come back into the gym and I believe he had COVID. Son of a gun. | ||
| And like all of us got it. | ||
| Basically, I think there were 20 of us training secretly in the blue basement. | ||
| Not so secret anymore. | ||
| We just spilled the beans. | ||
| We're out of there now. | ||
| It's safe. | ||
| And yeah, basically all 20, 25 of us got it. | ||
| For me, it was nothing too bad. | ||
| But obviously, I don't train as crazy as obviously someone preparing for a fight. | ||
| But yeah, very mild symptoms for me. | ||
| But what wasn't mild for you was when you got vaccinated. | ||
| Yeah, so I got vaccinated probably six weeks ago. | ||
| And the logic behind it was my family's back in Australia, so I haven't seen my parents, my brother, for probably close to two years now. | ||
| And Australia's going to be definitely one of those places you're going to need the vaccine, I assume, to travel there. | ||
| So I went and got it. | ||
| And yeah, it was a rough time. | ||
| Obviously, I had the standard side effects of fever, cold sweats, a lot of exhaustion, headaches. | ||
| But then my lymph nodes started to swell up and I started to get some crazy pregnant looking stomach and actually had to pull out of a grappling match for it. | ||
| So I was on the ultimate fighter. | ||
| So I was going to bail out one of the weekends on the show, go compete. | ||
| But yeah, it was just for a week. | ||
| I think I was carrying this fluid for close to a week. | ||
| And they never drained it to see what it is or anything like that? | ||
| No, I just peed it out eventually. | ||
| Volks was telling me, he's like, sleep upright, pull your pants above your stomach, and yeah, eventually it came out of there. | ||
| Because you could see it, mate, he was wearing pants, and you could see it sort of like the fluid would get caught there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'm like, yeah, just sit upright. | ||
| Jamie, show the image of it, because it's very weird. | ||
| It's funny, because who else got the COVID test? | ||
| Sorry, who else got the vaccines? | ||
| It was a few of yous. | ||
| Me, Woods and Joe all got it and yeah, I was the only one that really got messed up. | ||
| Woods said he felt pretty shit for probably three, four days. | ||
| Did Woods have COVID at any time? | ||
| I don't believe so. | ||
| Neither is Joe. | ||
| Joe's somehow immune. | ||
| He was with you throughout the whole... | ||
| Joe, mate, like we were, even when we got it, the four of us got, there was like four of us that got it in our camp. | ||
| Joe was training with us. | ||
| Like he was sharing drinks, everything with one of the guys that, you know what I mean? | ||
| And just... | ||
| Didn't get it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They don't know why. | ||
| I mean, they think there's a bunch of factors. | ||
| They think it's your blood type. | ||
| It's definitely how healthy your immune system is based on how healthy you're eating, exercise, all that stuff. | ||
| But they don't know why. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Because some people, they drink, they smoke, they live in a house filled with people that got COVID. They don't get it. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It's crazy, yeah, because Joe does like to have a good time, and yeah. | ||
| Joe hates me saying this, but I've been told old pissheads don't get how they have it. | ||
| That's a good image, but let's go to the image before that. | ||
| That's the one you really see it on the side. | ||
| See where his pants are? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Very strange. | ||
| Yeah, it's fucking weird. | ||
| I mean, I was worried, to be honest, because, like, I remember the medic on Tough, he's like, man, that's just lymphatic fluid, it should drain, but it just, it would slowly, getting bigger and bigger, and when I would walk, it would be, I wouldn't say it was too painful, but it was quite uncomfortable. | ||
| So I'd walk around holding my stomach and stuff, and I was just like, at the point it started to drain, I was like, I'll give it one more day, and then we'll investigate. | ||
| But yeah, I was peeing out some crazy colors, so, like, very strong colors. | ||
| Did you take any photos of it? | ||
| Of the crazy colors? | ||
| No, no, I should have, though, yeah. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| I want to see that. | ||
| One doctor told me if you're peeing out some crazy colors, maybe it affected your liver or something. | ||
| But, yeah, we've been too busy with ultimathleta, to be honest, to get anything else done. | ||
| And so the medic wasn't concerned. | ||
| They were just a little worried because it was weird, but they weren't like, hey, we've got to get you to a doctor. | ||
| He definitely wasn't too concerned. | ||
| What was funny, actually, was when I brought those symptoms to him, he's like, well, man, it's a vaccine. | ||
| He's like, we're in sort of unknown territory here. | ||
| He himself even said, he's like, I had Johnson& Johnson and he said he was the sickest he's ever been in his life for 12 hours and then he snapped out of it. | ||
| So nothing he told me was reassuring at all, unfortunately. | ||
| So you're supposed to get a second shot though, right? | ||
| I was meant to get it. | ||
| So Woods and Joe went and got it. | ||
| I actually took him to the place and I didn't get it. | ||
| They were definitely calling me a pussy for not getting it, but who knows what would have happened if I did get that second shot. | ||
| Yeah, that's a... | ||
| Because you knew you were competing as well, didn't you? | ||
| I knew I'd be competing because I'd pulled out of that match and we were looking to reschedule that for mid-June and I was just like, man, I don't want to miss another week of training potentially. | ||
| Then obviously this comp, I hadn't known when I was going to compete. | ||
| It was real last minute, this one, this Friday. | ||
| But yeah, so I really just didn't get it again because I was worried about potentially missing more training. | ||
| But yeah, after talking to some people, probably for the best, I don't get it. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| Obviously, I'm not a medical expert, but what I'm reading is that people that have already had COVID that get vaccinated are more likely to have issues than just regular people. | ||
| And it's still a low number. | ||
| You see, you hear a lot of people get issues. | ||
| You got to think of how many people have been vaccinated. | ||
| I think at this point in time... | ||
| Are they saying it's like 50% of all adults in America have been vaccinated? | ||
| I think that's the most recent number, which is what? | ||
| Like more than 100 million people, I think. | ||
| Which is pretty crazy. | ||
| So, it's just one of those things. | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wish they could tell you. | ||
| You know, I wish I could tell you, you're going to be fine. | ||
| Like, go ahead and take that second shot. | ||
| Yeah, there's no assurance of that, really. | ||
| So it stopped, it affected your training for how many days? | ||
| I would say I probably missed a good seven days of training, I think. | ||
| I mean, they came to a point where the fluid was almost gone, but I was just like, man, I don't know if I should be grappling and squashing this around. | ||
| Just didn't want to grapple me, that was all it was. | ||
| The fluid was gone and it was just like, nah, you know what I mean? | ||
| But now you're fine. | ||
| Yeah, fully back to normal, yes. | ||
| Obviously I feel great because I'm going to compete this week. | ||
| If there was anything dicey going on, I definitely wouldn't have taken the match. | ||
| And how long did it take before you fully ramped up your cardio sessions and all your training sessions so that you felt like 100%? | ||
| I'm not even sure, to be honest. | ||
| I felt like just getting back into training, it was pretty normal. | ||
| My fitness level was low just having missed the week, but I didn't feel like there was any long-lasting side effects. | ||
| But I guess that'll be to be determined, right? | ||
| Have you taken a week out before? | ||
| But you guys train so much. | ||
| One of the crazy things about the Donaher Death Squad is you guys are seven days a weekers. | ||
| Seven days a week, yeah. | ||
| Unfortunately, John holds us to a high standard because he's there seven days a week. | ||
| I wish that guy would take a vacation every now and then. | ||
| It's one of the craziest things I've ever heard of in my life. | ||
| A guy like that who literally used to teach philosophy at Columbia. | ||
| Fucking brilliant guy who also is like super high-level grappler himself. | ||
| And decides to dedicate his life to training the best grapplers on Earth. | ||
| And has had these insane results. | ||
| I mean, it's a really wild story. | ||
| If you looked at the John Donaher origin story, it's like a Marvel Comics, you know, like some sort of a mentor in Doctor Strange or something like that. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, he doesn't seem like a real guy. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| He's like some sort of mythical sort of being. | ||
| Like, because most people, like, you've shot the shit with him. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| But most people never see that. | ||
| They just see his instructionals or his interviews and stuff where he's very, very serious. | ||
| But yeah, it's crazy how knowledgeable he is in jiu-jitsu. | ||
| And what's funny is I sort of taught myself leg locks in Australia watching his guys compete on EBI and stuff. | ||
| I had no idea what I was doing, but I'd watch them using these moves because they didn't teach it in instructionals back then. | ||
| So we were just left trying to figure it out. | ||
| I'm sure Eddie's guys were trying to figure it out as well. | ||
| But that was how I learned leg locks. | ||
| And then it was just funny to ultimately one day join the team that I'd been stealing their moves from for years. | ||
| I couldn't beat Gordon, so I was like, fuck it, I'll jump in as well. | ||
| Well, it's so interesting. | ||
| When I was training a lot, there was very little leg locks. | ||
| I remember Dean Lister in 2003 in Abu Dhabi. | ||
| He was leg locking a lot of guys. | ||
| And Dean was one of the few guys It was like a few other guys, but he was one of the real top-level guys who was winning by heel hook and even ankle locks and stuff, knee bars. | ||
| And then John and him have this one conversation, one time, where he says to John, why would you ignore 50% of the body? | ||
| And John's like, ding! | ||
| And then he just develops this entire system based on leg locks. | ||
| And then you guys start dominating. | ||
| Gary Tonin, Gordon, Nikki, you, all these guys start dominating. | ||
| Eddie start dominating with leg locks. | ||
| And then everybody else is trying to dissect your system and put it together. | ||
| It's really crazy because that's not that long. | ||
| Like, if you think about, like, how long... | ||
| Arm bars have been around, rear naked chokes, standard jujitsu techniques. | ||
| Then all of a sudden, somewhere around, like what year was it? | ||
| 2015 or something like that? | ||
| Like what year did leg locks just start taking over? | ||
| Yeah, definitely. | ||
| I would say around 2015. I mean, indirectly, I guess Eddie Bravo is sort of responsible for this in a way because he gave the guys the platform to demonstrate this. | ||
| In jiu-jitsu at the time, apart from ADCC, you couldn't really do heel hooks in any tournaments. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So a lot of people didn't put any energy into it because they were like, why am I going to become a master in this skill set when there's no platform for me to use them on? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We had Husamar Poharis. | ||
| Terrifying guy. | ||
| Yeah, terrifying guy in the UFC, and he would heel hook you and hold on to it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and just not let it go, which was terrible. | ||
| You know, I mean, he ruined guys' knees. | ||
| He's the only guy that I know that's been kicked out of two organizations. | ||
| The PFL kicked him out, and then the UFC kicked him out first, and then the PFL kicked him out too. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Thank God he disappeared from grappling and everything. | ||
| He was actually one of the catalysts for me to learn leg locks because I qualified for ADCC and I was in the same weight division as him. | ||
| And I was like, I've got to learn this shit or this guy's going to potentially injure me forever. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| That is what you had to think too. | ||
| Do you ever see the match with David Avalon where they rolled out of bounds? | ||
| Have you seen it? | ||
| I think I have. | ||
| They rolled out of bounds and he was attempting to get a heel hook on Avalon. | ||
| They roll out and so they restart him. | ||
| But I don't know who the fuck allowed this, where you restart and let a guy have a fully sunken heel hook and go, ready, go. | ||
| A static position like that doesn't occur. | ||
| You never have hands on someone and go, ready, go, where you let them fully secure and adjust. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Lock themselves in their cores, ready to just... | ||
| Because it's all in motion. | ||
| Jiu Jitsu is in motion. | ||
| But why would he get into that? | ||
| What do you say if you're David? | ||
| If you're in the middle of this match, what do you do? | ||
| You say, no, I quit? | ||
| Like, no, you can't get a full heel hook on me? | ||
| Even though he kind of had it, but he was defending it. | ||
| So they let him lock in and he just fucking yanks it. | ||
| And held it. | ||
| And then, you know, see him tapping like... | ||
| And it just mangled his leg. | ||
| I love the aftermath. | ||
| Do you remember the aftermath? | ||
| Pow Harris gets up, celebrates, walks, he does a circle, comes back to shake David Avalon's hand, and David doesn't shake it, and then Pow Harris is like, shocked. | ||
| He's like, why would he not shake my hand? | ||
| He's an odd guy. | ||
| I had a match with him. | ||
| One of the most boring matches in history, but we signed a contract for a 190-pound match, and he shows up the day before with a note from his doctor, and he's 220 pounds, and he says, I will die if I cut any weight. | ||
| And the promoter of Kasai was like... | ||
| I remember that photo too, actually. | ||
| Yeah, that was crazy. | ||
| He was fucking jacked. | ||
| So he was 220? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He showed up at 220. And he used to fight in the UFC at 85. 85. And he had had... | |
| Actually, he even made 170 for a few fights. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dude, when he fought Gary Tony, he looked like he ate a whole pharmacy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He looked like he ate all the drugs. | ||
| Like, everything they had, he's like, let's go. | ||
| Let's see what that one does. | ||
| Shoot that one in here. | ||
| Like, he was so big when he had that match with Gary. | ||
| Oh, for sure, yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| What did he weigh then? | ||
| Look at the size of him! | ||
| Yeah, that's the one I remember seeing. | ||
| Jesus Christ, look at the size of him! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck. | |
| He looks like a fake person. | ||
| He looks like Wario from Mario Kart or whatever. | ||
| I know, and look at that mustache, too. | ||
| I always want them fucking arms around my heels, that's for sure. | ||
| Oh, fuck all that. | ||
| Get that away from my legs. | ||
| Well, he had a horrific childhood. | ||
| If you talk to any of the guys from his team that knew him, he was insanely poor. | ||
| He used to have to eat pig slop, and he worked on a farm. | ||
| It was just... | ||
| The story behind his childhood is terrible. | ||
| And I guess just it made him a ferocious fighter. | ||
| Just whatever that horrible childhood was like, it made him literally... | ||
| Like, that guy got a hold of people's legs. | ||
| He would go like this on the sidelines. | ||
| And back then, really, he was like one of the most sophisticated guys in MMA when it came to heel hooks. | ||
| When he'd wrap a hold of your legs, man, you had a real problem. | ||
| He must have got some nutrition in there somewhere, though. | ||
| He looks pretty damn... | ||
| Damn good. | ||
| Eventually. | ||
| Eventually he got nutrition. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And a lot of pharmacological intervention. | ||
| I would actually sympathize with him in MMA because I remember thinking I'd watch his fights and I'd be like, he's not a striker. | ||
| And the striker would be punching him, punching him, punching him. | ||
| He'd eventually get to the heel and be like, MMA, the striker would tap. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And it's like, he's like, well, I want to, let's even it up. | ||
| You know, you punch me in the face for the last 15 minutes. | ||
| Let me get a couple of pumps. | ||
| I'm going to fucking break your leg. | ||
| Yeah, but he even did it to Jake Shields. | ||
| He poked Jake in the eye before that as well. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| Jake was so angry. | ||
| Multiple times, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He poked him in the eye and then held a Kimura, right? | ||
| Yeah, and Jake was actually out grappling him, and that's why he started resorting to cheating. | ||
| He really takes advantage of the fact that... | ||
| That people do perceive, like he's self-aware enough to know what you think of him. | ||
| Like to know that you think he's a little slow. | ||
| He takes advantage of that and skirts the rules a little bit. | ||
| So I wouldn't say he's like a sophisticated guy per se, but he's self-aware enough to know what he can get away with in matches. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| When did you have a match with him? | ||
| Was it before or after Gary had a match with him? | ||
| After Gary. | ||
| And Gary actually, in that match, Gary actually popped in pretty bad. | ||
| Like, he injured his legs pretty bad. | ||
| So when we had the match, and I came out with John Danner, because I was like, well, we're going to do the camp against the scariest leg locker in the world. | ||
| I better have John in the corner. | ||
| And I don't know if that triggered Pal Harris to not commit to anything. | ||
| But what happened in the match was nothing was happening, and he was stalling. | ||
| So the referee started giving him penalties. | ||
| But in my head, I'm like, this guy knows he's going to lose. | ||
| He's taking penalties. | ||
| Eventually, he's going to attack. | ||
| So I'm waiting. | ||
| I'm waiting. | ||
| And then the time runs out. | ||
| I'm like, what the fuck? | ||
| This guy knew he was losing. | ||
| He just didn't try to make up that ground. | ||
| Maybe his legs were so fucked up from the Gary match that he just didn't want to risk it. | ||
| I think that definitely played a factor. | ||
| It's such a weird injury, right? | ||
| Because if you get your legs locked and you get heel hooked or something like that, you're tearing your meniscus and that shit never gets better. | ||
| Could it be an ego thing where he's like, I can't get my legs out, I don't want to submit from a leg lock, but I'm just not going to go there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe. | |
| Have you seen the Meow Brothers? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, what the fuck? | |
| Have you seen the clip of him with the toehold? | ||
| Well, I've seen the clip of him with a knee bar where his knee is like bent the other way. | ||
| It's like some, whoever he's grappling with, full on like hips down, like the knee is like completely hyperextended, like many degrees the wrong direction. | ||
| And you watch it like, and the guy never taps. | ||
| Yeah, it's crazy as well, because obviously in MMA, you guys, for the most part, are making quite good money. | ||
| But you'll see grappling tournaments all the time where, oh, watch your guy let his leg break for no money. | ||
| I'm like, what are you doing, bro? | ||
| That's never going to be the same. | ||
| What is the Meow Brothers deal? | ||
| A lot of Brazilians just don't believe in leg locks. | ||
| There's guys like Leandro Lowe, when I had a match with him, just completely let his leg snap because he always said, I'm never going to tap to a lower body submission. | ||
| So he just let you break his leg? | ||
| Let me break his leg, yeah. | ||
| Actually, I put him in a heel hook and he exploded the wrong way and kind of broke his own leg. | ||
| And then he just shakes it out and keeps going. | ||
| That happens all the time. | ||
| It's honestly crazy how many people let things break in jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Well, that's what I mean. | ||
| They just tell me, like, nah, I ain't tapping into that. | ||
| Yeah, like Vinny. | ||
| Yeah, Vinny Magalese let you break his leg. | ||
| I watched that live, and I was like, what is happening here? | ||
| Because that was one of the ones where I was like, what's going on? | ||
| I was thinking the same thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was like, are you sure you want to keep going? | ||
| Because you felt his leg break. | ||
| Yeah, because I knew I had done substantial damage. | ||
| But I was like, does Vinny not know? | ||
| I was like, I feel like I should stop and tell him what's wrong. | ||
| And again, Vinny did stop. | ||
| He goes, I think you broke my leg. | ||
| So I was like, well, I mean, you're going to keep going. | ||
| I'm going to go straight back for that leg again. | ||
| You said that to him? | ||
| Well, that was my thought process. | ||
| And when I put him in the heel hook the second time, there was no resistance. | ||
| And I started seeing the bone. | ||
| Starting to poke out of the skin. | ||
| It didn't break the skin, but I was looking at it and I was like, you know what? | ||
| I think I like... | ||
| Vinny's actually a really nice guy. | ||
| Really nice guy. | ||
| I just felt bad that he made it his shtick. | ||
| Leg locks don't work. | ||
| You shouldn't do that because, I mean, eventually, even if you're flexible, like for him, his knee and ankles were flexible, but the weakest link was his fibula. | ||
| So his fibula snapped and disconnected from his ankle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How is he now? | |
| Is he okay? | ||
| He's fine, yeah. | ||
| Surprisingly, I think the tib-fib breaks actually come back a little quicker than the knee, except for obviously the PTSD from looking at your broken leg. | ||
| But at the time, when I spoke to Vinny after the match, he seemed like he was most worried about what his wife was going to say. | ||
| That seemed like the priority number one for him. | ||
| Why was he worried about what his wife was going to say? | ||
| Because I think at the time, she didn't want him to go compete because it was during COVID and stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| And he was like, I think he was like, no, I gotta do it. | ||
| And then he went and he broke his leg and it's like, oh, all these things at once, eh? | ||
| But honestly, that's the craziest, one of the craziest moments in grappling where I was just like, I was like, how much is Chael paying you? | ||
| He's not paying me enough to fucking let my leg break. | ||
| Like, what's going on behind the scenes there? | ||
| That's just so nuts. | ||
| Like, some guys, it's just pride, I guess, huh? | ||
| Yeah, I've got none of that. | ||
| Hey, you get it? | ||
| I'm tapping. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Good for you. | ||
| Good for you. | ||
| Like, live to battle another day, man. | ||
| Especially with leg breaks. | ||
| You know, like, after watching Weidman's leg break a couple weeks ago against Hall, that was dark. | ||
| You know, like, see it snap like that and him fall over and the bone poked through the back of his calf. | ||
| That's hard to watch. | ||
| That's hard to watch. | ||
| I'll be honest. | ||
| I'm still leg kicking there. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure. | ||
| That's my thing, right? | ||
| Are you worried at all about that? | ||
| Nah, nah, I'm not. | ||
| I'm not saying I can't have it. | ||
| I don't want to jinx myself. | ||
| But nah. | ||
| Man, look, obviously... | ||
| Man, that's just the game, I guess, as well. | ||
| But I mean, every kick of mine isn't 100%. | ||
| I use it for so many different things. | ||
| Obviously, if I feel like they're going to be checking something really good, I'm going to be pretty cautious of that. | ||
| I'm not just going to run straight into a knee or something. | ||
| I'm not saying that you can see that coming, but there will be awareness of it probably now. | ||
| Because after seeing that, I was like, oh yeah, I might have to... | ||
| Look into this a little bit more, but I mean now, I'll still be using them. | ||
| Well with Chris, if you watch it in slow motion, he winds up and throws everything, everything into the first kick he throws. | ||
| I mean, it's just full body torque, 100%. | ||
| I guess he just decided right away he's just gonna really damage the shit out of Uriah's leg. | ||
| And then the first kick he throws, you hear the snap, and the snap was, look at this fucking... | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's loaded that up. | |
| It's just so crazy that it happened to him. | ||
| I know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Man, look, look where it hit as well. | |
| Oh, look at it folded. | ||
| The skin's folded. | ||
| That hit more on the side of the leg, did it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Or did I... Look at this. | |
| Oh, man. | ||
| That's not enough money for that. | ||
| The crazy thing is there's only been three leg breaks like that in the history of the UFC and he's been involved in two of them. | ||
| He's been on the receiving end and the giving end. | ||
| Yeah, that's... | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| It is crazy. | ||
| What the fuck are the odds? | ||
| All the thousands and thousands and thousands of fights in the UFC. Three leg breaks. | ||
| He's been one of them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was cooking a barbecue at the time. | ||
| I just heard him like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
The fuck? | |
| I run inside. | ||
| And then I was like, what the fuck? | ||
| And then I was like, wow, it didn't catch on straight away. | ||
| And then people are like, how's that? | ||
| And they're talking about Anderson Silva and he's doing that. | ||
| And then it just clicked. | ||
| I was like, oh, fuck. | ||
| It was a blowout. | ||
| Absolute blowout for me. | ||
| The other time I've seen it is in kickboxing with Tyrone Spong and Gokan Saki. | ||
| I saw that. | ||
| He handled it so well, man. | ||
| He was just like, yeah, my leg broke, just chilled out. | ||
| Yeah, he just laid down, just sat down. | ||
| That was crazy. | ||
| He handled it that well. | ||
| I'd be freaking the fuck out. | ||
| Yeah, 100% you would. | ||
| Yeah, he's that guy. | ||
| Tyrone Spong is a guy where I'm like, man, I'm kind of surprised he hasn't made more of a splash. | ||
| Because he was such a terrifying fucking striker in kickboxing. | ||
| And then he decides he's going to go over to boxing. | ||
| And he had a real chance with a top contender at one point in time. | ||
| But something happened, and he tested positive for something, and they pulled him out of the fight. | ||
| He failed the drug test? | ||
| Yeah, something happened. | ||
| And he said it was like a tainted supplement or something like that. | ||
| We don't have that in grappling, luckily. | ||
| Yeah, here it is with Gokhan. | ||
| I mean, this was a great fucking fight, too. | ||
| Right there. | ||
| Boom! | ||
| There it is. | ||
| He just looks at it, eh? | ||
| He looks at it like, ah, shit. | ||
| That's the most relaxed response, eh? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the fucking pain. | ||
| They go touch gloves, you know? | ||
| The ref just kicks his leg. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's Steve Mazzagotti. | ||
| Whoops. | ||
| Is that Steve Mazzagotti? | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| If it was Steve, the fight would still be going. | ||
| Yeah, he'd be like, get up. | ||
| Don't be a pussy. | ||
| Sorry, Steve. | ||
| Just joking. | ||
| That was a horrible one. | ||
| But, I mean, that particular style of leg break is just so hard to watch when someone checks, you know, with a shin kick. | ||
| Have you done much kickboxing sparring other than what you did with those guys and your friends? | ||
| None, really. | ||
| To be honest, nothing. | ||
| Did it make you think while you were sparring with these guys? | ||
| Were you sparring with Alexander? | ||
| Like, maybe? | ||
| I mean, that turned me off completely. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, starting at the top there. | ||
| I wasn't even turning them in, mate. | ||
| I know, but it was just so out of my depth that I was just like, fuck, this is too late. | ||
| Does it make you want to learn something? | ||
| I know that Gary, which is real crazy, is that John Donaher actually is a striking coach for Gary, too. | ||
| Which is just, to me, so bananas. | ||
| Because I was like, who's been training Gary striking? | ||
| Because his striking looks pretty sharp. | ||
| I'm like, did you guys fly someone out to Puerto Rico? | ||
| I'm like, no, it's John. | ||
| John does it all. | ||
| John runs MMA class followed by jiu-jitsu class. | ||
| They just do a lot of MMA. Shit, I didn't even know that. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of MMA drills. | ||
| He's an MMA coach. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| Bro. | ||
| He's a real wizard. | ||
| Yeah, man, he is. | ||
| And the attention to detail with everything, even, again, I didn't know that, but I could still tell that, you know, the way you would study fights and break things down, which is, it works. | ||
| You know, you get the right philosophies and, you know, the attention to detail can really capitalize on that. | ||
| He takes all the guesswork out. | ||
| Right? | ||
| There's a lot of, like, a lot of in training jiu-jitsu, there's a lot of, like, you know, just kind of rolling and learning things and figuring things out, and you get tapped with something, and then your teammate says, you left your leg here, and if you do this, you're okay, but if you do that, you're fucked. | ||
| And you go, oh, okay. | ||
| But with John, everything is, like... | ||
| The process of learning is shortened radically because he cuts out all the nonsense and just gets you to the points that you need to focus on. | ||
| When I watch you guys train under him and I watch him coach, I was like, this is very interesting because he's completely eliminated guesswork. | ||
| It doesn't always work. | ||
| Guys are going to lose matches because they're going to face talented grapplers. | ||
| In grappling right now, especially the no-gi game, the level of competition. | ||
| This Who's No. | ||
| 1 event this weekend, I love these. | ||
| I love that they have them here in Austin because the level of competition is so high. | ||
| It's so exciting to watch. | ||
| No one does it quite the way John does. | ||
| It's very interesting. | ||
| No one coaches the way that guy does. | ||
| He's just like an innovator. | ||
| What's crazy is like we'll come to class, right, and he would just drop some random thing. | ||
| He'll be like, I was watching the 1988 Greco-Roman wrestling final and I saw this move. | ||
| Let's test it out. | ||
| Let's see if it works. | ||
| And we'll just run a couple of experiments. | ||
| And that's like a common thing. | ||
| Like he's innovating, but he's borrowing stuff from other arts from another time. | ||
| Long forgotten things. | ||
| It's pretty crazy. | ||
| It's like, damn, when do you have time to watch all this shit? | ||
| Yeah, he watches tape every night. | ||
| Every night. | ||
| It's a good thing because when you're looking at things like that, there's a lot of people that do good things instinctively. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| They don't even know they're doing it, but some people have just been in their positions. | ||
| They just do things. | ||
| So fight study and all that type of stuff, because we did a lot of it in the house, Honestly, you start watching and your thought process around things, I felt like it made me understand things even a little bit more. | ||
| I thought I already had a good understanding, but watching other people and then capitalize, oh, he does this, and then you start learning figures, oh, let's nullify that by doing this. | ||
| You can go real deep, and that's why I'm watching. | ||
| Again, a lot of people do things that they probably don't even know. | ||
| It's just more instinctively, oh, this happened, so he done this. | ||
| It was the right reaction, and we can capitalize on that just from watching. | ||
| How much tape do you watch? | ||
| Say a fight like Holloway. | ||
| You beat him the first fight and then you're going to have a re-batch with him. | ||
| Do you watch the first fight? | ||
| Do you watch his other fights? | ||
| I'll be honest. | ||
| I don't watch as much. | ||
| We've got the coaches that do that. | ||
| I have Joe Lopez and Eugene and Brad Riddell. | ||
| They'll watch and they'll get a lot of the details. | ||
| But I mean, after doing a lot of it... | ||
| And I trust them anyway. | ||
| But I mean, after doing a lot of it in the house... | ||
| And just breaking things down, I'm like, you know what, I'm going to start paying attention to that. | ||
| I'm going to start looking at it myself, even though obviously I trust them, but I can just figure things out myself as well. | ||
| So I think I am going to start doing that, but I've got full faith in the coaching staff and they do a great job. | ||
| They get right into detail. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And it works. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| There's different schools of thought when it comes to how you prepare. | ||
| And some schools of thought think you need time off. | ||
| Well, you don't think about shit. | ||
| Well, you just go and play basketball or go fishing or just relax. | ||
| You need that relaxed time. | ||
| And other people say, no, no. | ||
| You need your fucking nose to the grindstone, period. | ||
| Well, the thing is, people do their camps. | ||
| They do their camp and then they stop at all on a break until next camp. | ||
| So where's your time for learning? | ||
| Where's your time for evolving? | ||
| Because when I'm in camp, that whole camp is structured for that fight. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So I'm doing every session, every drilling session is structured for that fight. | ||
| You know, obviously a lot of it's cardio and getting yourself ready for the fight. | ||
| But then when you're not fighting, say after the fight, like, alright, just doing a heap of drilling with Craig or like with the coaches, just doing a heap of striking and just working on other things. | ||
| And get a real understanding of things that, yeah, I don't need in the next fight, but I've got time to evolve and expand the brain. | ||
| Like, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, so that's where I feel like it's the best time. | ||
| It doesn't mean you have to go and bust your ass. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I mean, I feel like in between camps is where you evolve. | ||
| That's where you learn. | ||
| Yeah, that's where you learn and get as much knowledge as you can. | ||
| But then once I know I'm fighting someone, all right, eight weeks, that eight weeks before it is purely... | ||
| Structured towards that fight. | ||
| Now when you say structured towards the fight, so do you guys have With City Kickboxing, do you have it mapped out like in advance where you have like here's your eight-week camp This is what we're gonna do on Monday. | ||
| This is what we're gonna do on Tuesday. | ||
| Everything is completely mapped out. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So everything's and again like as I was saying earlier about having you know the high sessions and low sessions you need to have the you know the sessions in between and Like the chill sessions where you are going to drill certain things that you're going to need in that fight or a pad session or something like that, game planning. | ||
| So we have everything from eight weeks structured specifically for the fight. | ||
| So we even do sessions exactly the time we're going to fight. | ||
| Obviously in Australia it's Sunday. | ||
| So we don't really have any days off because Sunday's usually our day off, but that's when we fight in Australia. | ||
| Right, because it's Saturday night in America. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| So we'll just have the night off. | ||
| So we'll have three half days in a row. | ||
| So that's our recovery. | ||
| So we will train seven days a week, but there's three days where you've got high sessions, but they're going to be nothing the rest of the day. | ||
| And then we'll do that. | ||
| And then on the Sunday. | ||
| So it's everything specifically for... | ||
| For that fight. | ||
| What time is like 9 p.m. | ||
| Pacific time in Australia, in America? | ||
| It would be about lunch time. | ||
| So lunch time you train like you're fighting? | ||
| Yeah, lunch time or Pacific time. | ||
| Actually, that might be a bit different. | ||
| But yeah, it would be... | ||
| The time of, say, the main card would usually be around lunch time or just after. | ||
| And do you guys do anything to make sure that your sleep gets in that rhythm in advance? | ||
| What do you do for that? | ||
| Yeah, 100%. | ||
| Especially, say, a good example was Brazil. | ||
| So when we went over there, so the time's still going to be the same, but when you're in Brazil, We had to be up. | ||
| We made sure that we stayed up till like 2 o'clock in the morning. | ||
| Was that right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Sorry, yeah. | ||
| 2 o'clock in the morning because I was going to fight around 1 o'clock or 2 o'clock. | ||
| So we made sure that we'll wake till then and then I'll go to sleep after that because we wanted the body clock to be like, all right. | ||
| 1 o'clock in the morning, 1.30, 2 a.m., that's go time. | ||
| We need to be alert. | ||
| So you were sleeping like that in Australia? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Because in Australia, the times worked out okay. | ||
| But in Brazil, it wasn't. | ||
| So the week we were there, we made sure we just stayed to the same sort of pattern as we do in Australia. | ||
| How long were you there for? | ||
| Just a week. | ||
| So once you get there for a week, you go, okay, we're staying up until 2 o'clock in the morning every night. | ||
| And I would even do a session that late. | ||
| Just so my body was like, knowing that I had to. | ||
| Same as Abu Dhabi. | ||
| So when I fought in Abu Dhabi, we did the exact same thing. | ||
| But because we were going to bed at like 7, so we could get up at 4 in the morning. | ||
| Because I was going to fight. | ||
| We wanted to be up a few hours before we fight. | ||
| So that's why we had a pattern like that. | ||
| I think a lot of people were doing that. | ||
| But that's why, you know, and then, you know, fight night, you know, I'm trying to sleep in and that's when like USADA come in and woke me up and like I had to do the piss test and I had to skull water. | ||
| On fight night? | ||
| On fight night. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
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They woke me up. | |
| Yes, I was asleep at seven and they woke me up at like 10, 11. I was like, what the hell? | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| Joe Lopez, my coach, he was absolutely fuming, which he had a right to be. | ||
| He's like, mate, it's fucking fight night. | ||
| You're going to come in and wake him up. | ||
| And then it wasn't that easy. | ||
| I just pissed. | ||
| I remember getting up not long before, pissing, went back to sleep. | ||
| And then I had to go there and then I couldn't piss. | ||
| So I had to skull water, water load so I could piss so I can go back to sleep. | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| Then you're up all night pissing. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That is fucking ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah, it was pretty bad. | ||
| And then because we've got melatonin and all that, I don't ever do it fight night. | ||
| But I'm like, all right. | ||
| I'll have a melatonin so I can get back to sleep and things like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why would they do that on Fight Night? | |
| That's so dumb. | ||
| That's why Joe was fuming. | ||
| He's like, are you doing that for his opponent and whatnot? | ||
| He was fuming. | ||
| But I just thought... | ||
| I think... | ||
| I made it clear that I'm sleeping from 7 till 4. I was talking about it in media. | ||
| Everyone knew about it. | ||
| I even changed. | ||
| Come test you at 6.30. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I even told the UFC, but maybe they just did it themselves. | ||
| They don't give a fuck. | ||
| Well, yeah, they clearly don't. | ||
| Yeah, they don't give a fuck. | ||
| Look, and I appreciate them. | ||
| I like how strict they are with everything. | ||
| Keep doing it. | ||
| But don't wake up someone fucking fight night. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no. | |
| I couldn't believe that. | ||
| I was like, are you fucking serious? | ||
| Joe woke me up. | ||
| I remember, and he's like, I'm like, What? | ||
| He's like, you're so easy. | ||
| I'm like, are you fucking serious? | ||
| Like, do we literally have to go through this right now? | ||
| Like, I have to get up? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Skull water. | |
| So dumb. | ||
| That's so dumb. | ||
| That really, that's infuriating. | ||
| Do you have any specific strategy that you do when you get to a place to avoid jet lag? | ||
| Is it melatonin? | ||
| Does it, like, block the windows out? | ||
| Well, the fight dietician, Geordi, usually has us on melatonin. | ||
| But again, I won't do that fight night because I feel like sometimes in the morning it can make you that little bit. | ||
| Like, you know, like you're alright, you're there, but like just a little bit maybe drowsy, yeah. | ||
| So like you're still in that sleep sort of pattern. | ||
| But yeah, like we usually, I would, you know, especially when we come, we usually go overnight. | ||
| So I'll try and get as much sleep as I can, you know, on the plane as hard. | ||
| But I'll make sure I stay awake till the time I want to go to bed. | ||
| I don't care how tired I am, I just hold out and then usually I'll get to sleep and by the time I'm ready to wake up, I'm hitting my time zone anyway back home. | ||
| I've got it now every time I'm in Vegas to be honest. | ||
| My sleeping pattern is on point every time I get in. | ||
| Do you adjust your meals like when you eat to facilitate that as well? | ||
| No, I think it still works out now. | ||
| I guess I'll just make it, try whatever pattern that I want. | ||
| I'll have the breakfast and do all that. | ||
| Say I'm in Vegas now and I'm going to fight this time. | ||
| I want to go to sleep this time and I'll just make sure the pattern of the food. | ||
| Wake up at this time, eat and still have the lunch. | ||
| However I'll do it back home. | ||
| I just adjust it to how I'll do it here in Vegas. | ||
| Do they have you on a specific meal plan so you're eating like every x amount of hours and you're eating everything's portioned out for you? | ||
| Fight week you mean? | ||
| Like period? | ||
| Period, yeah. | ||
| We've got a pretty strict schedule. | ||
| When you get the right nutritionist on board, I'm eating more than I would out of camp almost because we're training so hard. | ||
| We need, you know, it's all about performing in the training. | ||
| So we, you know, the performance is key and you're training so much. | ||
| So I eat a lot. | ||
| So eating isn't too bad, to be honest, during camp. | ||
| I used to struggle with it because I didn't, you know, know or I didn't have guys helping me with it. | ||
| But now, mate, like I'm, sometimes I look at the meals like, man, I don't even know if I can eat that. | ||
| Like, that's too much, you know. | ||
| Obviously the science behind it is amazing. | ||
| It is amazing when you get experts behind your camp and get experts behind your training that a lot of the problems that you were having previously, they get fixed. | ||
| Like your back issue that you were having with your back would blow out every now and then. | ||
| And then since you've been working with the strength and conditioning guys, it never happened again, right? | ||
| Yeah, so Baymed performance we talked about last time. | ||
| They've been great. | ||
| Even when I do get a little bit of a spasm, Just like what I know now is like, mate, within a day or two, I'm like, you know, I'm back to grappling 100% like within a day or two. | ||
| You know, where before it'd be like two weeks. | ||
| I wouldn't be training and then I'll try and get back into it because I wasn't doing much. | ||
| Bang, it'll happen again. | ||
| This will go on. | ||
| Like, you know what I mean? | ||
| This would go on the whole time where I'm telling you before, in between camps, I want to evolve. | ||
| I wouldn't even be able to train because I was constantly getting back issues. | ||
| And then I'll get six weeks to prepare for a fight. | ||
| And that's how it was. | ||
| That was happening for years. | ||
| I was like, man, fucking, what do I got to do here? | ||
| It's amazing what real experts can do to help you in that regard. | ||
| Yeah, just having a full time. | ||
| Every time you get a niggle here, do this, do this, and just that. | ||
| A lot of the times the stretching and all that that we do is before training so we can train. | ||
| It's not going to heal. | ||
| I'm not going to be flexible because I'm doing this, but my body's going to move right for that session. | ||
| And they're just on point with that sort of stuff, and it helps a lot. | ||
| Craig, when you compare the way someone has to prepare when they're a professional grappler like yourself versus someone who's doing all these different disciplines smashed in together in MMA, do you look at it and go, fuck that? | ||
| Well, I'm just listening to the professionalism of his gamps and stuff. | ||
| Amazing, right? | ||
| Me, man. | ||
| I'm eating shit food. | ||
| I'm winging it. | ||
| Fuck, are you really? | ||
| Take away 24-7 this bloke, I'm telling you. | ||
| I don't stretch. | ||
| I don't warm up. | ||
| You don't stretch or warm up? | ||
| No, nothing. | ||
| Just get straight into it. | ||
| How old are you now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
29? | |
| Yeah, when you get to be like 34, you're probably going to be like, you know what? | ||
| You're going to start stretching. | ||
| I'll just pick an easy round, you know? | ||
| If we're going to go, I'll be like, that guy's not going to injure me. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I'll be like, I'll flow it out and by the second round we'll be good. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| You don't warm up at all? | ||
| Not at all, no. | ||
| Surely that's going to change soon, man. | ||
| You can't do that forever. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Listen, you're talking to a world champion professional. | ||
| Motherfucker's got everything dialed in. | ||
| Listen to him. | ||
| He's your friend. | ||
| You know, because you don't want to get injured, man. | ||
| You know, and then get injured because you didn't stretch. | ||
| That would be... | ||
| You'd be so mad at yourself. | ||
| Everyone is different. | ||
| This motherfucker's never even had knee problems. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| All the leg locks he does, no knee problems. | ||
| Maybe the grappling, so much grappling and all that, being him fucking upside down, fucking going leg locks, you know how he's rolling. | ||
| Maybe that's got him flexible and flexible enough to not even have to worry about it. | ||
| But you're going to get old soon, mate. | ||
| It's coming. | ||
| It's going to fucking change. | ||
| Well, some people can just take leg locks and take joint locks. | ||
| I remember when Hoyler Gracie fought Eddie, the second time he fought him, and Eddie put him this terrible leg lock that he calls the vaporizer. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And Eddie had pants on. | ||
| This is what's crazy. | ||
| They made some weird deal where, you know, there was like weird rules where they're trying to figure out what to do and what not to do. | ||
| And the rule was if Eddie had pants on, Hoyler could grab his pants. | ||
| But the amount of friction you have with pants, Eddie's like, sure. | ||
| Grab him. | ||
| Go grab him. | ||
| And he destroyed Hoyler's leg. | ||
| And Hoyler would not tap. | ||
| And when you're watching it, you're just like, oh my god! | ||
| You see him just ripping his knee apart. | ||
| And Eddie goes, it's popping. | ||
| It's popping. | ||
| He goes, it's normal. | ||
| It's normal. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| He's just taking it. | ||
| A healthy bone. | ||
| See if you can find Eddie Bravo vaporize Hoyler Gracie. | ||
| Even when you watch the folk style wrestling and that, and then you see the way their legs are positioned, and I'm like, mate, that fucking something's got to go there. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| They're just reaping it there, the body weight's on it, the leg. | ||
| They're still hanging on while the guy's lifting, you know, shoving the leg. | ||
| And you're like, how the fuck is their leg not fucking weight? | ||
| Most of those guys, when they retire, they have fucked up knees and fucked up backs. | ||
| It's like the neck, the back, and the knees. | ||
| No warming up. | ||
| It's coming. | ||
| Looking forward to that or what? | ||
| Well, you're a healthy guy in terms of your mindset, though. | ||
| Like, I've seen you roll before. | ||
| You're not a meathead. | ||
| You know, you roll, you flow. | ||
| So maybe that helps as well. | ||
| Like, you know when your body's warmed up. | ||
| But stretching is probably a good idea. | ||
| It's probably good. | ||
| Do you have a routine? | ||
| What routine do you recommend? | ||
| I've never stopped stretching. | ||
| I've been stretching since I was a kid. | ||
| To me, it's giant. | ||
| I mean, it's everything. | ||
| Can you still do the splits? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| I can do them right now. | ||
| I don't even have to warm up. | ||
| I've stayed flexible. | ||
| But that's just because I always stretch. | ||
| I just think it's everything. | ||
| Range of motion is everything. | ||
| I started in Taekwondo and you have to have range of motion if you want to kick. | ||
| You want range of motion to kick people in the head, but it's also to prevent injuries, so you can do things with... | ||
| Eddie's got the craziest leg dexterity, and he's got weird flexibility. | ||
| He doesn't have flexibility like I have, kicking flexibility, but he's got jujitsu flexibility. | ||
| The groin, right? | ||
| Yeah, he can put his legs right behind his head. | ||
| No problem at all, both legs behind his head. | ||
| And he can move his legs like a hand. | ||
| I have to grab my foot. | ||
| If I go into Mission Control, I have to grab my heel and pull it down. | ||
| I'm kind of flexible in that regard, but nothing like him. | ||
| He can do it all without even holding on to his feet. | ||
| He can just move his legs in certain ways. | ||
| And he's nothing compared to some of his other guys, like Richie Martinez. | ||
| Oh yeah, very flexible. | ||
| He's crazy flexible, because these guys were all elite breakdancers. | ||
| And they could do, like, where they would stand, they would do handstands, and then they would put their legs into a lotus position in a handstand and hop around on the handstand with their legs crisscrossed above their head. | ||
| Like, what the fuck are you doing? | ||
| Like, how are you doing that? | ||
| So here's Hoyler's leg. | ||
| It's tough to find in a good video. | ||
| This is Robin Black's breakdown of it. | ||
| Oh, perfect. | ||
| Robin is awesome. | ||
| So there it is. | ||
| And, dude, I was standing there watching this while it's happening, and his, like, right there, his leg is going sideways. | ||
| I mean, it is getting fucking destroyed. | ||
| And he's just tolerating it, man. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| If you've ever been put in this position, it is horrible. | ||
| It's so bad for you. | ||
| And he's like, no, fine. | ||
| This is what he's saying. | ||
| You see Hoyle go, that's fine, that's fine. | ||
| Look how bad that is, man. | ||
| Oh, he flinched. | ||
| I mean, he was in fucking agony. | ||
| I mean, if you know how nasty that is, and you see Eddie do that to Hoyler and the fact that Hoyler didn't tap, that's a tough man. | ||
| Eddie looked great for that. | ||
| He looked in great shape. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Put a lot of prep into that one, hey. | ||
| Well, he realized this is his last go at it. | ||
| He was in his 30s, late 30s. | ||
| And he's like, okay, might be even older than that. | ||
| When was that? | ||
| What year was that? | ||
|
unidentified
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In 2014? | |
| That was so cool. | ||
| Metamorris for that. | ||
| I remember watching the first Metamorris, and when they dropped the trailer to announce that, I still remember Eddie being like, everybody said it was a fluke. | ||
| I was like, no fucking way. | ||
| They got this rematch booked. | ||
| I was huge for professional grappling at the time. | ||
| Yeah, it was crazy. | ||
| And it was huge for Eddie, because he didn't just beat him. | ||
| And I mean, they made it a draw, whatever. | ||
| He dominated every aspect of that fight. | ||
| And he talked through it when we watched the match. | ||
| We watched it on the podcast and he talked through it. | ||
| And he goes, here he thinks he's doing better. | ||
| He goes, I let him do that so I can adjust and get back to a better position. | ||
| I'll let him get on top of me. | ||
| And everybody cheered. | ||
| He's like, he didn't do that. | ||
| I did that. | ||
| And then he moved back to where he was before. | ||
| But with these pants on, when he's got pants on and he's attacking legs, you can't just get out of it, you know? | ||
| Like, that's always been the issue with gi jiu-jitsu. | ||
| I think it's one of the reasons why they've had heel hooks and IBJJ. Like, they've kept it out. | ||
| They're allowed now, though, right? | ||
| They just allowed them for, yeah, 20... | ||
| I believe some stage during 2020, they allowed them in no gi. | ||
| They finally added them, yeah. | ||
| But not gi? | ||
| Not gi, no. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| It goes both ways in the gi because although there's so much friction and you can easily pop a guy's leg, they can also reach back and hold onto your sleeve. | ||
| So when you're trying to twist, they can hang onto the sleeve and take a bit of the mobility out of it. | ||
| But would you think that it's easier to get somebody with the gi pants on? | ||
| I would say once you've got it, it's easier. | ||
| But just based on the nature of how people pass in the gi, they can use more distance passing. | ||
| It might be easier to stay safe. | ||
| But again, like you said, once you're in there, the amount of friction, like even when I roll with 10th Planet guys and they're wearing gi pants, it's always a nightmare when they put me in half guard. | ||
| I want that sweat to slip out of there a little bit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you train in the gi at all? | ||
| I took the gi off when I got to Black Belt just because I wasn't as good in the gi, first and foremost. | ||
| And I saw the way the sport was going. | ||
| I saw, like, gi was becoming ultra-specialized. | ||
| No gi was becoming ultra-specialized. | ||
| And I always say, it's better to be good at one than shit at both. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You should probably put your attention to one of those arts. | ||
| It's always fascinating to me how some people, for the longest time, thought that to compete in no-gi, you had to train in the gi. | ||
| I really didn't understand the logic. | ||
| It was very strange. | ||
| Yeah, crazy. | ||
| I mean, people, even MMA fighters are trained in the gi. | ||
| I'm like, you can train in the gi for fun, but that's not going to fucking help you at all. | ||
| It was like saying you have to play ping-pong if you want to get good at tennis. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| You're kind of doing a different thing. | ||
| You could use that energy for so much more useful things, really. | ||
| Don't train the key. | ||
| Learn how to wrestle. | ||
| But, I mean, Gordon talked about it the last time I had him on the podcast. | ||
| It seems like that argument has kind of gone away. | ||
| The argument used to be that it's better to train in the gi for no gi. | ||
| But now, you don't hear that argument at all anymore. | ||
| Everybody who's an elite no gi grappler essentially trains in the gi, or trains with no gi. | ||
| For sure, because I think if we go historically and we look at the ADCC champions, they were mostly gi guys. | ||
| But that's because there was no avenue for no gi competition. | ||
| So there were very few no gi only guys. | ||
| So all the champions in the Gi, every second year would just be like, we'll take the Gi off, we'll do ADCC. And because that population was so much bigger, the talent was so much bigger, they could easily translate to no Gi. | ||
| But as no Gi grew, again, thanks to things like Meta Morris and Eddie Bravo, and even like Submission Underground, obviously who's number one today, guys saw an avenue where they could do no Gi all the time. | ||
| And then now we see that really it's like the Gi's not really going to help you in no Gi at all. | ||
| No, well, Eddie learned from John-Jacques Machado, right? | ||
| And John-Jacques Machado only has one hand. | ||
| And because John-Jacques had one hand, his jiu-jitsu is never based on holding on to collars and sleeves. | ||
| His jiu-jitsu is more like Greco-Roman underhooks and overhooks and things along those lines. | ||
| So when he went over to Abu Dhabi... | ||
| His game immediately transitioned. | ||
| You watch when he competed against Kao Uno and Sakurai. | ||
| He just dominated those guys because he was already using no gi all the time because of the fact that he was born with one hand. | ||
| Yeah, beautiful butterfly guard switch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I still remember watching Jean-Jacques back in the day being so impressed with how he would play guard. | ||
| It would be a very innovative way to play guard. | ||
| Yeah, he was one of the first guys that went over to Abu Dhabi that was finishing everybody and just showing everybody that his jiu-jitsu directly applies. | ||
| Some guys would come over and they'd compete in the UFC and they would be these elite jiu-jitsu guys, but you take away their gi and they lost like 50-60% of their game because they couldn't grab collars and everybody was slippery and then their takedowns weren't that good. | ||
| The cage, you could use the cage and the cage blocking certain things there. | ||
| That's a big difference. | ||
| It's crazy how far ADCC's come from those days to today. | ||
| Yeah, like the guy that runs at Mojasim, he's put a lot of money in to try to really give it an elite-level status in sports and stuff. | ||
| But it's also such a crazy event, because obviously UFC has drug testing and stuff. | ||
| You see some of the most jacked guys coming in and competing in these events. | ||
| There's no drug testing at all, right? | ||
| No drug testing. | ||
| I keep trying to get Moe. | ||
| I'm like, Moe, at the rules meeting, can you please just stand in front of everyone and be like, I would like to announce we are drug testing this year, just to see the crowd reactions. | ||
| Could you imagine that? | ||
| Someone would be like, I have my knee. | ||
| Can you imagine if they did that? | ||
| It would be hilarious, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Everybody would fall out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, literally, it would be like 80% of the lineup. | ||
| Some of the dudes, they're so big. | ||
| I mean, see, can we get a picture of a guy called Muhammad Ali? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's his name? | ||
| Muhammad Ali, but it's spelled different. | ||
| The last name's spelled A-L-Y. When you see this guy for ADCC, it's like 265 abs, just terrifying looking human being. | ||
| I'm not speculating here, but I mean... | ||
| But you are. | ||
| Some of the shape. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you guys train, and I know that there's, you know, John teaches mixed martial arts classes and he teaches grappling classes. | ||
| Are you doing any strength and conditioning to supplement your grappling? | ||
| Do you do anything else? | ||
| I do, but I just do it like, I do it for injury prevention mainly. | ||
| Look at that guy. | ||
| Yeah, so this guy was in there. | ||
| It looks a little saucy. | ||
| Crazy stacked. | ||
| I do strength and conditioning for injury prevention, but obviously if you've seen some of the guys on my team, like we've got Nicky Rod, even Nicky Ryan, Ethan, even Gordon. | ||
| These guys are doing some crazy bodybuilding workouts. | ||
| And I'm like, I'm not sure the sports science behind it, but I know they just want to look fucking jacked. | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| They want to look jacked? | ||
| Yeah, they love it, man. | ||
|
unidentified
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They love it. | |
| Nicky Rod loves it. | ||
| Any chance he gets shirts off, flexing, you know what I mean? | ||
| And I've seen the workouts, and they are kind of bodybuilding workouts, too. | ||
| Nicky Rhodes, so when he takes guys in the gym, he's like, don't worry about technique, just get it up. | ||
| Just get the weight up. | ||
| 100 reps. | ||
| What? | ||
| I love it, though. | ||
| That's that Jersey character. | ||
| No warm-up either? | ||
| No warm-up? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| I wonder if the other guys warm up. | ||
| Gordon's pretty banged up. | ||
| Gary's obviously pretty banged up, so I would imagine those guys do warm-ups. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, how could he not be banged up when you're training seven days a week for years? | ||
| Yeah, you're right. | ||
| I mean, Gary's definitely paid a price. | ||
| I sometimes wonder if he transitioned to MMA just because it would be easier on the body. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| MMA's easier. | ||
| I mean, easier in certain respects, you know what I mean, like on the joints and stuff. | ||
| Like, there's so much load on the body just doing that every day. | ||
| How banged up is Gary? | ||
| Like, what's banged up about him? | ||
| His neck's banged up. | ||
| I believe he had some stem cells in the neck and stuff. | ||
| Like, what's funny is he's had those crazy armbar escapes. | ||
| And he told me that, like, you remember the Krone Gracie where he slipped out of the armbar? | ||
| I'm trying to think he had another match. | ||
| EBI overtime, even Vinny on the arm, he was able to slip out with ease. | ||
| But he was telling me that... | ||
| The time he injured his elbow the worst was when he was rolling gently with a girl that was visiting the blue basement and he gave her an armbar and she just ripped it on him. | ||
| All these crazy moments in comp where he just almost looks like he's going to let his arm break and he was telling me that was the one that got him. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Some badass girl out there. | ||
| Got Gary's arm on her wall as a trophy. | ||
| I wonder if she even knows. | ||
| She knows now, man. | ||
| Yeah, I was going to say, she knows now. | ||
| That was me. | ||
| So, but he's doing, is he doing those kind of bodybuilding workouts as well? | ||
| Gary, no, Gary. | ||
| Gary, I'm not sure what he does in terms of workouts. | ||
| I think he does a lot of bodyweight style stuff. | ||
| But yeah, the other guys, man, I've done some workouts and watched them do workouts, and I'm just like, man, jiu-jitsu's bad enough on the body, let alone we throw in bodybuilding-style workouts as well. | ||
| Like, I don't want the wheels to fall off after this career too soon, you know? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I wonder, like, how do you find the line between too much and not enough? | ||
| And I would say the same thing to you, because, like, obviously your coaching staff, they've got it boiled down to a science. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But how do you know when it's too much? | ||
| How do you know when you're being lazy versus how do you know when you're overtraining, when you're going too far and you're not giving your joints and your muscles and everything a chance to recover? | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| Well, I guess it comes down to the people with the knowledge as well. | ||
| And what works. | ||
| Like, you know what I mean? | ||
| Right now, it's working for me, so I'm happy with what we're doing. | ||
| But, yeah, I just trust the guys. | ||
| Just trust. | ||
| Yeah, that's how I am. | ||
| Well, that's what's great about having such a professional camp with high-level guys and world champions. | ||
| I'll be honest, and this shows you, like, when I'm overseas, you know, say I'm in a city kickboxing, and we're training there, so we're busting our ass doing that, but I don't have my team that I do, like, Baymeda Performance, where I go do my strength and conditioning and my physio and all that, and they look after me. | ||
| My body, like, recovery and all that's way worse in New Zealand. | ||
| Because I'm doing the maintenance and even the strength and conditioning and things like that, when I'm in Australia, where my body, my recovery, everything, I feel like my body doesn't lock up nowhere near as much as it would when I'm away, where I don't really have that treatment. | ||
| Where I will, I'll wait until I'm like... | ||
| I can't move or I'm going to go see someone. | ||
| Where I'm just constantly, you know, even the strength and conditioning we do, it's more about injury prevention and obviously getting your strong as well. | ||
| But I mean, at the same time, they can't give me a bodybuilding exercise, like, you know, sort of session when I've got to go bust my ass in the MMA training, like, you know, the next hour. | ||
| So it's all, you know, it's all got to work together. | ||
| So again, they, the guys at Baymed, they make sure that I'm getting what I need to keep me strong and keep my body moving right, but I can still do all my MMA, my striking, my wrestling. | ||
| Because if they bust my ass, and I'm doing the workouts we're doing, it's just too much. | ||
| Are you guys in Puerto Rico, do you have a good massage therapist? | ||
| Do you have physical therapy there? | ||
| No, nothing like that. | ||
| Hey, nothing. | ||
| I have to drive 25 minutes to hit this gym, this hard body gym. | ||
| It's like it's from the 80s or something. | ||
| That's where I go lift weights when I'm down there. | ||
| That's why I'm trying to push these guys to move to Austin. | ||
| Mate, you should see him do his workouts, eh? | ||
| Each rep on his phone. | ||
| We're going to recover. | ||
| We're going to recover in between sets, eh? | ||
| A lot of people think that weightlifting, that that's how you should do it for strength. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| There's a lot of different schools of thought, but Pavel Tatsulin, you know, the guy from Russia, the godfather of kettlebells, He believes that you should never, when you train, you should never go to failure and that you should have long periods of rest in between sets. | ||
| And I was like, well, how long? | ||
| He's like, 10 minutes. | ||
| I said, 10 minutes? | ||
| Oh yeah, long ass fucking workouts. | ||
| Like you're eating in the middle of your workout because you're hungry. | ||
| Is this like every session? | ||
| He just thinks strength is a skill. | ||
| And the idea is you should only do that skill when you're recovered. | ||
| Think about it this way. | ||
| Again, I'm not necessarily saying that he's correct, but I work out this way a lot when I lift weights, when I'm not working with a trainer. | ||
| My trainer doesn't let me do this kind of shit, but when I work out by myself, I take these big-ass fucking times. | ||
| I watch a fight. | ||
| I watch a whole fight in between sets. | ||
| This is when you're doing strength though, yeah? | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| If I'm doing like cleans with like a heavy kettlebell, like a 90-pound kettlebell or something like that, if I can do 10, I don't do 10, I do 5, and then I sit it down, and then I wait a long ass time, and then I do another 5, and then I wait a long ass time, and then I'll do another 5, and then a long ass time, And that way, I'm getting every rep, I'm not exhausted. | ||
| Whereas if I was doing a set of ten, and I could only do like two sets of ten, and then I'm fucking broken down, and the third set I could only get to like five or six, and then I'm like completely exhausted. | ||
| Well, then I would have done 26 reps, but I've done 26 reps where the last ones are kind of shitty and my muscles are all blown out. | ||
| The other way, I might do five sets of five. | ||
| I'm doing 25 reps, but every one of them is... | ||
| Like full, clean, clear, like great technique, not exhausted. | ||
| Getting you stronger. | ||
| And your muscles don't, they don't feel as tired the next day. | ||
| Like you're not as beat up. | ||
| Like going to failure, and many people believe 100% in going to failure, and that that's the only way to do it. | ||
| And again, I'm not, by any stretch of the imagination, a weightlifting expert. | ||
| But Pavel's, his recommendation is never go to failure and do big breaks in between the sets and stretch out your weightlifting sessions and think of it as a skill. | ||
| Don't think of it as trying to wear yourself out. | ||
| Think of it as getting stronger. | ||
| And another guy who follows that is Farah Sahabi. | ||
| Farah Sahabi believes in that as well. | ||
| That's his philosophy when he comes to it. | ||
| So it goes with different chains as well, doesn't it? | ||
| So that's how we do a lot of our sessions. | ||
| We've got some that we're just real power-based. | ||
| So we've got lactic sessions and more power-based. | ||
| They change. | ||
| They're all different chains. | ||
| So there's some where... | ||
| We've got big rest in between and I'm just like, fuck, I'm ready for the next rep. | ||
| But I'm like, no, we've got to wait because we want you to give 100%. | ||
| And we do that a lot with our sessions. | ||
| Especially, like you said, you work in strength and you want to get strong and more explosive. | ||
| So we want every single rep to be 100%. | ||
| When we're going 80, how are we going to get stronger? | ||
| The reps go down, you're not doing them properly or you've got to go lower weight. | ||
| Well, it's the same as when I noticed, especially this camp. | ||
| I recovered better in between my sessions and I absolutely fucking smashed my high sessions. | ||
| And it got me fitter because I was able to go harder in them sessions. | ||
| So I pushed my body to even a higher limit because my body could. | ||
| But then I just noticed that this is the fittest I've ever been for this last camp that I had. | ||
| And purely because I think it was the rest in between. | ||
| I honestly felt like my fitness was on a whole nother level. | ||
| And I was getting through some of these sessions that were like, oh fuck. | ||
| Where I was just absolutely smashing it the next week. | ||
| Like, I could do another round of it, you know what I mean? | ||
| It was like, add another round on top of this fucking thing, I'm ready to go. | ||
| Because the recovery was just on point. | ||
| Well, it's such a big part of your arsenal, too, is your ability to push a pace. | ||
| I mean, the Holloway fight's a great example of that, especially the first one. | ||
| I mean, you just... | ||
| Your pace is so ferocious, and you can keep that up for 25 minutes where you're never fading. | ||
| It's so giant, man. | ||
| The difference between a guy who fades and a guy who doesn't fade, it's so big. | ||
| Because so many guys, especially when you see guys that are coming up in the ranks, they're kind of contenders, they're doing really well. | ||
| You'll see them do real well in a fight for the first two rounds, and then you'll see a substantial drop-off in the third round. | ||
| And that seems to be the difference between the really elite guys. | ||
| And I know a lot of it is energy management for sure, but a lot of it is just that work that you do in the gym to make sure that you can push that crazy pace. | ||
| Well, like you said, you want to be able to hold that energy, but then you've got sessions like your sparring and all that type of stuff where you can do that. | ||
| You need to have sessions that's going to get you ready for a fucking war. | ||
| And that's what we do. | ||
| I don't want to experience an uncomfortable feeling in the fight. | ||
| I'm going to experience it in the fucking camp. | ||
| I'm going to go to literally... | ||
| I get nervous. | ||
| As I say, I get nervous for some of my sessions. | ||
| I get more nervous for my sessions than I do for my fight. | ||
| Because I know I'm going to... | ||
| I know I'm getting fucked up in this. | ||
| I'm going to be very, very uncomfortable, but I accept that. | ||
| We do sessions where you are going to breaking point, but I've learned to just accept that. | ||
| From being in those positions, I get tired, but I don't tell myself you're getting tired. | ||
| I've fucking done much worse in training. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| So I'm just going to pick up the pace again. | ||
| So I literally, we do that in some of these sessions where, I'll be honest, a lot of people don't. | ||
| There's sessions that we were doing in our, sort of like during the tough series and that, and I don't know if they're probably like, fuck, you know what I mean? | ||
| I'm like, mate, like... | ||
| I'll do another two or three of these types of sessions. | ||
| I'll just bring one for you guys, you know what I mean? | ||
| And I'm like, man, a lot of people just won't go to that. | ||
| Obviously, some of them aren't full-time fighters and whatnot, but again, I want to be... | ||
| I'm expecting to go out there and the fight not be that hard, but I'm going to be prepared for however hard it gets. | ||
| That's a thing too about being a part of an elite camp, right? | ||
| Everyone knows that they're going to do that and everyone knows how to do that. | ||
| They know how to push literally past your limit. | ||
| Whereas you see guys where they're kind of the king of their domain and they run the whole camp and they're kind of in control of everything. | ||
| It's very hard to force yourself to go through hell. | ||
| You know, some people can do it, but you really kind of want a bunch of people going through hell with you, and you want someone who's the general. | ||
| You can't have yes, man, and just be like, oh, yeah, I'm just going to chill, and you just chill the whole way through. | ||
| You can have guys go, no, fucking get it, and get that session done. | ||
| When Conor fought Dustin Poirier the last time, one of my friends was watching one of the interviews where they were talking about how Conor can basically just train himself now, and my friend goes, the fuck he can. | ||
| That ain't good. | ||
| I don't know what caused it. | ||
| I'm of the belief that it's the low calf kick that was the big issue in that fight. | ||
| His leg gave out, and then when his leg gave out, he kind of knew he was fucked. | ||
| It definitely was the calf kick. | ||
| But you can see in a lot of his fights where you're going to start. | ||
| But again, he's very fast twitch. | ||
| And he's an opportunist. | ||
| If there's a shot there, he's throwing that fucking punch as hard as he can. | ||
| But you're fast twitched too. | ||
| Yeah, look, I guess... | ||
| That's what's different. | ||
| It's like, you don't get tired like that. | ||
| That's one thing that I must just have, like, the... | ||
| But, I mean, if you look at, like, when it comes to explosiveness, there's guys that are a lot more explosive than me. | ||
| I feel like I've got this really good balance. | ||
| Middle ground. | ||
| Yeah, this middle ground where I've got that cardio, but I've got the explosiveness. | ||
| You know, I don't know what it is. | ||
| And maybe, obviously, the training, you know, Mike, with Joe Lopez, the way, like, we've been training, he's always put me in, like, these sort of positions. | ||
| As I said, like, you know, being... | ||
| Uncomfortable and all that. | ||
| You're pushing the pace and all that. | ||
| So I've always had that anyway. | ||
| But I mean, I feel like there's a lot of things for me that made it work. | ||
| A lot of different things. | ||
| Obviously, there's a lot that comes into training and all that. | ||
| But even maybe my build or maybe just through life, the way I did things and maybe I built that type of... | ||
| Cardio or, you know, fast twitch, I don't know, but there's a lot of things that come into play that make me be able to do what I do. | ||
| Do you think part of it has to do with the rugby background because there's so much running involved in rugby? | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| Could be for cardio, could have been a benefit? | ||
| Maybe, again, it's headspace as well. | ||
| Like, on the type of guy that... | ||
| I can chill. | ||
| When you're playing rugby league, you can go take a run and then just chill. | ||
| I don't fucking chill. | ||
| I'm the type of guy, if we're in our 10-meter line, give me the fucking ball. | ||
| I'm going to run it. | ||
| Someone else runs it, give me the fucking ball again. | ||
| That's just how I am. | ||
| That's how I've always been. | ||
| Where I just feel like some people, I'll just chill for a bit. | ||
| I just wouldn't do that. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Now, when you see a guy who does get tired early, like a guy who's real fast-twitched and explosive and get tired early, do you ever think, is it just a cardio issue, like they haven't pushed themselves hard enough? | ||
| Do you think it's an energy management issue? | ||
| Is it a combination of things? | ||
| Maybe a combination of things. | ||
| Again, if you're always trying to be in a position where you're comfortable and all that type of stuff, as soon as it gets uncomfortable, you're not thinking right, you're struggling, you're like, oh no, you're starting to doubt yourself. | ||
| Again, that's why we put ourselves in that sort of position. | ||
| I notice it, especially when you're fighting or even sparring. | ||
| Everyone's fucking good for the first minute. | ||
| They're on point. | ||
| They're eager. | ||
| You can't slip up for a second because they're ready to pull the trigger. | ||
| One minute goes by. | ||
| Next minute, they're looking for a, you know, give me a second to reset it. | ||
| I'm like, I ain't giving you fucking shit. | ||
| I'm in your face. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| And you just seem crumbled. | ||
| But early, I can't do that. | ||
| I have to... | ||
| Yeah, wear them out and then be on them and then you just start to see like their reactions from the first minute to even the second, completely different. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And just be like, thank you. | ||
| Doesn't it seem like that should be doctrine? | ||
| Like that should be understood in every camp. | ||
| I wish I didn't fucking say it. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Here's the thing, I think you can say it and I don't think it matters. | ||
| Because I think it's a will issue. | ||
| Like some people just don't have the will to push themselves in that way. | ||
| Or maybe they don't think they have to or maybe they're deluding themselves and they think they're pushing themselves harder than they really are. | ||
| Like maybe, like if someone like Connor came and trained with you and saw how you prepare, maybe you'd be like, oh fuck. | ||
| Like obviously the guy's super fucking talented. | ||
| Obviously, he rises to the occasion. | ||
| Obviously, he handles pressure as good as anybody alive. | ||
| But there have been moments in his fights where he's faded. | ||
| And not faded like a world champion. | ||
| Faded like a guy who's got a flaw. | ||
| Like, you've got a hole in his game. | ||
| Like, you would expect world championship caliber fighters to be at the elite of the elite. | ||
| Their energy management's on point. | ||
| Everything's on point. | ||
| Cardio's on point. | ||
| The training camp's on point. | ||
| Unless there's an injury and there's some sort of a, you know, pre-existing problem... | ||
| They shouldn't have those energy management issues. | ||
| Again, he's fast twitch and he goes for the kill. | ||
| So if you throw a jab and he sees an opening, he's got a good eye, he's going to fucking pull that trigger. | ||
| And when you know you've got a hard workout, maybe I'm not pulling the trigger. | ||
| When I'm sparring, I'm not pulling the trigger because I don't want to knock out my trainer partner. | ||
| But I mean, once I'm fighting, I am literally throwing everything in this fucking punch. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the opportunity, like, you know, again, I'm in his face because he's the type of fighter he gets in your face, makes you panic punch and just capitalizes every time. | ||
| So he wants to be there in the heat of, you know, he wants to be in the fire because he knows people are going to make bad decisions and he capitalizes on it. | ||
| But I mean, again, that's putting himself in a position where he needs to go a lot harder, especially when he's trying to go for the kill at the same time. | ||
| Maybe there's a balance that he needs to, I don't know what it is, but Again, but going back to when we're talking about adversities in the gym and all that type of stuff, that's why I love this sport so much. | ||
| I feel like there's a lot of gyms, obviously. | ||
| That's just how they are. | ||
| It goes discipline and all that. | ||
| All these great life skills that we take out of it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And the adversities are... | ||
| That you do in our gym and what I've always done with freestyle and even city kickboxing, I feel like that just helps when you're under the pressure outside of MMA or whatever. | ||
| You just deal with things a lot better just because, again, you've been in uncomfortable positions and you've had to adapt. | ||
| And be able to move forward and look forward. | ||
| And, you know, again, you see that with a lot of people that, you know, they're good under pressure and all that type of stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
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And then you get people that aren't and can't. | |
| That's really one of the best things about martial arts as it applies to life, is that it makes regular life easy. | ||
| You know, even just jujitsu, you know, without the kickboxing and the striking and all that stuff, just the struggle of jujitsu, for the most part, is so much more difficult than the struggle of everyday life. | ||
| It makes everyday life seem kind of relaxing. | ||
| Like, problems seem minuscule in comparison to, I'm sure, like having Gordon Ryan on your back. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| I mean, that's the way we train for the rolling portion is we'll basically do 60 minutes straight with no rest, but we always do bad positions first. | ||
| So your first round of the day is under mount. | ||
| Then we'll go turtle, close guard, potentially even start on an armbar for that fourth round. | ||
| So in terms of like, we can't hide. | ||
| Like when I used to train in Australia and I was one of the better guys in the gym, I would never be in bad positions. | ||
| And then in competition, if someone put me there, I'd freak out. | ||
| I'd either get out and be tired or I wouldn't get out. | ||
| And then training with John, training with these guys, I'd be forced to do bad positions every day. | ||
| So then because we're doing back to back to back rounds, you can't use explosiveness to get out. | ||
| You have to use efficient movement. | ||
| So it forced me to really become an expert at how to stay calm in those bad positions and use technique to get out. | ||
| Because again, what's the use of getting out if you've got no energy afterwards? | ||
| Yeah, that seems to be one of the most important things about jujitsu is your defense. | ||
| And it's one of the things that people neglect. | ||
| And one of the things that Hickson always emphasized, like Hickson, who's always considered one of the greatest of all time, if not the greatest, when you would talk to him, he would always say, it's all about defense. | ||
| Like he goes, in any position, I remember talking to him about this, he goes, I am safe. | ||
| He goes, if he has my back, I'm safe. | ||
|
unidentified
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If I'm mounted, I'm safe. | |
| He goes, I'm always safe. | ||
| And then it's always, he's like, we start from a neutral position, and then, I'll never forget this, it was kind of spooky, because you know how good Hickson is. | ||
| I can listen to a guy who is just dominant over everyone that he competed against, and all the people he trained with. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He goes, I move from zero to number one, and when I go from number one, I'm going to two, and I'm not going back to one. | |
| And I'm going to checkmate. | ||
| And the way he's explaining it, like, super intense about his, like, his philosophy about just having perfect position and perfect technique. | ||
| And his thing was always have excellent defense. | ||
| You could never just rely only on offense. | ||
| And we've all seen guys like that that have this fantastic offense, but then they get stuck in a bad situation. | ||
| You see them flail and spaz and, you know, explode and they get tired and then they wind up getting caught. | ||
| Well, good defense gives you the confidence to be more offensive. | ||
| It's probably like with an MMA. If you know if that guy takes you down, the fight's over. | ||
| You're probably going to be pretty nervous and not be as offensive. | ||
| Whereas if you know you're going to get back up if he puts you down, it probably gives you more ability and confidence in your striking. | ||
| It opens up strikes for grapplers in a way that, like, one of the great examples is Kevin Randall when he fought Mirko Krokop. | ||
| Because Mirko Krokop at the time was, and still is, one of the most legendary strikers to ever compete in MMA. Just terrifying kickboxer. | ||
| But Randleman had him so scared of the takedown, he faked a shot and hit him with a left hook and knocked him out. | ||
| You know, dropped him and then finished him off. | ||
| Heavy knockout, too. | ||
| Yeah, heavy. | ||
| Well, Randleman was a fucking powerhouse, man. | ||
| He also had the worst staph infection I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| Oh, the hole here. | ||
| Oh, Mike, that was bad. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| It was literally like he had an armpit on the side of his body where you could look in and see all the muscles, you could see all the tissue, everything. | ||
|
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Horrible. | |
| Steph's no joke. | ||
| That's the worst part of this sport. | ||
| I've had some decent holes in me from Steph, to be honest. | ||
| I remember having a big hole in my arm. | ||
| I've had some nasty ones as well. | ||
| Not like that, not like a random one. | ||
| You guys use defense soap? | ||
| Do you use that stuff? | ||
| I should. | ||
| You don't have? | ||
| Dude. | ||
| I will bring some, because Guy Sacco sent some to my house the other day. | ||
| I got way more than I need. | ||
| You want some too? | ||
| Yeah, that'll be good. | ||
| Are you going to be at the matches? | ||
| No, we leave. | ||
| I tried to convince him to stay, but we couldn't do it. | ||
| I'll bring you a box of it, because he gives me a lot of it, because he's the nicest guy ever. | ||
| But that stuff is the shit. | ||
| Because it's all like natural tea tree oil and eucalyptus oil. | ||
| It's good for your skin. | ||
| It doesn't kill anything. | ||
| It just gives you a healthy environment for the skin. | ||
| So it's not like antibacterial where it kills all the good bacteria. | ||
| You can only use it for a certain amount of time because it's going to fuck you up. | ||
| It smells good. | ||
| It's good shit for you. | ||
| But it's like that and probiotics. | ||
| Probiotics are really important. | ||
| Acidophilus, giving your body healthy bacteria, things like kombucha, all those things. | ||
| Do you fuck around with any of that stuff? | ||
| I'm pretty fucking lazy, to be honest. | ||
| I should get onto it, eh? | ||
| It's fucking in-and-out burger. | ||
| When a guy trains seven days a week, he's literally one of the top three best grapplers on planet Earth, and you say how lazy you are, it's kind of hilarious. | ||
| He's fucking in-and-out burger every fucking meal. | ||
| Take away food. | ||
| It's tempting, yeah. | ||
| How much better do you think you'd be if you didn't... | ||
| I asked the same question to Gary back in the day. | ||
| Because Gary Tonin, when he was on my podcast years ago, he had a similarly shitty diet. | ||
| I mean, it's not terrible, but... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know what the bridge would be, how much better I would be. | ||
| I feel like quite often when I lose, it's never because they're stronger, faster, or in better fitness. | ||
| It's usually almost like, no, I fucked up with this particular move. | ||
| So I think the fact that I focus on the technique probably distracts me from other reasons that I could be losing particular matches. | ||
| So your body is in good enough shape so you can execute. | ||
| It's just mistakes. | ||
| Even now, I'm pretty lazy. | ||
| When I take a match, I don't even care what weight division it is. | ||
| I'd rather face someone bigger than cut weight. | ||
| I'd rather avoid cutting weight. | ||
| I'll cut weight for ADCC, but other than that, I'm just like, just give me a bigger guy. | ||
| I'd rather a bigger guy than starve myself. | ||
| Well, it makes sense when it doesn't come down to striking. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, for sure. | ||
| That's a luxury grapplers have. | ||
| Yeah, when you look at a guy like Francis Ngannou, you're like, I think I can lose some weight. | ||
| I think I can definitely lose some weight. | ||
| Fuck away from that guy. | ||
| We'll see how he goes, because he had me cooking meals for him the last five weeks. | ||
| He was cooking healthy, cooking healthy meals. | ||
| Yeah, you can cook, man. | ||
| I watched some of your videos. | ||
| You're a real cook. | ||
| I love cooking, yeah. | ||
| We had a couple of hits that they liked, so I just kept those on repeat almost every week, but... | ||
| I was even on the show cooking for everyone. | ||
| You're going to have to wait and see. | ||
| I love my barbecue. | ||
| I love my steaks and that as well. | ||
| One thing I do want to get some of the meats you guys have over elk. | ||
| We don't have that back home. | ||
| But in New Zealand, there's a lot of wild stag and a lot of wild animals. | ||
| They've got elks over there too. | ||
| Yes, they do. | ||
| Farmed elks over there. | ||
| Yeah, but you should go get it yourself. | ||
| Yeah, that's 100%, but that's what I like to do. | ||
| Kangaroo. | ||
| Hey. | ||
| Kangaroo meat's pretty healthy too, right? | ||
| It is, yeah, high in protein. | ||
| I've never had kangaroo, but I've had ostrich. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, there's a place called Fuddruckers, a cheeseburger place, and me and Eddie Bravo, we used to lift weights at 24 Hour Fitness, and we'd go get Fuddrucker ostrich burgers. | ||
| Mate, the kangabangers are good. | ||
| They're good, man. | ||
| Kangaroo. | ||
| Kangaroo's good? | ||
| Kangaroo sausages. | ||
| Kangabangers, we call them. | ||
| Oh, kangabangers. | ||
| You could probably get kangaroo here, right? | ||
| I reckon you could. | ||
| We've got that many of them in Australia. | ||
| There's a lot. | ||
| Yeah, it seems like there's a lot. | ||
| I watched a video once of, like, it looked like thousands of them running across a field. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Mate, like, you go, you start going out west and, like, just every 10, 15 meters on the side of the road, like, obviously, I mean, being hit by cars. | ||
| There's a lot of damage to cars, deaths and everything from just driving on roads and kangaroos. | ||
| Like, a lot. | ||
| And don't they have people go out and try to lower the numbers? | ||
| People hired by the country? | ||
| And that's with a lot of animals in Australia. | ||
| Koalas too, right? | ||
| Do they call koalas? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Oh, shit! | ||
| I didn't know about that. | ||
| Those little sweeties? | ||
| I think so, yeah. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| Koalas? | ||
| I hope not. | ||
| I think koalas are very limited because they have an extremely limited diet. | ||
| I think they only eat eucalyptus. | ||
| I think that's all they eat. | ||
| Yep, yeah. | ||
| Don't they have like a hepatitis? | ||
| Chlamydia. | ||
| Koalas have chlamydia, yeah. | ||
| How does people find that out? | ||
| But maybe that's why. | ||
| Are they keeping numbers down for that? | ||
| Found out the hard way. | ||
| I think koalas only eat eucalyptus. | ||
| Eucalyptus, yeah. | ||
| That's why they hang around. | ||
| They're always high. | ||
| Eyes are just glassy and red as fuck. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Eucalyptus gets you high? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| That's what I've been told. | ||
| We're just spreading a lot of misinformation on this show. | ||
| That makes some crazy noises, koalas. | ||
| I think so, though. | ||
| Yeah, they sound like a demon or something. | ||
| Hey, it's actually a scary noise. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| If you're out in the woods. | ||
| This is mainly. | ||
| Oh, mainly? | ||
| What else to eat? | ||
| Pussy? | ||
| Hey! | ||
| Chlamydia, dirty pussy. | ||
| But I don't think they call them, though. | ||
| It also says they're extremely picky with their food, but will occasionally branch out. | ||
| Maybe if they can't find any more eucalyptus. | ||
| Yeah, like they just hang out in eucalyptus trees. | ||
| That's pretty much it. | ||
| That's why I'm surprised they ate anything else. | ||
| I don't think they're... | ||
| They're not overpopulated, though. | ||
| I don't think they would call them. | ||
| Oh, so they... | ||
| That's what I was looking at before that. | ||
| They did... | ||
| Fuckin' hell, really? | ||
| Fuckin' a hundred years ago though. | ||
| Alright, I'm a bit late on that. | ||
| 800,000 were killed to send for the United States. | ||
| Oh my god, that's nuts! | ||
| Culling was banned in New South Wales, South Australia, and Victoria in the early 1900s, but continued until 1927 in Queensland. | ||
| It was eventually banned after a massive public backlash. | ||
| Have you heard about the emu war? | ||
| The Australian military went to war with emus? | ||
| Yes, I did hear that. | ||
| We lost. | ||
| My friend Monty Franklin has a fucking great bit about it. | ||
| He's Australian, and he's got a great stand-up comedy bit about the emu war. | ||
| I told John Danaher about that, and he looked at me for probably 30 seconds silent before he went straight to Google. | ||
| Then he came back in the next day an expert on the emu war. | ||
| Knew every single fucking detail about it. | ||
| What is the deal in the emu war? | ||
| Why did they have to go to war with emus? | ||
| There were so many of them? | ||
| I think they were fucking up some crops somewhere, so they sent the military out there, but they couldn't kill them. | ||
| There's a lot of animals in Australia. | ||
| You go out west than that, where we are, and they're just everywhere. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, the thing about it is you have to get within, you know, what, 500 yards? | ||
| And they're birds. | ||
| Like, good luck. | ||
| Once they realize you're shooting them, they're going to get the fuck out of there. | ||
| And then you're chasing them. | ||
| So how are you chasing them? | ||
| Are you chasing them by plane? | ||
| Are you chasing them on a truck? | ||
| Like, are you going to shoot individual bullets at individual birds? | ||
| That's a long project. | ||
| This is not like a simple, easy-to-do project. | ||
| It's not like buffalo that just stand there. | ||
| The thing about when they extirpated buffalo from the plains, buffalo would just stand there. | ||
| They would drop around each other like, boom! | ||
| One would fall down, the other ones would just keep eating. | ||
| They're like, what the fuck's going on? | ||
| They didn't know what was happening. | ||
| I would imagine those emu, they get hip to that ship pretty quick. | ||
| Very quick, yeah. | ||
| Can you eat emus? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I believe so. | ||
| Yeah, I'm pretty sure we do. | ||
| They are like the coat of arms as well, the kangaroo and emu. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| People get so angry when you tell them you eat kangaroo. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, they don't like it because I guess it's such a sweet looking animal. | ||
| But they're vicious. | ||
| Choke each other and stuff. | ||
| Oh yeah, and they get jacked too. | ||
| Some of them are really jacked. | ||
| Yeah, they literally have... | ||
| They've got biceps and shit. | ||
| They've got a chest. | ||
| They come out and they staunch you like this. | ||
| Like, literally, have you seen the one? | ||
| There's one that you go on, like, I think it's a window, like, comes up to a house, and they're on the other side of the window, so the kangaroo can't see him, but he's seeing himself in the window, and he starts shaping up, just like, shoulder charging it like this, like, what, you want to fucking go like that? | ||
| Mate, huge, I mean huge. | ||
| Like, the big reds, big red kangaroos, massive. | ||
| Well, they kill people, right? | ||
| Well, mate, they supposedly get you, like, in a tight clench, And they stand on their tail, get their both legs and just smash your guts. | ||
| But sometimes they've got big claws. | ||
| I've been told they can rip you. | ||
| They've got that little chug too. | ||
| You see them choke each other out. | ||
| See them choke that dog out? | ||
| And the guy fights him? | ||
| If you had to go out, you've got to arm drag a kangaroo, right? | ||
| I would think arm drags the move. | ||
| They probably have no idea what to do if you get to their back. | ||
| They got that tail. | ||
| You know, the tail could stop you from passing. | ||
| You hang on to the tail. | ||
| I feel like you could get them. | ||
| It'd be tough to leg lock, that's for sure. | ||
| Very tough to leg lock, but I feel like they would have no idea. | ||
| You get one good arm drag, you get their back, and they're going to fucking flop around and try to figure out. | ||
| This would be a good question for John. | ||
| If you ask him about any battle between animals, he will just go. | ||
| Anytime I want training to start a little later. | ||
| Start studying their body shapes. | ||
| What is the deal with the big giant knives that he gives you guys when you get your black belt? | ||
| I don't know, to be honest. | ||
| But it is very cool. | ||
| Usually he gives us a knife if we've had a good performance or something. | ||
| Because he sort of sees us as the blade and he's sharpening us. | ||
| And that's sort of like a metaphor for that. | ||
| But yeah, it's very interesting, yeah. | ||
| How many knives do you have? | ||
| I think I've got three. | ||
| I've only got three. | ||
| So, obviously, some of the boys have got a lot more. | ||
| Gordon's probably got an arsenal at home. | ||
| It's got to be a trip to train with a guy like that who's, you know, Gordon's only 25 years old, and he's already known as the greatest ground fighter of all time. | ||
| Like, if you ask people, who's the greatest jiu-jitsu practitioner ever, Most people today that are in the know will say Gordon Ryan, which is crazy because he's 25 years old. | ||
| But if you look at his accomplishments, the guy hasn't lost in 39 fights. | ||
| Like, who the fuck can say that in grappling? | ||
| That's never happened. | ||
| Yeah, very, very crazy. | ||
| I mean, he just took it to another level of dominance. | ||
| There's been guys that have been dominant, like obviously Hodgie Gracie and stuff, but for the most part, a lot of the dominant grapplers didn't finish everyone. | ||
| And he just goes out and just finishes people. | ||
| But it's good for my confidence because even if I have a bad day in the gym with him, I'm like, well, it can't get any worse. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Right. | ||
| You're literally rolling with the goat. | ||
| Yeah, no one's going to do that to me. | ||
| Well, I hope. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you hope. | ||
|
unidentified
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I had my moments. | |
| Now, what is it like when you brought a guy like him in? | ||
| What were you thinking, bringing him in for camp? | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Good banter as well. | ||
| Obviously, knowledge. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| We knew that. | ||
| And I've trained with him a few times. | ||
| But I mean, we just knew he was over here as well. | ||
| So we hit him up. | ||
| We just thought it'd be good to have him on the show because again, we get along and the type of crowd, the crew we have has good banter and we're like shit-stirring each other and all that. | ||
| We knew he would fit well and he did. | ||
| So it was great. | ||
| It really was. | ||
| But I mean, training in that was good as well. | ||
| And I'm glad I did that because... | ||
| Just through the start, like, man, I'll tell you right now, I was averaging, he was submitting me, you know, once a minute. | ||
| That would have been my average. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| If I did 10 minute round, I was doing, I was getting fucking submitted 10 times once a minute. | ||
| Honestly. | ||
| And like, I'll be like, fuck, and now we're getting them numbers, we're getting them numbers lower. | ||
| So it's all right. | ||
| So thank you. | ||
| Between 195 and 200? | ||
| And you walk around at like 160s? | ||
| Yeah, 167, like right now. | ||
|
unidentified
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But yeah, when I first started the tough and that was about 165. Your game is so pressure and volume and a lot of striking. | |
| But one of the things that you showed in the Holloway fight is you can mix it up and grapple too. | ||
| Like a lot of people... | ||
| When you're approaching a fight and you have this real wide array of skills, How do you decide, like, do you do based on strategy and game plan before the fight, how to approach a specific fighter, or do you flow? | ||
| Do you feel it in the moment? | ||
| A lot of it's flow. | ||
| Obviously, the game plan goes a long way, but, I mean, you need to play what's in front of you as well. | ||
| Like, with that last fight, you had Max, who changed his whole... | ||
| Fucking, you know, he's been successful for a long time in this certain style. | ||
| And then he went to, we call him Muay Thai Max. | ||
| He went Muay Thai Max in the last fight, which we just did not expect him to change his whole game. | ||
| More upright, legs are closer together, and, you know, didn't care too much about getting out, you know, like making you miss and then countering. | ||
| It was more just, I'm going to let you run it. | ||
| Like, we did not expect that at all. | ||
| So you've got to make adjustments mid-fight as well. | ||
| But I mean, it's funny because you talk about people being well-rounded and all that, and that goes so far. | ||
| People can wrestle, grapple, the way you put it all together, using the right tool at the right time, the right tool for the right job. | ||
| And then again, just being able to use certain tools, even knowing that that tool ain't going to work, but I'm going to get him thinking about that tool and I'm going to use this tool and just constantly mixing it up. | ||
| So if I don't get them takedowns, I'm not too fussed because that's still a piece of the puzzle he's trying to figure out or he's committing to stopping that takedown. | ||
| Once he's committing, I capitalise somewhere else. | ||
| But that's somewhere where I feel like I could always take it. | ||
| Before, if you look at five fights ago, five, six fights ago, everyone just thought I was a wrestler grappler. | ||
| Now, people just think I'm just a striker. | ||
| From the last few fights, they just look at me as a striker. | ||
| But it just shows you where, obviously, we did a lot more training with City Kickboxing and that. | ||
| So I've always had that wrestling background and that gritty, hard-working sort of mentality. | ||
| We knew a lot about going to City and the fine details. | ||
| We had details on the wall and all that type of stuff. | ||
| But going over there and they have just some attention to detail with striking. | ||
| And you've seen it in my last fights where people don't even know I've got wrestling or grappling. | ||
| Now I'm fucking up for Craig Jones. | ||
| He is doing a lot better on the ground. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm glad. | |
| I don't need to grapple him anymore, so I'm just going to talk a heap of shit. | ||
| I want to see him and Ortega after the fire actually have a grappling match because people obviously ride very, very high on Ortega's grappling, but I think, yeah, very underrated. | ||
| I would love to see him. | ||
| Ortega's very good on the ground. | ||
| His submissions are... | ||
| There's something about his squeeze that's really phenomenal. | ||
| Like when he caught Cub Swanson, he almost got him at the end of the first round. | ||
| I think it was the first round that he got him in the second. | ||
| But at the end of whatever the round it was, he caught him in a darse, had it fully locked up, and it looked like it was going out. | ||
| And then the buzzer rang. | ||
| And then he caught him in a guillotine in the second round. | ||
| And it's just the details of the way he cinches it up. | ||
| And it's so tight and it's so precise. | ||
| And you can see his adjustments when it's not that... | ||
| Even when he had... | ||
| Was it Cub? | ||
| When he used the cage, even kicked off the cage and hopped up a little bit and got even more over the neck and then really sunk it. | ||
| So again, he knows where to put the head. | ||
| He knows how to get that head down and capitalize on that. | ||
| I was surprised though when he fought Max that he didn't get it to the ground or make substantial attempts to get it to the ground. | ||
| I was surprised. | ||
| I was surprised that he decided to fight a stand-up fight with him. | ||
| Well, he's the type of guy where he said it himself. | ||
| He goes, I don't need to wrestle. | ||
| Someone wants to take me down, I'm going to fuck them up with my jiu-jitsu. | ||
| It's a pretty bad mentality. | ||
| What if you need to, as you did in that fight, need to get it to the ground? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| The wrestling goes a long way. | ||
| There's a lot of control in wrestling, defensively and offensively. | ||
| So, you know, having that tool goes a long way. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think you can have any holes in your game at the elite level anymore. | ||
| It's not... | ||
| Unless... | ||
| I mean, even if you're a great striker, what if you get clipped? | ||
| Anything can happen. | ||
| Yeah, 100%. | ||
| And you've got to understand that. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Even though... | ||
| You don't want to talk yourself up. | ||
| You don't want to be cocky, but I'm definitely confident. | ||
| But a lot of these opponents that I see, even with this next fight, there's a lot of different challenges that I need to be aware of, but I still feel like it's just more about him landing a certain shot or him maybe in a submission. | ||
| So it's just about nullifying that. | ||
| But I just feel like... | ||
| Without any disrespect to him, I just feel like that's his go-to. | ||
| But again, we're in MMA where that could definitely happen. | ||
| But I'm pretty defensively sound and working with him. | ||
| Now I feel like my jiu-jitsu is at a whole other level, especially defensively. | ||
| When you've had matches with a guy like Holloway, you've had these two epic fights with Max Holloway, and you have two victories over him, but real close fights. | ||
| How important is that for a guy like you to have a foil like that, to have... | ||
| A guy that is your rival. | ||
| Like Muhammad Ali had Joe Frazier. | ||
| You know, there's these epic rivalries where you have more than one fight together and they're just these crazy close fights. | ||
| Ten rounds. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| But I think, obviously, it's like someone I was talking to when they talk about having teams. | ||
| You can go and then You've got two teams, and then just because of the jersey you're wearing, you're going to have millions of people hate you and pick on absolutely everything you do. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So that's always going to be happening. | ||
| So a lot of the attention is just purely they're either a Max Holloway fan or an Alex fan. | ||
|
unidentified
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You could be both. | |
| Yeah, or be both. | ||
| I'm both. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But I mean, what a lot of people are missing is what happened in that cage, man. | ||
| There was some very, very high-level... | ||
| It was a high-level chess match. | ||
| Even in the first fight and the second fight, the adjustments he made in between, the adjustments I made mid-fight, even in the first fight, if I go into detail, there's times where he wanted to just catch me. | ||
| Every time I feel a kick or something, he just wanted to get me and just come forward. | ||
| He's a volume fighter. | ||
| So once he did that, I was just making him run into things because I knew he was going to come in. | ||
| Then he realized, oh, he's trying to catch me coming in. | ||
| So I'm going to pretend to go in and then catch him after he tries to catch me coming in. | ||
| And then I caught on to that, then I end up, you know what I mean? | ||
| So it was like, it was this, little tiny adjustments. | ||
| This was happening, like, I can show you sequences, oh, this is where this happened, and little chess matches the people are going to miss, you know what I mean? | ||
| And obviously I can't give away too much of what was going on in there, but there were so many things that we had to just, a lot of it was the fact that I just kept changing things up as well to make it harder for him to get a read on me. | ||
| But, you know, but again, there was a chess match where he would make, you know, great little adjustments, and it would work, and then I'll catch on to that, then I'll change it up, and he would do that, and you know what I mean? | ||
| But people are going to miss that, because they're just going to be like, you know, going to carry on how they do, which I get, you know, and I respect people, yeah, for obviously being that emotional about it, you know, because that's what we write off. | ||
| We want that, but... | ||
| Mate, there was 10 rounds, and again, you talk about it, and obviously, you're going to get people to say whatever they want, that's fine, but I think they're just missing the point of how competitive, yeah, it was very competitive, even though I've got the two wins, but the chess match we're having in there, I just think is missed by too many people. | ||
| Yeah, I think you're probably right. | ||
| The people that don't appreciate it just think it's a great fight. | ||
| But the people that appreciate it and have seen a lot of fights and understand the high-level aspects of it, were like, wow, this is pretty special. | ||
| I felt like it was pretty special. | ||
| And I think it's just so impressive that you have these two victories over Max when you look at how Max has performed with everybody else in the division. | ||
| Like the last fight with Calvin Cater, who is a fucking beast. | ||
| And Max just lit him on fire. | ||
| That was, in my opinion, one of the most impressive performances I've ever seen. | ||
| Oh, it was a great performance. | ||
| Again, people... | ||
| I'm going to give credit when credit's due. | ||
| No, you do. | ||
| He looked great. | ||
| He did. | ||
| Even I was like, wow. | ||
| I said that. | ||
| But then obviously afterwards, I go, yeah, you're hitting them numbers on these guys, but you ain't hitting them numbers when I'm in front of you. | ||
| But again, you're obviously going to say that, and people aren't going to be happy with that. | ||
| But at the same time, again, you know what I mean? | ||
| He's a smart dude. | ||
| He's got a high fighter IQ. You have certain habits. | ||
| Their team's going to pick up on it, and Max is going to pick up on it. | ||
| You exit a certain way and that's the only exit. | ||
| He's going to fucking piece you up if you keep doing that. | ||
| And again, like, you know, there was, and I know no disrespect to Takeda, but there were certain things that, you know, Max caught on and just fucking made him pay. | ||
| He was being first and then fucking stayed on him. | ||
| He was the first to get going. | ||
| As soon as he got him where he knew he was going to direct him. | ||
| Just kept going. | ||
| But the way he even mixed that up, I don't think I've ever seen him mix kicks, knees, so much. | ||
| After our fights, I feel like, especially from the first to the second, his tool was always his jab, his hands, and the volume fight. | ||
| The second one, obviously, he used so many different tools. | ||
| In this fight, you've seen him just... | ||
| The volume was there, the way he just mixed up all the tools. | ||
| So again, I'm going to give him a lot of credit because... | ||
| The kid can fight. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| He can fight his ass off. | ||
| He takes a shot too. | ||
| And I can guarantee you we're going to meet again. | ||
| But obviously I've got jobs to do. | ||
| And it's going to be a big fight. | ||
| And people are going to really want to watch that one. | ||
| But right now, obviously I've got Ortega to worry about and watch this season. | ||
| Everyone can watch me stir him up and give him shit. | ||
| What is the pressure like of hanging out with a guy that you're going to fight for five weeks? | ||
| You're just hanging out, day in, day out, seeing each other all the time. | ||
| I was talking about how I adjust and adapt to things in front of me, even in the fight. | ||
| I'm just like that 24-7. | ||
| I'm the type of guy that whatever I'm doing, that's it. | ||
| I'm me. | ||
| I forget I'm a fucking UFC champ. | ||
| I forget I'm even a fighter half the time. | ||
| Once I'm home, I'm daddy, that's it. | ||
| That's how I am. | ||
| I went in there and I just knew I didn't run a reality TV show. | ||
| He's going to be there, whatever. | ||
| It was funny, because again, you're trying to get reads on him and things like that, but again, I just think he's fucking awkward. | ||
| He's an awkward dude. | ||
| What do you reckon? | ||
| What did you get out of it? | ||
| Yeah, that's for sure. | ||
| He definitely wasn't a fan of me by the end of the show. | ||
| Really? | ||
| He almost got fired for one of the pranks I played on him, but we weren't allowed to... | ||
| You almost got fired or he almost got fired? | ||
| I almost got fired for it. | ||
| Which one was that? | ||
| Really? | ||
| That was the... | ||
| We had to take five COVID tests a week, so obviously there's pranks on the show. | ||
| This won't make the TV show anyway, but I did pretend to put his COVID test on my ass. | ||
| It didn't really happen. | ||
| So we're pretending to piss on his signs and all that. | ||
| We've got photos of us just stirring up. | ||
| Again, a bit of laughing, a bit of banter, but we know how he carries on. | ||
| There was a photo that he put. | ||
| You put it up, didn't you? | ||
| Of the keys. | ||
| Yeah, we pretended to take his car. | ||
| We just had a photo of the keys and supposedly he had the fucking shits and he was like, oh, I'll fucking fight Craig. | ||
| I'm like, I'm in the photo too. | ||
| Why aren't you saying you'll fucking fight me? | ||
| Yeah, he's like, if he touches the car, we'll fight him. | ||
| But I mean, again, whether he was just going along with it or whatever it was, or he's just easily triggered, I don't know. | ||
| So we started realizing that, so we just started playing on that a fair bit. | ||
| Hey, knowing that he's easily triggered, there might be a route to this next fight as well. | ||
| What happened with the COVID test swab? | ||
| Like, you took a photo pretending that you were sticking up your ass? | ||
|
unidentified
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Can we get this up? | |
| Airdrop it to Jamie. | ||
| Get the photo of us pissing as well. | ||
| You guys are grown, man. | ||
| Get the photo of us pissing. | ||
| And the thing with me with the thing up my ass? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Get that. | ||
| Mac Pro, Jamie? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yep. | |
| No, MVP. Oh, there it is. | ||
| Something happened. | ||
| But again, just have a bit of a laugh, you know what I mean? | ||
| It's on the wrong computer. | ||
| I got this one. | ||
| I mean, it's pretty lighthearted, you know? | ||
| Like, I wouldn't really stick his oral COVID swab up my ass. | ||
| How could you even get a hold of it? | ||
| I mean, isn't that stuff controlled? | ||
| That's what I don't understand. | ||
| Like, where the fuck is the nurse? | ||
| Oh, I just waited until the nurse had to go to the bathroom, you know? | ||
| Swab. | ||
| There it goes. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| That cheeky smirk too, eh? | ||
| They actually almost fired me for this one, so I probably crossed the line a little too much. | ||
|
unidentified
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But hey, remember, this is a different swap, just in case you still get in trouble. | |
| Yeah, this is fake, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| It's just a joke. | ||
| Allegedly. | ||
| It might have been a flavoured test, you never know. | ||
| LOL. So, what did they say to you? | ||
| Well, I mean, I did have some ideas for some COVID pranks, because obviously we're trying to get them, but they did tell me because they spent so much money on COVID testing, they were like, that's a line we can't cross. | ||
| But I just couldn't resist. | ||
| But Craig did it anyway. | ||
| That's probably not on the film. | ||
|
unidentified
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All our tests were sitting in the same section. | |
| Yeah, I get it. | ||
| Listen, it makes sense to me. | ||
| You gotta do what you gotta do. | ||
| But it's part of the fun of the show, right? | ||
| It's fucking with everybody. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| The whole pranks and stuff like shits through each other. | ||
| And the more conflict there is, the better the ratings are, the better the show does, the better it is for everybody when you guys have a big fight. | ||
| I mean, financially, it's hard because a lot of people think of martial arts, they think of honor and respect and commitment and discipline and all that, which is all real. | ||
| But this is a business, and it's an entertainment business. | ||
| And one of the reasons why Conor McGregor's worth a half a billion dollars is because that motherfucker knows how to stir some shit. | ||
| The fight with Jose Aldo, where they went on this world tour for months at a time, by the end of that tour, he had a whole apartment complex under Jose Aldo's skin. | ||
| I mean, he wasn't just under his skin. | ||
| He had fucking camped out, led sewer lines, electrical. | ||
| I mean, he lived there. | ||
| He was in Jose's health, in his head, and it factored in the fight. | ||
| Because Aldo was uncharacteristically reckless. | ||
| He just charged forward, looking to land that left hook, and got clipped with that straight left on the way. | ||
| And you even see the way he was trying to draw that out of him, too. | ||
| So you've got to give credit to Conor, because again, he lands all these shots, but he sets them up. | ||
| He puts them under the pump. | ||
| See when he's warming up and he's showing the exact technique he's going to use? | ||
| In the warm-up, in the locker room, before the fight. | ||
| He's mimicking Aldo and he's mimicking him. | ||
| And he's mimicking dropping a left hand on him and then he went out and started. | ||
| Knowing that he's going to put that pressure, get in his face and get the big reaction and capitalize on it. | ||
| And like you said, he pictured it. | ||
| Boom. | ||
| Got exactly what he went. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| It was good. | ||
| Do you anticipate staying at 45 for the remainder of your career? | ||
| Look, I can see myself going to lightweight, but again, I want to just stay in the division and win the next couple of fights and cement myself as the man of the goat of the featherweight division and all that type of stuff. | ||
| I mean, there's going to be a time where I'm going to be waiting to find the next number one contender and things like that, and I want to move up. | ||
| But right now is not the time. | ||
| Again, I'll wait. | ||
| I've still got a fair bit to work on. | ||
| Obviously, you've got fights that you've got to do anyway. | ||
| And obviously, build your brand and all that type of stuff. | ||
| Build your stocks. | ||
| And then they'll want that fight. | ||
| So I don't think that's too far away. | ||
| Yeah, there's so much in your division already, as it is. | ||
| And as long as you're not having a hard time. | ||
| There's a big gap. | ||
| 55 and 45. 10 pounds is a lot. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| And it's one of the reasons why I think boxing has a better system in terms of weight classes. | ||
| I think the UFC has way too few weight classes. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| When it gets between 85 and 205, that to me is crazy. | ||
| 20 pound gap, that's bananas. | ||
| It's just so much. | ||
| 205 and 265, what the hell? | ||
| That's a big jump. | ||
| That's a big jump, man. | ||
| Like, and you see, Jon Jones is actually having a hard time putting weight on. | ||
| Like, he's... | ||
| Yeah, it's the same that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, the weight he's putting on... | ||
| Look, there's weight, and then there's Francis Ngannou weight, right? | ||
| It's a different thing. | ||
| Like, you look at Francis, like, that's a giant human. | ||
| He's cutting weight to make 265. He's a natural 265. Enormous fists. | ||
| Enormous shoulders. | ||
| Everything about him is huge. | ||
| If you want to get to look like that, that's a multi-year process to go from a guy who makes 205. Francis ain't making 205, bro. | ||
| He's just not making that. | ||
| So if you want to go up and fight that guy, you either have to be a rock-solid 240, Or if you're going to really try to get to the 260 range. | ||
| I mean, I've talked to pro powerlifters and bodybuilders and people who do stack a lot of weight on and put muscle mass on. | ||
| I'm like, it takes years. | ||
| It takes years. | ||
| And then on top of that, then there's the cardio requirement of all that muscle. | ||
| John Jones is a cardio machine. | ||
| But being used to that weight. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's a different world. | ||
| It's a different world. | ||
| Talking about Nagano, I was meant to be on the same card as him. | ||
| And we got COVID. But we didn't know. | ||
| So we're still going to the PI and things like that because we're getting tested and the latest test was all good. | ||
| And then the morning I fired – sorry, the day that we found out we had COVID because there was a few of us – We were sitting in the sauna, shaking hands with Nagano, and he was fighting the next day, and we're like... | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, no. | |
| And then we're here, we're watching ads of Nagano's fighting, and we're looking at each other like, I fucking hope so, you know what I mean? | ||
| We started shitting ourselves, like, please don't tell me we gave him the COVID and things like that. | ||
| He wouldn't be fucking happy. | ||
| Is that when he fought Rosenstreich? | ||
| No, no, that was the last one. | ||
| That was with Stipe? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, that was the last one. | ||
| I was meant to be on that card with Ortega. | ||
| Imagine if that killed the whole card. | ||
| Oh, mate, that's what I mean. | ||
| I was like, we were fucking nervous, I'll tell you that. | ||
| I'm like, finding that and he's going to know it's from us. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's like, well, Alice got it. | ||
| A few days later, I fucking got it. | ||
| Well, the good thing about him is he doesn't have to cut weight, so his body never is depleting. | ||
| He's just sort of like watching his diet, and he gets down to 265. He's not draining himself. | ||
| Do you incorporate a lot of sauna into everyday workouts, or is it just when you're cutting weight? | ||
| No, no, because I like getting a good sweater, even hot baths and all that. | ||
| I love flushing that body out. | ||
| I just think it's... | ||
| Makes me feel good, too. | ||
| Everyone does the ice-cold baths. | ||
| I don't fucking like cold water, I'll be honest. | ||
| I fucking hate it. | ||
| I did better through this trip being at the UFC PI. We got into the recovery room, and I got into the ice bath a fair bit, so I was happy with that, but I fucking hate it. | ||
| But I mean, I love the hot baths, and I feel like whenever I do that, I feel like my body feels unreal. | ||
| I feel like it really does help with my... | ||
| With my recovery. | ||
| I don't know if there's science behind it, but I'm fucking claiming it. | ||
| I reckon it works. | ||
| Yeah, no, there is definitely science behind it. | ||
| Even for recovery and things like that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, well there you go. | ||
| It also increases your endurance. | ||
| It has a mild red blood cell count expanding effect, like a mild EPO type effect. | ||
| There's something about doing it particularly, I think... | ||
|
unidentified
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Is that the same with baths as well? | |
| No, not quite. | ||
| It's something. | ||
| It does something. | ||
| It's just you're not going to be able to get hot as hot. | ||
| But it's definitely better than nothing. | ||
| They say the same thing about steam, but the real benefit is in the sauna. | ||
| And the studies that they've done... | ||
| Because it's hotter, did you say? | ||
| Yeah, it's hotter. | ||
|
unidentified
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I have fun. | |
| Like when I do the hot baths, it gets fucking hot. | ||
| I think it's hotter than it's meant to be. | ||
| Oh, I'm sure it gets hot, but it doesn't get 200 degrees, right? | ||
| Oh, no, I don't think that much. | ||
| You know who Laird Hamilton is, the surfer? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| He's a fucking alien, okay? | ||
| Like, dude, like a legit alien. | ||
| The guy broke his ankle and never did anything about it, just kept walking around on it, so his ankles fused, and it's like the size of this fucking coffee pot. | ||
| When did this happen? | ||
| A long time ago. | ||
| This is like, doesn't give a fuck, just keeps walking around on it. | ||
| Show his ankle. | ||
| Show Larry Hamilton's ankle. | ||
| By the way, never had it worked on. | ||
| Just cracked his ankle and just kept walking around, surfing. | ||
| He doesn't give a fuck. | ||
| But I was going to say about him, he's just one of those guys that, world champion surfer, but just like insanely mentally strong. | ||
| Gets in a sauna at 220 degrees with oven mitts on and rides an airdyne bike. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| I'm not bullshitting. | ||
| Look at his ankle. | ||
| Oh, fucking hell. | ||
| Yeah, so that's how his ankle is right now. | ||
| Walks around with this fucking completely blown out ankle. | ||
| That's like a jiu-jitsu ankle. | ||
| I know, right? | ||
| People get the knuckles. | ||
| Some people's knuckles, like Megaton Diaz. | ||
| You ever seen Mackenzie Dern's dad? | ||
| His hands are just crazy knuckles. | ||
| They must be so painful. | ||
| Oh my god, I mean, that's crazy arthritis. | ||
| Every joint is swollen like a knob, like a tree, like a knot in a tree. | ||
| Yup, yup. | ||
| My fingers used to kinda be like that when I would train ki every day, like they were heading to that point, and I remember the relief in my hands when I switched full-time to nogi. | ||
| It was just like, I noticed it basically overnight. | ||
| My hands just recovered immediately. | ||
| It's that kind of gripping that people do all the time like that. | ||
| I mean that's got to have like some long-term Consequences and the grip breaks like all the time my finger would just swell up I'd be like like it gets stuck off a grip breaks I'm gonna kick out of a grip and it would just be like fuck But you have to train again the next day Did you do anything to try to mitigate that, like ice? | ||
| I would just try to keep it moving. | ||
| I felt like the first few times I'd be like, I better rest this, and then it would take forever to heal. | ||
| But no matter how painful it was, I would just keep trying to kill that finger back. | ||
| There was a period where I couldn't get any of my fingers back to the hands, but then just keep crushing it. | ||
| Literally? | ||
| You couldn't do this? | ||
| Yeah, like in terms of the curling motion. | ||
| Like, obviously that was fine, but it would be the kill. | ||
| You couldn't curl your fingers back to touch your hands? | ||
| I couldn't connect them, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow! | |
| Just from so much Gage Jiu-Jitsu, yeah. | ||
| In your 20s. | ||
| Yeah, early 20s. | ||
| Old man hands. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so many guys have arthritis as they get older, particularly in the hands. | ||
| I mean, you see the old pictures of Elio's hands when he was rolling? | ||
| No, I haven't seen those. | ||
| Elio was like in his 80s and 90s and he was still rolling. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| It's just the guy never stopped training. | ||
| Obviously, I'm sure he picked his training partner and said he's going to roll with Nicky Rod or something like that. | ||
| I have to roll with that fucking guy every day. | ||
| That guy's such a freak. | ||
| When he was at the Who's Number One last time and I'm standing next to him, I'm like, how are we the same species? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, like, if we were any other animal in the woods, you would see, like, this is one, you know, like, gorillas are basically the same size, right? | ||
| They're all, they all get pretty big, you know, but he's this fucking enormous super athlete dude. | ||
| Like, what does Nicky weigh? | ||
| I think he's about 250 with abs, can do backflips. | ||
| Oh, yeah, freakish athleticism. | ||
| Freakish. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And just crazy hip mobility, too. | ||
| I remember asking him about that, too, because with his match with Yuri, I was like, the fucking hip mobility that he has is crazy. | ||
| Like, his ability to move, his flexibility, like, you usually see a big, giant guy like that, and they're all weighed down from squats and deadlifts and everything stiff. | ||
| He's not stiff. | ||
| Yeah, he's pretty mobile. | ||
| Yeah, look at him. | ||
| A pretty freak. | ||
| The size of that fucking freak! | ||
| He says the funniest shit, too. | ||
| He's always like... | ||
| I remember one time he had staff and it exploded on an airplane, but then by the time he landed the flight back to America, it had somehow started to heal up, and he was like, it's just mindset, bro. | ||
| Positive thinking. | ||
| Well, it's also being 24. How old is he? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I think he's probably 24. Yeah, when you're young, you heal everything really quick. | |
| But staph, was he taking antibiotics? | ||
| No. | ||
| He's like, I'll just wait till I get back. | ||
| It was huge. | ||
| It was when he had the match with Luke Rockhold. | ||
| You could see it in the match, like this nasty staph infection. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fucking hell. | |
| Really? | ||
| He just doesn't give a fuck, yeah. | ||
| He just rolled with it in the match? | ||
| There's a school of thought. | ||
| Like, should you take antibiotics or should you just compete with the staff and then take antibiotics afterwards? | ||
| Obviously, you're putting your opponent at risk, which is the problem. | ||
| I would take antibiotics and compete. | ||
| I would just be like, yeah, fuck. | ||
| I'd rather get onto this and still compete. | ||
| But the antibiotics wreck you. | ||
| Yeah, they used to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They used to battle me. | |
| Yeah, they used to. | ||
| But for some reason now, the last few times I've had it, I didn't, I felt fine in camp. | ||
| Like I thought, like I used to, like back in the day, like a few years ago, I'd notice it. | ||
| I'd be like, man, a full fucking shit. | ||
| Where I'm expecting that. | ||
| And then it's just... | ||
| I'm like, oh, I'm fine. | ||
| So now I'm not too worried about it. | ||
| I've had staph twice, and the one time that I had it, the first time I had it, it was... | ||
| I caught it early, but the antibiotics... | ||
| I remember being lightheaded at a restaurant... | ||
| I was just like, oh my god, my world was closing in. | ||
| I felt so tired, and I was like, I wonder if this is the staph or the antibiotics. | ||
| I'm like, I think it's the antibiotics, because the staph was real minor. | ||
| My buddy Tate had caught it. | ||
| We were at the airport together, and I was wearing shorts, and I had my foot up like this, and there's some shit on my calf. | ||
| He goes, what's on your calf? | ||
| I go, I don't know, what is it? | ||
| He goes, dude, I think that's staph. | ||
| I go, come on, these little pimples? | ||
| He's like, yeah, that's what it looks like. | ||
| Go get it checked out. | ||
| And I went in, the doctor's like, oh yeah, we're going to get you on antibiotics right away. | ||
| We're going to do a culture test, but I'm pretty sure it's staph. | ||
| And so he put me on those antibiotics and I was feeling fine. | ||
| And then that night I was just like... | ||
| And I was thinking, and I tried training, not like rolling, but I tried lifting weights and shit, and I felt so weak. | ||
| And I was like, how the fuck does anybody fight like this? | ||
| Because I remember Luke Rockhold, when he beat Chris Weidman, he had staph. | ||
| He was on antibiotics while he beat him, which is crazy. | ||
| I feel like some people, yeah, like me, I was taking antibiotics every month for staph, so I was like, I just don't think there's any good bacteria left to kill, so I just didn't notice the... | ||
| You were taking it every month for how long? | ||
| When I was in New York, I had staph every month for 12 months, so I do a week of antibiotics every month. | ||
| That shit can get dangerous too, man. | ||
| Obviously, we've got the meat, it's around the meat, but that gets under the second layer of skin and gets near the bone, and you get infections through there. | ||
| My friend Brian Callen, his friend's wife died from staph. | ||
| They tried to use some sort of holistic methods to heal it, and her fucking gums were bleeding. | ||
| And he came over the house and he's like, bro, you got to get her to a hospital. | ||
| And it was too late. | ||
| A jiu-jitsu kid died because his contact lens fell on the map, put it in his eye, staff in his eye, straight to the brain, dead. | ||
| It's like an 18-year-old kid. | ||
| I can't remember his name. | ||
| It was in Los Angeles, though. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Took him out. | ||
| It can rock you too. | ||
| I've had MRSA before and I had it on my arm and as you were saying, I had fevers and it absolutely rattled me. | ||
| Obviously after Aldo and me, that was something different. | ||
| Cellulitis. | ||
| Cellulitis, so I got that and that absolutely. | ||
| Cellulitis is the same thing. | ||
| Yeah, well that's what I mean. | ||
| That's what I had. | ||
| 40 plus, I don't know what that is in Fahrenheit, but I was losing the plot. | ||
| I didn't know where I was. | ||
| I was gone. | ||
| Actually, we were a bit worried because last camp broke my finger and a bit of skin, like it was skin sort of cut open on the top. | ||
| So we didn't know if that was from the bone ripping through. | ||
| So we were worried about getting an infection. | ||
| During camp that happened? | ||
| Last camp, yeah. | ||
| And that's funny. | ||
| We were just talking about that. | ||
| I don't know if you can see, it's still fattening a bit more. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I was going to, oh, we're going to do surgery after the fight. | ||
| How far into the camp was this? | ||
| I don't know, a couple weeks into camp. | ||
| So the rest of the camp you fought, you just trained with a broken finger? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You fucking animal. | ||
| But then I was like, the guy goes, we'll just do the surgery afterwards. | ||
| And if we, you know, whatever happens, if we have to pull the bone out, we'll pull the bone out. | ||
| But I mean, you've got like the tendons and that as well. | ||
| But I didn't fight. | ||
| So I'm like, well, fuck, do I do it now? | ||
| I don't know when I'm fighting. | ||
| So we just left it. | ||
| So now I'm just going to leave it. | ||
| And you didn't need any surgery or anything? | ||
| Did you get an x-ray? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I probably should look into it. | ||
| But I mean, we're running... | ||
| Again, I was just going to do it after the fight. | ||
| But I mean, you feel like it's alright now. | ||
| We're grappling every day and all that. | ||
| But man, once they told me that, obviously I was worried about it. | ||
| I was like, fuck. | ||
| Like, you know, what's going to happen here? | ||
| But they're like, oh no, look, we'll just worry about it after the fight. | ||
| Sweet. | ||
| So I'm punching with it. | ||
| I'm fucking, it hurts. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, you hit it wrong, you're trying to clinch up and things like that. | ||
| You lose a bit of strength there. | ||
| Did you have to tape the other fingers to it to give extra support? | ||
| Nah, well, they gave me a splint for the training. | ||
| That helped a fair bit. | ||
| But, I mean, you fucking bang it. | ||
| It's going to fucking hurt. | ||
| But, I mean, obviously, while you're fighting, you're fighting with it. | ||
| You're hurt. | ||
| You just keep going. | ||
| You worry about it afterwards. | ||
| Then I'll get a surgery. | ||
| That was the plan, but that didn't happen. | ||
| And when did you get MRSA? MRSA, I think I've had it. | ||
| Twice? | ||
| Well, I had it on my hand. | ||
| I don't have my phone on me, but I've got photos. | ||
| It ended up being a big hole in my hand and it rattled me. | ||
| So we had to get the nurses come to my house and all that every day in the morning afterwards. | ||
| I didn't know much about it, but they were trying to get antibiotics. | ||
| They were trying to find out the bacteria and they were like, you're on Mercer, we're going to have to get the big guns out. | ||
| I didn't know what that meant, but they just gave me a... | ||
| It rattled me. | ||
| I had to pull out of a fight. | ||
| But that was well before UFC. I've had staff and been on antibiotics for my second fight in the UFC too, Mizuta Hirota. | ||
| So I had staff then and I remember it was the fucking worst because I went to Vegas for the UFC retreat like two weeks before the fight. | ||
| And I was there for a couple of days. | ||
| So I travelled all the way from Thailand to America. | ||
| And then I did that for a couple of days and then flew all the way back. | ||
| And then I just got everything. | ||
| I got staff. | ||
| I ended up getting the flu. | ||
| I ended up getting sick the night of the fight. | ||
| I was just like, fuck, this is the worst. | ||
| But I won, so it's all good. | ||
| Staff scares the shit out of me. | ||
| And what really scares the shit out of me is a lot of gyms don't tell people, like the young people that are starting out, what it is. | ||
| Like, my friend Ari and I were playing pool, and he was limping. | ||
| He was walking around the pool table limping. | ||
| And I go, what's going on? | ||
| He goes, I got a spider bite. | ||
| I go, let me see. | ||
| He pulls his pants up and shows me his knee. | ||
| I go, dude, stop. | ||
| And I unscrew my puku. | ||
| I go, we're going to the hospital right now. | ||
| And he goes, you serious? | ||
| I go, you got to go to the hospital right now. | ||
| I go, you got a staph infection. | ||
| I go, that's really bad. | ||
| I go, that's from jujitsu. | ||
| And he's like, why the fuck don't they tell you? | ||
| There should be signs everywhere. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, there should be. | ||
| I don't run the gym. | ||
| Have you heard of EKC? No. | ||
| EKC is another jujitsu one that I only found out about last year, but it's viral pink eye. | ||
| It's like epidemic keratoconjunctivitis. | ||
| Fuck, I've seen them go through some gyms, mate. | ||
| It permanently ruined the vision in one of my eyes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| So you catch it, right? | ||
| Your eye will not stop watering. | ||
| and crusting and like I couldn't see out of the eye properly for a good six months. | ||
| At all? | ||
| So it's different to pinkeye? | ||
| It's viral pinkeye, yeah. | ||
| So it's just like there's no known treatment for it. | ||
| You have to do steroid drops in the eye, antibiotic drops in the eye. | ||
| I had to compete with it and it was like horrible, horrible. | ||
| So your opponent got pinkeye after that? | ||
| I did give two of my opponents pinkeye. | ||
| But it was for ADCC. If it was any other event, I would have been like, you know what, I'm stepping out. | ||
| But I'm like, this shit's every two years. | ||
| You filthy bastard. | ||
| The worst was, for ADCC, you have to make weight three days in a row. | ||
| And I had to drop four kilos every day, so it would be like nine, ten pounds. | ||
| And the worst thing was, I had to jump in the sauna, and the hot air on my eye was fucking unbearable every day. | ||
| Every day I would have to do all the steroid drops and stuff and then I would have to do like a chemical burn cup for your eye. | ||
| I'd have to fill that with saline, hold it onto my eye, blink a bunch of times, try to clear out all the fluid. | ||
| But yeah, literally I was on the meds for probably six to eight weeks. | ||
| Then you have to wean off because your eye gets adjusted to the corticosteroids. | ||
| And literally six months at nighttime driving, I couldn't see out of my right eye. | ||
| I would be like completely blurred vision. | ||
| And the doctors, the eye doctors were like, man, this is just, there's nothing we can do. | ||
| Eventually your eye will be better. | ||
| But then because of the leakage and the conjunctivitis, it scarred my eye. | ||
| So it's like one eye is great, one eye is slightly still fucked up from it. | ||
| Like, how fucked up? | ||
| Can you read? | ||
| Not too bad. | ||
| Yeah, I can still read and stuff. | ||
| Because if you close your eye, you can read? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Just slightly worse. | ||
| But it was just like, I remember catching that, and it's super contagious. | ||
| When it hits a gym, it gets everyone. | ||
| And you're like, fuck it. | ||
| I'll give it to everybody. | ||
| I'll send it to Thailand. | ||
| Go literally fool everyone. | ||
| Really? | ||
| In Thailand. | ||
| Like, you go there and then like, you go, I'm like, every time I've seen someone, I'm like putting fucking, what do you call it, like the alcohol wipes in my eyes and shit like that, just trying to make sure I didn't get it and I'll just see it just go through that many people. | ||
| Did you avoid it? | ||
| I didn't get it. | ||
| How'd you do it? | ||
| So the... | ||
| The fucking sanitizers in the eyes, maybe. | ||
| You put sanitizers in your eyes? | ||
| Literally, at some point I'll be like, oh fuck, I touched him. | ||
| I touched my eye. | ||
| I'd wipe it, but obviously not in my eye. | ||
| But just, yeah, man, just trying to stay away from him. | ||
| I've seen it go through at least 15 different people. | ||
| It's so bad. | ||
| In the short time I was there. | ||
| You get it, and within a day or two, your fucking eye blows up. | ||
| Did you talk to those two dudes that you gave it to? | ||
| I did apologize to him, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're like, sorry, man, but it's fucking ADCC. What did they say? | |
| Like, I can't see, motherfucker. | ||
| One of them was cool. | ||
| The other one wasn't cool when he started showing symptoms, but forgave me afterwards and stuff. | ||
| But yeah, some of the competitors in the show knew it was going around, tried to get me eliminated from the event. | ||
| And I was just like, come on, it's ADCC. It's Olympics. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| What are you going to... | ||
| It is what it is, man. | ||
| You know, like, wow. | ||
| Some of these fucking infections and that, they can get nasty. | ||
| When you said that you had staph every month for a year, how the fuck does that happen? | ||
| How do you never get over it? | ||
| Was it in the same spot over and over again? | ||
| Because obviously this would fuck Gordon's stomach up, right? | ||
| From this massive amount of antibiotics. | ||
| And he had a similar situation, right? | ||
| So it was just going through the whole gym? | ||
| Maybe the in-and-out cured it though. | ||
| When we moved to Puerto Rico, I just stopped getting staffed. | ||
| I don't know if it just happened to be the Blue Basement, the particular strain that was going around there, maybe I was very vulnerable to, but the second we moved to Puerto Rico, started getting more sun, started getting in the ocean, felt like it actually helped. | ||
| I was worried though, because Puerto Rico's humidity, like Thailand's staff's wild. | ||
| I was thinking, fuck, maybe it's going to be worse in Puerto Rico. | ||
| But it just... | ||
| I've had staff once since then. | ||
| I wonder if getting in the ocean is good for your skin. | ||
| I mean, it must be better than whatever was happening in New York. | ||
| Well, and I would also imagine the ocean around Puerto Rico is pretty nice. | ||
| Like, it's probably not polluted. | ||
| Yeah, not as bad. | ||
| Not as bad as... | ||
| Definitely not as bad as New York, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I would imagine there's probably some benefit of being in the ocean. | ||
| Here it goes. | ||
| Mineral-rich ocean water can calm irritation Fucking Jamie on the ball, as always. | ||
| So, we're getting staff in the same spot. | ||
| No, just different spots. | ||
| I think some of it was to do with overtraining as well. | ||
| Usually that's an indicator for me that I am overtraining. | ||
| Overtraining, take away food. | ||
| That'll do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Giving them a hard time about the food. | |
| It is a lot just immune systems. | ||
| I believe that if you're run down in that, that's when I would always get them. | ||
| Even stressing about weight cutting, not eating right, all that type of stuff, I'd get them now because I'm on point with most of it. | ||
| I I barely get them. | ||
| You know, I don't stress about it. | ||
| When I see people, I used to be like, oh, freak out. | ||
| And then, yeah, the next day it gets worse. | ||
| But I reckon the immune system definitely plays a big part with a lot of things, doesn't it? | ||
| Sunshine. | ||
| Sunshine on the mats too. | ||
| I think like basement gyms, I think that's going to be much more susceptible to it. | ||
| Whereas a gym with some sunshine in there, I feel like it just really does help. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| I would imagine it's just a healthy environment overall. | ||
| But that purple, the blue mat, rather, down in the basement at Henzo's, do they defumigate that place? | ||
| Do they do anything to fucking kill off all the cooties that are running around that joint? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| They started doing something wild after COVID started coming around. | ||
| They started putting UV lights on the mat and stuff. | ||
| I don't even know what it was, doing some wild shit down there. | ||
| Was that for the COVID in that as well, seeing them doing it? | ||
| Yeah, I think it was for the COVID. Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, some people, they just didn't get staff. | ||
| And then others... | ||
| And generally speaking, if I speak to white belts and blue belts that are hobbyists, they don't really get it. | ||
| And I think that they're not as susceptible because their immune system's not as crashed. | ||
| So I think it's mostly the athletes that are vulnerable. | ||
| Do you think there's a balance to be had? | ||
| Maybe you work out a little too much? | ||
| Like maybe if you took it back a notch... | ||
| It would actually be better for you? | ||
| I mean, it could be. | ||
| You're going to have to convince Jon. | ||
| I don't know how you could. | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| You know, when I talked to him and I said, what about rest days? | ||
| He goes, no rest days. | ||
| He just looked at me like that was ridiculous. | ||
| He goes, if you're tired, just train light. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I do sneak rest days. | ||
| Like me, I'll just go, I'm just going to train until one day I wake up and I'm like, no, I can't do it today. | ||
| I'll take a day off. | ||
| But some of the guys will just... | ||
| They're there every day. | ||
| And that's typically the guys that I would say train the hardest, probably the juniors, like the up and coming guys, because I feel like they've got ground to catch up. | ||
| So those are the guys that really never miss any sessions. | ||
| Gary was probably the most infamous for training, like just a crazy person. | ||
| Like he would just be there all day, every day. | ||
| He just puts in that work. | ||
| Well, he's doubling it up too, right? | ||
| Because he would do the MMA, Gordon was saying, MMA sessions and then Jiu Jitsu sessions in the same day, every day. | ||
| And he's a smaller guy, right? | ||
| So it's like, it's easier for me, even me, like obviously I'm not as big as Gordon or Nicky Rod, but it is easier for me to be like, oh, just pick, I'll pick a smaller guy, I have an easier round. | ||
| Whereas a guy like Gary, you know what I mean? | ||
| Most of the training partners are either the same size or bigger. | ||
| So it's a bit tough. | ||
| It's probably like you at City Kickboxing, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, if you're trying to have a light round, you're like, fuck, these guys are all bigger than me. | ||
| It's a bit harder to manage. | ||
| Everyone's bigger than me. | ||
| We were fucking with him on the show, actually, every time. | ||
| We started the season, right, every time we'd take a team photo, I'd get everyone to stand on their toes and we wouldn't tell Alex. | ||
| They clearly don't need to, but they would anyway. | ||
| But it was just, I just didn't know. | ||
| Like, I seen them, I'm like, what, they're fucking all in on this fucking joke? | ||
| I'm like, when did this happen? | ||
| I'll see the photo and literally all of them, I'm like, what, you just have a fucking group meeting? | ||
| Let's make Alex look even shorter. | ||
| Listen, bro, we're in the same boat. | ||
| I feel your pain. | ||
| There's nothing you can do about it. | ||
| I'm shrinking as I get older, too, which is even more fucked up, because my discs, I'm having problems with some of my discs. | ||
| You know when you see old people shrink? | ||
| That's what's going on. | ||
| It's like their discs is deteriorating. | ||
| You know, they call it, what is it called? | ||
| Spinal stenosis. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So deterioration of the disc. | ||
| You know, that's when people get bone on bone, they have to get their discs fused. | ||
| That's what's going on. | ||
| There's only so much you can do to prevent that too. | ||
| Yeah, this just happened at an early age for me. | ||
| Well, so many guys are fucking, as they get older, they're getting disc replaced. | ||
| Like, I talked to Braulio Estima. | ||
| He sent me an x-ray of his fucking neck. | ||
| You want to see some crazy shit? | ||
| He's got two fake discs in his neck. | ||
| It's funny, because I always say that as well. | ||
| People go, how tall are you? | ||
| I'm like, five foot six. | ||
| On a good day. | ||
| Once I've done a bit of yoga and stretched out, I'll be five six. | ||
| Because I'm like, just on the border there. | ||
| I'm like, just under it. | ||
| But I claim 5'6". | ||
| That was it. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| This is Braulio's neck. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| So two of those in his neck are... | ||
| There's how it's pieced together. | ||
| That's not Braulio's neck, though. | ||
| That might be his lower back or some shit. | ||
| You've seen the video of when he... | ||
| I think that's just a random photo. | ||
| Because his actual neck is this, Jamie. | ||
| He has fake discs. | ||
| Here, I'll send it to you. | ||
| I'll send it to you so you can have it. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| But he won the Worlds with a fucked up neck. | ||
| Did you see the video when he actually inches it? | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh, that was right, right? | ||
| Was he going for, someone got him in a guillotine? | ||
| I think it was like the guy hip-tossed him against the cage and he landed fully vertical, like spiked into the cage and immediately couldn't move. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck. | |
| Yeah, that happened to Mark Holman too. | ||
| Scary, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Scary. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Because even last camp, again, I had to get a cortisone shot in my neck for the last camp because that, I don't know what happened, I think it was a punch or something, then my whole arm just like went dead and my whole shoulder and everything just started burning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Burning. | ||
| I was like, what the fuck? | ||
| I thought, you know, you get stingers, but it just would not go away. | ||
| You can get bad stingers, man. | ||
| Those are terrifying as well. | ||
| Yeah, but this one just stayed and I'm like, fucking burnt, burnt. | ||
| All that stuff is your discs, right? | ||
| Bulging and pushing against the nerves. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And as you... | ||
| It felt like fire. | ||
| See how, like, those are spacers. | ||
| So those are titanium articulating discs that they replace his neck disc with. | ||
| And he competed with that? | ||
| Well, he competed with his disc completely fucked up and won the world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Shit. | |
| One of the worlds before the surgery and then they got the surgery. | ||
| Now he's trying to avoid getting surgery on the ones above it and below it because they all start deteriorating. | ||
| So I've got like three or four of them that have shrunken down and become a real pain in the ass. | ||
| And one of them is my lower back and I've been doing some shit. | ||
| For that, you can kind of stretch out. | ||
| But you've got to always be aware. | ||
| And if you're training, if you're doing jujitsu, every day it's just a little bit of squish and everything's getting compressed and all that stuff is... | ||
| It's the worst injury, right? | ||
| Can you train hard? | ||
| Yeah, I can train hard, but only like a day a week or two days a week. | ||
| I can't do... | ||
| I could never do seven days a week. | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| My shit would start falling apart. | ||
| I would start getting... | ||
| I get... | ||
| What's it called? | ||
| Sciatica. | ||
| I get that down because of my lower back. | ||
| Sometimes it bulges against... | ||
| But it's all... | ||
| As long as I'm not going crazy at 53 years old, I can do a lot of shit. | ||
| But there's just... | ||
| There's limitations. | ||
| Like, the disc limitation's a big one. | ||
| Because there's not... | ||
| Like, if you tear a ligament, they could fix it. | ||
| But if you fuck your discs up, it's like the options are do what... | ||
| Eddie Bravo, too. | ||
| He's got a fake disc in his lower back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, quite a few... | ||
| Aljamain Sterling just got a fake disc put in. | ||
| He just got his disc replaced in his neck. | ||
| Chris Weidman has a fake disc in his neck. | ||
| There's quite a few guys who have replaced discs. | ||
| And it's like, man, that gets sketchy. | ||
| I know a guy who had a bunch replaced in his back. | ||
| He went to Germany. | ||
| They did a procedure on a bunch. | ||
| And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, one of his legs just started shrinking. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| So, like, his calf is, like, non-existent on one of his legs. | ||
| His calf is, like, a bone. | ||
| And he's this big, strapping guy. | ||
| And one of his calves just atrophied. | ||
| And the doctors don't exactly know why or what to do about it because he had all this work done on his back. | ||
| But something is blocking the nerve, whether it's scar tissue or inflammation or what have you. | ||
| It's like, back scares the fuck out of you. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| That's what's funny, I told you last time, the guy, when I first went to Bayman, telling him about my back and that, and he's like, oh look, I wanted to show him my discs, and he goes, look at that. | ||
| Once you can't control your bowels, and you've got the foot drop, then we'll look at it, you'll be right. | ||
| So they just went, let's see how we go with a bit of maintenance and all that, and then sure enough, I was moving. | ||
| I do know that they are doing some work now where they're actually injecting stem cells directly into discs. | ||
| And they're having discs... | ||
| I mean, this is... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe Google this. | ||
| Because this is all hearing from people that have been doing research on it. | ||
| And I don't exactly know what the studies show. | ||
| But they're apparently having some results. | ||
| That's why they can do a lot of wild shit in, like, Colombia and Panama. | ||
| You go down there to, like, BioAccelerator and, you know, Dr. Neil Reardon's place in Panama. | ||
| They just... | ||
| They can do all sorts of shit that they can't really do in America yet. | ||
| That's where Cejudo went, right? | ||
| I remember him telling me. | ||
| He went to Columbia, I believe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And TJ Dillshaw went to Neil Reardon's place, which is in Panama. | ||
| I sent my mom there, too. | ||
| My mom went down there twice for her knee. | ||
| Helped? | ||
| Helped her? | ||
| Yeah, helped a lot. | ||
| She was in serious pain. | ||
| And then six months later, no more pain. | ||
| Gone. | ||
| Yeah, in their 70s. | ||
| You know, her knee was pretty fucked up. | ||
| But it's just, it's not legal in America yet to do a lot of the stuff that they do. | ||
| You can do some stuff here, but you definitely can't do stuff to the extent that you can do in Panama and some of these other countries. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| I'll need this. | ||
| Or I need to start warming up. | ||
| One day. | ||
| Well, just one day. | ||
|
unidentified
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I need to warm up because I'll eventually do that. | |
| What you've done is interesting because what you've figured out is whatever issues you were having with your discs and your back Strengthening all the muscles around and preventing it is the best way to go about it. | ||
| By getting on a program where you really put a lot of rigidity into your back and made it all strong and supported, you've prevented all the problems. | ||
| A lot of movement at the hips before training and that again. | ||
| Let's try and get the load off the back. | ||
| If your hips aren't moving right, where's all the movement? | ||
| Lower back. | ||
| And you're putting all that pressure. | ||
| Like you said, not using the wrong muscles and all that type of stuff. | ||
| That's exactly what happened. | ||
| They were telling me to tense certain muscles and try and use this without using your core. | ||
| I couldn't do it. | ||
| You've got to use your glutes. | ||
| My glutes weren't firing. | ||
| I couldn't even do it. | ||
| That's how much I would use other muscles, back muscles and things like that, where they're like, no, you should be using your fucking glutes here. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| But now, after doing all that now, Are you doing neck strengthening exercises or anything too? | ||
| I had to do it for this in the last camp because, as I said, I got the cortisone shot in that camp and it just kept happening. | ||
| So I ended up going there and I got that and it got burnt and then a couple of days later got back in. | ||
| I had to have a few days off. | ||
| From the stingers? | ||
| Yeah, because I've had things before and they just go away. | ||
| This would end up staying on fire for a while. | ||
| Did you get an MRI? Nah. | ||
| Oh yeah, we did. | ||
| And then they end up saying it's just all ugly in there. | ||
| They look at it and they go, yeah, they're just like, you could tell you played fucking rugby league and you're an MMA fighter, put it that way. | ||
| But I mean, sometimes they don't like looking at them because they know it's going to look fucked up, especially guys that have been in sport their whole life. | ||
| But he goes, and they could see where the problem was, so that's why they put the cortisone. | ||
| Because it happened a couple of times, and they would have to have a few days off. | ||
| I was like, well, we can't do this all camp. | ||
| Like, I can't just have fucking... | ||
| How old are you now, Alex? | ||
| 32. So then they put that in, and then, like, let that sort of soak. | ||
| Like, whatever they've got to do, you've got to have a few days off for that. | ||
| And then, even though it would happen here and there, it was just minor, and I was perfectly fine within a minute. | ||
| Do you ever use that iron neck device? | ||
| Which one's that? | ||
| You don't know the iron neck? | ||
| Is that the turning one? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, actually, we had that at the apex. | ||
| It's the shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But they got me on, like, a thing where, like, you put on the door and then, like, they pull your head up and you open yourself up. | ||
| Oh, that too, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, but I started doing sunscreen thing and stuff, yeah. | ||
| Where it, like, decompresses your spine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, exactly. | |
| I love that thing. | ||
| That was good. | ||
| Like, click, click, click, click, click, and you're, like, kind of hanging yourself. | ||
| Yeah, but it's good. | ||
| That's exactly what it is. | ||
| I mean, that's what you need to try to give it some space and stretch it out. | ||
| So, if you do that on a regular basis, that'll provide you with some benefit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's another machine that I use all the time at home. | ||
| It's called the Dex. | ||
| It's by Teeter, and you hang from your hips. | ||
| You get in it almost like a leg curl thing, and you lean forward, and all the weight is on. | ||
| It's all just gravity. | ||
| It relaxes your back. | ||
| You feel it pop. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think you showed me. | |
| Yeah, I think I did, too. | ||
| You showed me that. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| After the studio. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't remember much of it, but I remember that. | |
| Craig, do you ever use any weightlifting things for your neck? | ||
| Use like iron neck or anything? | ||
| No, I did try it at the apex though. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was cool. | |
| Because I see you, you don't turn your neck much. | ||
| No, I'm pretty stiff. | ||
| Yeah, I'm noticing that. | ||
| I'm like, is it hurt? | ||
| Or is it just how you move? | ||
| I think just tight from jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Just people hanging off it and shit, but yeah, I should. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Could it be because you didn't stretch? | |
| Maybe. | ||
| I wonder if you did stretch and you did, like, somebody worked on you, if you would have better movement and you'd actually be better. | ||
| I wonder. | ||
| Yeah, I feel like very stiff, and then when I'm on the mats and they're stretching me out and stuff, I feel like that's when I start to loosen up. | ||
| But yeah, it'd be good to be a bit looser all the time, I think. | ||
| Well, you're a professional athlete. | ||
| Why don't you just do that? | ||
| I should. | ||
| I should. | ||
| Let's be real. | ||
| It's an intervention. | ||
| It seems like we've stepped in here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's your job. | |
| It is your job, right? | ||
| We're just into him now. | ||
| Come on, you've got to do this. | ||
| Sort out the diet, sort out the stretch. | ||
| But in saying that, hanging with him and that, maybe didn't do them types of things, but he's constantly on YouTube and studying things, looking up wrestling and all that, and goes and watches and get breakdowns of certain things. | ||
| So, like, obviously you can see, again, you can still see what separates some people from the rest of them. | ||
| Like, yeah, maybe he doesn't pay as much detail or attention to maybe the mobility side of things, but you see a lot of energy towards film studies and all that type of stuff and obviously train it. | ||
| Yeah, and you, well, your history of learning, like, watching a lot of the submissions that the Donaher crew was doing before you joined them and learning them from YouTube videos than just applying it to your own game. | ||
| Yeah, basically. | ||
| When I started training jiu-jitsu, my original coach was my cousin, Matt Jones, and he was a four-stripe white belt at the time because the city we were from wasn't much jiu-jitsu going on. | ||
| So even from day one, I never really had a really, I guess, experienced coach. | ||
| So I would just be trying to figure things out. | ||
| I'd watch the UFCs and see a submission and be like, fuck, I'm going to try that, try that in the next class. | ||
| I didn't even train with a black belt until I was well into my purple belt. | ||
| I just had no high level exposure. | ||
| So I was just forced to try and reverse engineer everything I saw. | ||
| I really had the assumption that I'm behind the eight ball, so I've got to try and find little tricks to get ahead. | ||
| And that's where the heel hook stuff really took off. | ||
| Well, once you started competing though and started traveling and doing that, it's really interesting that you did have this very limited exposure to top-level talent, but you just decided to throw yourself into the fire and go out there and literally travel the world and compete. | ||
| Yeah, I would literally just go on a seminar tour and use the seminar portion, Rolling With Strangers, to keep myself fit. | ||
| And when I'd show up to an event like EBI here in Austin, I remember I just put up an Instagram post. | ||
| I was like, who wants to be in my corner? | ||
| I don't have anyone to coach me. | ||
| And funnily enough, Denny Prokopos jumped in the corner. | ||
| He was in my corner the whole event. | ||
| I don't know what the fuck he was saying the whole time. | ||
| He was trying to give me code words and stuff. | ||
| But he was there for support. | ||
| He was saying shit. | ||
| That I had no idea what he was talking about. | ||
| Some of the shit he was saying, yelling out 10th planet moves, and I was like, I don't know what's going on, bro. | ||
| Crackhead control. | ||
| You're like, what? | ||
| Did you ever see Denny's staph infection, his knee? | ||
| No. | ||
| Bad one. | ||
| He had to open up his knee like a fish. | ||
| Like, it's a huge scar on his knee. | ||
| It was just horrible. | ||
| I think he, I don't know if it was Mercer or what kind of staph it was, but it was awful. | ||
| Those are scary. | ||
| It gets so nasty, man. | ||
| Even when I was in the hospital in Rio, it ended up being in Chile by the time we got there. | ||
| Just even me, because I had to have my leg up so the blood could go down and all that because of all the swelling and all that. | ||
| Finally, we want to go home. | ||
| We haven't been home for a while. | ||
| We're there for a week and then they end up doing MRIs and then found out from me having my legs up and being in that position so much, my lungs were like right up in my chest so I couldn't get on the plane so that we had to like do certain things to bring my lungs back down so I could get back onto an airplane. | ||
| So I had to do these blowing things. | ||
| As hard as you can to get my lungs back down to the normal spot because if I flew the way it was, not because of the staff, but just from the position I was in. | ||
| Really? | ||
| That's what I mean. | ||
| I'm just like, fucking hell. | ||
| What do you mean I can't go home yet? | ||
| Your lungs have moved? | ||
| Have you heard of that before? | ||
| My lungs pushed up higher from me being in this position and being in there fucking all day for four or five days. | ||
| They did MRI and then they seen that my lungs were too far up. | ||
| Yeah, so they're like, you can't go on a plane like that. | ||
| We need to bring them down. | ||
| The way you put it down was blowing on this little thing. | ||
| You get stuck everywhere. | ||
| It's so fucking crazy. | ||
| You always get medical conditions and get stuck, like COVID. I don't know what it is. | ||
| It happens every time, every time we do camp. | ||
| You've been stuck in America for three months now, right? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Every time I'm meant to fight or fight, something fucking happens. | ||
| Now, to go back home, do you have to get vaccinated? | ||
| What do you have to do to go back home? | ||
| We're still quarantined, so we leave tonight, but I'm going to go home and I still need to do the two-week quarantine. | ||
| But why is it two weeks? | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I couldn't tell you. | ||
| I feel like, because they tested it the whole time. | ||
| Obviously in a week, I thought maybe in a week's time, they still see you don't have it. | ||
| Well, not only that, you've already gone through COVID. Well, I can't get it. | ||
| So you have the antibodies. | ||
| It's a long time. | ||
| Well, we're in the show. | ||
| Because I had it, and obviously I'm immune to it or whatever it is, but I didn't even have to get tested because they know I can't get it. | ||
| But I mean, I still need to go. | ||
| People have got it twice. | ||
| My friend Mo got it twice. | ||
| Within the 90 days as well? | ||
| No, not within 90 days. | ||
| He got it a few months later. | ||
| He got it a second time. | ||
| But he said the second time was so mild. | ||
| It was nothing. | ||
| The first time, it kind of sucked, but the second time was nothing. | ||
| Is that because he still had some antibodies, do you think? | ||
| Yeah, the second time was much more mild because he had some antibodies. | ||
| He could take care of himself a little bit better. | ||
| He's not an athlete. | ||
| He's not out there taking care of his body. | ||
| He just fucked up. | ||
| He's a comedian. | ||
| Hilarious dude, but living that wild life. | ||
| That's how you catch it twice. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it was Dave's whole crew. | ||
| Dave Chappelle's whole crew. | ||
| They all caught COVID. Like a shitload of them got it. | ||
| Oh, fuck. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's quite a few. | ||
| Six or seven people, I think, got it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've been around a bunch of people that got it and I never got it. | ||
| I went to a concert once. | ||
| Backstage. | ||
| We're hanging out in the green room. | ||
| All having a good time. | ||
| Everybody got COVID except me. | ||
| Everybody. | ||
| The keyboard player had COVID. Didn't tell everybody. | ||
| And one of his band members was like, why are you wearing a mask? | ||
| What the fuck's going on? | ||
| Turns out he had COVID. And you didn't get it. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| I didn't get it. | ||
| No, everybody got it. | ||
| I mean, I was talking to everybody. | ||
| Everybody. | ||
| I'm on a shitload of vitamins, and I've been on a shitload of vitamins forever. | ||
| Do you drink a lot? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I'm joking. | |
| That's something that we've sort of come onto. | ||
| I do drink, though. | ||
| I enjoy alcohol, but I don't drink a lot. | ||
| I don't get a fucking hammer or anything. | ||
| It's pretty rare if I do. | ||
| But the thing that I do do is, first of all, sauna every day, mass amounts of vitamins, testosterone replacement. | ||
| That has a big impact, apparently. | ||
| There was an article... | ||
| That just came out yesterday about testosterone, high levels of testosterone and COVID symptoms. | ||
| And they used to think the opposite. | ||
| They used to think people with testosterone, like they thought that men had bad COVID responses. | ||
| They thought it might have been connected to testosterone. | ||
| But now they found that people with higher levels of testosterone, they have lower COVID symptoms, less severe COVID symptoms. | ||
| And they think it's like, like naturally, like if your body's natural production of testosterone, it depends on your sleeping habits, how you're eating, taking care of yourself. | ||
| But if you're on testosterone replacement, it's the same level, no matter what. | ||
| Like, so it's actually like a better level of testosterone than you would have Normally, just due to your endocrine system. | ||
| Apparently, that helps with people that have COVID. So that was one time that I was around it and everybody got it and I didn't get it. | ||
| Another time was my whole family got it. | ||
| My wife got it. | ||
| Kids got it. | ||
| Everybody got it. | ||
| And I was like, I talk all this shit. | ||
| I was like, let's see. | ||
| So I didn't wear a mask. | ||
| Just hung out with them. | ||
| Did normal shit. | ||
| And just never got it. | ||
| It's funny you say that because, well, Colby, the guy that's with us and he was on the show with us, he's got very low testosterone. | ||
| I think it was from, which I've never really heard of. | ||
| I don't know if you've heard of it. | ||
| They found out that the testosterone was so low that he was like a little kid or female levels, like really low. | ||
| He's still an animal, but... | ||
| I think it was from all the training, like the negative calories, and doing that for so long. | ||
| Head injuries, too. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's one of the things that Dr. Mark Gordon has done a lot of work with. | ||
| Don't tell me that. | ||
| He'll blame me for that. | ||
| That's a part of it, getting hit in the head. | ||
| Getting hit in the head is terrible for your pituitary gland, apparently. | ||
| It's not just getting hit in the head from fighting, it's playing soccer, people hitting the ball, they wind up with low testosterone. | ||
| Jet skis, just riding, the bouncing of jet skis rattles your head, you do it every day, you get low testosterone. | ||
| Well, because of that, because they found out, and then he got out of the fight dietitian, the majority, to just build a plan to try and get the testosterone back up. | ||
| So he's had to eat a heap, and then training couldn't be too crazy, and all this stuff just to try and get the testosterone back up. | ||
| But that's why, because maybe he's been doing that, that's why he didn't get as bad symptoms Maybe I'm just a little bitch with lower testosterone. | ||
| For you, for sure, it has to do with the training. | ||
| I mean, the thing is, like, people would think that someone who's training for a fight would be in excellent shape and you would ward off all sort of sicknesses and injuries. | ||
| But what they don't realize is you're far past working out and you're in this area of This fine line between breaking your body down too much and breaking it down just enough so that your body is forced to reach, like, hyperhuman levels of conditioning. | ||
| And you can't do it forever. | ||
| This is the thing that people don't understand about strength and conditioning training in regards to a fight camp, is that when a fighter's peaking for a fight, you cannot just stay there. | ||
| It's not like you can just keep pushing that level up. | ||
| Exactly right. | ||
| Your body, like, there's super physiological levels that your body can achieve During a small window, whether that is like 8 weeks, 10 weeks, whatever it is, where you ramp up and you get to this fucking BAM! Where you're just ready to go. | ||
| And I see you guys. | ||
| When you run into that cage on fight night and you're fucking slapping your hands together, that is a rare state of performance. | ||
| And it can only be achieved by balancing that edge. | ||
| And when you talk to top-level strength and conditioning coaches that work with fighters, It's an art to sort of balance that out. | ||
| But during that time, your immune system gets fucking crushed. | ||
| Yeah, 100%. | ||
| So I was fit. | ||
| I was that. | ||
| Because I had the aura ring, so I could see my heart rate. | ||
| I think some of the medication, like while I was in hospital, that can bring the heart rate down. | ||
| But I'm like low 40s. | ||
| But I was averaging 35 all night. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| 35. And I started freaking out because I started doing the old Google search and Google doctor. | ||
| And I'm looking and I'm like, yeah, it can be if it gets into your heart, the infection gets into your heart, your heart rate will go lower or hurt more. | ||
| And I'm like, what the fuck? | ||
| I'm watching this go down. | ||
| I was like, yeah, I'll be 38. The next day I was like 35 and I was under 40 the whole night. | ||
| Like, you know what I mean? | ||
| That's just sitting there. | ||
| But it just shows you how fit I fucking was. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I mean, obviously the immune system probably down from that hard training that we were doing. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| But that low heart rate is, I mean, if it's not because of the medication or the sickness, it's an indication of extreme cardio. | ||
| Bisping, I believe, when he was in his prime, he had a resting heart rate in the high 30s. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| It might have been in the mid-30s. | ||
| It might have been like 35 or something like that. | ||
| Bisping was crazy fit when he was in his prime. | ||
| But again, so fucking tough that he destroyed his knees. | ||
| Bisping's got two artificial knees now. | ||
| Is it true that he was fighting with one eye? | ||
| Oh yeah! | ||
| That guy's a fucking animal. | ||
| He can barely see out of his right eye. | ||
| Barely see. | ||
| Now it's a fake one, isn't it? | ||
| He wears a contact. | ||
| He gives a contact that makes it look normal. | ||
| Because it's so fucked up. | ||
| You know, from the Vitor Belfort fight, detached retinas, surgeries. | ||
| Did I see somewhere that he pulled his eyeball out, doesn't it? | ||
| They took the lens out. | ||
| He's got like a lens, a contact. | ||
| I thought he had pulled his eye out. | ||
| I thought like literally he's got a fake eye now. | ||
| No, when he puts the contact in, it looks normal. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| But I don't think he can see through that contact. | ||
| So he's essentially blind in one eye. | ||
| And he said for his like, I think he said the last 10 fights he had, something crazy, his eye was fucked. | ||
| Yeah, I heard that. | ||
| He's an animal. | ||
| I mean, that motherfucker is so tough. | ||
| Some of the shit these fucking fighters put themselves through, eh? | ||
| Too tough, but he walks around knowing he was the middleweight champion of the world. | ||
| I mean, that guy knocked out Luke Rockhold when Luke Rockhold was the fucking champ. | ||
| And, you know, that guy walks around with that glory forever. | ||
| You never take that away from him. | ||
| You know that. | ||
| You are the fucking featherweight champ of the world. | ||
| No one can take that from you. | ||
| That's who you are, no matter what. | ||
| I mean, even if you wind up losing, at one point in time, you were the baddest motherfucker that walked at 145 pounds. | ||
| That's a fact. | ||
| I ain't losing for a while now. | ||
| He had to get that in quick. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Before you finish that sentence, before you change the subject. | |
| Well, hey man, that's why you're the fucking man. | ||
| And the division that you're in, it's so exciting because there's so many guys that are challenging for that position. | ||
| You do have Max Holloway just put on that amazing performance against Calvin. | ||
| You do have Brian Ortega who's coming up next. | ||
| And I'm fucking pumped for that fight. | ||
| I'm really excited for that. | ||
| I'm real excited to see how you guys play off each other on The Ultimate Fighter. | ||
| But that showed to me... | ||
| I always want to get to the fights. | ||
| I don't want to see if we're going to throw watermelons at each other and give each other wedgies and shit. | ||
| Like, okay, okay. | ||
| This season's more serious, though. | ||
| The producers did tell us. | ||
| They said, obviously, in the past we've picked some crazy people to try to stir up the reality aspect, but they said this time they really wanted to pick proper fighters, serious fighters. | ||
| Good, good. | ||
| Well, it's ESPN, too, right? | ||
| ESPN's going to have a different approach than, say, a lot of these networks that are more reality TV focused. | ||
| But at the end of the day, it's a house full of guys that are stuck with each other. | ||
| I don't care how chill they are, shit's gonna happen. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| There's some real amazing thing about being a part of that show because that show is what launched the sport. | ||
| You know, in 2005, when they had the very first season of The Ultimate Fighter, The Fertittas had already dumped, they were like $40 million in the hole. | ||
| And they were like, Jesus Christ, we're losing money. | ||
| We can't burn out all of our money on this thing that we're trying to make happen. | ||
| And they fortunately were very wealthy. | ||
| What it was is like, when Eddie Bravo and I would go to the fights way back in the day, we used to always joke around, like, you know what the sport needs? | ||
| Some fucking crazy billionaire who loves the sport that's just going to dump a bunch of money in it and let everybody else know how great it is. | ||
| And that's what they did. | ||
| Like, really, that's what it took. | ||
| The Fertittas bankrolled that show. | ||
| It was their money that put that show together. | ||
| I don't think they got a penny to do that show. | ||
| I think they bankrolled the whole thing, and they were $40 million in the hole and thinking about selling. | ||
| They were thinking about selling the UFC before they did that. | ||
| And then the ultimate fighter becomes a hit, and then Stefan Bonner versus Forrest Griffin in the finals is It was such a wild fight. | ||
|
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Fucking bang. | |
| All these people were just calling their friends up. | ||
| Dude, you gotta see this shit. | ||
| Turn on the Spike TV. Turn on Spike TV. And then it became what it is today. | ||
| And then Chuck Liddell and his fights and the chaos that he would bring to the octagon sort of embodied what people wanted to see in the sport. | ||
| This hard-nosed savage with a fucking head tattoo just coming out trying to murder people. | ||
| And it became this thing. | ||
| And now you guys are on it. | ||
| That's what I mean. | ||
| And it's coming back. | ||
| So much history there. | ||
| So much history. | ||
| We've all watched it. | ||
| We all know about the Forrest Griffin-Stefan Bonner fight. | ||
| All of it. | ||
| So now to be a part of it, it's pretty crazy. | ||
| And it was good fun. | ||
| We enjoyed it. | ||
| Yeah, it really is history. | ||
| I mean, when it comes down to this sport, the Ultimate Fighter is really synonymous with the beginning of the public awareness of MMA. 100%. | ||
| Never gonna fight in MMA, right? | ||
|
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I don't know, man. | |
| You're thinking about it? | ||
| He's got some hands, you know. | ||
| We've been working with him a bit. | ||
| The tough thing would be it would be hard to get a good first fight, you know what I mean? | ||
| People are gonna probably give me something difficult because of the jiu-jitsu career. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| And what really keeps me out of it as well is like... | ||
| That five minute round. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| If I have a five minute grappling match, it's fucking hard to take someone down or pull guard and submit them when they're trying to grapple you. | ||
| Let alone, I have to not get knocked out, take them down, not get stood up, hold them down, and submit them. | ||
| It's really that five minute thing that I'm like, fuck, that doesn't favor jiu-jitsu guys. | ||
| That favors strikers and wrestlers. | ||
| Right, because you just have to be defensive enough to hold your position for five minutes and then get stood up again. | ||
| Every round starts taking that. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Even with the weight difference here, if I'm on top of Vox and he's like, he doesn't want to engage, it's hard to submit someone like that. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Even with a huge size and weight discrepancy. | ||
| I can't not fucking gauge it. | ||
| I'll just have to go like, I'm going to get fucked here, but I'm fucking trying something. | ||
| Every time I'm rolling, I was just like, why the fuck did I go for that? | ||
| I was like, why did I just sit there? | ||
| I guess that's made me who I am anyway. | ||
| What did you guys think of the old Pride way with the 10-minute first round? | ||
| That was cool. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| I think that's cool. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| Especially a guy like you who's a pressure fighter who likes to come forward and put a lot of pressure and see guys break. | ||
| You get more of an opportunity for that. | ||
| Round one, when it's seven minutes in, you have three more to go. | ||
| I'll be honest with you, when we do sparring and that, I'll get a couple of guys, they'll probably do two and a half minutes each sometimes. | ||
| And these guys are probably fit, but when I'm fit, in the two and a half minutes, They start. | ||
| Again, everyone's on point at the start, but the next minute, they've slowed down, and by the end of the two and a half minutes, I'm going with them. | ||
| They're like, ugh, and the next one in, and you do the same thing. | ||
| But to have ten minutes with someone, one whole round, because again, I just get better and better as the rounds go, especially as later the round goes. | ||
| So I would absolutely love that. | ||
| Absolutely love it, but... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think there's a real argument for that, and I think Pride had some great fucking rules. | ||
| They really did. | ||
| They had some great rules. | ||
| They had some little sketchy rules, like stomping on the head and soccer kicks and shit like that. | ||
| Some fake fights as well, right? | ||
| A lot of fake fights! | ||
| In the early days, there's a lot of fake fights, yeah. | ||
| They had quite a few that you could clearly see. | ||
| What was that, Mark Coleman vs. | ||
|
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Takata? | |
| Takata, yeah. | ||
| The heel hook, where he's like, I'm not gonna tap! | ||
| I'm not gonna... | ||
| I love the commentary too. | ||
| He's like, he passed his guard and now he's moving back to guard. | ||
| So I'm not sure what's going on. | ||
| It was unfortunate. | ||
| But, you know, they had this weird combination of pro wrestling and actual fighting. | ||
| And most of the fights were actual fights. | ||
| Like, you know, Fedor and Minotauro. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Go back and watch those fights. | ||
| Watch Fedor and Cro Cop. | ||
| And Fedor in his prime back then when he was running Pride... | ||
| I think he's one of the most impressive fighters that's ever lived. | ||
| He was a man. | ||
| And he could do anything. | ||
| He could submit you. | ||
| He could knock you out. | ||
| He would kickbox with Mirko Krokop. | ||
| I mean, he was that good. | ||
| He was a fucking monster. | ||
| And the face would not change the whole way through. | ||
|
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Stoic. | |
| Top and bottom submissions too. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Arm bars. | ||
| Remember Hongman Choi was seven feet tall and he armbarred him? | ||
| Like, that was wild. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wild, man. | ||
| Fedor was, I mean, he's a real legend. | ||
| It's still going at it, which is kind of crazy, right? | ||
| Yeah, I wonder what keeps someone in there at that point in their career. | ||
| KGB. Telling him to keep fighting. | ||
| Maybe he still just enjoys it. | ||
| I mean, you've experienced the highs that that guy's experienced. | ||
| Being the pride heavyweight champion for so long. | ||
| Is it still money? | ||
| Is he still getting good coin? | ||
| Bellator probably is paying him well. | ||
| Bellator is being very smart. | ||
| What they're doing is they're recognizing that there's some real elite talent that's in these negotiating situations with the UFC. Guys like Gegard Mousasi. | ||
| Guys like Rory McDonald. | ||
| Elite guys. | ||
| And then they have these conversations. | ||
| Corey Anderson. | ||
| They have these conversations and they go, look, we'll fucking pay you more. | ||
| Like, come on over. | ||
| Corey said he made more money. | ||
| I had dinner with him down in Houston when we were out there for the fights. | ||
| And Corey said he made more for two fights in Bellator than his entire UFC career. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| That is crazy to think. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| And I was like, wow. | ||
| Well, you can't argue with that, you know? | ||
| I mean, the guy's a prize fighter. | ||
| He's there to make money. | ||
| And they have high-level talent there, too, man. | ||
| You know, it's not the same talent, the same level of talent as the UFC, but that Pitbull guy, Patricio Pitbull, he's a bad motherfucker. | ||
| I know, look at him. | ||
|
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Immediately. | |
| He's going to come up. | ||
| He's going to be loving that. | ||
| I wouldn't mind putting hands on him, too, so... | ||
| Yeah, well, but obviously you've got to recognize that he's a good fighter, and that's why you want to fight him. | ||
| You're not dismissing him. | ||
| You're like, oh, I'd like to fuck that guy up, because you realize that he's elite. | ||
| Douglas Lima, one of the best 170-pounders in the world. | ||
| Man, that guy's a fucking beast. | ||
| Mousasi. | ||
| Gegard Mousasi's a fucking animal, man. | ||
| I mean, he's so good. | ||
| So there's real good talent over there. | ||
| And I think that's good for everybody. | ||
| I think it's good for the UFC. I think it's good for... | ||
| I mean, the bigger the PFL grows, the bigger one grows, it's better for everybody. | ||
| It's better for the sport. | ||
| You know, the sport... | ||
| But at the end of the day... | ||
| The UFC is the UFC, and that's, you know, it's the NFL of the sport. | ||
| It's like if you think about MMA, you think about who's the UFC champ, and then you think, well, there's some great fighters in other organizations too, but the UFC is without a doubt the number one. | ||
| But I think that's good for everybody. | ||
| I don't think there's anything wrong with recognizing all these other elite fighters in the rest of the sport. | ||
| I think it's good. | ||
| Especially when they come across like Chandler did. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| That's really cool. | ||
| It's fucking good, man. | ||
| I mean, knocks out Dan Hooker in one round. | ||
| Holy shit, you know Hooker. | ||
| He's fucking good. | ||
| He's a problem. | ||
| He almost did it to Oliveira. | ||
| Oliveira came out and did it to him. | ||
| That was a crazy fight. | ||
|
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Woo! | |
| What happened in the Soda Man and Tom Mike? | ||
| Yeah, it's hard to keep up. | ||
| The sport is so wild now. | ||
| I mean, there's just so many fights like that. | ||
| Like Usman Masvidal, the second fight, when Usman knocks him out. | ||
| Who expected that? | ||
| You know, it's just like these fucking guys are so good and everybody's getting better. | ||
| It's like the level. | ||
| And because of guys like you and Max and Usman and all these fucking elite guys and Oliveira, all these elite guys, like everybody's getting better. | ||
| It's like the level of the sport is just rising. | ||
| I love it because that's motivating, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Because I look at that as like, what I know now won't be enough in a couple of months. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I need to keep learning. | ||
| I need to keep evolving. | ||
| The sport's evolving. | ||
| I need to keep evolving and be a step ahead. | ||
| I want to be a step ahead. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I need to keep evolving with it. | ||
| So that motivates me. | ||
| I was like, fuck yeah, let's go. | ||
| Let's go! | ||
| Let's fucking go! | ||
| Well, listen. | ||
| Thank you, gentlemen, for being here. | ||
| Alex, you know I'm a fan. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Love when you fight. | ||
| Can't wait to see you in there. | ||
| Whatever the date is, whenever it's announced, make sure we blow it up, you and Ortega. | ||
| And this Friday, I'm going to be there to see your match. | ||
| Who are you competing against again? | ||
| Luis Panza. | ||
| So obviously filling in. | ||
| Gordon's... | ||
| This is the guy that Gordon was supposed to fight. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So be cool. | ||
| You'll be there. | ||
| Alex Jones. | ||
| Alex Jones will be in your corner. | ||
| Alex Jones, I'm going to make it happen. | ||
| He's getting in the corner. | ||
| I want to drunk Alex Jones in the corner, too. | ||
| Oh, you don't want to drunk Alex Jones in the corner. | ||
| Maybe you do. | ||
| You did ask me to choke him out yesterday, but I didn't do it. | ||
| You asked everybody to choke him out. | ||
| So that's on flowgrappling.com. | ||
| If you're not a member, you should subscribe. | ||
| It's awesome. | ||
| There's so many good matches you can watch on there, and they consistently hold these high-level matches at Who's Number One in Austin. | ||
| They have them once a month towards the end of the month. | ||
| Went to it last time. | ||
| I've gone to the last two here. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| And so that's flowgrappling.com and that'll be available Friday. | ||
| Subscribe. | ||
| It's not expensive. | ||
| If you're a supporter of jiu-jitsu, it's definitely worth it. | ||
| What is your Instagram handle again? | ||
| Alex Volkanovski. | ||
| Alex Volkanovski. | ||
| And yours is Craig Jones BJJ. That's it, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's it. | |
| All right. | ||
| Bye, everybody. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
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See ya. | |
| Hey, nothing but love to attack. |
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