On this week's episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, we're joined by the snack company, NatureBox, to talk about their new line of healthy snack boxes, and why they're the best snack options out there. Plus, we talk about how to get a deal with the Better Business Bureau and why you shouldn't be breaking the law to do it. Also, we have a new segment called "Drunk on Heroin" and it's about how you can get a free shot of heroin if you're drunk enough to be doing drugs and get caught doing it in your own home, and how to stop yourself from getting caught doing the same thing. And, of course, we finish the episode with a quiz from our listeners about whether or not you can be drunk and still do it legally, and if you can do it at the same time, and what you should do about it. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace, LegalZoom, and NatureBox. We're also getting a 50% discount on our first box from NatureBox! Subscribe to the show to get 50% off your first box! Want to sponsor the show? Subscribe, rate, and review it? Just go to gimlet.fm/TheJoeRoganExperience and enter the code "JOERogan" at checkout to get 10% off the entire show! and get 20% off for the rest of the show, plus free shipping on all future episodes, plus a free shipping, plus an ad-free version of the entire year, shipping included in the first month, shipping free, shipping, and free shipping throughout the entire month of the year, and a FREE shipping offer, plus shipping on the second month, and an additional $10/month, and no additional shipping on future orders, and shipping on a second year of the next year, free shipping available in the second year, plus all other options available to you get a year of your choice, plus you get an extra $10,000 in the show gets a maximum of $50,000 shipping and a $150, plus FREE shipping, you get $5,000, plus the choice of your first year, you can choose a maximum, and you get it all that you choose, you'll get $10% off, and they'll get a $25,000 Shipping, plus they'll also get a discount on your first month and a lifetime of the whole thing.
00:00:35.000If you go to devsquad.tv and check out the website that Brian has created, along with the online store that he's created, he did it in about fucking ten minutes.
00:04:55.000But, point is, whatever that thing is, the BB whatever, Better Business BBB, LegalZoom has gotten A-plus from them.
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00:05:34.000LegalZoom was developed by top attorneys to provide self-help services at your specific direction, but they are not a law firm.
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00:05:45.000Like if you're one of those panicky fuckers and you can't handle it.
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00:06:29.000Alright, without further ado, I try to keep these things in the minimum, ladies and gentlemen.
00:06:33.000I know people say, Tim Rogan, your fucking commercials take so much time.
00:06:37.000They don't necessarily have to take so much time.
00:06:40.000They take time only because I bullshit during the commercials, and also because I really do try to only have things on the podcast that we use.
00:06:50.000LegalZoom was used by us to start on it.
00:06:53.000The deskwad.tv, LegalZoom was used by Brian to start that.
00:06:59.000Bring things on the podcast as a sponsor that I believe in.
00:07:02.000I used LegalZoom to get Dolce Diet registered years ago.
00:07:43.000But I want to talk to you about a lot of people who don't understand mixed martial arts or maybe they're casual fans.
00:07:51.000They don't know that there's a lot going on in MMA. And one of the things that's going on besides the fact that it's a very dangerous, very...
00:08:00.000It's a highly charged sport with a lot on the line for the competitors.
00:08:05.000But one of the things that's on the line that a lot of people aren't aware of is a thing that we call weight cutting.
00:08:10.000And so I can fill people in that may just not know much about MMA. If a fighter is going to fight at, say, 145 pounds.
00:08:23.000It's very rare that you get a guy like Frankie Edgar, who was the lightweight champion, who lightweight in the UFC is 155 pounds.
00:08:31.000That's what he actually used to weigh.
00:08:33.000He was really fit, and he walked around at 155. He didn't cut any weight to weigh in for the weight class, and he was always smaller than almost anyone in his division.
00:08:43.000He still won and beat some of the best guys in the planet just because he's really tough and very highly skilled, but that's the rarity.
00:08:51.000The only division where that doesn't take place is in the heavyweight division, which guys don't have to cut any weight at all, generally speaking.
00:08:57.000There was a few exceptions, like Tim Sylvia in his heyday used to be a little bit bigger, or Brock Lesnar might have cut a little, or...
00:09:03.000Alistair Overeem, when he first fought in the UFC, cut a little.
00:09:05.000But for the most part, those guys get to eat whatever the fuck they want.
00:09:08.000For everybody else, essentially there's two different events going on.
00:09:12.000There's the event where there's a fight, where you're training to compete against the best mixed martial arts fighters in the world, but then there's also the weigh-in.
00:09:21.000And the weigh-in is an event in and of itself.
00:09:23.000It is a huge thing, because you get guys like, a perfect example of extreme examples is Gleason Tebow, which I don't think Gleason's missed weight.
00:09:58.000Ultimately, what we're trying to do is trying to be on weight for the shortest time possible to minimize the ill effects of being at that weight.
00:10:05.000A guy like Nick Lentz, 145 pounder, you brought up 45s.
00:10:08.000So Nick Lentz, he does most of his training camp around 175 now.
00:10:14.000And we want to touch down at 45 and be there for really under an hour.
00:10:18.000I want my athletes still kind of dripping that last sweat when they step on the scale so they can just graze the contract weight and immediately we hydrate them right back up again.
00:10:28.000And when you say Nick Lentz walks around at 175 pounds, for folks that are listening to this, you go, oh, he gets fat.
00:11:03.000So when I back up, when I talk to an athlete or when I talk about weight cutting, I say, number one, it's not the best case scenario.
00:11:08.000Weight cutting is something that unfortunately has to be done by a lot of athletes in order to minimize advantage as opposed to gaining an advantage.
00:11:17.000But the weight cut should start 52 weeks before competition, which means this should be a lifestyle.
00:11:22.000These athletes, and this is what they need to understand, and hopefully we can spread this message, is they need to be training and living and eating and breathing like professional athletes 365 days out of the year so they can minimize the downside of the weight cutting practice.
00:11:36.000They need to be eating the proper foods.
00:11:38.000Training intelligently, resting completely, so their body is able to endure the grueling practice of cutting weight.
00:11:46.000So with Nick Lentz, he's fresh in the mind right now.
00:11:47.000I was just with him in Connecticut last week.
00:11:49.000He made weight 146, Charles Oliveira, his opponent.
00:11:52.000He missed weight by four pounds, which was absolutely ridiculous, unprofessional.
00:11:56.000But there's a saying that the first fight is with the scale.
00:12:00.000So the athletes, when they get to the fight week or when they get to the location, they're focused on the scale.
00:12:07.000They don't even think about the fight for the most part.
00:12:10.000Does it keep them from getting distracted about the fight?
00:12:12.000Yeah, and that's actually one of the positive benefits of it is that they're not focused on the fight.
00:12:19.000They're not burning all that nervous energy thinking about the fight.
00:12:22.000But that sets in pretty quick as soon as they step off the scale and they have that first face-off.
00:12:26.000In that case, maybe every fighter should have just a really fucking crazy girlfriend that demands all their time and only hook up with her the week of the fight so that she just demands all your, you know, all you fucking care about is what you eat!
00:13:33.000Eight-week, 12-week training camp can be blown during fight week or in the 24, 48 hours before they step in the octagon or in the competition.
00:16:08.000I love Forrest, just as a person, and I'm a huge fan of his as a fighter.
00:16:13.000But I think that one of the best and worst things that ever happened to him was that fight with...
00:16:19.000I would say it's one of the greatest, most important fights in MMA. But the fight with Stefan Bonner in the finals of the Ultimate Fighter, the first season, which was such a crazy fight...
00:17:29.000It was because you got two guys who knew each other super well, trained together for the six weeks they were in the house, and then went to war.
00:17:36.000And they were so evenly matched that there was no winner in that fight.
00:18:47.000And you see that in the gym where an athlete, either they're very tentative and calculating when they first get into the gym and they kind of have to bring out that monster a little bit and learn to be a finisher.
00:18:56.000And they tend to look a little bit boring and maybe like an underachiever.
00:19:00.000Or you get a guy like Forrest or Lieben that goes out there and they just go balls to the wall throwing big shots and sometimes they get knocked out and sometimes they get their hand raised.
00:19:59.000Because if you look at boxing, the majority of the instances of men suffering in-fight brain damage, Gerald McClellan, Duck Ku Kim, like there's a lot of these cases and almost all of them involve someone weight cutting.
00:20:16.000And because of that, boxing and now MMA has adjusted its schedule where the fighters weigh in the day before, where they used to weigh in the day of the match.
00:20:25.000Old school boxing matches, you would see them weigh in the day of the match, and they would still cut weight, and then they would try to rehydrate, and they didn't know what the fuck they were doing back then.
00:21:09.000And he was one of the guys who was eventually going to fight Roy Jones Jr., fought Nigel Benn in an epic contest, had Benn really badly hurt.
00:21:19.000They collided heads and he was all fucked up and he went back to his corner and he took a knee and wound up bowing out of the fight and then immediately went into a coma and had some horrible brain injuries because of that.
00:21:34.000And that was a fight that changed a lot of people's ideas about weight cutting and about the dangers of head trauma because before that fight, Gerald McClellan was thought to be like an invincible destroyer.
00:23:49.000It's just another layer of insulation when you're constantly grinding on guys and being wrenched against the wall and picked up and slammed 50 times because you're drilling whatever move.
00:23:58.000You need that little bit of insulation.
00:24:00.000The leaner you get, the drier your joints get, the more susceptible to injury you become.
00:24:14.000I don't think I can speak intelligently enough to break down the true science of it, but it's something that certainly remains.
00:24:22.000I know when I was a power lifter, we would increase our body fat in order to increase the leverage points within our joints.
00:24:29.000When I was a power lifter, I would intentionally increase my body fat to 15-18%.
00:24:35.000And my numbers would absolutely go through the roof.
00:24:38.000I would get less joint pain, less injuries.
00:24:40.000So call it, you know, bro science if some people like to throw that term around there.
00:24:44.000But you just feel better, feel stronger.
00:24:46.000And the leaner you get, specifically when you start heading into the peaking phase, which is now mild dehydration as we get closer to fight week sets in, the entire body becomes drier.
00:24:55.000So there's less elasticity within the muscles.
00:25:58.000You know, but for the longest time, most people thought, no, you had to use a Nautilus machine and you had to fucking, you know, do everything.
00:26:20.000Like, you could call someone a bro and you limit their...
00:26:23.000Anything that they have to say, anything they have to say about culture, anything they have to say about society, any opinions, any thoughts, any philosophies they might have, you're a bro.
00:28:14.000I'm taking what I did on Friday, Saturday of that week, and on Sunday, I'm looking at the numbers and I'm retooling it because Monday I'm going to another fight week somewhere, and we're continuing to evolve this process as we move forward.
00:28:29.000That's also battle-tested and proven viable with experience.
00:28:34.000Because there's a lot of science out there that, you know, the guys in the suits and the lab coats, they're going to point to and say, that's the way to do it.
00:28:40.000But they've never actually done it in the human element.
00:28:58.000And that's kind of what we roll into this.
00:29:00.000Also, the stakes in MMA are so much higher than the stakes in any other sport when it comes to proven concepts in the real world, in quotes.
00:29:08.000Because the real world in MMA, your fucking consciousness is on the line.
00:29:15.000Things that would ordinarily, like if you were in any sort of a real-life situation and someone kicked you in the head, that person would go to jail.
00:29:32.000Well, it's performance of the night now.
00:29:34.000Do you think, and this is a really touchy subject, but I think it's an important one to bring up.
00:29:39.000Do you think that a lot of our ideas about what's physically possible when it comes to training and when it comes to fighting are distorted because of performance-enhancing drugs?
00:29:52.000I think performance-enhancing drugs have set the bar in all sports in a culture, whether it's looking at the movies, looking at the magazine cover.
00:30:05.000Golf, NASCAR. Anywhere you look that there's money on the line, where you get rewarded...
00:30:09.000For performance, there's some sort of ancillary good or commodity being used or purchased or consumed to improve your performance.
00:30:19.000It's very evident in the world of mixed martial arts because these guys and girls are getting punched and kicked in the head and they're losing consciousness and they're breaking bones and getting limbs torn off.
00:30:29.000So now you have these advanced superhumans Out there able to, you know, rip joints and punch brains and do all these other things.
00:30:37.000So it does, I think the odds are much greater, you know, for the risk is certainly much greater for anybody who competes.
00:30:46.000Yeah, that's where I took exception to a lot of people saying, like, who cares if someone juices, you know, I don't give a fuck, I'm gonna kick their ass anyway.
00:30:54.000You know, like Chris Weidman said that about Vitor Belfort, and I appreciate the fact that he thinks that way, because he's a champion, and that's how a champion feels.
00:31:02.000But, the reality is, there are punches that can be landed when you are on EPO and test and jacked to the fucking gills and whatever the fuck else you're doing, that you wouldn't have the energy to land in a normal scenario.
00:31:17.000It's very rare that a guy can do like what TJ Dillashaw does and go balls to the walls for five fucking rounds.
00:31:24.000TJ can do it as a natural athlete because he's got a fucking tireless work ethic, he's unbelievably dedicated and focused, and he's 145 pounds.
00:31:36.000The difference between that and a guy like Overeem, who Alistair Overeem came into the UFC against Brock Lesnar, he was 265, shredded to the tits, looked like a fucking superhero out of a comic book, pissed hot, and has never been the same guy again.
00:31:52.000And the reality is now he's being tested, he's shrunk, he lost body mass.
00:31:58.000It just seems to affect a guy's chin as well.
00:32:01.000The thing about taking performance-enhancing drugs is that it doesn't just seem to affect your cardio, but it seems to also affect your ability to take a shot.
00:33:11.000It brings out that killer instinct and maybe an athlete in that state, they can walk through punches more because they have more of that primal urge and instinct and those elevated hormones pumping through their body because that's really what testosterone does and God knows what else is out there.
00:33:27.000I mean, I don't even think we're aware In this room of all the drugs and performance enhancers that are truly out there and these, you know, evil geniuses around the world are creating and sticking into the athletes and putting them back out there to see what the effect is.
00:33:41.000No, and Bigfoot got popped on a simple urine test, which is quite fascinating because the UFC has taken a lot of flack about their stance on performance enhancing drugs and people's like, oh, it's just lip service.
00:35:00.000The reason being is because there's no shenanigans with these blood tests.
00:35:03.000And because of that, a guy like Chael Sonnen got popped for EPO, elevated levels of test, human growth hormone.
00:35:10.000He's been popped for a bunch of different things.
00:35:13.000Actually, the elevated test was the urine thing.
00:35:15.000But when they got him with the blood, they got him with some thing that they use for fertility.
00:35:23.000He was on Clomid, which is what you take when they take you off Of human growth hormone or testosterone to try to restart your body's system.
00:35:35.000Everyone's a fucking chemical factory.
00:37:06.000He was kicking everybody's ass, and he looks like he just stepped out of his fucking station wagon and waddled onto the beach to play volleyball with some friends.
00:37:16.000He was much bigger, actually, early in his career.
00:37:46.000But in that case, if you're going to sign that contract and then you're loaded up to the gills, I'm not going to sit here and judge morally because you're agreeing to those rules.
00:37:55.000It's like kicks to the face on the ground if you're going to agree to it.
00:37:58.000But in the UFC here where there's unified rules, it's a whole other ballgame.
00:38:03.000Well, when Jason Chambers was training at 10th Planet, he went over.
00:38:29.000I mean, is that just culturally, it's not an issue?
00:38:31.000I don't think they give a fuck about that.
00:38:33.000They just looked at him, you know, Jason's a handsome bastard, and they said, like, this fucking beautiful bastard, we need some muscles on this motherfucker to sell.
00:40:39.000No evidence other than a photo, but that photo was pretty fucking interesting.
00:40:45.000Well, it's interesting because Kung Lee is 40, but in Kung's defense, he said that he had had a series of aggravating injuries, and this was the first camp where he had had surgeries, he had fixed up all those injuries, and he went on a pretty rigorous strength and conditioning regime.
00:42:04.000Dan Henderson, who knocked him out, wasn't popped for steroids, but he was on a legal version of testosterone replacement therapy before they outlawed that stuff, which I think is a good thing to outlaw.
00:42:13.000And this is coming from a person who takes testosterone.
00:42:33.000That's what testosterone replacement is all about.
00:42:36.000But when it comes to professional athletes doing it, man, it's very tricky.
00:42:41.000Because on one side, an athlete can take it and it can make them feel better and they can perform better when their career would be over.
00:42:51.000Like you take a guy like a Roger Clemens.
00:42:53.000And I don't know whether or not Roger Clemens did anything, but most people believe he did.
00:42:56.000And he's a baseball player, and then deep into his 40s, all of a sudden the motherfuckers, he's still throwing 95 mile an hour fastballs, and he looks fantastic, and he's built like a brick shithouse.
00:43:09.000Well, most likely he got on hormone replacement.
00:43:12.000So the idea being that when you're getting older, you're getting wiser, and you have accumulated all this experience and all this knowledge, but...
00:43:23.000Your body does not perform the way it did when you were younger.
00:43:52.000And this is obviously hypocritical coming from me because I just admitted that I did take testosterone.
00:43:56.000But when you're a fighter, there's the guys that they've gone through all this experience, their bodies started to fade off, and then they get on it, and then boom, all of a sudden, they're world beaters.
00:44:59.000I'm a guy who likes watching entertaining fights.
00:45:02.000I like watching spectacular performances.
00:45:04.000But on another hand, I want to see someone fighting someone Where it's just will and determination and discipline and focus and you work towards something and then you achieve it and you do it just by hard work.
00:49:22.000And it was very tricky because you have to find out what's ethical.
00:49:26.000I mean, they allowed it in the first place because doctors were saying, my client has low testosterone and he has an issue, gonadism or whatever, hypergonadism.
00:50:16.000That's what happened with Nate Marquardt.
00:50:18.000That's what happened with a lot of people.
00:50:20.000That was the issue with when Nate Marquardt was pulled out of his fight with Rick Story at the very last minute is because the Pennsylvania Athletic Commission tested him and he was jacked through the roof.
00:50:31.000And they were like, what were you doing is dangerous?
00:50:55.000Unless you are going to the doctor, and that doctor is the only one who administers testosterone, and they do it right in front of you, you can put as much in as you want.
00:51:05.000You know, if Mike Dolce gets a prescription for testosterone, and you go to your doctor, your doctor's going to give you a fucking month's supply, and you could say, I want to put the whole month in right now.
00:51:26.000If you're on anything else, if you're on any other kind of medication, you take two pills in the morning, you take two pills at night, and here's your pills.
00:51:38.000But you could just decide to throw the whole bottle down your throat if you're fucking nuts.
00:51:42.000The only way you could prevent that with testosterone is by restricting access and making that access only through that medical provider that does it right there.
00:52:27.000Vitor's previous performances have been some of the best performances I've ever seen in all my years of watching MMA. He just looked fantastic.
00:52:35.000And if there was no concern whatsoever, if there was no issue with testosterone, if he wasn't on anything, he was just fucking training like a wild man and putting in, you know, if he was younger and this was all going on, if he didn't have like a noticeable I think?
00:53:10.000Find out what Chris Weidman over Vitor Belfort is.
00:53:12.000If you look at how Vitor destroyed Dan Henderson, you look at how he destroyed Luke Rockhold, you look at how he destroyed Bisping, you would say, how could anybody be a favorite over this guy?
00:53:25.000And the reason is, is because of the testosterone.
00:53:57.000Not knowing what his blood work or how bad off he was, you know, going into the TRT program, he's gonna come out worse off.
00:54:04.000He said he was at 180. That was what he said, which is really low.
00:54:09.000And I would believe that knowing a lot of the Brazilians, a lot of those kids get on in their early teens because it's a social medicine over there.
00:54:16.000You walk into a gym and that's what the coach hands them.
00:54:18.000And I've heard this story from dozens of Brazilians and it's nothing against the culture.
00:54:30.000When it's over here, you've got to get your, you know, if you're going to go to a gym and become a bodybuilder and you want to get testosterone or steroids, you're going to have to do dealings with some shady people.
00:57:44.000All these guys, it seems to be heart-related.
00:57:46.000Their hearts are just exploding on them.
00:57:48.000They're enlarged, for starters, and then they're just some sort of shutdown, breakdown, and they're just exploding, for lack of a more technical term.
00:58:41.000So cutting weight is one thing, using a very powerful pharmaceutical diuretic.
00:58:47.000That's like water and fucking, you know, rubbing alcohol.
00:58:53.000As far as, you know, putting that into your body.
00:58:56.000And that's what, like, Mohammed Benaziza and I think Andres Muncer, some of these famous older bodybuilders, were just huge into those prescription diuretics.
00:59:05.000And they just fucking blow their body up from the inside out.
01:00:53.000And that's when I became this fucking organic, like, pseudo-hippie health longevity dude.
01:00:58.000And when I focused on that, I lost 110 pounds, you know, through my own personal experience.
01:01:03.000But I was always working with athletes.
01:01:05.000You know, like, since I was 17 years old, first of all, my training business, I was always working with athletes.
01:01:10.000And I took that performance side, and I went to the longevity side.
01:01:13.000And what I saw is once we all started focusing on longevity protocols as opposed to performance protocols, everybody's performance went through the roof.
01:01:22.000So when you say longevity protocols, what do you mean specifically?
01:01:26.000I mean real food, getting rid of all the supplements, getting rid of all the pseudoscience, getting back to what's most natural.
01:01:32.000I use the term earth-grown nutrients because I used to say Whole Foods and people thought that meant go shopping at the supermarket.
01:01:39.000That was like really the first step for me.
01:01:42.000And I don't care as much about micronutrient ratios and weighing because I used to weigh my food and I used to sit there and I would spend a half hour every night and program all my meals and come up with all these different training cycles.
01:01:52.000And I was that dude, that insane dude about making these performance enhancements.
01:01:59.000You just need to focus on eating real food, extremely nutrient-dense foods from the planet as fresh as possible, as live as possible.
01:02:06.000And all the science that's out there shows that that's the healthier way.
01:02:09.000And all these different cultures that eat like that tend to be much healthier, perform at a higher level for a much longer period of time, longer lifespan, and a high utility.
01:02:21.000Not only do they live longer, they have a very high utility while they're Living longer.
01:02:26.00050, 60, 80, 90, 100 plus years old where they're still able to go out, fish, swim, do all these different things.
01:02:33.000That's what really turned my mind and this is back 15, probably 15 years ago now.
01:02:40.000And then I started implementing that with my athletes, whether it's the powerlifters, the wrestlers, or the grapplers.
01:02:44.000And then early 2000s, it was with the NHB athletes before MMA. That's kind of how I got the start into the MMA world was through Team Henzo Gracie on the East Coast.
01:02:53.000Guys like Kurt Pellegrino and Dante Rivera, when they were fighting for that ring of combat, NHB titles and whatnot, focused on those guys.
01:03:10.000It was almost like a leap of faith for a while for a lot of athletes to buy into, you mean I have to eat salads and fruit and make a smoothie?
01:03:21.000Now that we talk about it and the culture is a little more advanced, I think the science is out there and it's been proven for a decade plus.
01:03:28.000That people realize, well, that's the better way to go now.
01:03:30.000But going back, you know, 10, 15 years ago, that was like, everybody was living out of fucking jugs.
01:03:35.000You know, protein powders and GNCs and all that shit.
01:03:37.000That was the big rage in the late 90s all the way into the early 2000s and such.
01:03:41.000So, spun that, switched it, focused on the real foods, and that's what we've been doing with the athletes since.
01:03:47.000So, going back to the longevity, when I work with an athlete, like a Tiago Alves or a Ronda Rousey or whoever else, My goal is not for them to win a world title.
01:04:16.000If we focus on it now, because we're talking, that's 80 years from now, and with the medical advancements that are happening, with the way science is continuing to evolve, it's possible if we don't fuck it up early.
01:04:28.000And this is where I talk to the athletes about the weight cutting starts 52 weeks beforehand.
01:04:32.000If we don't fuck everything up now, science is going to advance to the point to keep us healthier, longer, offset some of these issues at a later stage of life, instead of having a Mike Matarazzo.
01:04:43.000You need a fucking heart transplant when you're 40 instead of, well, maybe when you're 80, it slowly starts to give out because you've eaten fucking great, highly nutrient-dense foods your entire life.
01:04:54.000You've been resting your body completely, not burning your nervous system out.
01:04:57.000You're training intelligently, enough to stimulate progress, but not enough to shut anything down and break anything down.
01:05:03.000You're living a rewarding, happy life surrounding yourself with positive people, and that's something that you talk about here all the time, and that's almost the most important aspect.
01:05:12.000Is being a very well-adjusted, happy, positive individual.
01:05:15.000And this is something that when I work with athletes, a lot of people think, oh, this is just this fucking diet dude, or I'm just making eggs for you or handing my athletes water.
01:05:23.000I think that's the least of what I do.
01:05:25.000The most of what I do is I try and get inside the athlete's head and help them focus on their life and what they want out of their life.
01:05:34.000Setting up goals and helping them develop action steps and eliminating this negative energy around them so they can truly realize their full potential.
01:05:41.000And that's, you know, I call it, we put a bubble of positivity around the athlete, especially as we get closer to competition, because that's when it's most important.
01:05:48.000But it's really, we will try and keep that around them their entire life, give them the tools, teach them the lessons now that they can carry on.
01:05:57.000I don't know, but I've read scientific research that assumes or believes that there's humans being born right now, on the planet right now, that will exceed 200 years old.
01:06:29.000If you have some bad shit in your life, you have some conflict, you'll feel bad about that conflict.
01:06:35.000The key is to resolve that stuff as much as possible and then figure out a way to make peace with the rest of it and move on with your life.
01:06:43.000The less you put out battling it, the better you'll feel about it.
01:06:50.000When I was younger, I would argue with people about everything.
01:06:52.000I was constantly involved in conflict.
01:06:54.000And then I realized as I got older, the less conflict I have, the better I feel.
01:06:57.000And the more I resolve conflict and not get in it, it's better for everybody.
01:07:01.000It's better for that person, it's better for me.
01:07:03.000There's certain shit that's unavoidable, but all these people that are running around suing people all the time, those are the motherfuckers that die of heart attacks.
01:08:40.000I remember this was the turning point for me.
01:08:41.000I sat around a boardroom table and I was a lot younger than my closest peer and I'm looking at all these older dudes and we're all sitting there in suits and like, we're so fucking important, you know, being those dickheads.
01:08:53.000They all have red faces and they're all talking about how they're going to fucking, you know, sneak off to the bar before they go home because they don't want to deal with the fucking family and the kids and all the fucking bullshit.
01:09:04.000I have to get the fuck out of here or I'm gonna fucking die like this.
01:09:08.000I gotta change my life and that's what we did and I kind of threw that away, resigned from the position, took the job as the strength coach at Team Quest up in Portland, Oregon, moved across the country for fucking minimum wage to clean toilets and left that job behind and I fucking loved it.
01:09:23.000I loved scrubbing disgusting shitty gym mats at 5 o'clock in the morning and not sitting in a beautiful corner office for X amount of dollars per year Because I was doing what I loved and I gave myself the opportunity and a chance to do something with my life and get rid of the stress.
01:09:40.000I think that's why I'm kind of veering off.
01:11:47.000Have you ever kind of analyzed, like, what drives you to get your ass out of bed, make yourself uncomfortable yet again on another day that you can just fucking put your feet up and lay by the pool and enjoy the sunshine?
01:14:38.000And then they do the same basic workout for the same basic reps and they do that, you know, the same.
01:14:42.000It's just the fucking same and they're on that rat wheel.
01:14:44.000So if you really, you know, talking to people out there, if you really want to break out, you really want to be spectacular, you really want to start to fulfill your potential, you have to make yourself uncomfortable, you have to challenge yourself, and then you have to earn it.
01:14:56.000So with my athletes, with myself, our earned meals are maybe once or twice a month.
01:15:36.000You know, once upon a time, I was the dude that would, I'd get a whole pizza and I'd put a half a pound of provolone cheese on top, eat that whole motherfucker.
01:15:45.000Half gallon of ice cream, big king-sized Snickers bar, and something colored to finish it down.
01:16:28.000Unfortunately, it's all preservatives, it's all chemicals, it's all coloring, it's all additives, and it's very little of the nutrition you're actually purchasing it for.
01:16:37.000It's such watered-down components of what is on the front label, just enough so they can legally put it in there and not get fucking sued, and it's a shitload of everything else.
01:16:46.000So your journey to becoming this MMA fitness diet guru, you've kind of like changed your own life in the process.
01:16:55.000You've sort of figured out what makes you happy, what makes you consistently perform well.
01:17:01.000And in the process, you've sort of become this guy by trial and error and education and application.
01:17:07.000And now here you are in this position where, I mean, fucking 90% of the guys that I see That are doing well in MMA. I see guys with these Dolce Diet shirts on.
01:17:18.000I mean, you have so many athletes that follow your protocols, and whenever someone is in trouble, and they have a hard time cutting weight, they come to you.
01:17:31.000Was it through, like what you said, Kurt Pellegrino, and then Kurt told other people, and that kind of shit?
01:17:36.000That was like 2002, 2003. I was working with guys on Team Henzo Gracie.
01:17:41.000I started training under Henzo, and I'd been a powerlifter for years before that, and I was an amateur wrestler for years before that.
01:17:47.000So I've been cutting weight since I was 13 years old.
01:17:49.000I was a varsity captain as a freshman, so a four-year varsity letterman, captain of the team, and I was just, since I was eight years old, fathered fucking massive stroke.
01:17:59.000I dove into bodybuilding and weightlifting at that age, and I was just attuned to it.
01:18:04.000I was in honors, sciences, biology, mathematics, and I just had that type of analytical brain, and I would analyze everything and all this shit.
01:18:12.000So, you know, I won't get too deep into that.
01:18:13.000As I went through, I was always cutting weight, always trying to get bigger, always trying to get stronger.
01:18:18.000I was rather short, had no money, family was broke, wanted to go to college.
01:19:14.000Because I talked to Steve Maxwell about this, and Maxwell, who's a really well-respected guy and a very knowledgeable guy when it comes to strength and conditioning and athletics.
01:19:27.000He believes that you should do all of your strength workouts and your conditioning workouts kind of building up to a camp.
01:19:36.000And then when you're in camp, the majority of your work should be spent doing the actual sport itself.
01:19:41.000Without knowing his entire protocol, I agree on principle.
01:19:45.000And what I do and how I work best is not just overseeing the nutrition, the diet, and the weight cut.
01:19:51.000I call it the peaking program, and I bake it out into the traditional...
01:20:14.000Rebuild, regenerate, and continue building him all the way through until he's 35 when he plans to retire and the specific goals that we have set.
01:20:21.000So a guy like Nick Lentz, I took over five or six fights ago when he was a 55-pounder.
01:20:27.000It'll be a little long-winded, but to kind of help explain your answer to the question here.
01:20:32.000Took him over and he was doing a lot of the wrong things.
01:21:40.000We always want the body constantly regenerating, regenerating, regenerating.
01:21:44.000Because once we stop regenerating, then we're breaking down.
01:21:47.000Once we start breaking down, everything goes to shit.
01:21:49.000So, with Nick, using him as the example again, build him up in the off-season, and that's where I start to break down these three-week mini-cycles.
01:21:56.000Three weeks before the fight, that's the peaking phase.
01:21:58.000That's when everything, the volume drops dramatically, the intensity goes up, but it's safe intensity.
01:22:03.000You're not sparring your fucking hardest those last three weeks.
01:22:06.000You're sparring your most intense and most precise We're good to go.
01:22:32.000Your mind meaning you just you resolve like mental toughness I mean we see guys unfortunately that they get into the octagon They get put a bad spot that they haven't been in before and they fold because they haven't been there You have to go to those spots unfortunately, but you have to do it in a very calculated fashion Because you go there too often you'll break in training and you'll give up in the fight you don't go there enough and You'll break in the fight,
01:22:56.000and again, it's going to be the same result.
01:22:58.000So you have to touch it just enough, and this is where that periodization comes in.
01:23:01.000So I help oversee the overall training program.
01:24:05.000We want to keep that type of strength, that explosive strength, that absolute or maximal strength that we build in the off-season.
01:24:11.000We want to keep that, but now we want to turn it into a different type of strength, like a strength speed or speed endurance, as we get into this specific competition.
01:24:19.000And that changes depending on what the sport is.
01:24:35.000Normally, I don't really pull back the veil, but I think because this is such a public situation, and Oliveira and his team, they've already spoken on it.
01:24:43.000Unfortunately, what they said was incorrect from what we saw.
01:24:46.000So Nick and I, this fight's on Friday.
01:24:47.000Nick and I, we get there on Monday, and we're already...
01:24:53.000He's fighting at 146. That's the official weighing weight.
01:24:55.000And that's actually lighter than Nick normally is.
01:24:57.000But we tightened up his diet just a little bit for Charles specifically.
01:25:01.000We knew Nick was going to overpower him.
01:25:03.000We wanted Nick to be just a little bit lighter, a little bit leaner, a little bit faster for this fight in better condition in case it was a three-round dogfight.
01:25:35.000We're pulling the weight at this point.
01:25:36.000And I want to feed the athlete as much as possible, hydrate them as much as possible, keep them as strong and healthy as possible so they can endure the process of cutting weight, whereas I like to frame it positively as purification.
01:25:49.000We're purifying the body as we go through this Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Step on the Scale Friday phase where the body is completely clean, pure, and we can just put the best possible nutrients back in When you say no working out, you mean nothing?
01:26:10.000Tiago's last fight, he weighed in at 171 the night before weigh-ins using this new protocol that we're using because they're fucking healthy.
01:26:18.000We're not tearing them down during fight week.
01:26:21.000Actually, I build my athletes to this scale.
01:26:24.000Everybody else tears themselves down to this scale.
01:26:48.000We're just shooting the shit like you would do with your boys.
01:26:50.000Just hanging out in the hot tub for a little bit.
01:26:52.000Comozzi's coming down and hanging out with Ben Rothbro a little bit.
01:26:55.000We're just shooting the shit down there.
01:26:56.000Charles and his coach are in the fucking sauna on Monday in plastic fucking suits and sweatpants all goddamn day long.
01:27:04.000Nick and I were in the hot tub for a half hour just to break a sweat, drinking water the whole time, eat beforehand, stay hydrated during, go upstairs and eat again.
01:27:12.000This is what we do and that's what we did typically twice a day during fight week.
01:27:15.000Every time we went downstairs to the spa, which was beautiful at this hotel, Foxwoods, Charles was in the fucking sauna.
01:27:21.000Plastics on, in the sauna, and they would pick him up, carry him out, and just fucking let him lay on the floor, and then they'd cover him with towels.
01:27:28.000So archaic, and this is what a lot of athletes do.
01:27:48.000On Wednesday, and this is fun, so we're watching him just break this fucking kid.
01:27:51.000He's laying there in the sauna, I mean, just not moving, you know, and he'd get up and, you know, he'd do and he'd kind of like give us a thumbs up.
01:28:12.000At one point, Charles comes in, sits in the hot tub at the very end, and he's looking at Nick, and Nick's just sitting there drinking water, you know, shooting the shit.
01:28:19.000Charles is over there, dry mouth, just sucked out, big dark bags under his eyes after being in the fucking sauna for God knows how long.
01:28:26.000And just kind of laid out on the wall.
01:29:27.000So, I say to him, I'm like, no, we're good.
01:29:30.000I mean, Nick's losing a pound every 15 minutes and we're replacing it the whole time because, again, I'm a data head and I track all my athletes.
01:29:37.000I know Johnny Hendricks, you know, between 195 and 185 pounds.
01:29:41.000He'd lose 1.2 pounds of fluid every 15 minutes.
01:29:44.000I know Nick Lentz loses a pound on the dot.
01:31:31.000So let's say you're taking it the week beforehand.
01:31:34.000So 10 days out typically should be your hardest training session.
01:31:38.000Okay, because any more than 10 days out, now we're too close to the competition time, you might not be fully recovered and you're not going to perform at your best.
01:31:45.000So right about 10 days out, usually the Tuesday before the fight or the following week, that should be the hardest day.
01:31:50.000And then everything else we start to pull way back.
01:31:52.000Light and medium workouts, much shorter intensities.
01:31:54.000Start to increase your sodium just a little bit.
01:31:57.000So you can taste it, but it's nothing that you don't like.
01:32:21.000So we rise the sodium up, then we pull it back down to normal levels, probably anywhere between 1,000 to 2,000 milligrams, depending on the athlete, depending on their lifestyle, and we really focus on feeding them a similar caloric content, but more often.
01:32:33.000So it's basically the same, let's say, 2,000 calories a day, but instead of 5 to 6 meals, now we're eating 8 to 10 smaller meals all day long.
01:32:56.000Four to six pounds, that's a lot of steaks.
01:32:59.000If you looked at six steaks, slap six steaks down, like boom, boom, boom, six T-bones, 16-ounce T-bone steaks, that's a lot of fucking weight.
01:33:08.000And the fluid that food absorbs as it comes out.
01:35:42.000He's not having these big meals, but we go from meals to, you know, kind of snack size to now it's handfuls just to keep his metabolism moving, keep his body processing the food, keep pulling the nutrients, keep his blood sugar stable, keep his brain on, keep his mood elevated so he doesn't feel like shit.
01:37:19.000So with Tiago, what we did in the beginning, you know, he missed weight with John Fitch in 2010. I started working with him two days later, brought him down, fought John Fitch, John Howard, and His weight issue was gone.
01:38:13.000Slowly but surely, I tightened up his diet, I tightened the wheels and the switches just a little bit, really made sure he was getting enough food to fuel, but not enough to spill over.
01:38:23.000And we were able to slowly bring his weight down to the lower 90s.
01:38:26.000So if he's 8% body fat, and you're lowering his body weight, are you causing atrophy?
01:39:04.000The same exact principle, different foods for Tiago than what Lentz ate.
01:39:07.000Tiago is much more of a protein and fat metabolizer.
01:39:13.000Nick Lentz is much more of a vegetable and produce metabolizer.
01:39:17.000They perform better or their analytics are much better when they have those type of foods and that just comes through experience working with these guys.
01:39:31.000Anytime he has the heavier carbs outside of the breakfast bowl, oats and such, berries first thing in the morning, he tends to bloat up and really hold on to that water.
01:39:50.000Once a week we'll do a refeed where we go really high carbohydrate, but we'll stage that with a lower carbohydrate either before or right after.
01:39:57.000So we'll do the refeed definitely once a week, sometimes twice a week, depending on how close we are.
01:40:03.000It's to refill the body of lost glycogen to make sure that usable energy is available.
01:40:09.000And it's also a mood elevator because a lot of times the athlete starts to get a little, you know, shitty if they're not getting more carbohydrates.
01:40:16.000And the brain runs on carbohydrates also.
01:40:18.000So you can see the mood kind of decrease just a little bit.
01:40:42.000So it was really trying to find the line that is exactly what they need without spilling over.
01:40:48.000And once we got that, we got him feeling good for 10 days.
01:40:50.000We're able to stage it down just a little bit and he feels even better.
01:40:54.000So now we're slowly into that last three-week phase, the peaking phase, and he's now 148 pounds yesterday, which his last fight for him to get under 155, he felt like he was going to die.
01:41:05.000So now he's training at 140. It feels fucking amazing.
01:41:08.000Fully fed, six-plus meals a day, but everything's kind of perfectly controlled.
01:43:20.000When she fought Misha Tate, her fight lasted into the third round, and Misha's a very well-conditioned athlete, one of the better-conditioned female athletes in the game, and Ronda looked amazing, and that was a scrap.
01:43:51.000BJ's a guy who fought at 170 because he didn't like making 155. So all of a sudden we see BJ training and getting ready and he looks so thin.
01:44:08.000And then they broke off communication with me.
01:44:12.000After the ultimate fight was over, I didn't hear from anybody from their team, their camp, until the very end of May, which is just a few weeks before fight week, and they were in a bit of crisis mode.
01:45:09.000You know, just eating a little more, he's paid more attention to his food as he got closer to the fight those last couple weeks I was there.
01:45:24.000It was one of the oddest training camps I had ever been a part of, and I was there for less than two weeks physically in Hawaii and had very little experience.
01:45:33.000And I made some very strong suggestions and I made, you know, very strong observations to members of the team of what I saw and what I am accustomed to and what I think would really benefit.
01:46:27.000He had a coach who was a nice man who, from what I understand, has no experience in boxing or Coaching, you know, professional athletes, certainly not the world-class UFC MMA level.
01:46:41.000And, you know, the only, the top-level jiu-jitsu guys, of course, BJ, who's very accoladed, but his brothers were there, and it didn't seem like they had any influence as far as technical proficiency or strategy or, you know, game plan or training.
01:46:56.000The only training camps there of, you know, training partners there of value were the two guys I brought in at the last minute, which was Nick Lent and Mursad Bektik.
01:47:04.000Now Lentz left very, you know, he got there and he left because he didn't want to be there.
01:47:08.000He didn't feel like it was going to be a good training environment for him.
01:47:23.000Is it one of those situations where, in all fairness, BJ, who's a great champion, who's a real MMA legend, is almost too strong of a personality to be coached because he's been so successful and because he's been such a destroyer at points in his career that he has something in his head and who the fuck are you to tell BJ Penn what to do?
01:47:45.000It was very, you know, I don't know why there was no coaches there that were able to truly make influence.
01:47:53.000The suggestions that I made were, and I made them officially, and they were accepted but not responded or reacted to.
01:48:00.000And it was just a matter of, you know, this is, that's the direction he's choosing to go, and he's either going to win and look like a fucking genius, or he's going to not win and he's going to make the odd makers look like a genius.
01:48:11.000In all fairness, there's other issues besides diet.
01:48:15.000There was also his upright boxing style that confused the shit out of a lot of people.
01:48:28.000And when he was asked about it, he said that it was very effective for him in training and that they came up with it to, somehow or another, reserve energy.
01:48:42.000So by not lowering his body weight, meaning by not lowering his stance and pushing off of his legs more, by standing up straight, he would extend less energy.
01:48:53.000It would be less difficult for him to do.
01:50:03.000Yeah, it's just, it's so hard when you're a fan of a guy like that, where you almost want to just be able to, like, get inside of his head and just, you know, man, if you had, like, a Matt Hume-type coach, someone that you could completely listen to.
01:50:40.000It's really a fascinating sport in that this sport has evolved before our eyes and we've seen the training change and move and adjust.
01:50:52.000It's one of the reasons why I brought up the idea of whether or not people have unreal expectations because of performance-enhancing drugs because it's very confusing in a lot of ways.
01:51:03.000Everyone's sort of imitating the successful behavior that they see around them.
01:51:18.000We see everyone sort of imitating what's successful and what people have done successfully before them.
01:51:24.000And then there's guys like Fedor that confuse the shit out of everybody because he's throwing rocks and fucking, you know, throwing punches with little hand weights, and that's basically all you ever see from them.
01:51:37.000And then it's not like pro football, where, you know, you go back to the Jim Brown era and you change to today.
01:51:44.000You know, you've seen 50 years of evolution, and it's all sort of culminated in the last couple of decades, and you see science and nutrition.
01:51:52.000Strength and conditioning protocols have all sort of adjusted, but with MMA, it's not just running.
01:51:58.000It's not just moving left and moving right.
01:52:01.000At the same time, you're learning the thousand-plus possibilities of any jujitsu match.
01:52:08.000You're learning the 500-plus possibilities of any combinations in kickboxing.
01:52:13.000You know, you're learning so many skills that The combination of wrestling and judo.
01:52:19.000The combination of jujitsu, sambo, catch wrestling.
01:52:59.000You know, as a sport, though people have been fighting for years, never like this, never at this level, never with so much on the line, you know, multi-millions of dollars available now for the top dog.
01:53:09.000So there's a race, and that's obviously what brings in the PEDs, but it's also what pushes athletes like Ronda Rousey forward to constantly evolve and work on her striking more and find new ways to diet and do her strength and conditioning better and use her mental visualization approaches to really make sure she can be at the top of that cresting wave.
01:53:39.000And the thing about the performance-enhancing drugs, I mean, they exist in all sports, of course, but in MMA, it's almost like there's not enough time in the day to do everything.
01:53:51.000There's so many different things that you have to be on top of that an athlete almost doesn't have the time or the physical resources.
01:53:58.000Like, their body can't do all the work that's required.
01:54:01.000And that's where periodization comes in.
01:54:02.000That way, you're able to What we're going to be working on for this three-week phase and then we're going to work on something different but synergistic on the next three-week phase and we're slowly going to be the best possible version of ourself at that time when we step into the octagon or step into the competition circle and then it all starts over again and we look to add more tools.
01:54:22.000One of the other things that BJ's camp said was that you kind of restricted the amount of food that he ate the day of the fight.
01:54:28.000A lot of the things, unfortunately, that said were factually incorrect and I chose not to...
01:54:34.000This is the first time I'm even commenting about it.
01:54:37.000I go on the underground every day, and a lot of the people on the underground seemed to have a pretty good take on what the reality of the situation was, and I didn't feel the need to personally comment.
01:54:46.000What I'm going to say is that he had a house full of food.
01:54:51.000I personally brought over tons of amazing food that was available.
01:54:56.000He was two minutes from a Whole Foods that was right down the street from him.
01:55:02.000You know, there's his house that, you know, shit, 10 gallons of water in it, and a gallon of coconut water, and a running faucet, and there's sea salt everywhere, and, you know, just, you know, a big, I brought a huge vat of the power pasta with grass-fed beef, and, you know...
01:55:20.000It's a brown rice pasta, so it's a higher carbohydrate content food.
01:55:25.000I made two 16-ounce boxes of it, which would basically feed a family of four really fucking big dudes or a family of six or so.
01:55:34.000Two pounds of grass-fed ground beef was mixed up in there and just I think like two peppers and two red peppers and two green and two red onions and just really high quality nutrients.
01:55:43.000And a full fucking smoothie, massive handful of kale, handful of spinach, handful of red grapes, handful of blueberries, handful of strawberries.
01:55:51.000So you don't restrict their calories at all the day of the fight?
01:56:48.000As to exactly what happens, which is a really nice thing, but it's kind of the public conversation that just continues on, and it's just not correct.
01:56:56.000So do you think that what happens is after a fighter loses, there's an interesting thing that happened with Travis Brown.
01:57:03.000Travis Brown did this interview, and I really love Travis.
01:57:32.000He's working with Edmund, Rhonda's trainer, on his striking and trying to tone things up and change some things and learn some new skills and learn some new variables that he could add to his fight game.
01:57:43.000But what I love about the fact that he was honest about how after the fight there's this instinct to sort of blame.
01:57:51.000Blame himself, blame others, rotate, you know, no, fuck it, it was everybody else's fault.
02:00:35.000I found it incredibly fascinating that you said the athletes don't work out at all the week of.
02:00:41.000And one of the reasons why is because I happened to be at Uriah Faber's gym this past weekend when TJ fought and when Danny Castillo fought.
02:00:53.000And when I got there, Danny Castillo was working out the day of the fight.
02:02:03.000So you treat it like as if he's just going to do some hard sparring that day.
02:02:07.000So when you have him work out to get the fluids moving, as it were, what's the idea behind that?
02:02:13.000Is that like the rehydration process, the IV and everything like that?
02:02:17.000You want everything moving through the body?
02:02:19.000We have to make sure everything's working properly so there's no surprises, but we're not overworking the athlete.
02:02:24.000We're warming them up and then we're just cooling them right back down again, making them...
02:02:28.000A big part of it is also building confidence because they go through the weight cut process and sometimes you feel a little shitty and you're like, fuck, do I still have it?
02:02:36.000I felt like, you know, shit yesterday.
02:02:39.000And you get in there and they feel, you know, obviously Nick weighs in at 46 and he was probably 46, closer to, you know, 65 the very next morning and felt like a fucking machine.
02:02:50.000And he left that room with a smile on his face like, I'm going to fucking kill this dude.
02:02:54.000What do you do when it comes to guys like heavyweights?
02:02:58.000Most heavyweights, in my opinion, I'm not saying that they should cut weight, but they should all be fighting somewhere between 10 and 12% body fat.
02:03:05.000The chubby heavyweights with the fat belly, that's a lazy athlete.
02:03:21.000These guys, just because you compete in an unlimited weight class or nearly unlimited weight class, doesn't mean you can have an unlimited body weight.
02:03:28.000What's the proper body weight for performance?
02:03:31.000For most athletes, it's somewhere between 8 to 12 percent.
02:03:34.000Is there a proper body weight for a heavyweight as far as like when you get too heavy, you're dealing with gravity, you're dealing with mass that needs to have blood pumped through it?
02:03:42.000Because isn't the one variable that's not very different in people the size of your actual heart?
02:03:49.000That the heart tends to be similar in size, slight variables, more similar in size.
02:03:54.000So like a guy like Bigfoot Silva, or Brock Lesnar is a better example, because Bigfoot actually has gigantism, he has a real issue.
02:04:01.000But Brock Lesnar, an enormous giant, and then a guy like, say, Chris Cariasso, who's fighting for the flyweight title.
02:04:08.000Their heart is probably way more similar in size than any other part of their body.
02:04:38.000I think they think that because that's what Kane is.
02:04:40.000That's what Kane is, but Kane eating properly, and he's the fucking dominant champion of the world, so I'm not saying he should do anything, but there's no reason why any professional athlete should be walking around with excess non-functional weight.
02:04:55.000And a lot of what's floating around Kane's midsection are athletes like Kane, and he's one of the better conditioned, but without that 8, 10, 12, 16 additional pounds, how much faster would he be?
02:05:07.000Force production would probably be very similar, unless he really sits down on a single punch or one single blast, but he'd probably be faster, he'd probably be more agile, he'd be more capable of scrambling, he'd be able to do a few more things with no loss in strength.
02:05:23.000So you think if he got down to about 230 and lowered his body fat to about 10%, he'd be even better than the best heavyweight ever?
02:06:09.000But then as time goes on, that weight starts, gravity starts to pull on you.
02:06:13.000But okay, in response to that, the two guys that we were talking about, both Kane and Fedor, are both guys that had high body fat who are known for their high output and their long fights with incredible endurance.
02:09:10.000Yeah, I mean, as we're talking about this and talking about different styles and different people's training, it is interesting that there's no one answer.
02:11:03.000Strength and conditioning, I think, is very similar, and it's...
02:11:06.000The athlete is really going to gravitate towards what suits them, but it's all...
02:11:12.000You know, like I said, the athlete changes, which is why my...
02:11:14.000We have the principles, so the principles don't change.
02:11:17.000You know, Dwayne, let's say, throw a punch with your right hand, left hand has to be blocking.
02:11:20.000I think Duke would say the same thing.
02:11:22.000But the individual application, that's where it changes on...
02:11:26.000The individual basis per athlete, per time they compete, or on different athletes.
02:11:31.000So the principles are always the same, but we always have to evolve the application.
02:11:34.000I'm sure just like Eddie's doing every night he goes in the gym, he's like, oh shit, I saw this fucking white belt do something that just totally killed the black belt's move, what?
02:13:42.000But a little slower, let's say, you know, two, three years from now, there's some fucking kid in the middle of nowhere that's going to come out.
02:13:48.000I can't imagine that, but I know you're right.
02:13:56.000And then, you know, you have a guy like Dillashaw coming out, moving the way he does, putting his wrestling together, all the feints that he's doing, hitting with power, you know, kind of like what you were saying about Diaz, where they're able to off-speed their punches and their strikes and really change angles.
02:15:18.000And that's something that people need to take into consideration when they discuss training protocols is that what's happening with a lot of fighters is they're going through the same sort of thing that they went through in wrestling practice.
02:15:30.000And what wrestling practice is fantastic for is developing mental toughness.
02:15:35.000I believe there are no tougher athletes in the world than someone who goes through high-level wrestling camps.
02:15:41.000Someone who goes through Purdue, like a John Fitch.
02:15:44.000When you go through these fucking camps, you go through Iowa, you go through these high-level wrestling camps, amateur wrestling, college wrestling camps, those people are fucking animals.
02:15:55.000They have a level of mental toughness that if you don't understand it, they're going to wake up 15 minutes earlier than anybody else because they know that no one else is awake.
02:16:03.000They're going to run an extra mile because they know no one else is going to run it.
02:16:07.000They're going to do all these different things because they pride themselves in being uncomfortable and in grinding it out.
02:16:13.000And there's good in that, but there's also bad in it.
02:16:16.000And the bad in it is the physiological reality of the body's ability to recuperate.
02:16:21.000And that if you tested any of these high-level professional wrestlers, or amateur wrestlers rather, at their highest level, when they're going through camps, I guarantee you a lot of them are going to have low testosterone.
02:16:33.000And it's just because their body's being broken down and it's just the sheer dogged determination of their own mind that allows them to get up every morning and keep doing it.
02:16:55.000In training, he was fractured chin, torn by his, partially torn by his, that would tore all the way during the fight, and didn't even blink.
02:18:10.000I mean, he just had that kid as a youngster with a very high tolerance to work and just this drive.
02:18:18.000He pushed him so that everything else would be easy.
02:18:20.000I mean, he made it so everything at home, all the training he did, all the wrestling practices were so fucking hard that everything else would be easy.
02:18:35.000I mean, he got the title with the Robbie Lawler fight, but I thought he beat GSP. And the only people that disagree that I've talked to were people that were in that Henzo Gracie camp that were a little bit biased and thought that George won round one, which I didn't understand.
02:18:50.000I think damage is more important than anything, and I think Johnny, without a doubt, did more damage in that fight.
02:18:56.000They pointed to the guillotine attempt in the first round, but I didn't think that was a successful attempt.
02:20:11.000And the reason why I would tell George to stop is because we did some sort of a fight metric thing where we calculated all the times he'd been hit inside the octagon.
02:20:18.000And he had been hit in the head 880-something times over the course of his UFC career.
02:20:23.000And I'm like, what's the number where a guy can walk?
02:20:27.000Because if you talk to George now, he's lucid.
02:20:52.000Very possibly, but could he come back and take some damage that five years from now we're gonna see a much compromised George and that's possible as well, right?
02:21:01.000Probably and I've had this conversation with athletes before and it's it's difficult and it's emotional and And it's, you know, it's in their best interest and sometimes, you know, they've gotten mad, but they know it's out of love and care and concern.
02:22:42.000I said, and the quote, so I hope nobody out there is going to quote this out of context, was athletes need to get rid of their, need to fire their managers and hire attorneys.
02:22:52.000And it wasn't meant to be that every athlete needs to get rid of the manager because I said there's some great managers out there.
02:22:57.000But there's some managers out there that they have their hand too deep inside the athlete's pocket where the athlete can't, We're good to go.
02:24:26.000He's one of the guys who's in the UFC and he's one of the higher paid athletes out there doing it.
02:24:30.000Well, you know, obviously, I love the UFC. Obviously, it's a huge...
02:24:38.000It's a huge honor for me to call the fights and to be a part of the organization, but I think the only way that the UFC is ever going to satisfy the athletes, I mean, the only way the athletes are ever going to be in a situation where they're completely,
02:24:57.000totally happy with what they get paid is if they're at the top of the heap.
02:25:38.000I mean, he's got a lot of shit going on.
02:25:40.000Unless a fighter becomes a part of a promotion, I mean, it's just not the same thing.
02:25:46.000You know, if the UFC, like when Oscar De La Hoya was Golden Boy Productions and when he was fighting as well and making insane amounts of money in that, again, there's only one Oscar De La Hoya.
02:25:58.000And there's also, the UFC, like it or not, and I love it, they're essentially the number one game in town.
02:26:06.000And it's not like there's a close number two.
02:26:09.000Whereas, Bob Arum, Golden Boy, you know, there's all these different promotions.
02:26:14.000The money team, there's a lot of different promotions when it comes to promoting fights.
02:26:20.000Whereas the UFC is like, there's Bellator.
02:27:56.000And they did that just to sell a pay-per-view.
02:27:58.000And the whole thing was just preposterous.
02:28:00.000And I think that, you know, unless that changes, the amount of money fighters get, it's not going to be the level that you're going to get in boxing.
02:28:35.000What she does outside of the octagon as much as she does what she does inside.
02:28:40.000And that's something I try and talk to athletes about, the athletes that I have the ability to influence.
02:28:45.000And that's what I see other athletes do, a guy like Alan Belcher.
02:28:47.000Alan Belcher makes far more money running his gyms and online training business than he does when competing as a professional athlete inside the UFC. And he makes a good payday inside the UFC. And the athletes, they need to understand that they're as big or as good as they want to be,
02:29:05.000and they can certainly build their brand in areas like yourself.
02:29:09.000You find areas that you enjoy and that you're good at, or you're not good at yet, but you want to be good at, so you bust your ass to push your way into that field and that niche.
02:29:19.000And athletes, they have more than enough time to do that, whether it's flipping real estate like Bristol Marundi's doing right now.
02:29:26.000Bristol Mirondi fought in UFC a couple times, fought for Strikeforce.
02:29:29.000He was on The Ultimate Fighter a couple seasons back.
02:29:32.000He's flipping real estate in Las Vegas.
02:29:34.000An article came out about him recently.
02:29:36.000He makes a shitload more money doing that than he does fighting.
02:29:39.000And he's fighting because he enjoys fighting.
02:29:41.000You know, Alan Belcher, what he's doing, what Ronda's doing, priming Ronda's outside the octagon money is going to eclipse what she makes inside the octagon.
02:29:59.000He went from being a high-level fighter.
02:30:01.000At the end of his career, he transitioned into a coach, and he'll be a much more successful financially and business-wise as a coach coach.
02:30:35.000And it's not sitting back waiting for sponsors to just hand them a check to put on a t-shirt or to hold up, you know, an energy drink.
02:30:41.000There's other ways to go out there and take care of it.
02:30:43.000Yeah, it's tricky for fighters to find that and sort of explore that while they're also trying to improve their skill set, improve their conditioning, and also to have the energy to do it.
02:30:55.000People are fucking exhausted after they're done training.
02:30:58.000You know, at the end of the day, they're just like, oh, Christ.
02:31:58.000When Jon Jones and Cormier, when they had their mics hot and they didn't know it and they recorded that, it's like, hey pussy, you still there?
02:32:45.000And I would think that anybody who, like, I've heard people say, oh, he's cocky, oh, he's this, and I wonder what the fuck is going on with that.
02:32:53.000And I'm going to throw this out there.
02:33:03.000Because I think they look at him as this cocky black guy.
02:33:07.000And I think a lot of people have an issue with that.
02:33:10.000And I think that if he was a white guy and he was doing the same thing, a la Chael Sonnen, I think he'd be way more popular.
02:33:16.000And Chael was never the successful athlete that John is.
02:33:20.000But I think that Chael was way more successful as a promoter than John is.
02:33:25.000And John has not been nearly as cocky or outwardly braggadocious as Chael was.
02:33:32.000But somehow or another, when Chael did it, first of all, Chael was very entertaining, very articulate, best shit talker, bar none, in my opinion, combat sports has ever seen.
02:34:00.000Do you think people, Chael resonated with the public because we all knew or felt in the back of our mind that he wasn't Yeah, maybe.
02:34:33.000I want to see the next, you know, chapter two, or the second act of Jon Jones, and then the third act.
02:34:39.000I'm really excited as just a fan of this sport to follow his career, follow his arc, and, you know, I'm friends, you know, with Cormier, of course, also, so I'm not going to pick a horse in that one, but it'd be really interesting to see how Jon goes.
02:36:12.000I was busting my friend Tony's balls because it made for a fun podcast, but the fucking wave of misspelled hate tweets that have come my way.
02:37:50.000And I'm 47. I mean, when I'm 48, I guarantee you I'll be looking back saying, whatever I do, whether it's podcasting or comedy, I'll be better at 48 than I am at 47. And when I'm not, that means I'm fucking dying.
02:38:13.000But I think that when a guy like John Jones is 30 and looks back at who he was when he was 25, yeah, he'll have said some things that he didn't think he should have said.
02:38:21.000But the trials and tribulations of being that guy are almost unimaginable.
02:38:26.000Just the stress and the pressures and all that jazz.
02:38:34.000With now the scrutiny that's on a guy like that with all the social media available, all the cameras in his face, just the attention at a 25-year-old.
02:38:43.000All of us, everybody listening at 25, we're all fucking idiots.
02:38:46.000And if you're 25 right now, you're going to look back 10 years and be like, Jesus, I was an idiot.
02:38:50.000You know, so it's fun to watch, you know, what John's going through, and I would love to see him just go straight heel, fuck you all, you know, double fingers up in the air, I'm the best in the fucking world, fuck you, and not try and play, not pander to the comments anymore,
02:39:05.000not try and be the Christian dude, not try and, you know, make people happy.
02:39:43.000So when Chael was fighting him, I was helping Chael for that one, and John wouldn't look at Chael, and there's a photo, and I made a comment on the photo, like, you know, Jones must be scared.
02:40:06.000And then, you know, I see him like, you know, a week or two later and he was just such a sweet guy and he's like, man, I'm sorry about that.
02:40:11.000He was like, I was hyped up at the fight.
02:44:19.000And then to have to cut all the way back down again, there's no way we can expect his body to respond.
02:44:24.000I'm not sure how they cut weight, but I know those guys, they don't cut weight In the healthiest manner, they really struggle and sacrifice to get down.
02:46:07.000Well, that's the difference is you, a lot of these guys that are, you know, these weight cutting guys and these people that people get brought in is the amount of documentation that you have and the amount of just raw data just from dealing with various athletes.
02:46:19.000Yeah, it's all, everything we do is data-based.
02:46:24.000I mean, it's proven, and then it's never perfected, but it's always evolving.
02:46:29.000What worked last time against, you know, with everybody, well, that's what we're sticking with, and if something was an anomaly, well, we consider it, and we look into it, we research it, but we don't add it to new protocol.
02:46:55.000I'm not going to take you back to freshman year of high school wrestling.
02:46:57.000No athlete under my watch has ever missed weight, but the one I would like the redo, I mean the Hendricks one in Dallas, I would have loved to have made weight on the first time with that one, but there was a whole comedy of errors.
02:47:07.000Well also you've got to stop to think about the fact that he's pretty seriously injured.
02:48:20.000I've been at events, and I won't say the promotion, where the scale got dropped, and then you get on the scale at the early day pre-weigh-ins, the scale got dropped somehow between the venue and the hotel, and now all of a sudden it's got a crazy reading like you're saying right now.
02:48:36.000The last minute the scale gets switched because it goes to the wrong place where it doesn't get through.
02:48:41.000So I've seen almost every odd issue I've been at.
02:48:43.000I don't even know how many weigh-ins now.
02:48:45.000And it's not as easy to weigh in properly when you're trying to keep the athlete as healthy as possible.
02:48:51.000You're not just trying to get the athlete to 170 pounds and just leave them there for four hours.
02:48:55.000You're trying to minimize that period as much as possible and really just skim the top of the weight and let them bounce right back up because we're trying to preserve their health, which is going to increase their ability to perform to the best of their ability.
02:49:06.000So, you know, like with Hendrix and the weight, it was a matter of get him out of here, get him calm again, because he's freezing cold.
02:50:01.000I'm not going to put an injured athlete out there to get his bicep torn off and possibly lose his only opportunity to fight for a world title.
02:50:08.000Let's say Robbie went out there and won that last round, or Johnny had to default because he tore the bicep and couldn't lift his arm.
02:50:14.000Ref saw that, judge saw that, medical doctors saw that, called the fight on the stool.
02:50:19.000Crazy things happen, and then he loses his bit.
02:50:21.000And now he goes to the back of the line.
02:50:23.000He's got to fight three, four fights against its stacked division.
02:50:51.000And it's crazy, because we're talking about how you should rest, and you should train smart, and you shouldn't overtrain, but it's like the overtraining is what made them so mentally strong, and that becomes one of their biggest weapons.
02:52:25.000Is there more energy in a grass-fed piece of beef versus a corn-fed piece of beef?
02:52:31.000Yes, and this is now my opinion based upon a lot of scientific research.
02:52:35.000There's other research that says the opposite, so now we're just going to throw it up in the air.
02:52:39.000So my philosophy, the Dolce Diet Principles, number one is earth-grown nutrients, and that's eating real food from its natural source and its natural habitat, raised and bred in the natural way.
02:52:50.000You cannot beat that when it comes to nutrient quality, nutrient density.
02:53:39.000If you're only eating earth-grown nutrients, real food, and you don't pay attention to the time of day, you don't pay attention to the quantity, you're going to be much better off than most of the other people.
02:53:47.000But is there more energy in, say, a piece of elk than there is in line-caught salmon?
02:53:53.000Is there more energy in grass-fed beef than there is in lamb?
02:55:15.000It's very difficult unless you're dogmatic about your sourcing of nutrition.
02:55:20.000It becomes a full-time plus job in order to eat the right foods at the right time and you have to go to the market and you always have to have that supply.
02:55:27.000You can't miss meals because your body is just constantly breaking down.
02:55:31.000Is it harder for them also to get high enough calories from their proteins and things like that?