In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Aaron Horschig, Director of the Center for Sport Performance at Cal State Fullerton, to talk about what it takes to be a top-level athlete, how to get the most out of your training, and how to make the most of your time in the gym. We cover a wide range of topics such as: - What is a good training program? - What are some of the biggest mistakes people make when it comes to training and nutrition? - How can we improve our training? - Why is it important to have a coach who can help you improve your training? - How important is it to have good nutrition and recovery? - What s the best way to prepare for a fight? And how important is training to be the best you can be in order to have the best possible chance of winning a fight or being the best athlete you can possibly be? This episode is a must-listen! If you like what you hear here, please consider becoming a patron or supporter of the show! Subscribe to the show and leave a review on iTunes and/or share it with a friend! Thank you so we can keep sharing it with your friends and family! - The guys behind the world! P.S. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to our other podcast, and spread the word to your friends about this podcast! Cheers! Timestamps: 0:00 - 5: 1:30 - What's the best training program you've ever done? 5: What do you like about someone else has done? 6:15 - What would you think of someone else did? 8: What are you looking for? 9:20 - How do you think I should do better? 11:40 - What should I do more? 12:00 13: What is the most important thing? 15:00 | What is your favorite training method? 16:40 17: What s your favorite part? 18:30 | How do I train? 19:30 21:40 | What s a good day? 22:20 | What's your favorite type of workout? 27: What's a good morning? 26:30 What do I need to do for me? 25:00 What s my biggest challenge? 29:00 Do you like it?
00:00:13.000So, why don't you tell people what you do?
00:00:15.000I am a muscle physiologist, so I'm a PhD in human bioenergetics, and I'm the director for the Center for Sport Performance, which all that basically means I study muscle physiology, why it grows, shrinks, repairs, dies, and all that crap.
00:00:27.000Now, when you're dealing with athletes and you're dealing with state-of-the-art performance, how much does that stuff change year-to-year?
00:01:37.000You know, it really depends upon who's successful, and then you go, well, that guy obviously has it down.
00:01:43.000Yeah, that's a major fallacy called the fallacy of authority, or appeal to authority, which is somebody really good did it, or somebody who coaches somebody really good, they did it, or a lot of people did it.
00:01:53.000All three of those are examples of major logical fallacies, right, to break down in Aristotle's reasoning.
00:01:59.000Now, they can help us with some ideas of where to go, but that's a really bad approach.
00:02:03.000So, we have to understand, like, what works for somebody at a very high level is not necessarily going to work for the bulk of people, and particular, if, like, the great example is Schwarzenegger.
00:02:13.000So, when he came out with his book of the Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding, everyone was like, fantastic, I'll go do those workouts.
00:02:41.000So all that is really important to understand.
00:02:45.000With the context of recovery, the nutrition he has, all the other stresses that are eliminated from his life, all of that changes what's going to work or not work for you.
00:02:53.000Now, there's a bunch of different ways of approaching things.
00:02:56.000I've always been fascinated by the Marv Marinovich method, and now Nick Kurson takes that method as well.
00:03:02.000And their idea is that strength and conditioning, especially when a fighter's in camp, is more important than anything.
00:05:50.000You know, like, Mark Hunt is going to have a completely different set of requirements than, you know, Derek Lewis or Mighty Mouse Johnson or anybody.
00:05:59.000So, like, everybody's got different needs and everybody's coming to the table with a different set of skills and a different set of problems.
00:06:07.000Especially when you look at experience, too.
00:06:08.000So what worked for you in your second fight when you were 20 is maybe not the same approach you have to take when you're 30. I just got back from New York.
00:06:16.000I was in there the last three days, and I was with one of my guys, Dennis Bermudez.
00:06:20.000And we had this conversation, and when I first started working with him, we had to take a very different approach the week of, and especially even the hour before the fight, because the way that he got ramped up for a fight is very different than some other people that I've worked with.
00:06:35.000What we had to realize, and I remember he called me right after one of his recent fights, maybe four or five fights ago, and he's like, I'm freaking out because I didn't freak out in the cage this time.
00:06:46.000And he's like, you know, I'm usually really freaked out in the cage, and this is what drives my performance, but this time I was really calm and collected, and I saw everything, and I'm nervous that I'm not nervous enough.
00:06:55.000So I had to get him in with my good friend Lenny Wiersmo, who's a sports psychologist, who works with a lot of combat sport athletes, and say, okay, we need to get you in a place of optimal arousal.
00:07:03.000Because if you're under aroused, that's a problem, but if you're over aroused, that's a problem as well.
00:07:07.000So we had to change the tactics a little bit between everything from his walk down to the week of, before, the queuing, the things that we say to him, to make sure he's in an optimal state.
00:07:17.000Every other athlete, all those approaches are completely different.
00:07:32.000Everything from breathing drills to the cueing, the words you use.
00:07:37.000So, for example, in the back, if you're a Dennis Bermudez five years ago, you know, Ryan Parsons would have to say, like, real vile, horrible shit, like, rip his fucking head off, I want you to bring it back in a plate, like, murder him, rip him to shreds.
00:07:55.000Now it's a little bit different approach, and Ryan can tell you the details of what he does now, but some guys, like you tell some other people that backstage, they're going to be like, what?
00:08:08.000And so the guys that are too ramped up...
00:08:10.000There are very specific breathing drills, for example, we can have them do as they're walking down the cage, as they're in the cage, especially if they're the first one down or the second one down.
00:08:19.000So if they're first down, sometimes that's a 10-minute delay between when they're standing in the cage and when they actually start throwing.
00:08:25.000If you're not taking advantage of that time, or if that time is getting taken advantage of you, that can have a real problem with your energy.
00:08:32.000Especially if you get a guy who's really savvy, like a Connor or a John Jones, who takes their time coming down, and they mess with you, they do different things on the way down.
00:08:43.000That really influences what's going on with the guy in the cage, especially if they're less experienced or maybe attention to the underdog or other things like that.
00:09:52.000But it's really difficult without telling too much of Dennis' story for him.
00:09:58.000It's quite funny what happens with the game plan sometimes and what happens when they get in there, even with a seasoned guy like Dennis.
00:10:03.000And I don't know if a part of that was because it was in New York, in Dennis' hometown, or if that was because of Pat, who was his good friend, fought right before and won a really crazy fight in the fight before.
00:10:14.000If he saw that, you just don't know what goes in.
00:10:17.000And then, you know, sometimes in the middle of a fight, the fight's over and you're like, I don't even know why we did that.
00:10:22.000We got into this weird rhythm thing and we started doing this and that was, I don't know what happened.
00:10:27.000And the rhythm can kind of take over the fight.
00:11:46.000He should have just been more active, particularly in the second round, which is what really got him.
00:11:50.000And you saw in the third round, once he kind of got into it, Dennis, in our eyes, at least, was pretty dominated that round, or was at least clearly ahead, where one and two were not so good for him.
00:12:01.000But yeah, just potentially a focus, potentially a lot of things.
00:12:05.000Nothing physically that happened to him in the fight, was he like, oh, we didn't prepare for this, we didn't think this was going to happen, this is throwing me off.
00:12:13.000He was just like, I just didn't go in the second round.
00:12:15.000So it's a weird job you have because you're kind of relying on someone else to pull the trigger.
00:12:21.000You're relying on someone else to make the moves.
00:12:23.000And you could train them all you want.
00:12:25.000You can get them in incredible shape, but then, you know, ready, go.
00:13:57.000How do we not just get to 80 years old, but how do we kick ass at 80 years old?
00:14:01.000And be coming from the performance background that I have, my athletic background, It just makes so much sense.
00:14:07.000I didn't come from a martial arts background at all.
00:14:09.000I didn't do anything until much later in life.
00:14:13.000But once I started paying attention to MMA, I was like, there's something energetically, physiologically far different about the demands of this sport, and it's really exciting, and it's a really complex problem to solve.
00:14:26.000So I just started helping out and chipping in, and then once you help a couple of people and they're like, this is fantastic, etc., kind of the ball gets rolling.
00:14:32.000So right now, basically what I do is think of it like concierge service, if you will.
00:14:37.000I'm not like, you can't email me for a training program.
00:14:40.000I don't have an online website you can buy stuff from.
00:16:35.000Because what happened was, wrestling is this really weird thing where world championships is at different weight classes than the Olympics.
00:16:43.000So she was a world champion at 55 kilos and either had to go up to 58 kilos for the Olympics, which had a three-time defending gold medalist and a 15-time straight world champion, or go down to 53 kilos to wrestle somebody who also had that 15-time straight world title.
00:16:59.000So pounds-wise, it's like three kilos, like six pounds, yeah.
00:17:18.000But Eric was her nutritionist, and Eric reached out to me because he's right down where we're at and Helen's down here.
00:17:23.000And he was basically like, I know what I'm doing, obviously, but let's get as big a team as possible to make the right decisions as possible.
00:17:56.000And all of us have to be focused on her.
00:17:58.000And it doesn't matter if anyone knows what I do with her or not or anybody.
00:18:02.000I don't care if you get the credit, another nutritionist gets the credit.
00:18:05.000If you want to actually help these professional athletes, you have to let your ego go completely out the door and say, why throw people out?
00:18:11.000Let's take every information I have about everything you've ever done and come together with solutions.
00:18:16.000And if somebody else has an idea that you don't like, that's up to you to figure out and give it to the athlete.
00:18:20.000Okay, so what'd you find out with her?
00:18:22.000Like, what was the issue and how'd you get her to lose the extra?
00:18:25.000So, actually, it was like a year of issues.
00:19:03.000So we had to basically play a game of saying, if we give you the things that keep you from not being sick, that's also the stuff that actually harms iron absorption.
00:19:23.000So if you're going to go travel internationally for a long time, you can take a big bowl of vitamin C and it may help you from getting sick, from getting cold.
00:19:30.000Does that really affect it better than probiotics do?
00:19:34.000But the point was, if you're going to go on like a two-week thing to Eastern Europe, I'm going to give you every advantage possible to not probably get a cold.
00:19:41.000Right, but wouldn't you do that on a regular basis?
00:19:44.000Like, why would you accentuate the diet on a traveling trip and give it some stuff?
00:19:49.000I mean, wouldn't you want that boost everywhere?
00:19:51.000So the probiotics are basically a no-brainer all the time.
00:19:54.000But I mean, even vitamin C and everything else?
00:19:56.000Yeah, but you have to be careful because any time you go with a vitamin specifically, you're going to have potential toxicity.
00:21:28.000And we did that for the vast majority camp, but she was continually getting sick because of a variety of reasons, some that I probably shouldn't say.
00:21:37.000So we were like, okay, fine, we addressed that.
00:21:39.000And then it was like, okay, now you're super anemic, so let's get away from that.
00:21:43.000But what we did basically is get iron back to a decent level as soon as possible and then go off of everything.
00:23:23.000But she's like, all they have is cookies and popcorn.
00:23:26.000She's like, I guess I'll just like starve.
00:23:28.000And we actually, that was one time we didn't want to do that because she was at a problem where she was so calorically underserved for so long, her body would crash quite often.
00:23:38.000So we had to keep her nutrients really, really, really high, our vitamins and minerals to keep her at a low calorie count, but her body not freaking out.
00:23:46.000So she was like, what do I do, not eat?
00:23:48.000And we had to actually go to the popcorn because of the good fat in there, the butter that it had, to keep her from not feeling terrible.
00:23:55.000Jesus Christ, you had to go for popcorn for nutrition at the Olympics?
00:24:29.000This is, I think, generally a terrible approach.
00:24:32.000It's a combination of where they're at, who are they with, what have they done, what's their past history, what do they like, what are they not like, what do we really need to get?
00:24:38.000So I try to identify what's compromising their performance.
00:24:42.000Let's pick the best solution for that issue.
00:24:45.000So you show up and you're like, your problem is agility, your footwork, you're just too slow on your feet.
00:24:49.000Well, we're going to have a different approach to training than when someone says, you're getting out strength here, like someone's pushing you around too much.
00:24:56.000I don't need to rebuild your feet, I don't need to improve your maximal speed because you're already the fastest in the division.
00:25:19.000So we can actually measure the amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide coming in and out of the body, which allows us to get a number called a VO2 max, which is the maximum amount of oxygen that you bring in and exhale.
00:25:30.000So it tells us basically your maximum cardiovascular capacity.
00:25:33.000And it's pseudo-important for MMA. So the average person's like at 40, 45, just to give you some context of that number.
00:25:41.000Anyone past about 60, if you continue to go up, it's not going to really make you fight any better.
00:25:47.000So that's one of the things that we did, or we found doing all the research on MMA folks is...
00:25:51.000There's a point of diminishing returns somewhere around 60. So if you show up and you're a Jake Ellenberger and you're at 52, and I can get you to 58...
00:26:01.000Then that's going to help your performance a lot.
00:26:03.000But when you show up and you're a Pat Cummins and you're 66 and I get you to 69, that's not going to make you fight any better.
00:27:36.000So we can do your right foot on one, your left foot on another one.
00:27:39.000So we can test everything from not only your force, which is like if I measured your maximum deadlift, I would know how strong your back is and your hamstrings and your glutes.
00:27:48.000But how do you produce that force is the big key.
00:27:51.000So a good example is years ago we had some fighters come in and one of them was clearly not fast enough, but he wouldn't believe it.
00:27:59.000So he was strong, but it took him a long time to produce that force.
00:28:04.000So to give you a number, let's say you could produce 100 newtons of force, right?
00:28:54.000But the time it took him to produce that force, what's called the rate of force development, his peak velocity, the time it took him to get to that velocity, all that when I compared him to the other athletes and NFL players and stuff was just like off the charts bad.
00:29:08.000So what exercise do you do to measure that?
00:29:21.000So the one that doesn't produce force very quick, we would put them on a drill where we say, okay, the goal of your training is to maximize how quickly you produce force.
00:29:31.000I don't care how heavy you get, but this is a reactive strength thing.
00:29:50.000We would take the speed advantage away from him or her and say, you need to be able to produce more strength without taking advantage of the speed.
00:29:57.000And it basically comes down to using the muscle for force or the connective tissue for force.
00:30:03.000And that's really what we can tease out.
00:30:04.000Now, how much of speed and athletic performance is genetic and how much of it is what you've been doing and how much can you improve?
00:30:13.000Yeah, so we actually just completed a really cool study on monozygous twins.
00:30:18.000So monosegous twins means you're the exact same DNA. So sperm went in, implanted two, implanted one egg, the egg split, and you became identical, right?
00:30:27.000And so we found two twins that were the exact same DNA, but one of them had been doing marathons and endurance stuff for 35 years.
00:30:37.000The other hadn't done anything in 35 years.
00:31:19.000Cardiovascular stuff, VO2 max, strength, all these same tests that we do with the MMA fighters, muscle biopsies, fiber type, how much fast, how much slow twitch, all the ones in between.
00:31:27.000What we found was, of course, the endurance athlete had higher VO2 max.
00:31:59.000And the craziest part is the fiber type.
00:32:02.000The trained athlete and his quad was 90% slow twitch, 10% fast twitch, The untrained was 40% slow twitch, about 30% fast twitch, and then about 30% of some of the hybrids in between.
00:32:32.000You can take an ultrasound and you take an image of the muscle and it looks at it like a combination of how much menstrual muscular fat there is with how much total muscle master is in the size and a bunch of different things.
00:32:44.000So you get this rough idea of quality.
00:32:47.000How does it not favor a guy who's exercising constantly?
00:33:51.000If you trip and you're about to fall and you can't put your foot out and catch yourself, you have to have the foot speed to get yourself out there, but the strength...
00:35:04.000Well, it goes back to, I think every one of us would agree, if you want to be as healthy as possible, you need to do a variety of training.
00:35:13.000So if you've only done yoga your whole life, you're probably going to have strength problems or foot speed problems.
00:35:18.000If you've only run, if you've only lifted weights, if you've only exposed yourself to a few of these stimuli, you're probably in a real problem.
00:35:30.000So my friend Brian McKenzie and I have a book that just came out a couple weeks ago on this whole idea called Unplugged where we need to expand past just lifting and running and think about what other physiological exposures do we need that are important for longevity.
00:36:04.000So if we want to be able to sustain and perform as well as we can throughout life, we probably need to be able to handle a bunch of different challenges.
00:36:11.000So you're talking about longevity now, not like necessarily athletic performance in professional athletes, right?
00:36:16.000We would use this under that umbrella, but very, very carefully.
00:36:18.000So, for example, I would not recommend extensive fasting during the middle of a six-week camp prior to UFC fight.
00:36:46.000But maybe, oh, you got hurt, you know, you got an extended layoff.
00:36:50.000Now we start to work on that other part of your physiology, so that next camp we've got more what's called metabolic flexibility.
00:36:56.000So we have an ability to switch back and forth between fuel sources.
00:37:00.000Right, so when you're preparing someone for a very specific event, like here you're ramping up for September 12th, boom, we have a protocol, let's get ready, but then after the fight's over, then you might be working on very specific balancing exercises or that kind of stuff?
00:37:16.000Exactly, so I'm of the belief that during those last few weeks, you need to be very specific to what you're going to do.
00:37:22.000Get on weight, get focused, get all these things.
00:37:25.000But now, because if we over-specify for too long, We have problems.
00:37:32.000We have this complex, these fighting forces called optimization versus adaptation.
00:37:38.000So generally, when you're optimizing, you're not adapting and vice versa.
00:40:01.000And there's creativity involved in it, too, because you have to manipulate things and figure stuff out and contemplate.
00:40:08.000Well, that's why I'm the director or the co-director, and I run my own lab, and I've got fantastic postdocs and students that are actually the operators that execute.
00:40:15.000But it seems like everything is constantly evolving and shifting and changing.
00:40:20.000Well, I find myself honestly spending more time...
00:40:23.000Being in the middle of saying, like, let's stop all the fighting between things and let's spend time saying, well, what was good about this and what was bad about this?
00:40:31.000Now, when it comes to ice, what about an injury?
00:40:33.000Like, what if somebody twists their ankle or something like that?
00:40:35.000Do you believe in icing it right away?
00:40:40.000But just to finish the example, so post-lifting session, maybe not great, but maybe if you wait six hours or do it the next day, And when we're talking about icing, we're talking about ice baths?
00:41:07.000So what I've read about cryo chambers is the big thing is the anti-inflammatory markers in the blood, or the reduction of inflammatory markers in the blood, improvements in cytokines, cold shock proteins, things along those lines, that those would be beneficial.
00:41:52.000So, for example, if you get a lift in and you're like, oh man, my elbow always things up on me after I lift, but I got a competition in eight weeks or a show in eight weeks, this would be like a powerlifting competition or a bodybuilding competition.
00:42:04.000And if you get in the ice, that takes that pain away for whatever reason, physiologically or antagonistic or anything.
00:42:52.000And there's some preliminary evidence that suggests perhaps an ice bath, I think, specifically post-exercise increased mitochondrial biogenesis.
00:44:46.000In fact, when you said variability, I assume you mean having a wide variety of foods in your daily.
00:44:53.000Yeah, I think also a wide variety of foods in your daily life, but also I think what works for you might not work for Jamie or might not work for me.
00:45:57.000It's a big issue in the MMA community.
00:45:59.000I see a lot of these guys popping up where they're trying to make a name for themselves.
00:46:03.000It seems super common that someone wants to diminish the other people out there doing different things and like, this is our way and this is the only way, this is the right way.
00:46:15.000Also, I think what they're playing to is that fighters in particular want someone to come along and go, Andy, I got the fucking solution, okay?
00:46:56.000But I think for some people, clearly, like, some diets fit better.
00:47:01.000Like, I've had a bunch of friends that went plant-based and maybe not even vegan, but the majority of their food is plant-based and they just feel better.
00:47:11.000I would say the vast majority of us would.
00:47:12.000Yeah, but I know a lot of other people that went fat-based, and they feel better, too.
00:47:18.000I mean, like, a lot of coconut oil, a lot of avocados.
00:47:21.000That seems to me especially true with people that are in intense exercise.
00:47:27.000And I don't know why that is, but it seems like a lot of dudes that I know that lift a lot of weights or that are involved in jiu-jitsu or wrestling or anything, or there's a lot of explosion...
00:47:35.000It seems to me like a lot of fats and fish oils and things along those lines.
00:47:40.000When they add those to their diets, fish oil in particular seems to have a big effect on grapplers.
00:47:45.000It seems to help them with joint issues and a lot of pain and maybe inflammation.
00:47:52.000I would say that most people are going to far better on a more traditional carbohydrate diet that are in the more explosive power strength stuff, especially at the volumes that MMA fighters are on.
00:48:05.000Because of the amount of output they're doing, like the glucose requirements of the muscles.
00:48:11.000And you have to be careful because it's the exact same principle.
00:48:15.000Either you're adapting or you're optimizing.
00:48:17.000And if you're optimizing all the time, then you're not adapting and vice versa.
00:48:20.000So if you push yourself to one end of the spectrum, you're going to probably compromise the metabolic ability to go back to the other side of the spectrum.
00:49:04.000I mean, he's 100% keto, and he believes that ketogenic diets have a host of benefits and that the human body just functions better on them.
00:49:19.000But everything I've seen of him has been fantastic.
00:49:23.000I'm in very much support of the vast majority of what I've heard him say.
00:49:26.000But his main lens is being focused on cancer prevention, epilepsy, these things.
00:49:31.000But if you look at some of the research, and I'm not an oncologist, so I'm going to speak a bit out of turn here, but there are now actually identification of several cancers that thrive on fats rather than carbohydrates.
00:49:43.000I have not seen this because he was talking about a host of different cancers that thrive on sugars and you stop them dead in their tracks by going on a fat-based diet.
00:50:44.000Those are coming from the entire circulation.
00:50:46.000So when you use carbohydrate for fuel, you're using the carbohydrate in the muscle that is exercising.
00:50:51.000So if you're doing bicep curls, you're burning glycogen from the bicep fiber, not even the muscle, but the individual fiber that's contracting.
00:50:58.000And how would that be more beneficial than systemic?
00:52:42.000He was saying that when you're talking about ketogenic states in particular, when you're talking about most people during a regular life...
00:52:50.00050 grams of carbohydrates would keep you in a ketogenic state.
00:52:56.000But when you're talking about some pro-athletes, powerlifts, you're in hundreds.
00:53:01.000It's 100, 250, and you're still ketogenic because your body has much more requirements.
00:53:11.000But the problem is micronutrient quality.
00:53:15.000So if an athlete's coming down in calories, and especially if those calories are coming from carbohydrate, and carbohydrates, their main source of carbohydrates are plants.
00:53:23.000So if we've compromised that and they're really low in calories, then they go down in nutrients and biochemicals, and that's a real problem.
00:53:30.000So we have to be very careful with getting them into keto if it comes...
00:55:00.000And we gave her a bunch of nutrients and were like 40 ounces a day or up to 60 ounces a day of fresh-pressed vegetable juice and just like clockwork every day.
00:55:09.000You know, this is such a complicated subject and it's so nuanced and there's so many different variables that...
00:55:16.000I feel like you have to be a scientist to really truly understand this.
00:55:22.000It's one of the problems with the bro science people, the people that do not have the real education in this stuff that are out there, you know, coaching athletes and teach them what to do and what not to do.
00:55:32.000It's like, you don't really know what you're talking about, and that becomes a real problem.
00:55:59.000I could tell you more about that than vast almost anyone on the planet, and then yet I'll still have people who are like, I read this guy's Instagram post, bro.
00:56:59.000And by the way, a three-hour video is a goddamn gift from God.
00:57:02.000Because if you stop and think about how much schooling you would have to go through to get the information that's in that three-hour video, it would take a decade.
00:58:09.000But making him like a, you know, fill in the blank, David Goggins type character.
00:58:15.000No, I mean we have, so the easiest way to understand this is plasticity.
00:58:20.000Your ability to change, your adaptability, is far higher than what people understand.
00:58:25.000And in fact, there's almost a direct link between the increase in technology and the increase in our thoughts of what change and how much they change.
00:58:35.000So the reason why we didn't think fiber type changed 20 years ago is because we didn't have the technology to actually have the fidelity to measure all the ones that we were missing.
00:58:43.000And is there also probably a psychological factor in there as well from the people that are measuring it?
00:58:48.000It's probably easier to say that it doesn't change than to say that it does.
00:59:17.000So, for example, if you were the first one to try to publish a study that fiber types changed as a response to exercise training, and 20 years of research suggested otherwise, you'd have a very hard time getting through a review.
00:59:29.000They would hammer you for every little thing, like, wow, did you do this, and did you do this, and...
00:59:34.000Because you're going to be very skeptical.
00:59:44.000What the problem is, when the other people who aren't scientists and don't pay attention, like if you don't know it like I do, then you need to...
01:00:52.000How it happens in humans, when it does, it's going to be very difficult and probably impossible to ever show.
01:00:57.000But we have more and more evidence because we know the mechanisms now behind the cell growth.
01:01:02.000So once we see the physiology and the mechanics behind it and the molecules and the gene expression, then we say, okay, it lines up with A, B, C, D, and E. We just can't show it with F because of technology.
01:01:14.000Now we need to rethink our position here.
01:01:20.000Now, when you're dealing with athletes, and especially athletes that are trying to make weight, like a fighter, and do you ever tell them, like, say, like a Jake Ellenberger, who's a pretty thick guy, gets down to 170 pounds, and you got them exercising and doing all these things,
01:01:36.000and you do a body composition of them, do you ever tell them, like, you got to lose some muscle?
01:02:37.000But when you see a guy like him, and he got outpowered by a guy like Chris Weidman, what's the line in the sand you draw where you say, okay, Calvin, let's put on some muscle and some strength so that you can deal with the Yoel Romeros of the world, or let's lean you out and get you off the tacos so you can fight guys that you're supposed to be fighting,
01:03:16.000I've met him a handful of times, but we've never been to my lab.
01:03:19.000I don't know how bad his stuff is or if he's got medical problems that no one knows about or if he has other issues that are going on that make it hard.
01:05:00.000On short notice, when he had a whole camp, and has every reason to not have confidence, and like, 90% or more fighters would have just been like, no, I'm out.
01:07:39.000I just wonder, and this is unfortunate, but I wonder how many of these young new fans, I would like to say like post-Ronda Rousey fans, how many of them even know who the fuck GSB is?
01:07:54.000But I mean, I wonder of how many of the new ones, you know, the people coming up, Actually know who he is and I mean it's been a long time.
01:09:13.000And then, as a fighter, like, when you get to MMA in particular, guys have, like, nine years to compete at a world-class level, and then the wheels just fall off.
01:09:21.000Yeah, get in, get your money, get out.
01:10:00.000So, what people don't understand about when you watch professional athletes, fighters in particular, is a lot of what happens in that fatigue is either psychological or it's bad weight cut stuff.
01:10:09.000So now he doesn't have that, but if he's lugging around extra weight that he's not used to, potentially...
01:11:10.000But having said that, if we want to do a small circuit or something that incorporates one of those things in there, sure, but I'm never going to prescribe, if they're not doing it, like, hey, let's hop on and let's get an hour on the elliptical.
01:11:21.000That's never going to come out of my mouth.
01:11:27.000I'm not pro or con, but that's traditionally not where I'm going to go because it's far easier for us to help them lose weight through food than it is adding on an extra hour, and that adding on an extra hour of activity can be real harmful for them muscularly.
01:11:39.000Right, but we're not necessarily just talking about losing weight.
01:11:42.000We're talking about increasing performance.
01:11:44.000Do you believe in any of those machines?
01:11:46.000It's not a believe in or not believe in.
01:11:49.000I don't feel like in camp it's a huge need with the exception of maybe like a recovery.
01:11:54.000So you want to do like, hey, let's go an easy 45 or something on the bike.
01:11:58.000But as like a 45 hard, with the exception of when you start moving to championship fights, I do think there's good cause for doing maybe once a week of saying, like we do this with Durkin all the time, like, hey, he loves to ride mountain bikes, so go out on the mountain bike and go ride for...
01:12:13.000When you're saying Durkin, you mean Pat Cummins?
01:13:47.000But if they don't run well, I mean technically well, if they're landing in bad positions with their fear out everywhere and they don't want to take time to go to a running coach like Brian McKenzie or something, then...
01:14:13.000Because generally, the foot position of the hill is much easier to get to, and it's harder to run bad uphill than it is on flat ground, generally.
01:14:22.000So it is something you go to, but that's also probably something where...
01:14:26.000You don't have as much teaching and you're at altitude, so that by itself is going to reduce how hard you work, which is going to reduce the stress on your joints and bones and ligaments.
01:14:36.000So all that can be integrated where you reduce the likelihood of them getting a sore back or knees because you added some 45-minute running on there that didn't really have to happen.
01:14:46.000Well, hills seem to reduce that anyway because you're really almost like doing squats.
01:14:50.000It's almost like doing a lunge or something like that because you're just kind of running and pushing your body up instead of like the pounding.
01:15:29.000Is Aerodyne or VersaClimber, are those things limited in the fact that the movement is very specific in terms of doing that versus maybe like a kettlebell cardio workout?
01:16:27.000Oh, we're trying to improve your ability to repeat maximal sustained 15 second intervals with short rest and all at the same time keeping your breathing mechanics.
01:16:40.000Now, what modality do we want to use today to introduce that insult?
01:16:43.000And so you think the good move would be to introduce a bunch of different things, like one day, yeah, one day do the kettlebell cardio workout, another day do the aerosol, was that aerosol bike, what's it called?
01:16:55.000Aerosol, aerodyne, yeah, there's a bunch.
01:18:35.000Like, it's based on performance, the coach, the athlete, when I've been around them.
01:18:38.000Like, we plan it out so that this is the volume this week, this is the volume this week, this is the volume this week, so that we don't get ourselves in those situations.
01:18:46.000And how do you know how to plan the volume out?
01:18:49.000Like, say if you've got a guy like, you know, fill in the blank, Chris Weidman comes to you, and he wants to train with you, and he's preparing for a five-round championship fight.
01:18:59.000How do you know how much work to give him?
01:19:28.000Then I look and we can assess some volume.
01:19:30.000And then I can generally tell, okay, this is normal for a person of your caliber, of your age and your experience, or like you're way over what's normal.
01:19:38.000But I don't know how that lands on you.
01:20:14.000So people don't understand, especially in CrossFit or in MMA or in wrestling.
01:20:19.000People use CrossFit for conditioning for the most part, which is fine.
01:20:23.000But they don't get the biggest benefit out of it, which is strength, speed, power, training the reactive part of the system, training muscle spindles.
01:21:56.000Now, I've talked to a bunch of people about this that have started doing this recently, like within the last year or two, and they've all experienced great results.
01:22:04.000And that the idea being that you used to go to failure and then you'd be wrecked.
01:22:09.000Like three or four days instead of that like say if you could do ten reps or something you do five and then you take a big rest and then you do five again and you take a big rest and then you wind up instead of doing 15 reps You wind up doing like 30 over the course of an hour and a half and then you're fine the next day Well,
01:22:27.000I mean you had Louie on like Louie Simmons, right?
01:23:55.000So now you did the same total repetitions, but ten of them were done after full rest, which means you're going to have more power and more force.
01:24:46.000People kept coming to me with this and I'm like, you don't know basics of speed training or strength training?
01:24:51.000And the MMA guys were so wrong and that's how I got into this for the most part is people were like, oh my god, this is changing like everything.
01:24:58.000Well, MMA training is, it's weird, it's really strange because MMA training is essentially, it's still in its infancy, right?
01:25:06.000It really didn't even exist until 1993. And then it didn't even really exist even then until like...
01:25:13.000I feel like Frank Shamrock was the first real professional MMA fighter, because he was the first guy to figure out that you have to be an insane cardio, and he was the first guy to be able to strike and also be able to grapple, to be able to fight off of his back, and piece it all together.
01:25:34.000When he beat Tito Ortiz, it was way smaller than Tito, but he beat him because of cardio.
01:25:40.000But one of the things that I used to see early on that was so confusing to me because I came from a striking background was how many of these guys were willing to beat the fuck out of each other in the gym.
01:25:51.000And like that they were just going to war.
01:25:54.000But not even going to war with like good skills.
01:25:58.000Like going to war while they were learning.
01:26:51.000I tell people to eat vegetables all the time.
01:26:53.000No, but they watch this and they're like, okay, and they'll come at me with a thousand really weird nutrition questions or something, or really weird advanced training ones, because I went to a seminar or something, and I'm like, back the train up.
01:27:02.000Like, you're sparring six times a week.
01:27:15.000That's the vast majority of what I do, is bring these guys back to life and go, like, let me help you sift through all this internet stuff that's really complicated, and let's take what's actually good and bad and dial in a very usable system.
01:27:28.000So you think people just get overwhelmed with options from the internet?
01:27:53.000Like, they get bogged down in the details way too much of things that really don't matter.
01:27:57.000Your body's not that sensitive or insensitive enough where it can't convert something from something to something else.
01:28:03.000And if it needs it, it will do that for the most part.
01:28:05.000So there are some real small things at the end, but a lot of what we can do is, like, just get you on a reasonable program that's actually possible for you to implement.
01:28:16.000And that doesn't drive you so crazy or is so difficult and so confusing for you that you get halfway into it, you abandon it, and then you want to start over.
01:28:22.000Well, you know, I always think about Dan Gable.
01:28:25.000When Dan Gable was young, he pretty much outworked anybody.
01:28:29.000And he was just an unbelievable savage when it came to his training.
01:28:32.000And then that manifested itself in the competition.
01:28:35.000He was just like, the momentum behind him because of his ruthless training was so intense.
01:29:02.000Because, like you said, here's where it gets so tricky, is physiology versus psychology.
01:29:07.000So if that gave him that extra mental confidence that he needed to perform better, well then it's hard to say that it wasn't necessary.
01:29:14.000Yeah, like he was always talking about guys on steroids, that he liked competing against guys on steroids because he knew they were mentally weak and they would break.
01:29:23.000Like you have all this conflicting stuff and you try to do this dance, which is why again you need people, you need a team to do this stuff and say, okay, this is what I think.
01:29:31.000So people have a really hard time with physiological truth or scientific truth And implementation.
01:29:51.000But what you tell somebody is scientific truth versus what the message you spread to either your athletes or a bunch of people, that can be very, very different because of unintended applications or consequences.
01:30:03.000So, for example, there's no physiological harm with sugar.
01:30:15.000And so most of the fighting that goes back and forth between any conversation like this is people saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, but the actual effect of it is good.
01:31:18.000So now you could have a person in the corner of left who says, like, no, you're an idiot, look at the science, sugar's not bad for you for a thousand reasons, and they're technically right.
01:31:28.000But, when we have conversations to 350 million Americans, they don't want all that detail in between.
01:32:04.000And that's what you're dealing with with the average American diet, whether it's through breads or pastas or actually sugar and soda itself.
01:32:44.000Well, even having this conversation, though, is going to be really confusing to a lot of people because you're talking about so many different variables.
01:32:50.000And by your being intellectually honest about all this stuff and saying, well, it's, you know, there's no real good answer.
01:32:58.000You know, and it's different for one person than it is for another person.
01:33:00.000Some people might get over really well on, like, macadamia nuts and almonds and get their protein from, you know, and other people, they might actually have an allergy to those things.
01:33:11.000Yeah, and, you know, trust me, try to be my students.
01:33:13.000They get irritated as shit when I do this to them.
01:35:02.000Cooking is like, well, alright, what's left?
01:35:04.000I get some oil, get some hot, kind of dices, yeah, throw some, whatever, that you give a mishmash, right?
01:35:11.000So, people generally, I find, work well with nutrition information, either one of two approaches.
01:35:17.000So, if I said, Joe, I'm going to do a nutrition program for you for the next six months, whatever you want, and I said, you can either do this one of two ways.
01:35:24.000We can work together every morning, weigh every single thing you eat on the scale, text it to me, I'll tell you exactly how many slices of avocado to have, how many jalapenos, and I'll tell you exact weights and volumes for everything.
01:35:37.000Or we can maybe text once a day or once a week and we would just go over concepts and ideas.
01:35:42.000Here's what we're trying to get to, do what you want.
01:36:18.000So, giving people the information in the way that they absorb it is important.
01:36:23.000So, if you talk to a baker, so chemistry, details, weighing, everything out, and I go, alright, here's what I want you to do, a little bit of fat, a little bit of protein, some grains, that's not going to work for them.
01:36:35.000You have to give them a very, very specific system.
01:36:38.000Half a cup of this, a tablespoon of that.
01:40:23.000And if you're a cook, though, you're like, well, who cares?
01:40:26.000And if a scientist could step in and go like, well, these are all the problems, and this, and this, and this, and this, and everyone's fighting back and forth, you're like, well, fuck, do I guess, do I eat fat or not eat fat?
01:43:36.000So they get it a little bit technically.
01:43:37.000So just adding a little salt to your water.
01:43:39.000I think somebody actually did a study of a bunch of those alkaline waters and tested them in the store, like bought in different brands, and they were all over the place acidity-wise.
01:45:03.000Again, this is me highlighting my mistakes.
01:45:05.000But then I actually, funny enough, paid attention to what he was saying, and it turns out there was something there.
01:45:11.000So it's funny how much you hated someone when you don't actually listen or read their stuff.
01:45:16.000So he was promoting the training mask, and I'm like, like everyone else, I'm like, it doesn't work, evidence shows it doesn't work, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
01:45:23.000And then I listened to how he was actually using it.
01:45:26.000So he wasn't using it to simulate altitude, because that's not really effective, but he was using it to teach people how to use their diaphragm.
01:45:34.000And that's when I was like, oh, I get it here.
01:45:39.000So I'll come back and I'll finish this in, but the quick analogy here would be if I handed you a pen and said, you know, like, does this pen work?
01:45:48.000Well, it may not work as a dagger, but it worked pretty good as a pen.
01:45:53.000So the problem with the mask was it's flipped.
01:45:55.000It didn't work for what it was told you to work for, but it worked because, in this case, the act of restricting people's breathing sometimes can help them learn to use their diaphragm.
01:46:04.000People who breathe with their shoulders up and they don't use their stomach and their diaphragm a lot, when you put that mask in front of their face, they don't have that option, and so they learn to breathe through their belly and use their diaphragm.
01:47:04.000And this is actually, that's what turned me on to Brian initially, because I'm like, when Boss came to me with the O2 trainer, I was like, this stuff doesn't work, bro.
01:47:31.000So all those little valves on the left and right hand side, they're thick.
01:47:34.000They increase airflow or decrease airflow.
01:47:37.000So what we did is we had people come in four times and they either got the high restriction, low restriction, medium restriction or no restriction.
01:47:44.000And what we saw is in every person under one of those, sorry, let me back up.
01:47:50.000They came in and either they did some breathing drills like blowing it out, inhaling as hard as they can, blowing it out.
01:51:32.000You're going to have to ask him, but he is the one that can say, like, do this for this thing, do exactly this way for this thing, you want this adaptation, you want this effect.
01:53:52.000Depending on what you're looking to do, because one thing you can train your body to do is how well do you perform when you've generated a bunch of carbon dioxide?
01:54:07.000So I can put you in a situation where you get a bunch of carbon dioxide buildup, and if I don't let you dump it, then you're gonna fatigue a lot faster.
01:54:16.000But that's not necessarily a bad thing.
01:54:18.000You could learn to then deal with a lot of fatigue.
01:54:25.000So because of the fact that your body has more carbon dioxide in the system, your body adapts to process that carbon dioxide more efficiently?
01:54:33.000This would be the assumption, yet to be scientifically shown.
01:54:43.000And it's also a way for us to get a lot of training volume in, or sorry, a lot of cardiovascular training in because your heart rate goes way up without actually doing a lot of physical work.
01:54:53.000And so for MMA guys, this is what we're looking for sometimes because of physical work in their training camp is so high.
01:54:59.000We can't add any more volume to them that's going to beat them up.
01:55:02.000So now we can get them a cardiovascular workout in that's easy on the joints and ligaments and the bones.
01:55:08.000So the other approach would be dump all the CO2 or do other things like nasal breathing only.
01:55:14.000So the whole workout where you're only allowed to breathe through your nose.
01:55:17.000When you breathe through your nose, it actually can release nitric oxide, which is a vasodilator.
01:56:31.000So we focus on the one or two that you're like, wow, this is moving something here.
01:56:37.000But, I mean, just like the example we went over with the cold.
01:56:39.000It's like, yeah, it's great for this, or actually it's terrible, and then people say, no, they want to make blanket statements like heat's good or cold's good or cold's bad.
01:56:46.000Well, as we study it more, we start finding out, well, actually, it's good for this, and it's good for this, and it's bad for that, and that, and that, and that.
01:56:52.000So we'd have to assume sauna would be the same way.
01:57:22.000There's a study they're doing right now at Harvard, apparently.
01:57:25.000Somebody was telling me about it the other day, where they're concentrating on hot yoga and the benefits of hot yoga and heat shock proteins.
01:57:33.000Yeah, I'm sure they're going to find a lot.
01:57:46.000Like you and like me, I don't go out of my way to do too much sauna work because of the way I train, I get really hot.
01:57:53.000And sometimes we'll train specifically with a little bit more clothing sometimes and get kind of like, well, instead of sitting in a sauna for 45 minutes, let me wear a little bit of extra clothing during my training session and get real hot.
01:58:03.000But for the average people, I think it's a fantastic modality because they're maybe only working out once a week or less and you can get them hot and we can actually work on those health benefits and While we're building good quality habits and we can eventually lead them down the path to more exercise.
01:58:20.000Emmanuel Stewart used to run the Kronk Gym.
01:58:23.000He used to crank the temperature up in the gym over 100 degrees.
02:00:13.000So if you're used to fighting at the pace that it takes for you to sustain 10 rounds of sparring in the gym at 110 degrees, and then we come in and you and I fight and I'm ready to go with the speed, you're not ready for that pace.
02:00:23.000So it's not that you don't physically have the conditioning, but you're just like, oh my, I'm just not, this guy's just...
02:00:29.000So you have to be careful of training too far outside of what you're actually going to encounter.
02:00:34.000Which is, you know, some of these guys run into those problems when they do, you know, I'm going to spar 10 rounds so that I can go 5 easy.
02:01:49.000I mean, it seems like you're very passionate about it, but it also seems like, wow, it could be kind of stressful having so many variables and possibilities.
02:02:30.000I've done some actors and things like that, but I generally stay away from that, even though the money is far, far higher for me in those things.
02:02:39.000But I did it because these MMA folks, I have a real passion for someone who's going to put all that on the line.
02:04:23.000I told this story also on my podcast about the history of strength conditioning.
02:04:28.000And how it went from the 1900s to where it is now.
02:04:32.000And the quick story is there was a guy named Peter Karpovich...
02:04:36.000He was a scientist and he was extremely, he was the guy who started the idea that lifting weights causes you to lose flexibility and it's bad for your health and all these things, right?
02:04:47.000This is 1952, 54, something like that.
02:05:28.000Everyone's like, oh, they're great, they're strong and athletic, and everyone knows the showdown's coming.
02:05:32.000Everyone's there to watch the show, but everyone's really there to watch.
02:05:34.000Just like they are on the internet now, it's like, let's watch the shit show afterwards.
02:05:39.000So everyone's done, and Carpich stands up, and he's like, it's great, you're strong, and you've got a lot of muscle and all that, but let me ask you a question.
02:05:57.000Drops into a full splits, grabs 50-pound dumbbells, does a standing backflip.
02:06:01.000And at this point, Karpovich is like, uh-oh.
02:06:04.000Like, my entire career is that strength training's bad for you, it's unhealthy, you lose flexibility, and these dudes, the strongest in the world, just showed up.
02:06:12.000Not only are they not inflexible, but they just did his splits.
02:06:15.000Their bodybuilders were reigning world champions.
02:06:17.000So he was at a crossroads right there in his career to say like, do I admit in front of the whole world about how wrong my entire research line was?
02:07:11.000He was pulling the, like, walking out of the bathroom by himself and he had, like, his cell phone up to his ear, like, I'm on the phone, but I think his cell phone was dead, but he's, like, didn't want anybody to talk to him.
02:12:18.000Yeah, I mean, I would look at them from the performance side of it.
02:12:21.000I wouldn't look at brain damage at all.
02:12:22.000I would say, well, here are your numbers in the room, stacked up to other folks we've had in this room, and if you're far below their performance-wise, I would say you might have a performance problem in terms of you might not be talented enough physically to compete.
02:12:34.000Like, I'm not going to make a comment about your other reasons to retire, but if I tested you across the board and you were terrible at everything...
02:12:43.000Then I might be like, well, physically, from my perspective, I don't know if you have what it takes anymore.
02:12:48.000Do you see a deterioration in physical skills from, like, punishment?
02:12:53.000I don't know if I could really say that.
02:13:44.000But the other stuff I do is, like I said, it's so much usually helping them calm down through all the nonsense that I can give them a settling presence in terms of this is not something you should worry about or get to hear.
02:14:31.000And then we also looked at this other thing.
02:14:33.000So, one of the things that we measure in our lab is called myonuclear domain.
02:14:37.000So the nucleus is what holds the DNA, and it tells the cell to grow, shrink, die, like repair.
02:14:44.000Well, like human muscle is really unique.
02:14:47.000It's one of the only cells in all of biology that is multinucleated.
02:14:51.000So that means it's got not only more than one, but it's got thousands of nuclei per cell.
02:14:58.000The obvious advantage is that allows us a lot more plasticity, so we can recover and repair and adapt and adjust really, really quickly, which is why we see people's fiber type change in a matter of weeks.
02:15:10.000A paper that came out last year showing actually a high-fat, high-sugar diet can change fiber type.
02:15:15.000We've seen carbon dioxide concentrations alter fiber type, things like this.
02:15:19.000So the nucleus is really interesting because the more nuclei you have, The faster you recover.
02:15:27.000It's also what determines how big a muscle will grow.
02:15:40.000Well, working right now through it, a lot of people are, but the old theory would be a satellite cell would come in, it would turn into a nuclei, and the cell will only grow as big as the amount of nuclei that are around it, or that are inside of it.
02:15:56.000And so what that basically means is there's a certain domain or a certain size that each nucleus will control, and it won't exceed that size because it loses control.
02:16:06.000So if you, all three of us, were all a nuclei and this whole room was one cell, if we wanted to expand the wall, we would have to bring in another nucleus because you'd be like, dude, it's too much area to control.
02:16:20.000So when you go through, like, about a training, a year or something of heavy lifting, and we add those satellite cells that turn into myonuclei, and we expand the size, well, we used to think, like, if we stop training and the room gets smaller, we used to think that, well, all right,
02:16:35.000like, time to kick Jamie out of the room.
02:16:54.000And you can increase the amount of nuclei just by increasing the size of the muscle, and that makes it easier to go back to that if you lose some muscle.
02:17:38.000Because the book is really a guide for how to use some of these training technologies in your training and how it can ruin your training and how it can help your training.
02:17:46.000So a part of that is the importance of doing a couple of things.
02:19:30.000So what they basically identified is we didn't have a separate word for the color blue because we didn't differentiate blue shades.
02:19:38.000It wasn't important for the world because blue doesn't happen very frequently in biology, in nature.
02:19:44.000It wasn't until we had textiles and we started printing and making cloth and paper and stuff like that that we had all these different dyes and shades of blue, so then we developed different shades of blue and different colors.
02:19:54.000So because of that, we started perceiving and focusing on different shades of blue.
02:19:59.000So now the average person that comes to the room would be able to identify all these different blues, where prior to this we didn't care about it, we didn't focus on it, so we all just saw that as one color blue.
02:20:21.000So how does that make going to nature?
02:20:24.000So if we think about it from this way, what's happening in the exposure when we're in this artificial environment versus being in the external environment like nature?
02:20:32.000So what are we not being exposed to now that we could be exposed to out in nature?
02:20:38.000The third part of the book is the consciousness aspect, which is we talk to a lot of people.
02:20:43.000Tim Ferriss wrote a section or did a little interview thing for it.
02:20:49.000And they talk about the things like getting into flow state and the stress relief of it and all the other psychological benefits that we have from detaching a little bit from our constant tech exposure.
02:21:01.000Dopamine is another great example, right?
02:21:03.000So if we look at the dopamine rush that we get from the constant exposure, Not from the actual tech, but from things like, oh, I want to look at my likes.
02:21:34.000Well, you can, but it's really beneficial to have ourselves exposed to that.
02:21:39.000And it's a problem now, but really the book is about, wait 20 years and think about the problem that's going to be in 20 years when this technology thing only gets more advanced and it takes more portion of our life.