The Joe Rogan Experience - JRE MMA Show #11 with John Danaher

00:00:00.000 And we're live.

00:00:06.000 John Donagher, thank you very much, sir.

00:00:09.000 Very nice to see you.

00:00:10.000 It's my pleasure, Joe.

00:00:11.000 Thank you for having me here.

00:00:12.000 Nice to be with a fellow fanny pack proponent as well.

00:00:16.000 And now you have one of the beautiful Higher Primate leather bags.

00:00:20.000 I like that, huh?

00:00:21.000 Joe Rogan has just given me one of the most beautiful fanny packs that I've ever seen in my life.

00:00:28.000 I wear a very cheap fanny pack and this is a thing of beauty.

00:00:33.000 I was just telling Joe about my student Gordon Ryan was recently given a Gucci fanny pack.

00:00:40.000 It's literally the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life.

00:00:43.000 When he wears it around me, I get insanely jealous.

00:00:45.000 But would you buy one of those?

00:00:47.000 It's like an $800 fanny pack?

00:00:49.000 Just on principle, I can't buy an $800 fanny pack. 0.88

00:00:52.000 But I could definitely stab Gordon Ryan in the back with a knife and steal it from him and blame it on Nicky Ryan. 0.94

00:00:57.000 I could do that easily. 0.99

00:00:58.000 Blame it on his brother?

00:00:59.000 Absolutely.

00:01:00.000 Great TV series.

00:01:03.000 The fanny pack is making a comeback.

00:01:05.000 It's a slow comeback that a lot of people are reluctant to join.

00:01:09.000 They're scared.

00:01:11.000 They worry about their position in the sexual food chain. 0.98

00:01:15.000 With good reason, by the way.

00:01:16.000 I don't know why. 1.00

00:01:17.000 I feel like anybody that won't fuck you because you have a fanny pack, you don't want to fuck them. 1.00

00:01:21.000 They're too much work. 1.00

00:01:23.000 Strong point.

00:01:24.000 Essentially, it's always a battle over appearance versus function.

00:01:30.000 Fanny Packs score very, very low on appearance but very high on function.

00:01:35.000 I feel like that one bucks the trend.

00:01:38.000 I think you're right.

00:01:39.000 Between this and the Gucci, we've got something going on here.

00:01:41.000 There's a video that I put up the other day of my archery game, this techno hunt thing, which is this big, crazy, elaborate thing.

00:01:48.000 I got more comments on the fact that I was wearing a fanny pack in the video than anything.

00:01:53.000 Were they positive or negative comments?

00:01:54.000 Mostly negative.

00:01:55.000 But that's just the internet.

00:01:59.000 The internet is extremely angry.

00:02:01.000 That's the first thing you learn about the internet.

00:02:05.000 You could literally save a baby's life. 1.00

00:02:10.000 80% of the internet will call you an asshole for doing so. 1.00

00:02:13.000 It doesn't matter what you do. 0.99

00:02:15.000 The internet is very angry.

00:02:16.000 Well, what the internet is, is it shows what people are like when there's no social cues, when they're not in front of you, they don't have to deal with, like, looking you in the eye, and what weird little hidden demons of jealousy and anger and resentment.

00:02:32.000 And it's a pretty sad story, isn't it?

00:02:34.000 If that's what we're really like, it's not looking good for the human race.

00:02:38.000 I just think it's the kind of people that comment in general.

00:02:42.000 What it shows you is that 99% of what we call human goodness and politeness really comes out of fear of consequences.

00:02:49.000 There's a lot of that, for sure.

00:02:50.000 Because there's no consequences when you talk online.

00:02:52.000 But I think it's the quality of the people that are making those kind of comments.

00:02:56.000 I would say, if you look at YouTube comments, Michael Jordan is not leaving YouTube comments.

00:03:01.000 The people that leave YouTube comments and bitch and complain about things, usually everything's not going so fantastic in their own life.

00:03:08.000 But they have this forum now where they feel like, you know, if there's a video that has 3 million downloads, they also are on that video.

00:03:17.000 They're there in the comments section.

00:03:20.000 You go to that.

00:03:21.000 They're a part of that.

00:03:23.000 Unqualified.

00:03:23.000 No one asked him to be there.

00:03:25.000 Literally, all you have to do is make an account.

00:03:27.000 No one has to know anything about your education, the way your mind works, what you've done with your life, what mistakes you've made.

00:03:34.000 Doesn't matter. 0.98

00:03:35.000 You are oldfuck66, and that's your name. 0.99

00:03:39.000 And you can say whatever you want. 0.99

00:03:40.000 And your comments are right there with everything else.

00:03:44.000 Yes.

00:03:44.000 It's fascinating to watch.

00:03:46.000 It's very egalitarian.

00:03:48.000 But in a lot of ways, it's also, it's like, boy, I don't know if that's the best way to get your information.

00:03:55.000 Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to that.

00:03:57.000 Yeah.

00:03:57.000 So, John, you are one of the most fascinating characters in the world of jujitsu and the world of martial arts.

00:04:07.000 And for people who are not aware of your background...

00:04:11.000 You started out, correct me if I'm wrong, you started out a philosophy student.

00:04:16.000 That's correct, yes.

00:04:17.000 And you were working as a bouncer.

00:04:19.000 And you were jacked, right?

00:04:20.000 You were a power lifter at the time?

00:04:22.000 Yes.

00:04:22.000 And you wanted to figure out a way to defend yourself.

00:04:25.000 It wasn't really a question of wanting to figure out.

00:04:28.000 It was a pretty simple desire that I had.

00:04:32.000 When I grew up in New Zealand, martial arts was almost entirely based around striking prowess.

00:04:38.000 You'll back me up on this, Joe.

00:04:40.000 We're similar age.

00:04:42.000 When we grew up, the...

00:04:45.000 It's no exaggeration to say that the study of martial arts in English-speaking countries, North America, Western Europe, etc., was absolutely dominated by the striking arts.

00:04:56.000 And if you ask the average person who was the best fighter in the world, they would typically say whoever was the best boxer in the world.

00:05:05.000 So in the 1980s, Mike Tyson wasn't just the best boxer in the world, he was the best fighter in the world.

00:05:09.000 People...

00:05:11.000 Always equated prowess in fighting with the ability to strike.

00:05:17.000 I grew up in that time period and so I grew up studying kickboxing as a teenager in New Zealand.

00:05:25.000 I came to the United States And for the first time, there's no wrestling culture in my country.

00:05:29.000 New Zealand has no wrestling culture.

00:05:31.000 It's one of the few countries where there's no indigenous wrestling culture.

00:05:33.000 There were, but it was kind of lost in the sands of time.

00:05:38.000 When I grew up, wrestling was something I saw once every four years at the Olympics on TV. And I didn't even associate it with fighting, to be honest with you.

00:05:48.000 I just saw it as this strange sport where two guys tackled each other.

00:05:52.000 And so I came to the United States and I was working as a bouncer.

00:05:57.000 America has much, much more of a wrestling culture in it.

00:06:00.000 In New Zealand, when I grew up, when you fought, you were expected to fight with fists and if it went to the ground, the two guys stood up and they resumed fighting.

00:06:07.000 You stood up and you fought like a man.

00:06:08.000 That was the idea.

00:06:10.000 And in the United States, when I was bouncing, I was Absolutely shocked and impressed by the prowess of judo players and wrestlers in street fighting, working as a bouncer.

00:06:22.000 I worked alongside them and I was massively impressed.

00:06:25.000 What year was this?

00:06:25.000 This is in the early 1990s.

00:06:27.000 I arrived in the United States in 1991. So I started working late 1991 in New York City.

00:06:36.000 New York was a very, very different city back then.

00:06:42.000 It's almost like two different cities from what it used to be.

00:06:44.000 It is amazing how much it's changed, right?

00:06:45.000 The transformation is amazing.

00:06:46.000 Night and day.

00:06:48.000 It's become like a giant TGI Fridays now.

00:06:50.000 That's pretty much what New York City is.

00:06:52.000 To give you an example, I used to live on West End Avenue on the Upper West Side.

00:06:58.000 When I would come home from working in nightclubs at 5.30 in the morning to go to sleep, there would be large numbers of street-walking prostitutes on my block, my avenue. 1.00

00:07:14.000 If you saw even a single street-walking prostitute in that area today, it would be front-page news of the New York Times. 1.00

00:07:22.000 It would be so shocking, so completely out of people's minds.

00:07:29.000 It would literally just...

00:07:30.000 Yeah.

00:07:31.000 People's minds.

00:07:31.000 Times Square is the best example.

00:07:33.000 Times Square is an extreme example.

00:07:34.000 Because Times Square used to be all seedy peep shows.

00:07:38.000 It was nothing but seedy peep shows.

00:07:39.000 And now it's like Guy Fieri restaurants.

00:07:42.000 It's all weird television.

00:07:45.000 So the transformation is huge.

00:07:46.000 So that was the New York that I went into.

00:07:48.000 And it was a violent New York.

00:07:50.000 1991, I believe, was the year with the highest murder rate in recorded history for New York City.

00:07:56.000 So it was a very, very different New York City.

00:07:58.000 It's not what you see today.

00:07:59.000 So I came into this environment and I saw these people were incredibly adept in fighting.

00:08:04.000 They were using grappling technique to do so.

00:08:06.000 This impressed me a lot.

00:08:08.000 Shortly after that time, as I was working, I started to hear talk about this show, this ultimate fighting show.

00:08:15.000 And there was this Brazilian guy who had beaten everyone. 0.78

00:08:17.000 He was wrestling people and strangling them and locking their arms, things like this.

00:08:23.000 Things that I'd never heard of.

00:08:24.000 So I'd heard this and...

00:08:28.000 One day I was teaching at Columbia University, and a close friend of mine, who was also on the PhD program, came into my office.

00:08:34.000 It was office hours.

00:08:35.000 And he said, John, you know, I know you work as a bouncer.

00:08:37.000 And I know you work at night.

00:08:41.000 And I started doing this martial art.

00:08:44.000 It's called Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

00:08:47.000 And it's mostly fought on the ground.

00:08:49.000 And I remember you said most of the fights you get into, people get put down on the ground and they wrestle.

00:08:55.000 And I was wondering if you would be interested in doing it.

00:08:58.000 And I was like, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu?

00:09:00.000 I never associated martial arts with Brazil.

00:09:03.000 For me, martial arts, Japan, Korea, Brazil.

00:09:07.000 What do they got?

00:09:08.000 Capoeira?

00:09:10.000 Who's this guy?

00:09:11.000 So I'm like, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu?

00:09:13.000 Isn't Jiu Jitsu like Japanese? 0.92

00:09:15.000 Isn't it like a contradiction of terms like Brazil Jiu Jitsu?

00:09:19.000 So at the time I was around 230 pounds and this guy couldn't have been more than 140 and he'd only been training two weeks.

00:09:28.000 So he goes to me, we go on the ground and we wrestle on the ground.

00:09:35.000 And I was like, okay, let me put you in a headlock and let's see what you can do.

00:09:40.000 So I shut the door of the office.

00:09:41.000 I cleared out the furniture.

00:09:43.000 This poor kid on the ground.

00:09:45.000 Now, the only thing I knew how to do on the ground in those days was headlock people.

00:09:49.000 I was a strong guy.

00:09:51.000 I had a pretty nasty headlock.

00:09:53.000 So I grabbed my poor little friend and throttled him with basically a Kezika Tamay type headlock. 0.94

00:10:02.000 And to my shock and horror, he started slipping around behind me.

00:10:05.000 And I started holding harder and harder.

00:10:08.000 And about two minutes went going, and I really had no real control over him.

00:10:11.000 And he was starting to get around behind me.

00:10:13.000 Now, I didn't know back attacks were.

00:10:15.000 I had complete naivety on the ground, but I could feel something bad was happening.

00:10:18.000 Someone getting behind you is never a good thing in a fight.

00:10:20.000 And I was getting tired.

00:10:22.000 My arms were getting tired.

00:10:23.000 I had no control over the guy.

00:10:24.000 And finally, he slipped out, and I had to stand up and run away.

00:10:27.000 Are you kidding me?

00:10:28.000 I'm twice your size. 1.00

00:10:29.000 You've been training two goddamn weeks. 0.99

00:10:31.000 And if this was a real fight, he would have got away from it. 0.99

00:10:33.000 I'm tired.

00:10:34.000 That's not good.

00:10:35.000 And I was going to say, if he did this in two weeks, What could you do with some training?

00:10:40.000 So I was fascinated.

00:10:41.000 I went down, got completely destroyed on my first day.

00:10:46.000 It was hilarious.

00:10:47.000 Who was there on his first day?

00:10:48.000 Matt Serra.

00:10:50.000 He was a blue guard at the time.

00:10:52.000 So even on that first day, you met people that would become very important in your life later on.

00:10:59.000 And I vowed to the moon and the stars that I would at least become competent.

00:11:04.000 I couldn't live with the idea that I was incompetent at an important element of fighting.

00:11:09.000 I didn't want to be a world champ.

00:11:10.000 I just wanted to be competent.

00:11:12.000 And I believed it would make my bouncing work significantly easier.

00:11:17.000 That was absolutely true.

00:11:21.000 Within a very, very short period of time, bouncing got massively easier for me.

00:11:27.000 You always hear this cliché, jiu-jitsu saved my life.

00:11:32.000 How many people say that all the time?

00:11:35.000 Well, I can think of, without any question, there are four times in my life that jiu-jitsu actually did save my life.

00:11:41.000 I can say that with complete honesty.

00:11:44.000 It's a cliché for most people.

00:11:46.000 For me, it did happen.

00:11:49.000 So it made a massive difference, but I still saw it as something that was interesting and something I just wanted to gain competence in.

00:11:58.000 That fundamentally changed because really at that point I wanted to finish my PhD and become a professor.

00:12:03.000 That was my original goal when I came to the United States.

00:12:07.000 But things started to change when the three senior students at the Henzo Gracie Academy, Hikato Almeida, Matt Serra, and Rodrigo Gracie all went their separate ways.

00:12:17.000 They had to go out and start their own schools.

00:12:19.000 And Henzo was busy fighting professionally in Japan, so he couldn't be at the academy all the time.

00:12:24.000 And he came to me and he said, John, you're going to have to be a teacher.

00:12:28.000 Like, there's no one else.

00:12:29.000 And how long have you been training?

00:12:31.000 I believe if I go through the...

00:12:33.000 It was around four years.

00:12:34.000 I believe I was a purple ball when I first started teaching at Hanzo's.

00:12:38.000 Don't quote me on that, but I'll have to go back and check.

00:12:40.000 But I believe that's...

00:12:41.000 And why did he come to you?

00:12:44.000 Probably because he felt sorry for me.

00:12:45.000 I don't know.

00:12:47.000 I was there a lot, and I think maybe he saw some...

00:12:52.000 Enthusiasm.

00:12:52.000 Well, you were obsessed, right?

00:12:54.000 You were there daily.

00:12:55.000 Yeah.

00:12:55.000 That became much more so when I became a teacher.

00:12:58.000 I saw that, okay, I'm filling big shoes here.

00:13:01.000 You must remember all three of those names that I just mentioned, all three were world champions.

00:13:06.000 These were good, good people.

00:13:08.000 And for that time, they were killers.

00:13:10.000 And here I am, a PhD student.

00:13:14.000 Now I've got to fill in these shoes.

00:13:16.000 So I was like, I've got to get serious about this.

00:13:18.000 So I made a commitment to becoming the best possible teacher I could.

00:13:24.000 Now, you must remember, I went in as a teacher.

00:13:27.000 That was my first assignment.

00:13:28.000 And so I decided my primary focus in Juditsu would be upon teaching.

00:13:34.000 And fortunately, I came from an academic background.

00:13:37.000 I had many brilliant, brilliant professors coming through the philosophy programs, both in New Zealand and the United States.

00:13:44.000 Columbia University had a fantastic PhD program.

00:13:48.000 So I was very experienced in the art of teaching, but in an academic context.

00:13:54.000 And I thought, maybe this has given me, fate has given me this angle where I can use an academic approach to teaching in a sports environment.

00:14:05.000 And that has really become one of the patterns of my approach to teaching a jiu-jitsu.

00:14:12.000 So this is in the 90s and you are a purple belt at the time.

00:14:18.000 When did you develop this leg lock system that has become so legendary?

00:14:24.000 So for people, for the uninitiated that have never heard of you or understand what we're talking about here, For the longest time, jujitsu was primarily attacks on the arms and the neck.

00:14:38.000 That was pretty much it.

00:14:39.000 And there were known attacks on the legs, but they were frowned upon.

00:14:44.000 Yes.

00:14:45.000 Something happened.

00:14:46.000 You got to see some of those techniques in MMA. You got to see some heel hooks, occasionally foot locks.

00:14:52.000 There's a few guys.

00:14:53.000 Orlovsky pulled off a foot lock in the UFC against Tim Sylvia.

00:14:57.000 There's a few guys that were pulling these off.

00:14:59.000 This is pre-Husamar Palhares.

00:15:02.000 But you all of a sudden came along with this very effective system that there was rumblings many years ago about this where a lot of people were talking about it.

00:15:16.000 And a lot of people were saying that, you know, John Donaher has this insane leg lock system, and then you started developing all these...

00:15:25.000 For people who don't know, the top grapplers in the world...

00:15:28.000 There's a lot of top grapplers in the world.

00:15:30.000 Jiu-Jitsu is incredibly competitive, but...

00:15:33.000 You're recognized as being one of the premier coaches of the most promising young people, like Gordon Ryan, who you're talking about before, who's an Abu Dhabi champion, Gary Tonin, Nicky Ryan, Eddie Cummings.

00:15:46.000 You have an incredible crew of world-class strangle artists who are also known to be some of the very best leg lockers in the world.

00:15:57.000 So what happened?

00:15:58.000 How did that all take place?

00:16:01.000 Let's go through...

00:16:03.000 We should talk about the history of taboo...

00:16:06.000 You've actually asked about six different questions.

00:16:08.000 Yeah, I'm sorry.

00:16:08.000 No, no, no, it's good.

00:16:09.000 We can answer them in turn.

00:16:10.000 So let's go...

00:16:11.000 The first question, your first question was a historical question.

00:16:13.000 How did it happen?

00:16:15.000 Yeah.

00:16:16.000 First off...

00:16:17.000 There was nothing in my early learnings of jiu-jitsu which suggested leg locks, nothing.

00:16:26.000 Henzo would teach.

00:16:27.000 By the way, I should say my sensei throughout my entire career has been Henzo Gracie.

00:16:31.000 I never left Henzo.

00:16:33.000 He taught me from white belt to black belt and I never left his academy.

00:16:37.000 I'm the only one of his students who stayed with him from white belt to black belt and never left.

00:16:43.000 So Henze would teach leg locks, but it was taught in always the same fashion that everyone else did.

00:16:48.000 Here's a move, here's a figure four toe hole, here's a heel hook, here's an Achilles lock.

00:16:53.000 So the moves themselves were known.

00:16:56.000 They were in existence.

00:16:59.000 It wasn't like I invented heel hooks or something like that.

00:17:01.000 That's not the idea.

00:17:03.000 But they weren't emphasized.

00:17:07.000 A very, very talented and influential figure in my life was a guy that I only knew for three days.

00:17:18.000 Now that sounds crazy, right?

00:17:21.000 How can you learn something from someone in three days?

00:17:23.000 Well, actually, the influence he had occurred in three minutes.

00:17:27.000 I'm a big believer in the idea that someone can come into your life for a very short period of time and have a massive influence.

00:17:35.000 I truly believe that.

00:17:37.000 In my case, it was a great American grappler called Dean Lister.

00:17:41.000 Dean Lister was invited by Matt Serra to come to the Henzo Gracie Academy. 0.92

00:17:45.000 I believe, don't quote me on this, but I believe Dean was a brown butt at the time. 1.00

00:17:48.000 I'm pretty sure Matt was a brown butt at the time, too. 0.98

00:17:51.000 And he brought him in for around three days and he trained mostly with Matt Serra in preparation for a grappling tournament, if I remember correctly.

00:17:58.000 Now Dean was known mostly in those days for his Achilles lock.

00:18:04.000 Later on he would become a heel hook specialist, but in those days it was mostly an Achilles lock.

00:18:08.000 And he came to the academy, he rolled with some people, and he was doing Achilles locks and getting some success.

00:18:14.000 You know, it went both ways.

00:18:16.000 I remember he couldn't really get his stuff to work on Matt Serra, and Matt Serra could get his stuff to work on him.

00:18:22.000 But he was doing something which was unusual.

00:18:27.000 And so I talked with him just briefly after class, and I said, you know, it's interesting what you're doing with these Achilles locks, because I don't really do that at all.

00:18:35.000 It's not something I do.

00:18:37.000 And he said...

00:18:38.000 One sentence which completely changed my outlook.

00:18:42.000 Why would you ignore 50% of the human body?

00:18:45.000 One sentence.

00:18:46.000 Why would you ignore 50% of the human body?

00:18:50.000 And I looked and I was like, I don't know.

00:18:53.000 Why would you?

00:18:55.000 Makes no sense.

00:18:58.000 And we never talked again.

00:19:00.000 And then he went back to California.

00:19:02.000 He went on to become two-time ADCC champion, mostly with leg longs.

00:19:06.000 But what Dean gave me was not technique, didn't show me a single technique.

00:19:11.000 But he gave me a point of view.

00:19:14.000 If you give a man a point of view, you can change him.

00:19:18.000 He can work from there.

00:19:20.000 That was the influence.

00:19:24.000 And my sensei, Henso Gracie, was an extremely liberal-minded professor of jiu-jitsu.

00:19:30.000 He would let us do whatever we wanted.

00:19:32.000 He wasn't one of those guys who said, no, no one in my academy is studying leg longs.

00:19:35.000 He was never like that.

00:19:36.000 He would allow his students to go in any direction they wanted, provided they could prove it was effective.

00:19:43.000 So I started studying leg locks, and that's where I'm going to come to the second question, which you asked, which is why did leg locks have such a bad reputation in jiu-jitsu?

00:19:54.000 It's curious, right?

00:19:55.000 We don't talk about this way about arm locks.

00:19:57.000 I'm going to run through the main criticisms, and you'll be my witness on this, Joe.

00:20:01.000 I'm sure you heard the same criticisms a thousand times.

00:20:03.000 You would always hear people refer to leg locks in the following way.

00:20:07.000 The first criticism, they were too dangerous.

00:20:10.000 If you allowed people to do leg locks, everyone would be injured in a week and jiu-jitsu would be impossible.

00:20:15.000 So that was the first criticism you would always hear.

00:20:17.000 The second great criticism is they didn't work.

00:20:21.000 You might be able to tap out a white belt with a heel hook, but if you have a world championship level, you're never going to tap anybody. 0.92

00:20:27.000 They didn't work at high levels.

00:20:29.000 By itself, those two criticisms seem to go in opposite directions.

00:20:31.000 If they're really that dangerous, But they don't work.

00:20:34.000 How do those two gel?

00:20:36.000 They're either incredibly dangerous to the point where they can't be practiced or they don't work.

00:20:40.000 The two arguments contradict each other.

00:20:42.000 Then you hear other arguments that they were positionally unsound.

00:20:46.000 That if you were in top position and you went for a leg lock, you would lose position and that was a disaster.

00:20:52.000 That's a criticism with no merit because that same criticism applies to guillotines, arm bars, etc.

00:20:59.000 You can be mounted on someone.

00:21:00.000 Go for an arm lock and lose position and end up on bottom.

00:21:03.000 But no one criticizes armbars.

00:21:05.000 So as I went through the reasons why people criticized leg logging, none of them really made sense.

00:21:12.000 So I started asking myself, well, often the reasons people give, as opposed to what the real reasons are, are very different.

00:21:21.000 And the more I thought about it, the more I thought the real reason people don't like leg logs runs much deeper than that.

00:21:30.000 Let's understand Jiu Jitsu for what it is.

00:21:34.000 Jiu Jitsu is a systems-based approach to fighting.

00:21:40.000 What is the system of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu?

00:21:42.000 Well, it can be described in a few different ways.

00:21:44.000 I'm going to give you one rendition, which is pretty simple and will resonate with most of your listeners.

00:21:51.000 Jiu-Jitsu is a system based around four distinct steps.

00:21:56.000 You can add steps, you can subtract steps, but the rendition I'm going to give you now is probably the most widely known.

00:22:03.000 Okay, let's say a friend of yours asks for advice on fighting.

00:22:07.000 He knows you're a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu expert.

00:22:10.000 You're a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

00:22:12.000 And he's saying to me, Joe Rogan, tell me, I don't know anything.

00:22:16.000 I want to fight someone else using your Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

00:22:20.000 What are the steps of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu?

00:22:24.000 What is the system that it espouses?

00:22:26.000 You're going to see always that step number one is take your opponent to the ground.

00:22:32.000 Okay.

00:22:33.000 Why?

00:22:33.000 Why do you think the ground is so special?

00:22:36.000 Why did Brazilian Jiu Jitsu choose the ground as step number one of its system?

00:22:39.000 Why do you think?

00:22:42.000 Well, it all came out of Judo, right?

00:22:45.000 So Brazilian Jiu Jitsu took the effective submission techniques of Judo and then just refined them.

00:22:49.000 That's the historical reason, but what's the mechanical or physical reason?

00:22:54.000 Because you can control someone on the ground far better, right?

00:22:56.000 Yeah, you can control people.

00:22:57.000 Lomachenko controls people in the standing position with angle and distance.

00:23:00.000 There's different ways to control people.

00:23:02.000 Yes, in boxing, if you only are boxing.

00:23:07.000 But why the ground?

00:23:08.000 Why did they choose the ground?

00:23:09.000 What's the mechanical reason?

00:23:10.000 What happens when you take a human being to the ground?

00:23:12.000 Well, there's a whole barrier behind them that you can press them against.

00:23:16.000 What about if you're in bottom position?

00:23:18.000 Well, you could use that barrier as leverage.

00:23:21.000 True.

00:23:22.000 But there's something that occurs when someone goes down to the ground.

00:23:26.000 There's something big that you may be missing here.

00:23:28.000 What am I missing?

00:23:30.000 What's the most explosive event in the Olympic Games?

00:23:34.000 The event that probably requires more Transfer of energy and development of kinetic energy than any other.

00:23:43.000 There's a bunch you could name, but one of them for me is always going to be the javelin throw.

00:23:48.000 The javelin throw involves a full powered sprint, a jump, a massive explosive turning of both hips and shoulders, and a throw.

00:24:01.000 All the quintessential explosive elements of the human body are involved in the javelin throw, probably to a greater degree than any other Olympic event.

00:24:11.000 And as a result, people can throw a javelin 80, 90 meters.

00:24:16.000 What would happen if you took those same javelin throwers and made them perform the same event on their knees?

00:24:26.000 Wouldn't be so good.

00:24:27.000 They probably couldn't throw up more than 10 meters.

00:24:30.000 Okay, and what's changed?

00:24:31.000 The closer they get to the ground, the less they can employ explosive force.

00:24:37.000 What's the first thing cowboys do when they go to Brandeis Deer?

00:24:40.000 Take it down.

00:24:41.000 Yeah.

00:24:42.000 They lock up its legs and they put it down on the ground.

00:24:44.000 Nobody tries to brand a standing steer. 0.96

00:24:47.000 You're gonna get killed.

00:24:48.000 Because it can employ explosive dynamic movement to hurt you.

00:24:52.000 You put them on the ground, dynamic explosive movement is massively curtailed.

00:24:58.000 It takes away the single riskiest element of fighting, which is quick dynamic movement that can generate kinetic energy.

00:25:06.000 So step number one of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is get it to the ground.

00:25:10.000 It's inherently safer.

00:25:11.000 Less things can go catastrophically wrong on the ground than in the standing position.

00:25:17.000 What's step number two?

00:25:19.000 Secure dominant position.

00:25:22.000 Control.

00:25:23.000 Control?

00:25:24.000 Too vague.

00:25:24.000 There's many ways to control people.

00:25:26.000 There's a definite step.

00:25:27.000 You've just taken the guy down.

00:25:28.000 What's your first thing in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu?

00:25:31.000 Well, the first thing I would try to do is get to a dominant position.

00:25:34.000 What do you mean by that?

00:25:35.000 Be more precise.

00:25:35.000 Okay, pass to side control, try to mount.

00:25:37.000 Good, good, good, good.

00:25:38.000 You just answered it right there.

00:25:39.000 Get past his legs. 0.91

00:25:40.000 Past his legs.

00:25:42.000 Why?

00:25:43.000 His legs are strong.

00:25:44.000 They carry you around.

00:25:46.000 You can hold a person in position.

00:25:49.000 They're very good defensively.

00:25:51.000 They're dangerous.

00:25:52.000 They're dangerous. 0.99

00:25:53.000 Okay, if I end up inside your legs, if you're a skilled judici player, you can arm lock me, you can leg lock me, you can strangle me. 0.99

00:25:58.000 Even if you were an untrained fighter, you could up kick me. 0.98

00:26:00.000 Many a man has been knocked out by an up kick.

00:26:02.000 Even an untutored guy can form an up kick.

00:26:05.000 Legs are dangerous.

00:26:06.000 So step number two is get past those dangerous legs.

00:26:10.000 What's step number three?

00:26:12.000 Go for submission.

00:26:13.000 No?

00:26:16.000 He must be a tenth planner Black Belt.

00:26:19.000 Sorry, I had to throw that in somewhere, Joe. 1.00

00:26:21.000 I'm an asshole. 1.00

00:26:23.000 Step number three, Joe, you're failing. 1.00

00:26:25.000 Okay, I passed the legs.

00:26:27.000 Well, I'm going to try to control.

00:26:29.000 I'm going to try to either mount or, like I said, side control.

00:26:33.000 You're on the right track.

00:26:35.000 You're going to work your way through a hierarchy of positions.

00:26:38.000 You're going to go knee on belly. 0.98

00:26:39.000 You're going to go side control.

00:26:40.000 You're going to transition to mount.

00:26:42.000 You're going to transition to rear mount.

00:26:43.000 Depending upon my game.

00:26:44.000 There's a sequence of pins once you get past your opponent's legs, and Jiu Jitsu encourages you to go through those various pins.

00:26:52.000 If you look at the sport of Jiu Jitsu, the pins score different amounts of points.

00:26:57.000 Neon Ballet scores a certain amount.

00:27:00.000 Mounted position scores more.

00:27:02.000 Rear mount scores more.

00:27:04.000 Why?

00:27:05.000 Ever wondered about that?

00:27:06.000 Why do we score the pins of Jiu Jitsu differently?

00:27:10.000 Well, there's more available from rear mount, of course.

00:27:13.000 Of course, you can attack the neck.

00:27:17.000 You can also attack the arms.

00:27:18.000 You have a positional advantage where you can't be attacked.

00:27:23.000 You're behind them.

00:27:26.000 So it's one of the most superior positions to achieve.

00:27:30.000 Very good.

00:27:31.000 What about the mount?

00:27:34.000 Mount, when the striking involved, is phenomenal.

00:27:38.000 You just put your finger on it right there, Joe.

00:27:41.000 Every one of the pins of Jiu-Jitsu, the value of it is measured by your potential to strike your opponent on the ground.

00:27:51.000 That's why they score more.

00:27:52.000 Neon Valley scores more than side control, because from distance of Neon Valley you can strike with more power.

00:27:58.000 It's inherently unstable, however, so it scores less than mount, which is inherently more stable, and offers the same punching platform.

00:28:07.000 Step number three of Jiu Jitsu is to work your way through a hierarchy of pins where the pins are graded in value according to your ability to strike with effect on the ground.

00:28:18.000 So far we've got three elements in this system of Jiu Jitsu.

00:28:23.000 Step number one, get the fight down to the ground where explosive kinetic energy is less likely to be developed by a dangerous opponent.

00:28:30.000 Step number two, get past his dangerous legs.

00:28:33.000 Step number three, work your way through this hierarchy of pins where the pins are understood in terms of the potential to harm your opponent with strikes on the floor.

00:28:43.000 What's step number four?

00:28:46.000 Step number four is try to secure a position where you can submit them.

00:28:49.000 You've already got the position.

00:28:51.000 So what's step number four?

00:28:53.000 Attack with a submission.

00:28:55.000 Correct.

00:28:58.000 So we've just described Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as a four-step system.

00:29:03.000 It's beautiful, it's elegant, and it's deadly effective.

00:29:06.000 Step number one, take the fight to the ground. 0.81

00:29:10.000 Take away the danger of explosive kinetic energy.

00:29:13.000 Step number two, get past his dangerous legs.

00:29:16.000 Step number three, work your way through a hierarchy of pins.

00:29:19.000 Each one graded upon your ability to harm your opponent with strikes on the ground and set up.

00:29:23.000 Step number four, submissions.

00:29:26.000 And now the question that needs to be asked.

00:29:30.000 Where do leg locks fit into that system?

00:29:35.000 And where do they fit in?

00:29:37.000 They don't.

00:29:38.000 Well now, they don't.

00:29:39.000 They don't.

00:29:40.000 Traditionally.

00:29:41.000 Leg locks fit into the system in only one way.

00:29:45.000 When the system has failed. 0.99

00:29:48.000 When the system's not working and you can't take your opponent down, you can't pass as guard, you can't maintain a dominant position, and you can't get the regular submissions to work, fuck it. 0.98

00:29:59.000 Try a leg lock. 0.97

00:30:02.000 Yeah, that's what you used to have.

00:30:03.000 Yeah.

00:30:04.000 Leg locks were seen for generations as a signal of failure.

00:30:10.000 When you couldn't get the system to work, you had to resort to leg locks.

00:30:15.000 It meant you were a bad jujitsu player.

00:30:17.000 You couldn't impose the fundamental system of jujitsu, and so you chickened out and you went to leg locks.

00:30:24.000 That's why they were despised.

00:30:29.000 That was the real reason why, for generations, leg locks were dismissed.

00:30:35.000 You don't think it was because so many people were injured by them?

00:30:37.000 No, absolutely not.

00:30:39.000 People get injured.

00:30:39.000 The worst injuries in Jiu-Jitsu don't come from submission holds.

00:30:42.000 The worst injuries in Jiu-Jitsu come from falling body weight.

00:30:45.000 When people jump guard, when people accidentally, when poorly performed takedowns, that's where you see catastrophic injuries in Jiu-Jitsu.

00:30:52.000 That's where you see career injuries.

00:30:55.000 The joint lock submissions, you're out for a week, two weeks, you know, catastrophic injuries.

00:31:01.000 As I said, go on YouTube and put in, God, Paul, gone wrong.

00:31:06.000 You'll see catastrophic injuries.

00:31:07.000 You'll see career-ending injuries there.

00:31:09.000 You're not going to see it from arm bars, heel hogs, etc. 0.92

00:31:12.000 You'll see people getting hurt, but it's a contact sport.

00:31:15.000 You expect that, okay?

00:31:17.000 No.

00:31:19.000 There's a very simple, elegant system, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

00:31:22.000 We just saw one rendition of it, the four-step approach.

00:31:25.000 And you clearly see leg locks don't fit comfortably into that system.

00:31:32.000 What I did is I tried to find an avenue where they could come in.

00:31:37.000 And the results were surprising.

00:31:40.000 The first thing is our four-step rendition of Jiu Jitsu I looked at Jiu Jitsu from top position, where we took our opponent down to the ground and we were on top of them.

00:31:51.000 But my study of Jiu Jitsu didn't start from top position.

00:31:54.000 It started from bottom position.

00:31:56.000 If you look at my students in competition, you will notice that around 80% of their entries into leg locks come from bottom position or with their opponent behind them.

00:32:07.000 In other words, from what are supposedly inferior positions.

00:32:13.000 So for me, it was never a question of losing position when I went for leg locks because I was already underneath my opponent.

00:32:19.000 I started underneath.

00:32:21.000 How can I end up on bottom by going for a leg?

00:32:22.000 I'm already on bottom.

00:32:24.000 So most of my early work in leg locks was how to get into leg locks from disadvantageous positions, from underneath or when someone is behind me.

00:32:34.000 So I never felt this problem of, okay, I'm going to lose position if I go for leg locks.

00:32:40.000 I could still play a conventional jiu-jitsu game and have a very, very strong leg lock injury.

00:32:44.000 That was the first avenue of leg locking.

00:32:47.000 But things became more interesting when I got further into the leg lock game and I started to realize that as you add leg locks into the game, you change the very nature of the sport.

00:33:04.000 If you look at Jiu Jitsu as it's ordinarily practiced, it's a single direction game.

00:33:11.000 If someone is in front of me and I'm standing over them, Jiu Jitsu is all about movement from the legs towards the head.

00:33:20.000 I'm supposed to pass their guard, work my way up to chest-to-chest contact, and get my head next to their head, either in front of them or behind them, either mounted or rear-mounted.

00:33:32.000 So Jiu-Jitsu always goes in one direction.

00:33:35.000 If you ever get stopped or you lose position, you just start the process over again.

00:33:39.000 It's a mono-directional sport.

00:33:41.000 It always goes from the legs to the head.

00:33:44.000 Once you start adding leg locks into the game, jiu-jitsu becomes a two-directional sport where you can go from the head down to the legs.

00:33:52.000 You can go in both directions.

00:33:54.000 So if I'm passing someone's guard and I simply can't do it, I can fall back and go back into the legs.

00:34:00.000 If I'm side control on someone and they start to recompose their guard, I can fall back into the legs.

00:34:04.000 I'm going from their upper body down to their lower body. 0.75

00:34:07.000 Traditional Jiu-Jitsu always goes from the lower body, directionally, up to the upper body.

00:34:12.000 So you end up head-to-head with your opponent.

00:34:15.000 But once you start adding leg locks, Jiu-Jitsu for the first time becomes a two-directional sport instead of a one-directional sport.

00:34:22.000 And you can play your opponent's reactions between the threat of lower body and upper body in ways that opens up submissions so much more easily than the traditional game.

00:34:32.000 So if I take you back to the moment where Dean Lister says to you, why would you ignore 50% of the human body?

00:34:39.000 You go back and think about this, and what is your next step?

00:34:44.000 Do you just start looking at students and looking at what you're teaching and analyzing positions?

00:34:51.000 And you're still rolling at the time.

00:34:53.000 Yes, correct.

00:34:56.000 The first thing that I started to look at is, okay, who out there is doing a good job of leg locking?

00:35:03.000 And the honest answer was there weren't a lot of people.

00:35:06.000 What you would see is random success with leg locks.

00:35:10.000 You'd see a guy wins a match here, a guy wins a match there.

00:35:15.000 Most of the eminent leg lockers of that generation were actually coming out of Japan. 0.93

00:35:19.000 You'd have people like Romina Sato who had a decent heel hook for that time. 1.00

00:35:23.000 Iminari.

00:35:24.000 That was a little bit pre-Iminari.

00:35:26.000 Iminari came slightly after Romina Sato.

00:35:28.000 They fought each other in grappling matches.

00:35:30.000 One was younger than the other.

00:35:34.000 But, you know, they had some success.

00:35:35.000 I believe even Sakuraba finished Newton with a knee bar.

00:35:39.000 So, you know, the knowledge was there.

00:35:42.000 But there was nothing systematic about it.

00:35:44.000 There weren't people who were coming out and just systematically finishing people with one move.

00:35:53.000 So there wasn't much in terms of people to study.

00:35:58.000 So the first thing I started to ask is what is the nature of leg-locking?

00:36:03.000 It seems to have some problems associated with it.

00:36:07.000 It's not as controlling as the traditional methods.

00:36:10.000 That was really the key word there, control.

00:36:13.000 Why do people favor things like rear naked strangles so much?

00:36:16.000 Because it's such a controlling position.

00:36:18.000 Rear mount is an incredibly controlling position.

00:36:20.000 Why do people favor things like karagatame, the arm triangle?

00:36:24.000 Because this too is a very inherently controlling position.

00:36:28.000 All the most high percentage Finishing holds in jiu-jitsu all have control as their dominant feature.

00:36:37.000 It's hard for people to work.

00:36:38.000 And as a result, one person can continue to use the same move with a large degree of success over time against a wide array of opponents.

00:36:47.000 So every question I asked ultimately always came back to control.

00:36:52.000 And the one thing you would see with regards to the use of leg locks in the late 1990s and early 2000s was a lack of control.

00:37:01.000 So all of my studies immediately went to the notion of control.

00:37:07.000 Now, there are many forms of leg lock, but the ones that interest me the most always come out of what the Japanese call ashigurami.

00:37:17.000 Ashigurami is a generic term.

00:37:18.000 It just means tangled legs.

00:37:21.000 There are many different forms of ashigurami.

00:37:26.000 Ashigurami is a mechanism by which I can use two of my legs to control my opponent's legs and hips.

00:37:33.000 What I started to do was make a deep study of this notion of Ashigurami.

00:37:39.000 How am I going to use my legs to control the real estate between my opponent's knee and his hips, preferably on both sides? 0.94

00:37:47.000 Probably the single biggest cliché that you'll hear about Jiu Jitsu is that it's position before submission.

00:37:52.000 At the time, I was primarily interested in the idea of control before submission.

00:37:56.000 Control is a much deeper and wider concept than the basic point structure-based position before submission model of Jiu Jitsu.

00:38:07.000 There's many ways to control people.

00:38:08.000 They have very little to do with position.

00:38:10.000 For example, Ashigurami itself scores nothing in Jiu-Jitsu, but done well, it can control an opponent just as well as rare mount can.

00:38:18.000 So I started to see that there are many forms of control that went outside of the traditional, basic, positional hierarchy of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

00:38:26.000 Ashigurami was one of them.

00:38:30.000 Probably the single greatest key in the development of my leg lock system again came from a simple realization that the greatest mistake that people had made in leg lock work prior to the arrival of the squad was that they made no distinction between the mechanism of braking and the mechanism of control.

00:38:55.000 Ashigurami was the mechanism of control.

00:38:58.000 The lock itself, whether it be a heel hook, an Achilles lock, a figure four toe hold, that was the mechanism of breaking.

00:39:05.000 If you watch 99% of the people out there who claim to be experts in leg locking, they don't distinguish between the two.

00:39:13.000 They see, for example, heel hooking as a single skill.

00:39:18.000 There's the lock on the legs, the ashigurami or whatever term they use for it, and the lock itself.

00:39:24.000 They're not distinguished.

00:39:25.000 They're taught as a single skill.

00:39:27.000 You can't differentiate the ashigurami and the lock.

00:39:30.000 And you'll see people teaching in this manner.

00:39:33.000 What I did was to strongly distinguish between the two so that my students could all hold an ashigurami position and switch from one ashigurami to another and hold people for extended periods of time and inhibit movement.

00:39:48.000 If I can inhibit movement for long periods of time, I can break you at will.

00:39:53.000 I can take my time when I come to break you.

00:39:57.000 Because the control is there, the control is prime, the break is second.

00:40:01.000 For most people it's just throw on the ashigurami and immediately go for the lock.

00:40:06.000 The ashigurami is described as part of the heel hook.

00:40:09.000 They don't distinguish between the two.

00:40:12.000 Once I made that realization in the early 2000s, that's when the ball started rolling.

00:40:19.000 That's when a significant amount of progress was made.

00:40:26.000 I would say that your question was an interesting one.

00:40:29.000 Okay, you had the insight.

00:40:30.000 Lister gave you the insight.

00:40:31.000 What started you going?

00:40:34.000 It was making first a critical distinction between control and submission, and in the case of leg logging, between the mechanism of control, ashigurami, and the mechanism of braking, which is the lock itself.

00:40:44.000 In my case, the heel hog. 0.99

00:40:48.000 A really good example of this is how effective it's been implemented by your students against real world class Brazilian Jiu Jitsu competitors who don't use these methods.

00:41:01.000 Like a good one is Gordon Ryan versus Cyborg. 0.99

00:41:07.000 Cyborg who is a fucking beast of a man and just a physical specimen, a real freak. 0.99

00:41:14.000 And is known for his tornado guard, is no stranger to leg locks. 0.99

00:41:19.000 He's no stranger to any of the positions of no gi or gi jujitsu.

00:41:24.000 But when I watched Gordon wrap him up and control him, and before he got the submission, you could see Cyborg look completely befuddled.

00:41:34.000 Yeah, the match was over roughly 30 seconds before the submission was applied.

00:41:39.000 Yeah, he was just trying to figure out a way out of it and just...

00:41:42.000 There's nowhere to go.

00:41:43.000 It was a terrifying position to be in for...

00:41:47.000 A real world-class brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt like cyborg when you watch that that match I was like this is stunning because gordon is what 21 years Which is amazing and cyborgs in his 30s, right?

00:42:01.000 I think cyborg has been a black belt Many many years longer than gordon has even been doing jiu-jitsu.

00:42:07.000 Yeah.

00:42:07.000 Yeah, he's one of the best guys in the world And when you look at how well Gordon dismantled him on the ground using the strategy that you just described, it just...

00:42:20.000 See if we can find that, actually.

00:42:22.000 See if you can find Gordon Ryan versus...

00:42:26.000 His actual name is, I believe you pronounce it, Abru.

00:42:31.000 How do you...

00:42:32.000 Ricardo Abru?

00:42:33.000 Ricardo Cyborg Abru.

00:42:35.000 Yeah.

00:42:36.000 There's a lot of cyborgs in the jiu-jitsu world.

00:42:38.000 There's a male cyborg in MMA. There's a female cyborg. 1.00

00:42:42.000 Here we go.

00:42:43.000 I think cyborg and pitbull are two most commonly seen.

00:42:46.000 So we're watching it here now, and you see cyborg who is this... 0.79

00:42:51.000 Fucking tank of a man and Gordon Ryan is quite a physical specimen himself, but much younger guy Hasn't how long has don't Gordon been doing jujitsu? 0.94

00:43:01.000 I believe it's between six and a half and seven years total now. 0.98

00:43:05.000 That's fucking crazy and immediately he dives under Gets low Using butterfly guard And so what he's trying to do, Gordon is trying to do what with Cyborg's legs?

00:43:21.000 The first thing that Gordon Ryan needs to do is establish inside position with his feet. 0.83

00:43:28.000 Probably the single biggest starting point for any kind of Ashigarami-based game, if you want to remember anything about this, Joe, remember this.

00:43:39.000 Whenever you go into leg locks, the person whose feet dominate the inside position will always dominate the Ashigurami game. 0.68

00:43:46.000 That's the heuristic that I teach all of my students.

00:43:48.000 Gordon Ryan has just established inside position.

00:43:50.000 Well, Cyborg just pulled him in, which is interesting.

00:43:54.000 Cyborg literally pulled him in with his feet inside.

00:43:57.000 Yeah, but Gordon's feet were positioned in a way where they could only end up in the inside position.

00:44:02.000 So that's the first thing.

00:44:02.000 He's got to establish inside position with the feet.

00:44:04.000 He knows damn well.

00:44:05.000 If his feet occupy the inside position, wherever they go, he's going to get to the ashigurami, and his opponent won't be able to stop.

00:44:12.000 Now, can we freeze it there?

00:44:13.000 Yeah.

00:44:14.000 Pause.

00:44:15.000 Okay.

00:44:16.000 Actually, can you go back a little bit?

00:44:18.000 We've overshot just a little.

00:44:21.000 Okay, right about here, okay?

00:44:24.000 Initially, there's a battle going on here for inside foot position.

00:44:28.000 Cyborg is an extremely well-trained and knowledgeable opponent, and he's doing a good job of trying to backstep with his left leg.

00:44:35.000 He knows that if he keeps both of his feet on the left-hand side of Gordon Ryan's body, he will be able to prevent his opponent getting inside position.

00:44:42.000 So he's doing the right thing.

00:44:43.000 He's doing a good job here.

00:44:45.000 Cyborg's not naive.

00:44:46.000 As you said before, he's a multi-time world champion.

00:44:48.000 He's very, very good.

00:44:49.000 He's not leg-locking someone who doesn't understand what's going on.

00:44:52.000 He knows what Gordon Ryan wants.

00:44:55.000 There's a battle here for inside foot position.

00:44:57.000 Cyborg is doing the right thing.

00:44:59.000 He's going into a back step.

00:45:00.000 He's going to post his right hand on the floor and try and back step out.

00:45:02.000 Let's go just a little further forward into the video.

00:45:06.000 Good.

00:45:07.000 Freeze.

00:45:08.000 Go back just a fraction.

00:45:13.000 Just a little more.

00:45:17.000 Okay.

00:45:18.000 What does Gordon's right foot have?

00:45:23.000 His right foot, it looks like, it's hard to see here, but it looks like he's got...

00:45:27.000 He's got inside position with one foot.

00:45:29.000 He's got inside position with one foot.

00:45:30.000 The whole question is, what's going to happen with Cyborg's left leg?

00:45:34.000 Now we've got a battle between Gordon Ryan's left leg and Cyborg's left leg.

00:45:41.000 How the battle goes from here will come down to one thing.

00:45:44.000 Who wins that battle?

00:45:47.000 Go forward just a little more.

00:45:50.000 Hook.

00:45:50.000 Stop.

00:45:51.000 Right away.

00:45:52.000 Okay, Gordon Ryan just won the battle.

00:45:54.000 Essentially, at this point, the fight is over.

00:45:59.000 The only question is, how long is it going to take?

00:46:03.000 Why am I so confident? 1.00

00:46:04.000 Am I an asshole? 1.00

00:46:05.000 Am I saying this because I'm an asshole? 1.00

00:46:07.000 No, I'm saying this because I know what's happening. 0.99

00:46:10.000 I gave you one of the keynotes of the leg locking game already.

00:46:15.000 I'll say it again because it's so important.

00:46:17.000 The man whose feet dominate the inside position will always dominate the Ashigarami game. 0.95

00:46:25.000 Now, the second.

00:46:28.000 Whenever you go to attack someone's leg, 90% of the resistance on the leg you're attacking comes from the other leg.

00:46:41.000 That's so important I'm going to say it to you again.

00:46:43.000 Whenever I go to attack my opponent's right leg, 90% of the resistance is going to come from his left leg.

00:46:50.000 We talked about control.

00:46:53.000 The foundational principle of control in leg locking is a principle I refer to as double trouble.

00:46:58.000 Double trouble is a simple idea that if I control both of my opponent's legs, he no longer has the opportunity to use his second leg to defend the first.

00:47:08.000 So the amount of trouble that you've put him in is literally doubled in a matter of seconds.

00:47:12.000 Gordon Ryan has a hold of Cyborg's right leg with his left arm.

00:47:19.000 And he has a hold of Cyborg's left leg with his legs.

00:47:24.000 Why was I so confident that the match is over at this point?

00:47:28.000 Because both of Cyborg's legs are now controlled by Gordon Ryan.

00:47:33.000 He has just attained double trouble.

00:47:37.000 Now, let's slowly advance the video.

00:47:39.000 Do you see how cyborg's legs are in a straight line?

00:47:48.000 He's having a very, very hard time holding his base.

00:47:51.000 Stop.

00:47:53.000 Can you go back just a fraction?

00:47:59.000 Right about here.

00:48:00.000 Freeze.

00:48:01.000 Okay.

00:48:04.000 Our whole approach to Jiu-Jitsu is based around the idea of putting wedges around our opponent's body so that we can inhibit movement.

00:48:11.000 A wedge functions just as a door stopper stops a door from moving in a breeze.

00:48:17.000 The only thing better than a wedge is a reinforced wedge.

00:48:20.000 That's where the wedge is locked in place by another part of your body.

00:48:24.000 Gordon Ryan currently has inside position with the right leg.

00:48:28.000 He has control of Cyborg's other leg with his arm, so both legs have some degree of control.

00:48:33.000 But he's about to massively reinforce that control by locking a triangle or a senkaku around his opponent's leg.

00:48:40.000 In order for that to happen, he's going to have to lift his hips slightly off the floor so that he can elevate over Cyborg's left knee.

00:48:47.000 Watch the video.

00:48:49.000 There's the elevation.

00:48:50.000 There's the lock.

00:48:51.000 Freeze.

00:48:52.000 Now he's got Cyborg's two legs in a straight line.

00:48:55.000 That means Cyborg's only mechanism of posting or saving his balance is his left arm.

00:48:59.000 That's all he's got left.

00:49:01.000 At this point, the fight is done.

00:49:06.000 Cyborg's right leg is controlled by Gordon Ryan's left arm.

00:49:10.000 Cyborg's left leg is controlled by a reinforced wedge, the strength of both Gordon Ryan's legs locked up in a triangle.

00:49:18.000 Cyborg's actually a weight division heavier, I believe, than Gordon, but it doesn't matter.

00:49:22.000 At this point, both hips are controlled.

00:49:24.000 This is a full state of double trouble.

00:49:28.000 Both legs are controlled and a braking mechanism in place.

00:49:32.000 There's an ashigurami on the leg.

00:49:34.000 You can brake someone from there.

00:49:36.000 Cyborg knows his only method of not being finished is to keep his hips over Gordon Ryan's hips.

00:49:42.000 So the next battle is, how is Gordon Ryan going to put Cyborg's hips on the ground?

00:49:47.000 What's saving Cyborg is his left hand.

00:49:50.000 Let's see how the battle goes.

00:49:54.000 The battle just got lost.

00:49:56.000 The hips went down. 0.96

00:49:57.000 Why was it so easy?

00:49:58.000 Stop.

00:49:59.000 Why was it so easy?

00:50:01.000 I don't know.

00:50:03.000 Tell me.

00:50:04.000 Do you see that right knee?

00:50:06.000 Yes.

00:50:06.000 That's what pushed him over.

00:50:08.000 The right knee went into the pocket of Cyborg's left hip.

00:50:13.000 That meant the directionality of force was slightly away from the one base of support that Cyborg had left, which was his left hand.

00:50:21.000 So he got sat on his hips.

00:50:24.000 Now, go forward just a little.

00:50:29.000 And freeze.

00:50:32.000 What do you see, Joe?

00:50:36.000 What do you want me to look at?

00:50:39.000 Well, I see both legs wrapped up.

00:50:41.000 Good.

00:50:41.000 Be more precise.

00:50:43.000 Well, he has incredible control with his right leg, the way he's got his right leg and his left leg triangled.

00:50:49.000 He's got the cyborg's right foot tucked deep under his arm, and he also has the left foot there as well.

00:50:56.000 So he's completely wrapped up with his legs and his arms.

00:51:00.000 Very good.

00:51:00.000 Okay, let's bring in a few points here.

00:51:02.000 First, if you want to immobilize a human being and prevent them from moving, what are the best things you can ever do?

00:51:08.000 It's locked their legs together.

00:51:10.000 You get a dangerous prisoner, what's the first thing you do?

00:51:11.000 Handcuff his feet together and handcuff his hands together.

00:51:14.000 He's no longer dangerous.

00:51:16.000 Here, Cyborg is one of the most dangerous Jutsu players in the world, but with two of his feet locked together, he's effectively neutralized.

00:51:24.000 Perhaps most importantly, we've got a very interesting distinction here between what we call a primary and a secondary leg.

00:51:31.000 Which leg is the ashigurami locked up on? 0.97

00:51:36.000 Well, he's got the left leg is what's triangle.

00:51:41.000 Good.

00:51:41.000 You just answered it.

00:51:41.000 That's the ashigurami leg.

00:51:43.000 We call that the primary leg.

00:51:45.000 The ashigurami is locked on Cyborg's left leg.

00:51:49.000 That's the primary leg.

00:51:52.000 The other leg, remember our principle before, 90% of all resistance comes from the second leg.

00:51:58.000 The arm controls the secondary leg, and the legs control the primary leg.

00:52:05.000 So the resistance from the secondary leg is pushing off and trying to separate the lock?

00:52:10.000 There's numerous things.

00:52:10.000 He could pommel the foot.

00:52:11.000 He could put his foot on the floor and turn.

00:52:13.000 He could invert his body.

00:52:14.000 There's a thousand things he could do.

00:52:15.000 But he's not doing any of them if you control that leg.

00:52:19.000 That's the important theme.

00:52:21.000 So, Gordon Ryan's upper body, his left arm, controls the secondary leg.

00:52:26.000 And his lower body, the ashigurami, controls the primary leg.

00:52:30.000 As a result, what do you think of Cyborg's ability to move? 0.99

00:52:33.000 He's fucked. 0.99

00:52:34.000 He's completely nullified. 1.00

00:52:36.000 Okay, let's go a little further.

00:52:42.000 Freeze.

00:52:44.000 Now, Cyborg is doing all he can do.

00:52:48.000 Movement has been taken away from him, so his only option is to fight the hands.

00:52:53.000 Gordon Ryan understands that he has control of the secondary leg, but he needs to make a transition to the primary leg in order to break Cyborg.

00:53:06.000 He's going to have to release the secondary leg.

00:53:10.000 Now that's a scary thing.

00:53:12.000 If you release the secondary leg, then your opponent can start defending himself again.

00:53:16.000 So he's got to measure how he releases the secondary leg.

00:53:20.000 So there's a battle for angle here.

00:53:23.000 Cyborg is battling for the hands, but Gordon Ryan hasn't even started the hand fight yet.

00:53:29.000 He's still in a control fight.

00:53:31.000 His only interest is in holding the position.

00:53:36.000 Go a little further.

00:53:41.000 Freeze.

00:53:42.000 Why did Gordon switch his right hand to the knee?

00:53:48.000 Well, that's the leg that can control the secondary leg, which can defend.

00:53:53.000 I would imagine he's distracting him.

00:53:55.000 Mm-hmm.

00:53:56.000 Why is Gordon Ryan's head leaning to the right-hand side?

00:54:00.000 I don't know.

00:54:00.000 Why?

00:54:02.000 Because that's the side he needs to take Cyborg.

00:54:04.000 If Cyborg turns his head to the other side, when Gordon Ryan releases the secondary leg, there's going to be a problem.

00:54:13.000 There's a battle for angle now that no one sees.

00:54:18.000 Gordon Ryan's head tells the whole story here.

00:54:22.000 Let's go a little further.

00:54:28.000 Freeze.

00:54:28.000 Gordon Ryan is already beginning to transition to the primary leg.

00:54:33.000 The way he's got it locked up is just so horrific too.

00:54:37.000 Yes.

00:54:37.000 The two of them crossed over each other.

00:54:39.000 Now, at some point, he's got to uncross the legs to get to the primary leg.

00:54:44.000 Let's go a little further.

00:54:51.000 Cyborg's still engaged in the hand fight.

00:54:53.000 Now Gordon is about to make his transition to the hand fight.

00:54:56.000 Freeze.

00:55:02.000 Yes.

00:55:03.000 Gordon Ryan's made the critical release of the secondary leg.

00:55:09.000 This is where things start to get interesting.

00:55:13.000 Cyborg has perhaps tragically sat on his right hip, which means he has no ability to use his secondary leg to escape.

00:55:23.000 And because he's holding Gordon Ryan's arm, he has no ability now to invert his body and go into a turning escape.

00:55:31.000 Now, Gordon Ryan just needs to release the right arm.

00:55:35.000 Let's go further.

00:55:36.000 Freeze.

00:55:46.000 Freeze.

00:55:48.000 Go back just to here.

00:55:53.000 Okay.

00:55:54.000 Gordon Ryan is about to release the secondary leg.

00:55:57.000 Freeze right there.

00:55:59.000 Now, very slowly take it forward.

00:56:01.000 Watch Gordon Ryan's left elbow.

00:56:03.000 Freeze.

00:56:05.000 Why did he put the elbow there?

00:56:09.000 I don't know.

00:56:10.000 It's a wedge.

00:56:13.000 It's immobilizing the leg he really wants to attack.

00:56:16.000 He's switched his arm position from controlling the secondary leg, which he hasn't yet fully released, but he's put his elbow in front of the toes of the primary leg.

00:56:29.000 To keep that primary leg from extending.

00:56:30.000 Correct.

00:56:31.000 And to be able to transition effortlessly into the lock.

00:56:36.000 All he needs now is to release the right arm.

00:56:40.000 Cyborg knows if he loses the right arm, the fight is lost.

00:56:44.000 continue Gordon goes back to elbow position Freeze.

00:56:58.000 Freeze.

00:56:59.000 Go back just to here.

00:57:04.000 Why did Gordon Ryan win the hand fight battle?

00:57:10.000 Freeze.

00:57:13.000 Cyborg is one of the strongest people in Jiu-Jitsu.

00:57:15.000 He's got two hands on a guy in a weight division lower than him.

00:57:20.000 Why can't he hold?

00:57:21.000 Why did he lose the arm?

00:57:22.000 Why?

00:57:23.000 Watch Gordon Ryan's right elbow.

00:57:25.000 What did you see?

00:57:33.000 Amen.

00:57:35.000 Thank you.

00:57:36.000 Let me see that again.

00:57:37.000 He's just lifting it up and pulling it away.

00:57:45.000 What is he doing?

00:57:46.000 He changed the angle through the elbow.

00:57:50.000 There's a grip over and a grip under.

00:57:52.000 If you just pull, you'll never release the arm.

00:57:54.000 He changed the elbow position so that one grip was lost and then a push-pull with the elbow and a slip.

00:58:03.000 Once, continue forward now.

00:58:06.000 He's got the left arm set as soon as the hands touch.

00:58:10.000 And Cyborg just taps before he even gets a chance to extend it because he knows the game's lost.

00:58:16.000 He knew the game was lost long before then. 0.82

00:58:19.000 That's pretty goddamn impressive. 0.92

00:58:21.000 Yes. 0.94

00:58:22.000 And you'll see this with almost all of my students.

00:58:25.000 I have seen that with almost all your students, which is so bizarre.

00:58:28.000 Now, how many people are recognizing this system and trying to mimic it or trying to find out some sort of a counterattack to it?

00:58:39.000 That's an interesting question.

00:58:41.000 I'm told there's actually kind of like an industry of people who try to break what we do down and mimic it.

00:58:47.000 I know there's people putting out numerous instructionals.

00:58:51.000 They watch what the squad does and tries to break it down.

00:58:58.000 That's good and it's natural.

00:59:00.000 I'd be doing the same thing.

00:59:02.000 If someone else was coming out and wrecking people with a given rule, I'd be studying what they're doing too.

00:59:07.000 So yeah, there does seem to be an industry of that.

00:59:10.000 The question is how successful are they?

00:59:13.000 Do you see any other groups of people coming out and just exclusively finishing people with the same moves time and time again for years at a time at all levels of competition?

00:59:23.000 No.

00:59:23.000 You're seeing more Tenth Planet guys do that now.

00:59:26.000 Tenth Planet guys have given you all the credit in the world, by the way, that they've started transitioning to a lot more leg lock attacks, leg lock defense.

00:59:37.000 Concentrating on that.

00:59:38.000 Yeah.

00:59:40.000 What we find is that most people definitely struggle with defending it.

00:59:46.000 And, you know, this has been around for quite a while now.

00:59:49.000 It's been five years since the squad really started pushing this publicly.

00:59:54.000 And it seems like there's still going to be some...

00:59:58.000 Eventually people will figure things out.

01:00:01.000 It's just the way progress works.

01:00:05.000 But I think at this point it's pretty clear that people have changed their minds about leg locks.

01:00:10.000 People, I think, are recognizing that there's something different going on here, that this is a control-based approach to leg locks rather than, you know, a speed and power-based approach to leg locks.

01:00:21.000 And the evidence for its success really comes from the nature of the squad itself.

01:00:27.000 If you look at the three founding members of the squad, Eddie Cummings, Gordon Ryan and Gary Tonin, All three have very, very different body types.

01:00:35.000 All three have very, very different personalities.

01:00:38.000 And yet all three use a very similar game.

01:00:42.000 Two of those three athletes came from nowhere.

01:00:45.000 They had no competition record before they started training with me at the Henzo Gracie Academy.

01:00:51.000 One of them had a competition record.

01:00:54.000 I believe Gary Tottenham was a brown belt competitor in the Gi, but he had no leg lock game.

01:01:01.000 He was a guy who was essentially known for scrambling from bottom half guard and using rear naked strangles out of scrambles.

01:01:09.000 Strangles out of scrambles, my God, that was a tongue twister.

01:01:13.000 So Gary Tom was a particularly interesting case because he came to me as an already developed athlete.

01:01:18.000 He's trained under a very good friend of mine, Tom DeBless, and completely changed his game.

01:01:24.000 So that showed something very interesting.

01:01:26.000 That showed that someone could already have a developed game and then take on this and change their game.

01:01:32.000 So that was a particularly interesting case.

01:01:33.000 With the case of Eddie Cummings and Gordon Ryan, they came to me early in their development, so they took it on wholesale, as it were.

01:01:42.000 I think this style and approach and one of the things that's so fascinating about it is it really requires someone like you to systematically break it down the way you have described it.

01:01:55.000 I've done jujitsu for 20 years.

01:01:58.000 But I never stopped and thought of all the positions in the system, all the steps in the system, take the fight to the ground, get past the dangerous legs, achieve some sort of a dominant position, go for the submission.

01:02:12.000 I didn't do that.

01:02:13.000 I knew what I was doing.

01:02:14.000 What I find with most Jiu-Jitsu players is that they know what they're doing on an unconscious level.

01:02:19.000 My job as a coach is to make it conscious.

01:02:22.000 Now, for me, the most interesting thing, when I first started thinking about jiu-jitsu as a system, I did that when I wrote a book for my sensei, Henzo Gracie.

01:02:33.000 He asked me to write a book, and I started thinking deeply about, you know, what is this thing that I study?

01:02:36.000 I spend all day on the mantle.

01:02:38.000 What am I doing exactly?

01:02:39.000 And when you start consciously thinking about, okay, breaking it down into steps, you see Brazilian jiu-jitsu as a step-by-step system.

01:02:48.000 My question was, can I go further than that?

01:02:52.000 If jiu-jitsu was a simple single system, what about if you divided jiu-jitsu up into niche areas and instead of having one overall system you had an overall system with many subsystems within it.

01:03:10.000 So you had a leg system, a back system, a front headlock system, a kimura system.

01:03:15.000 My approach to jiu-jitsu is that I had recognized that much of the success of early Brazilian Jiu Jitsu came from its systematic nature.

01:03:24.000 The fact that it was a systems-based approach to Jiu Jitsu and I took various niche areas and created systems within systems.

01:03:35.000 Then things started getting interesting when I started integrating the system so that one subsystem failed you could transfer to another.

01:03:42.000 That meant that my students could put Opponents who had trained much, much longer than they had into a niche area which my students had so much knowledge of, so much training in that isolated niche domain that they could take someone who had trained three, four times longer than themselves and have more knowledge in that one domain than their much more experienced opponent did.

01:04:07.000 And so what you saw with the squad was incredibly speedy progress where they were getting wins against people who trained two, three times longer than they had.

01:04:16.000 And this idea of what I call integrated subsystems, instead of having Jiu Jitsu as just one simple single system, you keep the overall system of Jiu Jitsu, but you have subsystems within it, each one integrated with the other, so that when one system fails, you can pass off to another and go back and forth until you get the win.

01:04:33.000 That was my approach to Jiu Jitsu.

01:04:35.000 That's what I want to do.

01:04:37.000 If I can innovate Jiu Jitsu in any given direction, that's probably the one I would push the most.

01:04:41.000 Now, throughout this time, you're dealing with some pretty significant injuries and physical limitations that you've had.

01:04:50.000 Tell me about those, what those were, and how those hindered you.

01:04:56.000 When I was in my early teens, I was involved in a rugby injury where my knee was massively injured.

01:05:04.000 Over the next six years I would dislocate my knee.

01:05:10.000 The ligaments appeared to be severely compromised.

01:05:14.000 Every six months or so I'd get a fresh injury which would be severe and I'd be on crutches.

01:05:19.000 I spent a significant amount of my teenage years on crutches.

01:05:24.000 Around the age of 19 I had one last injury and my knee just seemed to have no power in it.

01:05:33.000 Things like I walked with a limp and you must remember this is in the 1980s in New Zealand and this is pre-MRIs, pre-arthroscopic surgery.

01:05:44.000 The doctors said well we can do an operation where we shorten the ligaments so there's less looseness in there and hopefully your knee will be strong again.

01:05:54.000 An operation was performed and unfortunately the ligaments were cut too short and as a result my leg never straightened again.

01:06:06.000 I developed a severe case of atherofibrosis where my knee actually became deformed and doesn't straighten.

01:06:16.000 Simple actions like walking, kneeling are extremely painful for me and have been my whole life.

01:06:23.000 Just walking around is painful?

01:06:24.000 Just walking is painful.

01:06:25.000 Kneeling is extremely painful.

01:06:27.000 And, you know, it's not easy to do jiu-jitsu where there's a lot of kneeling.

01:06:31.000 Yeah.

01:06:32.000 Also, there were other kind of structural problems as I got older.

01:06:35.000 Because I walk with a limp and one leg significantly bent and one straight, I tend to be completely out of balance, out of sync with my body.

01:06:44.000 So I soon developed considerable hip and back pain.

01:06:48.000 So this is something I carried with me my whole life.

01:06:53.000 And when I started jiu-jitsu at the age of 28, there was a concern, you know, am I going to be able to do this?

01:07:00.000 Well, fortunately, ground grappling as a rule is generally easier on your body than standing martial arts.

01:07:08.000 I don't think, for example, with my leg I could even become moderately effective at Muay Thai or Taekwondo or something where you have to be able to jump and land.

01:07:15.000 I just couldn't do it.

01:07:17.000 Whereas jiu-jitsu, because it's on the ground, you can become pretty good.

01:07:22.000 So I battled through that and I developed a satisfactory degree of competence.

01:07:31.000 I got a black belt from Henzo Gracie and I became one of his main teachers.

01:07:34.000 How did you train with such a compromised knee?

01:07:38.000 You just figure out a way around it.

01:07:42.000 You know, what are you going to do? 1.00

01:07:43.000 Sit down and die. 1.00

01:07:44.000 But you never thought, well, boy, I fucked my knee up. 1.00

01:07:47.000 I don't want to fuck my other knee up, too. 0.99

01:07:49.000 You know, I think at that point, you just got to go forward. 0.99

01:07:54.000 And you got a choice.

01:07:56.000 You got to sit down and feel sorry for yourself or you're going to do the best you can with what you've got.

01:08:00.000 And how limited was your game because of your knee?

01:08:02.000 I mean, were you able to do things?

01:08:04.000 Standing position was difficult for me.

01:08:05.000 Were you able to do triangles and all sorts of different things?

01:08:09.000 Every week or so I would tweak it and I would be in pain for a day.

01:08:12.000 I developed a strong need for ibuprofen throughout my life.

01:08:18.000 And other problems started to emerge, especially the lower back.

01:08:21.000 The lower back is a big issue and gave me problems my whole adult life.

01:08:26.000 Does it still bother you now?

01:08:27.000 Less so now.

01:08:28.000 I have a machine I have to show you.

01:08:30.000 Okay.

01:08:30.000 It's called the Reverse Hyper.

01:08:32.000 Have you ever heard of it?

01:08:33.000 Oh, yes.

01:08:33.000 I believe they were used by a guy called Louis Simmons.

01:08:37.000 Yeah.

01:08:40.000 It's a life changer.

01:08:41.000 Yeah.

01:08:41.000 I can't use one now because they have a hip replacement.

01:08:44.000 And when you go up, it puts extreme shearing force on a hip replacement.

01:08:48.000 So I can do it with body weight, but I can't do it with a weight.

01:08:51.000 So I'm aware of what they are.

01:08:54.000 I know many people speak very highly of them.

01:08:56.000 Yeah.

01:08:57.000 So yeah, I had this problem and things didn't really become critical until my mid to early 40s when as a result of walking my whole life with a limp, my left hip started to become completely bone on bone.

01:09:13.000 So then the problems doubled because now I had a Completely screwed up knee and a hip, but I couldn't get any kind of operations because George St-Pierre was fighting, Chris Weidman was fighting.

01:09:25.000 They both had great goals and so I delayed the hip operation as long as I could until George had his first retirement and Chris Weidman became a world champion and then moved further away to Long Island.

01:09:38.000 He wasn't training with me so much.

01:09:41.000 At that time I started training the squad and my first active competitive grappling student was Eddie Cummings and I was able to work effectively with him as best I could with my hip problems and of course the original leg problem and then at some point I got to a point where I literally If I walked down a New York City block,

01:10:09.000 I would have to stop several times and just stand on the side of the road and wait for my hip to stop hurting so I could walk and it just became impossible to work with and I ended up getting a full hip replacement.

01:10:22.000 So that's when they shear off the top of your hip, they screw a bolt down in there with a new hip?

01:10:28.000 That's correct.

01:10:29.000 And how does it feel now?

01:10:30.000 It's pain-free, which is a wonderful thing for me.

01:10:34.000 Like any fake hip, it's never going to be as strong as your real hip.

01:10:37.000 There's limitations on what I can do there.

01:10:39.000 The only problem was that shortly after the hip replacement went in, then my knee finally collapsed after 30 years of problems.

01:10:47.000 And so I'm going to have to get a knee replacement on the same leg.

01:10:52.000 And how do they do that one?

01:10:54.000 Knee replacement's a little bit more tricky because you don't have as much bone mass to work with.

01:10:57.000 And generally the longevity of knee replacements is not as...

01:11:02.000 Because there's much more movement in the knee than there is in the hip.

01:11:06.000 There's much greater range of motion.

01:11:10.000 There's less bone to affects too.

01:11:11.000 They generally don't have the longevity of a hip replacement.

01:11:17.000 I'm 50 years old, so ideally you would want a replacement that outlived you, but I would probably have to get a second knee replacement when I get older to replace the first, which is not ideal, but I'm probably going to have to do it.

01:11:32.000 Well, who knows what kind of crazy technology they'll have down the line.

01:11:36.000 I hope so.

01:11:37.000 I hope they give me some kind of superhero leg that turns things around for me.

01:11:41.000 Yeah, well, you never know.

01:11:43.000 I mean, it's just the nature of the hip replacement is so...

01:11:46.000 It's so brutally invasive.

01:11:50.000 The shearing off the top of the hip and then the rod that's inserted deep into the bone of the hip and then all that jazz.

01:11:59.000 Yeah.

01:12:00.000 It's a lot.

01:12:00.000 It's a lot going on there.

01:12:02.000 So, to answer your question, in the early days it was an impediment that I worked around.

01:12:08.000 But as I got older, I had to do a first operation and now a second.

01:12:15.000 Believe it or not, Joe, I was actually scheduled to get my knee replacement tomorrow.

01:12:20.000 But I didn't do it because Gary Tonin is going to be fighting his first MMA fight in March 26. Now, is he fighting for 1FC? 1FC. Ah, interesting.

01:12:30.000 So if I got the knee replacement now, I would not be able to help him get ready for his first MMA fight, which I thought would be – that's not fair on my part.

01:12:39.000 Right.

01:12:39.000 And so I delayed it until after that fight.

01:12:43.000 Why did he decide on 1FC? That's an interesting question.

01:12:46.000 You'd have to ask Gary Tonin to be certain.

01:12:49.000 But I think one of his main fears was that if he went through the amateur route and then worked his way towards the UFC, there would be problems because he's already an established name in grappling.

01:13:02.000 And I think he was concerned that it would be difficult for him to get people to fight amateur.

01:13:09.000 And then eventually make his way to the UFC. Whereas 1FC is a fairly well-known organization and they were pretty open.

01:13:17.000 He did a grappling match for them and they loved it.

01:13:20.000 They were like, you know, are you interested in MMA? So he could, as it were, go into a fairly high level of MMA right from the start as opposed to do a long, circuitous amateur route and then battle his way into the UFC. I believe, don't quote me on this, but I believe that was the logic behind it.

01:13:39.000 Now, are you able, so when you're demonstrating techniques, are you demonstrating them verbally?

01:13:47.000 After the hip replacement, I could only do it verbally and I had to trust in my students, Eddie Cummings, Gary Tonn, Gordon Ryan and others, Brian Glick, no one knows him, but he's one of my great students.

01:14:01.000 I would point with a stick and they would do the moves for me.

01:14:07.000 Since then I've gotten a little better and I like to demonstrate as best I can.

01:14:11.000 There's days when I can barely walk and on those days I'll have the students go through.

01:14:17.000 Sometimes there's certain standing techniques that are a little risky for me to do and I'll have students demonstrate those.

01:14:23.000 But I do what I can on the days that I teach.

01:14:29.000 It is quite fascinating that a guy who has catastrophic injuries of his leg is one who is known for being an innovator and crushing people's legs.

01:14:41.000 There is something kind of strange about that.

01:14:44.000 Yeah, you were joking around about it being revenge.

01:14:46.000 Yeah, this is my revenge against the world.

01:14:48.000 If God took away my leg, I'm taking away everybody else's.

01:14:53.000 So, yeah, there is something ironic about that.

01:14:57.000 Now, when you're teaching this system and you're showing all the guys in the squad, the Donaher death squad, do you have it worked out to the point where it's like you have a curriculum?

01:15:15.000 I never like the word curriculum because that kind of implies that it's all worked out in advance and it's done step by step.

01:15:22.000 I come in on a given day and I'm there seven days a week.

01:15:26.000 I watch all of my athletes every single day.

01:15:29.000 They don't do anything without me watching them do it.

01:15:32.000 So I know at the end of every day what they need to work on tomorrow because I'm there.

01:15:37.000 Wow.

01:15:38.000 So it's not like a set curriculum where, you know, I know that on April 13, I'm going to do this.

01:15:42.000 It's not like that.

01:15:43.000 Right.

01:15:44.000 It's like, I saw you train yesterday. 0.99

01:15:45.000 I saw where you fucked up and I saw where you were good. 0.94

01:15:48.000 So tomorrow we're working this. 0.98

01:15:50.000 What an amazing resource for those guys to have someone like you standing over them, watching them and analyzing their positions and techniques and progress.

01:15:59.000 That's generous of you to say, but I always feel that my students are more of a resource to me than I am to them.

01:16:09.000 I've been blessed through my entire coaching career to have some truly remarkable students.

01:16:14.000 Some of whom are famous and known to you and many others who aren't.

01:16:19.000 And whatever debt they owe to me, I feel I owe at least as much to them.

01:16:28.000 My students literally give me everything.

01:16:31.000 I'm a notoriously difficult person to get along with.

01:16:34.000 I'm demanding.

01:16:34.000 I'm a perfectionist.

01:16:37.000 I can be downright unpleasant when my body's in pain, I'm short-tempered.

01:16:42.000 And yet, they're like angels.

01:16:44.000 They stick in there and they tough it out and they give so much time, so much effort, so much thought.

01:16:50.000 And as I said, whatever resource I am to them, they give it right back.

01:16:55.000 They're a resource to me.

01:16:57.000 Well, that attitude is why you're such a fantastic coach in the first place.

01:17:01.000 I remember one of the first times I started talking to you was when you were working with George.

01:17:06.000 Now, what's interesting is you had a very interesting approach and even the way you described things.

01:17:14.000 You would talk about shootboxing.

01:17:16.000 Mm-hmm.

01:17:18.000 Describe that because you you didn't talk when like I remember I think one of our first long conversations with that some weird Denny's or something somewhere and one of those weird road shows Like we're just sat down.

01:17:32.000 You're absolutely right.

01:17:33.000 That was the first time we met.

01:17:35.000 Yeah, we had a long conversation and You were talking about the principles of shoot boxing.

01:17:41.000 Please explain.

01:17:44.000 One of the strange things about the sport of mixed martial arts is so young that there's still so much to be done.

01:17:52.000 Even the way people understand mixed martial arts to me is interesting.

01:17:58.000 99% of people who look at mixed martial arts see mixed martial arts as an eclectic sport.

01:18:06.000 In other words, it's a conglomeration of different martial arts kind of banded together and then you've got mixed martial arts.

01:18:12.000 It's a mix of martial arts and there you have it.

01:18:15.000 You get two guys in a cage and you've got mixed martial arts.

01:18:17.000 I never saw mixed martial arts as an eclectic sport.

01:18:23.000 I see it as a transcendent sport.

01:18:26.000 What I mean by that is there are four distinct skill areas of mixed martial arts.

01:18:34.000 Any one of those skill areas always goes beyond the component martial arts that make it up.

01:18:43.000 In other words, the skill area transcends the various martial arts that make it up and create something bigger and different from the core components that originally built it.

01:18:56.000 When you look at the sport of mixed martial arts, you see there are four dominant skill areas.

01:19:01.000 The first occurs when they first come out and the two athletes have no connection with each other and they're dancing around the cage.

01:19:12.000 This is the so-called shoot boxing phase which involves skills drawn from Western boxing, Muay Thai, Karate, freestyle wrestling and various other martial arts.

01:19:23.000 Where the two athletes are jockeying for position and typically they're trying to determine the direction of the fight.

01:19:29.000 Will it go down or will it stay up?

01:19:32.000 That's one skill area.

01:19:35.000 The second skill area is the skill area of the clinch, where the two athletes are both still standing, but now they've got a hold on each other.

01:19:42.000 They're no longer moving around at will.

01:19:46.000 This has its key components drawn from Muay Thai, Greco-Roman wrestling, freestyle wrestling, judo, etc., etc.

01:19:55.000 Then there's a third key skill area.

01:20:01.000 The area of fence fighting, fence boxing, where the two athletes are in a clinch, but they're locked on the fence, which dramatically changes the skills required for success than if you're in the open.

01:20:15.000 And then you have a fourth skill area, which is the ground.

01:20:19.000 And of course, that's divided into top and bottom position.

01:20:23.000 So there are four skill areas of mixed martial arts.

01:20:27.000 You could add more or less.

01:20:30.000 For example, you could add in the idea of the geography of the cage, you can add in new areas.

01:20:34.000 But let's stick with that fundamental four for now.

01:20:38.000 If you show me any one of those skill areas, yes, you can derive skills from those component martial arts, from Muay Thai, from Judo, whatever you choose.

01:20:52.000 But that skill area is going to have other elements that are not part of those original martial arts, that is something different, something unique, and something above the various component martial arts that made it up.

01:21:07.000 When you're fighting on the ground, a lot of what you do is derive from Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and modern mixed martial arts.

01:21:12.000 Most of the athletes come from a Jiu-Jitsu background.

01:21:15.000 When they work ground skills, they work in a kind of a Jiu-Jitsu framework.

01:21:19.000 But many of the things going on down there are a mix of things that are far outside of your daily training in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

01:21:28.000 You can bring in things from Muay Thai.

01:21:30.000 You're throwing Muay Thai elbows on the ground, but on the ground the elbows have a very different feel from the standing position.

01:21:35.000 The mechanics behind them are significantly different.

01:21:37.000 You're throwing hooks on the ground, but the mechanics of throwing hooks on the ground are very, very different from the mechanics of throwing hooks in the standing position.

01:21:45.000 So yeah, you're bringing skills in from boxing, but you're adapting them too.

01:21:51.000 So the way to look at the sport of mixed martial arts is not just like, okay, I'm going to rope together some wrestling, some boxing, and see what happens.

01:22:00.000 Rather, you're developing skills in four distinct areas, a minimum of four, And the skills you ultimately develop go beyond and are significantly different from the core components that you started with.

01:22:16.000 And so ultimately the skills of a mixed martial artist at the highest levels transcend the various core martial arts that made the sport up.

01:22:24.000 You're going further.

01:22:27.000 When you fight in a mixed martial arts fight, you're a jiu-jitsu fighter, you use it a lot more than just jiu-jitsu and the various other boxing styles, etc., etc., that you use.

01:22:36.000 In the case of shoot boxing in George St. Pierre, everyone always talks about George's wrestling.

01:22:44.000 Now, George is a very good wrestler.

01:22:46.000 He's wrestled a long time with very good people.

01:22:50.000 But 90% of the success of his ability to take people down It goes far beyond wrestling.

01:22:58.000 It has to do with the precursors to the shot.

01:23:02.000 What wrestling teaches you to do in mixed martial arts is how to finish a shot.

01:23:06.000 It gives you the body mechanics to finish the shot.

01:23:09.000 But the setups are Completely different from wrestling.

01:23:15.000 I can show you endless examples of good wrestlers who went into mixed martial arts competition with no background in mixed martial arts and couldn't take anybody down.

01:23:24.000 The distance is different.

01:23:25.000 The stance is different.

01:23:26.000 The motion is different.

01:23:27.000 The setups are completely different.

01:23:28.000 The context is different.

01:23:29.000 You're being punched instead of grappling.

01:23:34.000 George In my opinion, throughout his career, had a level of skill and technical insight in the art of boxing, kickboxing into takedowns that no one else has even come close to.

01:23:54.000 Much of what he did in that area came from himself.

01:24:00.000 Did he have good wrestling coaches?

01:24:01.000 Absolutely.

01:24:02.000 Did he have good boxing coaches?

01:24:03.000 Absolutely.

01:24:05.000 Great Muay Thai coaches?

01:24:07.000 100%.

01:24:07.000 But the skills he was exhibiting went beyond any one of those teachers or even them as a whole.

01:24:18.000 The act of tying together all of those disparate skills came from him.

01:24:23.000 The integration of skills And so you have someone who had a wrestling background, had a boxing background, had a Muay Thai background, but ultimately what he was doing was something bigger than all of those put together.

01:24:35.000 There's a synergistic effect here where the sum was somehow greater than the components that individually made it up.

01:24:46.000 And that's what I mean when I talk about a transcendent sport.

01:24:50.000 George St. Pierre was largely responsible through individual experimentation, starting in his late teens and going through his entire career in the development of Shootbox.

01:25:05.000 Now, when you work as a coach for George, you weren't just working as a jiu-jitsu coach.

01:25:11.000 You were working in almost like a mastermind sort of a position.

01:25:17.000 I mean, I saw some conversations that you had with him where you discussed various things.

01:25:22.000 In fact, one of the things you came to me about was you asked me if I knew anyone who was proficient at the spinning back kick.

01:25:31.000 And that's how I got to working with George.

01:25:36.000 Your coaching with him was not just simply like, these are the principles of jiu-jitsu, this is what I want you to work on, when the fight goes to the ground.

01:25:45.000 You were working on a lot of different aspects.

01:25:49.000 You were a guy that sort of put it together.

01:25:53.000 Now, when you don't have a background in striking and you're looking at all of these various disciplines and trying to formulate a strategy for a guy who's such a supreme athlete like George, how did you formulate that?

01:26:09.000 Did you do it based on the individual, based on their physical strengths and limitations and sort of formulate what you think would be the best approach?

01:26:17.000 Did you work it out with him in conjunction?

01:26:22.000 When George comes to train with me, there's a bunch of considerations.

01:26:25.000 First of all, George lives in Montreal.

01:26:27.000 I live in New York.

01:26:28.000 So time is always an issue.

01:26:29.000 Well, he does go down there.

01:26:31.000 He goes down there quite often.

01:26:32.000 But it's not like a squat.

01:26:34.000 The squat's there like seven days a week, three times a day.

01:26:36.000 George was never like that.

01:26:39.000 So in the time available, we'll work on what we can.

01:26:45.000 So everything's always done with George.

01:26:47.000 How much time is available?

01:26:48.000 And what is the scenario that's coming up?

01:26:50.000 For George, almost always, it was an upcoming mixed martial arts fight.

01:26:56.000 So a lot of people often ask me, say, you know, how come he didn't teach George St. Peter leg locks?

01:27:01.000 Why wasn't he leg locking everyone in MMA? Well, that's a good question.

01:27:07.000 First off, leg locking, as you saw from the Gordon Ryan clip, requires...

01:27:15.000 If it's not done well, leg locking is one of those things where if it's done well, it's amazing.

01:27:19.000 But if it's done badly, it's the worst looking thing in the world.

01:27:21.000 It's a disaster.

01:27:25.000 Secondly, George's game, because his takedowns are so strong, is almost always done from top position on the ground.

01:27:31.000 It's rare for George to be in bottom position on the ground.

01:27:34.000 And in a fight situation, if you're already on top of someone and you've got the striking prowess of George St-Pierre, I was happy to coach him more in what we call grapple boxing, the skill of grappling to punching on the ground.

01:27:47.000 It just made more sense for him.

01:27:50.000 He's competent in leg-locking, but he's not like Gary Tonner, Eddie Cummings, or Gordon Ryan.

01:27:56.000 Could he finish most black belts?

01:27:58.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:27:58.000 But why would you stake a fight where literally millions of dollars are being fought?

01:28:02.000 There's a legacy on the line.

01:28:03.000 Why would you take that risk when you could just stay on time and punch him out like he did with, say, John Fitch, for example?

01:28:09.000 So it didn't really make sense to push that hard on George.

01:28:13.000 Your question, though, was, okay, what about these other skills?

01:28:16.000 What about standing position?

01:28:17.000 Well, I'm fascinated not just by Jiu-Jitsu, but by martial arts in general.

01:28:22.000 And I've always believed all the various sport martial arts in the world have areas where they are particularly strong.

01:28:29.000 For example, people make fun of Taekwondo.

01:28:33.000 No one does Taekwondo or MMA. You'll back me up on this joke.

01:28:36.000 There are some Taekwondo players out there at Olympic level who can kick with a skill level that most people can't even imagine.

01:28:45.000 I've seen people like Herb Perez do kicking demonstrations where You're looking at it.

01:28:51.000 This is one of the most impressive things I've ever seen in my life. 0.96

01:28:53.000 And this is a guy who, if he hits you, he's going to take your head off. 0.98

01:28:57.000 It's impressive.

01:28:58.000 I was there when Herb Perez was in his prime.

01:29:00.000 I watched him KO quite a few people.

01:29:03.000 I watched him KO one of the U.S. national champions with an axe kick.

01:29:08.000 Some of the worst KOs I've ever seen in my life came from Taekwondo.

01:29:12.000 They tend to involve jump-spinning kicks where there's just huge amounts of kinetic energy being developed.

01:29:19.000 You see the same thing in point-fighting karate.

01:29:20.000 You see some terrible knockouts in point-fighting karate.

01:29:22.000 People make fun of these sports.

01:29:24.000 Well, on their own is the issue.

01:29:26.000 That's the issue.

01:29:27.000 On their own, they've got problems.

01:29:29.000 But if you can integrate that into a well-developed Complete skill set, they could be incredibly effective and I always saw tremendous potential for Taekwondo's jump spinning back kick.

01:29:39.000 No one does spinning back kicks better than Taekwondo.

01:29:43.000 That's one of their main things and they do it incredibly well.

01:29:45.000 The setups are fantastic, the application, the mechanics, everything's super impressive.

01:29:50.000 So I always thought that would be a, you know, George had a good spinning back kick, but I thought that would be a nice addition.

01:29:54.000 You always want to be Building new skills into a pun.

01:29:58.000 You don't want to be that predictable guy where everyone knows what you're doing.

01:30:01.000 And I know you came from Taekwondo backgrounds, and so I thought that would be an interesting thing for you to work on with him.

01:30:08.000 Well, it was a funny conversation because that was my specialty.

01:30:12.000 Yes.

01:30:12.000 And so when you brought in, I always wanted to talk to you.

01:30:14.000 I always found you a fascinating guy.

01:30:16.000 So when you came up to me and you said, do you know anyone?

01:30:19.000 It's almost like a trick question.

01:30:20.000 It was a trick question.

01:30:23.000 Do you know anyone besides Joe?

01:30:25.000 What I said, I was like, I was hesitant.

01:30:28.000 I was like, okay, you're not going to believe this.

01:30:31.000 The truth is, I knew you had a good jump swinging back kick.

01:30:34.000 I was trying to subtly push you.

01:30:35.000 Did you know?

01:30:36.000 Yeah.

01:30:36.000 How did you know?

01:30:37.000 Word gets around this guy.

01:30:39.000 Oh, okay. 0.99

01:30:39.000 I thought you were just fucking with me. 0.99

01:30:41.000 I mean, but I felt like when I was telling you, I was like, man, I don't even want it. 0.98

01:30:46.000 I wish I knew someone who did it as well as me.

01:30:48.000 You were too modest. 0.99

01:30:48.000 You should have just been like, yeah, I've got the best jump spinning back kick in the fucking world. 0.99

01:30:52.000 Not really. 0.98

01:30:52.000 I did jump spinning back kick quite a bit, but I prefer a regular spinning back kick. 0.98

01:30:56.000 I want my foot on the ground.

01:30:58.000 Because I push off that foot.

01:30:59.000 There's a significant amount of force in that left leg pushing off that back.

01:31:05.000 Interestingly, you're seeing some guys out there now having good success in MMA spinning back.

01:31:10.000 I remember seeing Michael Page had a beautiful one.

01:31:12.000 He's got everything.

01:31:14.000 That guy can do everything.

01:31:15.000 He's another guy who came from that point fighting background.

01:31:18.000 You see Raymond Daniels and him and a lot of these guys from that background.

01:31:24.000 Raymond Daniels worked with George for his last two fights.

01:31:28.000 Very, very impressive guy.

01:31:29.000 Phenomenal.

01:31:30.000 Again, he had just the point fighting skills and now he's developing real boxing skills.

01:31:38.000 You've seen him in Bellator kickboxing.

01:31:41.000 You see the integration of the two.

01:31:43.000 Phenomenal.

01:31:43.000 He could just do things physically that most kickboxers just really don't know what he's doing.

01:31:49.000 He'll jump up and do what's called a touch spinning back kick. 0.82

01:31:55.000 Like he'll jump up and touch you with the front leg and spin.

01:31:58.000 I saw that.

01:31:59.000 He hit it in a glorified, I believe.

01:32:00.000 Yes.

01:32:02.000 Beautiful.

01:32:02.000 Yeah, he's phenomenal.

01:32:04.000 He's phenomenal.

01:32:06.000 When you see that, it's like those things by themselves, you're just gonna get taken to the ground and smashed and most people, unless you land one of those catastrophic spinning back kicks right away, the odds are you need all those other things as well in order to be particularly effective, which is why George was such a unique case.

01:32:27.000 George can get away with that kind of thing, yeah.

01:32:29.000 But that was a fun moment.

01:32:32.000 It was interesting.

01:32:33.000 It was like, I've always wanted to show somebody this.

01:32:36.000 Because it's a weird little thing that I know how to do.

01:32:39.000 Going back to your original question, the idea of George in Shootbox, you'll see that George's entire methodology in The Standing Musician is built around the concept of a dilemma.

01:32:49.000 The dilemma is always between his jab and his takedown.

01:32:56.000 People always talk about proactive and reactive takedowns.

01:32:59.000 Okay, this guy's a reactive, this guy's a proactive takedown guy.

01:33:03.000 The thing about George is he would use his jab proactively, but he would use his takedowns reactively.

01:33:12.000 Now that's interesting because George would literally provoke people into the takedown.

01:33:19.000 I just want to point this out, past tense.

01:33:23.000 You're saying this like you know something I don't know.

01:33:26.000 No, no, no.

01:33:27.000 Because George just won the middleweight title, relinquished the title, and then the great speculation is, will George fight again?

01:33:33.000 The truth is that no one knows because it comes down to medical problems.

01:33:37.000 George has a, he's got a problem on his stomach.

01:33:41.000 It's like colitis, is that what it is?

01:33:43.000 Yeah.

01:33:43.000 What is that exactly?

01:33:45.000 I'm not going to claim to be a medical expert, but it's one of the most frustrating things that George has had to deal with, where there are certain parts of the human body that are just out of your control, and the stomach is one of them.

01:33:55.000 Just things happening in your stomach, you can't control it.

01:33:58.000 Things like stress seem to make it worse.

01:34:01.000 And the truth is that no one really knows at this point.

01:34:05.000 So wherever there's doubt, my Instinct is to think well, do you really want to come back George?

01:34:12.000 You've done all this and What a great way to cap off a career too.

01:34:15.000 It was amazing.

01:34:16.000 It was impressive.

01:34:17.000 And I gotta tell you when he came back This is what was really interesting about that fight George had said I'm better.

01:34:24.000 I'm a better martial artist than I was before and he looked better I mean, he definitely looked like he was a little out of competition Like there was a moment.

01:34:33.000 After four years he should.

01:34:34.000 How many fighters do you know came back after a four-year layoff?

01:34:37.000 Very few.

01:34:39.000 But, skill-wise, he looked phenomenal.

01:34:42.000 I mean, his striking looked incredibly smooth.

01:34:45.000 And I think you could see it in Bisping's face, like, pretty early on.

01:34:50.000 Like, this guy is...

01:34:51.000 This is not a rusty George St. Pierre.

01:34:53.000 He's not a small welterweight who's making his way in the middleweight.

01:34:57.000 He looked huge.

01:34:58.000 He looked phenomenal.

01:34:59.000 His technique, the way he was landing leg kicks and his sharp jab, and then ultimately that left hand that he used to stun Bisping and get him on the ground.

01:35:09.000 I mean, he looked sensational.

01:35:11.000 Yes.

01:35:13.000 You were there the night George went into his first retirement, and you'll recall the whole retirement thing was kind of, the speech was vague, it wasn't clear, it was confusing, because in truth he didn't know if he wanted to retire.

01:35:27.000 The whole thing was actually contrived in the octagon, right there in front of you.

01:35:32.000 It would have been a hard fight.

01:35:33.000 The training camp hadn't been the best camp.

01:35:35.000 The fight for Hendrix was...

01:35:37.000 George was unclear if he wanted to fight at all.

01:35:39.000 There were all kinds of controversies involved in the fight.

01:35:41.000 And then when the fight was over, it was a very close fight.

01:35:46.000 And he wasn't sure what he wanted to do.

01:35:50.000 There was some language miscommunication.

01:35:52.000 And ultimately, essentially he walked away from the game.

01:35:56.000 And he walked away for four years.

01:35:58.000 That's a long time to be out of a sport that's as young as MMA, which is evolving all the time.

01:36:02.000 Every year the sport changes and the belts tend to change hands very, very quickly.

01:36:09.000 So when George started talking to me about the idea of, okay, I want to come back.

01:36:14.000 I think I've still got to come back.

01:36:16.000 I want to come back.

01:36:17.000 There's a desire, a passion.

01:36:19.000 And My point to him was, first off, you sure you really want to do this?

01:36:24.000 Like, you know, the last two fight camps was tough.

01:36:27.000 He didn't seem to have the same kind of drive as he used to have.

01:36:29.000 You sure you want to do this?

01:36:30.000 Is this like a middle-aged fantasy going through here?

01:36:34.000 And he said, no, no, I feel this.

01:36:36.000 I want to come back.

01:36:37.000 So my question to him was, If you're going to come back, are you just going to do the same thing?

01:36:43.000 Are you just going to come back to welterweight and do what you always did, which is come out and beat the best welterweights and just hold the title?

01:36:51.000 Are you just going to be doing the same thing?

01:36:54.000 I thought, if you're going to come back, let's do something significant, something you haven't done before.

01:36:59.000 And so the way I put it to him was, what are the three most persistent criticisms you always hear about George St. Pierre?

01:37:09.000 You never fought up a weight class.

01:37:10.000 You never went up.

01:37:12.000 Number two, you fought so tactically sound, with such an emphasis on strategy and techniques or what have you, that matches could become dull.

01:37:25.000 The average fan was like, well, yeah, he's winning easily and it's dominant, but doesn't do it for him.

01:37:30.000 It's not exciting.

01:37:31.000 There's no drama in the fights.

01:37:32.000 Okay?

01:37:34.000 So we had this idea that on the one hand he was very technically sound, strategically deep but the fights weren't as exciting as they ought to be.

01:37:47.000 The idea that he'd never gone up a weight category and the third most persistent charisma he didn't finish fights.

01:37:54.000 He was a very skilled fighter but he wasn't finishing fights.

01:37:58.000 So my point is, okay, if you're going to come back, let's do it in a way where you address those three things.

01:38:05.000 Okay?

01:38:06.000 George is always concerned about his legacy as a fighter.

01:38:10.000 And if there were three persistent criticisms of George NPS legacy, it was those three things.

01:38:13.000 You're not finishing fights, you never went up a weight class, and you're too tactical.

01:38:17.000 Okay?

01:38:18.000 You're not providing the drama that a fight should.

01:38:21.000 So I said, let's change things.

01:38:26.000 In that four years, previous to that, whenever I was training George, I was training him for a fight.

01:38:31.000 He was fighting Nick Diaz, he was fighting Carlos Condor, he was fighting whoever.

01:38:35.000 And it was always getting him ready for a fight.

01:38:36.000 You're fighting Matt Hughes in two months, let's get ready.

01:38:39.000 Now you're retired, I'm not going to train you to fight some dude.

01:38:44.000 I'm going to train you in jiu-jitsu.

01:38:47.000 Freddie Roach is going to train you in boxing.

01:38:54.000 In this sense, we had the time now to start working on finishing skills.

01:39:01.000 A significant change occurred where my primary emphasis in training George in that four-year layoff was in submissions.

01:39:08.000 Now, happily, that happened at what time?

01:39:11.000 The time the squad was coming out.

01:39:13.000 So I had a group of some of the best submission peoples in the world for George to work with. 0.96

01:39:18.000 So his submissions started getting better.

01:39:20.000 Suddenly George said, Pierre, if he got on your back, it was a problem.

01:39:24.000 He's submitting people in the gym.

01:39:25.000 I could run off some names.

01:39:27.000 I won't do it because it's not the thing to do, but I could run off some names of people he submitted in the gym that would shock you, like well-known jiu-jitsu people.

01:39:35.000 And for the first time, our primary emphasis wasn't on grapple boxing, it was submission.

01:39:41.000 Freddie Roach was working on the mechanics of punching.

01:39:44.000 George always had good in-out movement.

01:39:46.000 He always had that karate movement, the ability.

01:39:49.000 He always had a strong jab.

01:39:51.000 But now he's teaching him how to sit on a punch.

01:39:53.000 Suddenly George had a left hook. 0.92

01:39:57.000 A guy who can integrate left hand between jab and left hook, that's a dangerous man.

01:40:04.000 Everyone was worried.

01:40:06.000 There's so much overreaction to George's jab that suddenly left hook opportunities were opening up.

01:40:10.000 And now he was sitting on that left hook and people were getting hurt.

01:40:13.000 So now for the first time you've got a guy who's got submissions and he's hitting with genuine power.

01:40:23.000 As he came back, there was a question of who's going to be the opponent.

01:40:29.000 And the next thing I said is, well, you never went up a weight division.

01:40:33.000 Go up to 85. Now, was any consideration about going up to 85 because of the fact that Bisping was the champion?

01:40:42.000 No, because that decision was made before Bisping was the champion.

01:40:46.000 Really?

01:40:47.000 Yeah.

01:40:47.000 How far in advance was the decision made?

01:40:50.000 Because Bisping had defended against Henderson, he'd won against Rockhold.

01:40:53.000 Remember, this was a four-year project.

01:40:55.000 Okay?

01:40:56.000 So, during these four years...

01:40:58.000 Initially, I couldn't make that decision because another student of mine, Chris Weidman, was a 185-pound champion.

01:41:03.000 And Chris and George would never fight each other.

01:41:05.000 But once that was no longer an issue, then it was like, hey, this could work.

01:41:10.000 This could be interesting.

01:41:11.000 So during the entire four years, he was talking about eventually coming back?

01:41:16.000 Not the entire four years.

01:41:17.000 No.

01:41:17.000 Okay.

01:41:17.000 But he was training the whole time.

01:41:19.000 And I was pushing him like, you're not fighting anymore.

01:41:22.000 Let's do some submission grappling. 1.00

01:41:23.000 Right.

01:41:24.000 Okay.

01:41:24.000 He stuck with Freddie Roach.

01:41:26.000 He loves working with Freddie Roach.

01:41:28.000 And so the training was going in different directions.

01:41:33.000 And who is this Muay Thai coach?

01:41:35.000 Mostly, he works with Firas Zahabi in Tri-Star, but that's more integrated.

01:41:41.000 Firas is a black belt of mine, so he often does jiu-jitsu with Firas, where I teach Firas, and Firas does a good job there.

01:41:50.000 But Firas ties things together.

01:41:53.000 That's his principal function.

01:41:54.000 And I know he trained with Phil Nurse for a while as well?

01:41:57.000 Yes.

01:41:58.000 Then he trained with a lot of guys who came out of Thailand itself, from Tiger Muay Thai.

01:42:07.000 Yod, that's a shortening of his actual name.

01:42:10.000 They all have very long names, but Yod was one of his trainers.

01:42:13.000 They trained him prior to Condit and Diaz.

01:42:17.000 Did a fine job.

01:42:19.000 So there's never been a shortage of coaches in his life, but there are certain things that seem to gel with him more than others.

01:42:27.000 Interestingly, during that four-year period, George had a strong rebirth into karate and worked with a lot of specialized karate people, including Raymond Daniels and others.

01:42:37.000 They came mostly from the European point-fighting karate circuit, and he was working with them a lot.

01:42:43.000 And so they crossed a certain period of time where you're dealing with a different athlete now.

01:42:52.000 This is a guy who's had four years off and the training had gone in different directions.

01:42:56.000 His finishing skills in both fisticuffs and grappling had gotten considerably better.

01:43:03.000 He was toying with the idea of going up to 85 and experimenting with diet, etc.

01:43:09.000 to get his body weight up.

01:43:11.000 That's never an easy thing to do.

01:43:13.000 And tactically, he was working more on the idea of being an exciting fighter through movement and pushing harder for the finish.

01:43:22.000 And I thought those were three very, very healthy directions to go in.

01:43:29.000 And this would, as it were, if he did come back, this would offer a genuine opportunity to address the three most persistent criticisms of his career.

01:43:38.000 Initially, there was a lot of persistence from the UFC. I don't think they were fond of the idea at all.

01:43:42.000 They wanted him to go to 170 and do what he had done.

01:43:45.000 But George pushed hard for the fight at 85, and ultimately it happened in a rather strange way.

01:43:53.000 Tyrone Woodley had a fight at 170, which wasn't the most crowd-pleasing fight, and George St-Pierre was supposed to fight Tyrone Woodley, and then the U.S. said, you know what?

01:44:09.000 Fight Brisbane, it's on.

01:44:10.000 So we chose the Madison Square Garden.

01:44:13.000 That's one of the great fight capitals of the world and that's how it happened.

01:44:17.000 So there was consideration in fighting 170?

01:44:20.000 Yes.

01:44:20.000 And so this was the UFC's idea, but what about your plan for...

01:44:24.000 I thought...

01:44:26.000 First of all, I'm not the matchmaker.

01:44:28.000 I'm not the main policymaker.

01:44:30.000 I don't want to say that I was the guy that suggested those ideas.

01:44:35.000 And George seemed to like the idea.

01:44:36.000 He said, if I'm going to come back, if I'm going to take the risk of a four-year layoff and come back, it's a big risk.

01:44:41.000 I mean, Muhammad Ali came back after three years and had two warm-up fights and still lost his title fight.

01:44:46.000 Yeah, but Muhammad Ali really wasn't working out.

01:44:50.000 That was when the Vietnam War thing had happened.

01:44:53.000 Yeah, he was mostly doing tours of college campuses.

01:44:55.000 Yeah, he wasn't really working out.

01:44:56.000 George is working out the whole time and improving.

01:44:58.000 You could see the difference in Muhammad Ali's body when he came back.

01:45:00.000 But still, there's many other examples.

01:45:02.000 Sugar Ray Leonard came back after layoffs.

01:45:04.000 He had one successful and one very unsuccessful comeback, and he was working hard the whole time.

01:45:08.000 So, coming back is a tricky, tricky thing.

01:45:12.000 On many levels, too.

01:45:13.000 Not just physical, but also psychological.

01:45:15.000 So now this Kaleidos thing is throwing a monkey wrench into the gears.

01:45:18.000 Yeah, actually it threw a monkey wrench during the camp.

01:45:21.000 Really?

01:45:21.000 Yeah, I could tell you some stories about that.

01:45:23.000 That camp was, as good as the four years was, the camp itself, I can say it now because it's over, was a disaster.

01:45:32.000 It was probably the worst camp I've ever been involved in.

01:45:35.000 Really?

01:45:35.000 I was coaching, of course, the squad for ADCC. So ADCC, I believe, was around six weeks before George's fight.

01:45:45.000 Yeah.

01:45:45.000 So I was in Finland and communicating with George and he's like feeling good.

01:45:51.000 The moment I get back, I was going to go on a plane from Finland to Montreal and start the camp.

01:45:58.000 George sent me out, I've got stomach issues.

01:46:01.000 And I was like, what do you mean, stomach issues?

01:46:03.000 What does that even mean?

01:46:05.000 Now, about two weeks into the camp, the issues got so bad that George literally could not...

01:46:14.000 Now, this is a six-week fight camp.

01:46:16.000 It's a very short camp.

01:46:17.000 Back in the day, we used to do eight to twelve weeks.

01:46:19.000 But George thought a shorter camp would be better.

01:46:21.000 As he was getting older, he wanted a shorter camp.

01:46:23.000 The first two weeks were okay, but I was in the aftermath of the Finland expedition.

01:46:31.000 And when I first went up, George said, I've got to cancel.

01:46:36.000 I can't train.

01:46:39.000 My fight's four weeks away.

01:46:43.000 And George took two weeks off.

01:46:45.000 There was a critical moment on a Friday evening where I said to Farah Sahabi, this is the second time I've had to say this to Farah Sahabi, the other was the Carlos Condit camp.

01:46:55.000 I said, if George isn't training by Monday, we're going to pull the plug.

01:46:58.000 There's no other way.

01:47:00.000 I mean, we're talking about a four-year layoff.

01:47:02.000 And this camp is lost.

01:47:05.000 It's dead in the water.

01:47:06.000 So four weeks out, he takes two weeks off.

01:47:09.000 I believe it might have been five.

01:47:11.000 I'll check the dates later.

01:47:12.000 But close.

01:47:13.000 Somewhere in the neighborhood.

01:47:13.000 We're talking very close.

01:47:14.000 It was a critical two-week period.

01:47:16.000 And during that two weeks, what is he able to do?

01:47:19.000 Essentially nothing.

01:47:20.000 Nothing.

01:47:21.000 Just light drilling, some movement, and it occurred at the worst possible time.

01:47:28.000 It wasn't at the start of the camp, it was in the middle of the camp.

01:47:30.000 So the first two weeks were lost because...

01:47:35.000 Then we had two weeks of inactivity.

01:47:37.000 Then there's two weeks left.

01:47:38.000 And I remember the first time I went up, I brought Jake Shields, Gary Toner, and Gordon Ryan with me.

01:47:44.000 We came up and we went through some drills on the ground.

01:47:47.000 And I was happy.

01:47:48.000 You know, George looked okay on the ground.

01:47:49.000 He did fine against the squad guys.

01:47:51.000 And we worked on some specialized grappling stuff.

01:47:54.000 And then the next day he went to do a shoot box workout.

01:47:57.000 Now, I could sit here all day and tell you adventures of George St. Pierre doing shoebox training with people.

01:48:04.000 I've seen him spar everybody.

01:48:06.000 I'm not going to mention names, but I've seen George St. Pierre take down effortlessly some of the biggest names in mixed martial arts, in weight divisions far above his own, So many times per round, you just lose count.

01:48:26.000 I'm afraid to even tell you the stories because people wouldn't believe me.

01:48:31.000 I'm used to seeing George St. Pierre shoot boxing, bang, bang, down.

01:48:37.000 I've seen that since the start of his career.

01:48:40.000 I watched George St. Pierre do a shoot box workout where he couldn't score a takedown.

01:48:46.000 This is a fight two weeks away.

01:48:48.000 I'm just looking and going like, holy heck, what is this?

01:48:52.000 He's getting hit.

01:48:53.000 He's getting frustrated.

01:48:54.000 He's getting tired.

01:48:56.000 And I said to Faraz, you know, this is a crisis.

01:49:01.000 This is one of the biggest UFCs of the year.

01:49:03.000 It's Madison Square Garden.

01:49:05.000 He's the headline.

01:49:07.000 The UFC had to pull some big things to get this fight to happen.

01:49:11.000 They originally didn't want it.

01:49:12.000 If we pull out now, it's going to look like a disaster.

01:49:15.000 It's going to let George let the UFC down.

01:49:19.000 And to his everlasting credit, George said, I'll be back on Monday and I'll be better.

01:49:25.000 We went up and he dug in deep.

01:49:31.000 What can I tell you?

01:49:32.000 He's a trooper.

01:49:33.000 He trained every day those last two weeks.

01:49:38.000 As each day went by there was significant improvement and I remember there was a distinct moment about five days before the end of the camp I saw him do a shoot box workout and he looked like the old George I was okay.

01:49:48.000 I believe in this kid again.

01:49:50.000 You can do it.

01:49:51.000 Jamie will you please google colitis?

01:49:54.000 I don't know enough.

01:49:55.000 I believe you should google ulcerative colitis Yeah, I don't know it's so it's something to do with stomach ulcers I'm not going to claim to be an expert, but yeah.

01:50:08.000 I can tell you what the symptoms were.

01:50:10.000 It was extreme stomach pain and inability to eat.

01:50:12.000 It screwed up his entire diet.

01:50:14.000 And when did it start?

01:50:15.000 It started early in the camp and got progressively worse.

01:50:18.000 So before the camp there was no issues?

01:50:21.000 Not none that he mentioned.

01:50:22.000 Ulcerative colitis is usually only an innermost lining of the large intestine, colon, and rectum.

01:50:28.000 Forms range from mild to severe.

01:50:30.000 Having ulcerative colitis puts a patient at increased risk of developing colon cancer.

01:50:35.000 Symptoms including rectal bleeding, bloody diarrhea, abdominal cramps, and pain.

01:50:39.000 Sounds like a party.

01:50:41.000 Yeah.

01:50:41.000 Can you bring it back?

01:50:43.000 Read the first four.

01:50:45.000 Treatment can help, but this condition cannot be cured.

01:50:48.000 Requires a medical diagnosis, lab tests, or imaging always required.

01:50:53.000 Chronic can last for years or be lifelong.

01:50:56.000 It's incredibly frustrating for him to deal with.

01:50:59.000 It says treatments include medications and surgery.

01:51:02.000 Yeah.

01:51:04.000 So, it's a problem.

01:51:06.000 But it appeared to back off a little bit in the last two weeks.

01:51:11.000 He came back.

01:51:12.000 This is the kind of person George St. Pierre is.

01:51:16.000 The morning of the fight, Saturday morning, we're in New York City in the hotel room.

01:51:22.000 Farah Sahabi, Freddie Roach, and myself are at the breakfast table.

01:51:26.000 George comes down for breakfast.

01:51:27.000 He's weighed in.

01:51:31.000 He looks at his breakfast.

01:51:35.000 Originally the plan, because it was a fight at 185, was to have George come in at a higher body weight.

01:51:41.000 But he ended up weighing 191 pounds, which is exactly the same as he used to fight at welterweight, the same body weight.

01:51:49.000 So that was kind of a disappointment, you know.

01:51:53.000 And he quietly excused himself and went to the bathroom.

01:51:58.000 Everyone else went away to do their things and I sat there and I realized he's in the bathroom for an hour.

01:52:05.000 He came out and I was like, George, you okay?

01:52:07.000 And he looked at me and he said, I'm fine.

01:52:09.000 But I knew he wasn't.

01:52:11.000 And then he went out and fought.

01:52:14.000 And then afterwards he told me, dude, I was in so much pain.

01:52:18.000 And he was afraid to tell me because he would worry that if I cornered him and I thought he was compromised, I wouldn't corner him the way I normally would.

01:52:26.000 That I would doubt him.

01:52:27.000 So he kept it all inside, didn't say a word.

01:52:30.000 And he's a good kid.

01:52:32.000 You know, you can't help but admire a kid like that.

01:52:34.000 Wow.

01:52:35.000 Well, that's what makes him a champion.

01:52:37.000 It's one of the things.

01:52:39.000 It's less than perfect conditions.

01:52:41.000 He could still rise to the occasion.

01:52:43.000 Less than perfect.

01:52:43.000 It was very far from perfect.

01:52:46.000 Now, you said that during the Johnny Hendricks fight, during the camp for that fight, when...

01:52:51.000 He decided to impromptu retire inside the octagon.

01:52:55.000 There was talk during the camp that he didn't want to fight.

01:52:59.000 What was that about?

01:53:01.000 Really, it centered around two things.

01:53:03.000 One, I cannot discuss because it involves a personal life of George St. Pierre.

01:53:08.000 There were some things going on in his personal life.

01:53:12.000 That deeply affected him, and he was deeply unhappy with some circumstances in his personal life, and it's not appropriate for me to talk about those.

01:53:22.000 And the second was the whole idea that it had become an obsession with George at that time, which was the use of anabolic steroids in mixed martial arts.

01:53:32.000 And he was deeply unhappy with what he perceived as the prevalence of the use of anabolic steroids in mixed martial arts as a whole and among his opponents in particular.

01:53:45.000 And he wanted a testing program to be brought in for that fight.

01:53:51.000 There was talk about it but nothing came of it and it became like this psychological obsession during the camp.

01:54:01.000 Between those two issues, there was a lot of unhappiness.

01:54:05.000 He came in, he did his training.

01:54:07.000 He's a professional athlete.

01:54:08.000 It's not like he missed workouts or anything crazy.

01:54:10.000 There wasn't going out at night or anything foolish.

01:54:12.000 But there was a degree of unhappiness where I'm looking and thinking, how much longer can this go on?

01:54:21.000 Now There was some talk about the Tyron Woodley fight and then Tyron had this bad performance, but if George did get healthy and was confident enough in his health that he could get through an actual training camp, would he be interested in considering a fight with Tyron Woodley?

01:54:43.000 Absolutely.

01:54:44.000 I think Tyrone Wood is a great champion.

01:54:46.000 I know he gets a lot of stick, a lot of flack.

01:54:48.000 That kid is talented.

01:54:49.000 Very talented.

01:54:50.000 He's very, very good.

01:54:51.000 He doesn't think George wants to fight him.

01:54:52.000 He was on the podcast the other day.

01:54:54.000 I think people say that for reasons so that they can motivate someone to fight them.

01:55:00.000 There's a political aspect to it.

01:55:02.000 I think that both athletes have a deep respect for each other.

01:55:07.000 Tyrone Willie's a very, very difficult opponent to beat.

01:55:11.000 People criticize his style, but people don't understand the difference between regular fighting and championship fighting.

01:55:17.000 Championship fighting is about winning and losing, and you've got to do what you've got to do to win.

01:55:21.000 That's the first consideration.

01:55:23.000 It's nice to impress the crowd, it's nice to do this or that, but ultimately it's about what are you going to do to win?

01:55:28.000 What are you going to do to beat the second best guy in the world?

01:55:30.000 That's a difficult, difficult thing.

01:55:33.000 And it has to be done correctly.

01:55:34.000 This idea of fighting to entertain.

01:55:37.000 This is a very complex thing and you talked about it with George addressing that or attempting to address that in his comeback and trying to finish and be more energetic and aggressive.

01:55:49.000 The reality is, that's not always the best way to engage.

01:55:52.000 There's a right way to fight a person with a particular skill set.

01:55:56.000 Especially in the Woodley vs.

01:56:00.000 Stephen Wonderboy Thompson fights.

01:56:01.000 I was like, this is the only way to fight that guy.

01:56:04.000 Unless you are what he is, which is a very skillful, traditional martial artist.

01:56:11.000 That has this very unique ability to bend at the waist like a snake and slide in with techniques and does a lot off the front leg, dangerous stuff off the front leg.

01:56:20.000 Unless you can do that too, you really shouldn't be on the outside striking with him.

01:56:24.000 It's just too weird.

01:56:26.000 That style's too weird.

01:56:27.000 So he kind of had to lay back.

01:56:30.000 Again, if you look at the results of the fight, the times in the fight where someone was hurt, it was Tyron Woodley putting the hurt on Wonderboy Thompson.

01:56:40.000 Those were the only times in the fight where it was really exciting.

01:56:42.000 Other than that, it was Wonderboy trying to pick at him from the outside.

01:56:48.000 It's a very difficult fight to look good at.

01:56:52.000 You know, the whole idea of mixed martial arts fans, there's always three kinds of people that watch mixed martial arts.

01:57:00.000 There's fans of drama, there's fans of violence, and there's fans of strategy and technique.

01:57:07.000 Guys like us, when we watch MMA, we fall under the technique and strategy crowd.

01:57:11.000 To me, I can watch Woodley fight Wonderboy, and I'm fascinated by it.

01:57:15.000 To me, that's just like, wow, it's magic.

01:57:17.000 I can watch it all day.

01:57:20.000 Many of the fans want to see violence.

01:57:23.000 That's what they're attracted to.

01:57:24.000 And it's a significant portion.

01:57:27.000 Others like the idea of drama.

01:57:29.000 And athletes, in a sense, have to brand themselves according to one of those three choices.

01:57:34.000 George always branded himself as the technique and strategy guy.

01:57:38.000 Tyrone Woodley's struggling with that now himself.

01:57:40.000 He's doing the same thing.

01:57:41.000 Kale Sonnen is the quintessential drama fighter.

01:57:44.000 He didn't really have an exciting fighting style, and he was never really a technique and strategy guy.

01:57:49.000 So he went with drama.

01:57:51.000 It's mostly done vocally.

01:57:54.000 You'll get a violence-based fighter, someone like Husumar Pau Yarris.

01:57:57.000 That's his appeal.

01:57:59.000 Rumble Johnson.

01:58:00.000 Yeah, Rumble Johnson. 0.95

01:58:00.000 It's a violence, okay? 0.95

01:58:02.000 He's not into drama.

01:58:03.000 He's not going to talk anything.

01:58:05.000 He's not known.

01:58:06.000 It's like a strategy and technique guy.

01:58:08.000 He's going to come out and do the same thing every fight.

01:58:10.000 And it's going to be a violent finish.

01:58:12.000 So every fighter has to, as it were, identify what's his area.

01:58:16.000 What's he going to do?

01:58:17.000 What's going to be his appeal and work within that?

01:58:19.000 And, you know, Tyron is Learning is not an easy thing to do.

01:58:24.000 You get criticism from certain aspects of the other two elements of the mixed martial arts audience.

01:58:31.000 That seems like the big fight.

01:58:33.000 It's certainly the big fight for Tyron, but it seems like the big fight for George as well.

01:58:37.000 My only reservation when you say, is this the big fight?

01:58:44.000 Essentially, it's the same fight that George did for a decade.

01:58:47.000 It's George against another very, very tough welterweight, which he did for 10 years of his life.

01:58:54.000 Yeah, but Tyron is...

01:58:57.000 He's especially dangerous.

01:59:00.000 I mean, he's...

01:59:04.000 I think he's more dangerous than Hendrix.

01:59:06.000 I think he's more dangerous than any of those guys.

01:59:08.000 I think his ability to put you away with one shot is top of the food chain.

01:59:13.000 But you could say Hendrix was putting people away with one shot for three years.

01:59:15.000 Yeah, he was.

01:59:17.000 Hendrix is a fascinating case, and we should probably talk about that once the camera stops.

01:59:26.000 He was a fascinating case, and I can understand why he was so successful.

01:59:32.000 But, you know, there's a lot to maintaining that.

01:59:37.000 There's a lot to...

01:59:38.000 It's one thing to get to a position where you are a world-class fighter.

01:59:42.000 It's like, how long can you keep that up for?

01:59:44.000 And one of the most impressive aspects of George's career was the fact that George was able to keep that up for so long.

01:59:49.000 People don't understand this.

01:59:52.000 It's incredibly tough to become a UFC champion, but however tough that is, it's ten times tougher to stay there.

02:00:00.000 And on so many different levels, too.

02:00:02.000 It's not just the physical.

02:00:03.000 The moment you become a champion, you become the most studied fighter in the world.

02:00:07.000 Everyone knows every little weakness.

02:00:09.000 They see every little strength, and they can negate it.

02:00:13.000 Psychologically, it's tough too.

02:00:14.000 Every time the other guy fights, it's the biggest fight of his life.

02:00:21.000 Whereas every time you fight, it's just another fight.

02:00:24.000 This is your tenth title defense.

02:00:26.000 For you, it's just another fight.

02:00:27.000 For the other guy across the ring, this is the biggest moment of his life.

02:00:31.000 He's coming at you with everything he's got.

02:00:33.000 This is his moment of glory.

02:00:35.000 This is literally going to change his life if he becomes a UFC champion.

02:00:38.000 For you, it's just the next fight.

02:00:39.000 That's the question.

02:00:40.000 Is it possible for a champion to maintain a challenger's intensity through a 10 title fight defense?

02:00:48.000 Or do you just have to accept the fact that you're dealing with a completely different mind space?

02:00:53.000 I think ultimately you have to drop the whole pretense that it's about intensity.

02:00:58.000 Because no, I don't believe anyone can hold the same amount of intensity over 10 years of preparation.

02:01:03.000 You have to start Thinking in terms of, I'm going to defend my title with technique and strategy.

02:01:10.000 Because if you go with intensity, you can only hold intensity so long.

02:01:14.000 It's going to diminish in time.

02:01:15.000 As you get paid more, as you get tired, as you get injured, as years go by, the intensity drops.

02:01:22.000 Now, when you analyze various fighters of today, who stands out to you?

02:01:29.000 There's a lot.

02:01:30.000 There's some very, very impressive people.

02:01:32.000 A guy who impresses me enormously is Demetrius Johnson.

02:01:37.000 I'm extremely impressed by this guy.

02:01:39.000 I think he's the greatest of all time.

02:01:43.000 It's hard to...

02:01:44.000 Grace of all time is such a tough thing to say.

02:01:47.000 It is.

02:01:49.000 With Demetrius, the open question is always going to be, what was the level of competition?

02:01:53.000 But that's not his fault.

02:01:55.000 You can only fight the guys that give you.

02:01:57.000 Well, it's like Roy Jones Jr. when Roy was in his prime.

02:01:59.000 It's the same sort of situation.

02:02:01.000 He was so much better than everybody else.

02:02:03.000 It's like, how good were these guys?

02:02:05.000 I mean, they were world-class guys, but against him, they just looked like they didn't belong in there.

02:02:10.000 What you typically find is that when you come to assess who's the greatest of all time, it's always going to come down to criteria.

02:02:18.000 And each guy has his strong point, his claim to fame.

02:02:24.000 As far as, you know, I was the best guy of all time.

02:02:26.000 Let's stick with just UFC champions, otherwise the discussion would be too great.

02:02:31.000 If we go into pride, it's going to get out of control.

02:02:37.000 But Demetrius Johnson's claim to fame is the completeness with which he's winning fights.

02:02:46.000 He's using everything beautifully.

02:02:50.000 He's hitting people.

02:02:51.000 He's clinching people.

02:02:52.000 He's hitting clinch knockouts.

02:02:54.000 You don't see those often in the UFC. He's incredibly good on the ground.

02:02:57.000 A few times he gets in trouble.

02:02:59.000 He seems to navigate his way out without a problem.

02:03:02.000 There's a completeness in his skill set which is incredibly impressive.

02:03:05.000 He's integrating wrestling and striking in ways that are just deeply, deeply impressive.

02:03:11.000 You'll get someone like Jose Aldo.

02:03:15.000 Who's right up there in terms of, you know, is he one of the greatest of all time?

02:03:18.000 A sad thing about UFC is that, UFC fans I should say, is that people have very short memories. 0.98

02:03:25.000 A guy loses a couple of fights and suddenly he sucks. 0.98

02:03:28.000 It's like, dude, Jose Aldo was a killer. 1.00

02:03:30.000 A killer for 10 years. 0.71

02:03:33.000 And obviously very, very skilled.

02:03:36.000 He fought many tough opponents.

02:03:40.000 Do you feel like when you see a guy like Aldo, you're just seeing the Miles pile up?

02:03:45.000 Or do you think that Max Holloway is that good?

02:03:47.000 He's not that old.

02:03:48.000 He's not that old.

02:03:49.000 32. Yeah.

02:03:50.000 So I'm reluctant to say it's the Miles.

02:03:52.000 And also, Jose Aldo didn't really take a lot of damage in his career.

02:03:56.000 He's not like a guy that got knocked out five times and came back.

02:04:00.000 So in terms of the damage he took and his age, I don't think it's a question of miles.

02:04:05.000 Do you think it's a question of the game just passing him by?

02:04:09.000 New levels of the game?

02:04:12.000 That's a great question.

02:04:13.000 Well, I feel like Max Holloway's style was almost like the perfect antidote.

02:04:18.000 A lot of it comes out of styles.

02:04:20.000 And you're right.

02:04:22.000 Holloway's awkward distancing and things like that.

02:04:25.000 Very good distancing, but also phenomenal endurance.

02:04:29.000 Unbelievable mental toughness.

02:04:31.000 Extreme confidence in himself.

02:04:32.000 And he has the ability to break guys.

02:04:35.000 Just puts a pace on them.

02:04:36.000 Very Nick Diaz-like in that regard.

02:04:38.000 Just puts that pace on them.

02:04:40.000 And you saw it with Aldo.

02:04:41.000 You see Aldo start to wilt.

02:04:43.000 Because it almost started strongly in both cases.

02:04:45.000 Yes.

02:04:45.000 It starts very strong.

02:04:47.000 Well, that's his thing, though.

02:04:48.000 He's so explosive and he sprints, essentially.

02:04:51.000 But you really can't do that.

02:04:53.000 I mean, his style is highlighted by incredibly explosive, fast movement.

02:05:01.000 And Max is not.

02:05:02.000 Max is about avoiding and then accumulation of bombs, of techniques.

02:05:08.000 Keep it on you.

02:05:09.000 And also his well-roundedness, his ability to submit you, ability to absorb shots, maintain composure when being fired upon.

02:05:17.000 All those things, incredible strengths of his.

02:05:20.000 But particularly matched up against Aldo, his strengths really shined.

02:05:25.000 He is.

02:05:26.000 Yeah, but that's a hallmark if you're going to call someone the greatest of all time is they have to be able to take on a wide array of opponents and still be successful.

02:05:36.000 Yeah, which is why Demetrius gets my vote.

02:05:39.000 I just feel like when you look at Benavidez, when you look at just many different people that he fought showed him a bunch of different looks, a bunch of different styles.

02:05:51.000 And he was able to overwhelm them all.

02:05:53.000 Wilson Hayes.

02:05:54.000 What's your assessment of his fight against Dominick Cruz upperweight division?

02:05:58.000 See, I look at that as a learning experience, a different era, a different guy.

02:06:04.000 He had a full-time job back then.

02:06:06.000 He wasn't the same fighter.

02:06:07.000 What do you think happens if he fights Dominick Cruz a second time?

02:06:09.000 I'm fascinated by that.

02:06:11.000 I want to see him fight TJ Dillashaw.

02:06:12.000 I think that's the big fight because TJ's willing to go down to 125. So instead of fighting Dominic at 135, TJ's like, I can make 125. And TJ feels like he'll be the guy to break the legacy.

02:06:24.000 He'll be far bigger, stronger.

02:06:25.000 He feels like he can match him speed for speed.

02:06:27.000 And he thinks he can make the weight comfortably.

02:06:29.000 I'm really fascinated by that fight.

02:06:32.000 Because also I think...

02:06:34.000 TJ is one of the few guys that's trained by, I think Matt Hume is one of the great unsung heroes of MMA. I agree with that, yeah.

02:06:43.000 He's a master.

02:06:44.000 Fascinating guy.

02:06:45.000 Fascinating guy.

02:06:46.000 Incredibly intelligent, deep, deep knowledge of the sport, both stand-up and on the ground, and integrating those two things together.

02:06:53.000 He's one of the few guys you can genuinely say has expertise across all areas of mixed martial arts and played a pivotal role in taking someone from being an unknown to a legitimate great world champion.

02:07:11.000 All the time I see people who...

02:07:13.000 People often don't make a distinction between recruiters and coaches.

02:07:18.000 There's many fight camps out there that are very good at recruiting people that were already good and helping them to manage them, etc., and make them slightly better.

02:07:27.000 The world's full of recruiters.

02:07:29.000 But there's not many coaches out there.

02:07:31.000 Matt Hume took a kid who no one had heard of and took him from obscurity to arguably one of the best of all time.

02:07:40.000 And he did it in a way where that kid went from being essentially a wrestler to a genuinely well-rounded mixed martial artist with a complete set of skills.

02:07:52.000 That's an impressive accomplishment.

02:07:54.000 Yeah.

02:07:55.000 And it's also the way he does it, the way he fights, how little damage he takes.

02:08:02.000 It's his movement, his ability to control.

02:08:06.000 Like, a good example is Dodson.

02:08:09.000 He fought John Dodson, who's unbelievably explosive and fast and dangerous, and just overwhelmed him.

02:08:17.000 If Demetrius Johnson didn't exist, Dodson would have been a very good champion.

02:08:21.000 Oh, yeah.

02:08:22.000 Highly regarded champion.

02:08:23.000 Yeah.

02:08:23.000 People don't realize how good some of these opponents are.

02:08:26.000 You know, they say, oh, is there a level of opponent that good?

02:08:28.000 Well, Dodson's a very good opponent.

02:08:30.000 Dodson was especially a few years ago.

02:08:34.000 He was extremely dangerous.

02:08:35.000 He seems to be in a bit of a rut now, whether it's a psychological rut or a physical rut.

02:08:40.000 He's not quite the same guy that he used to be.

02:08:44.000 But, you know, it's hard when a guy bests you the way that Mighty Mouse bests you.

02:08:49.000 Because it seems like the level of talent is so far above where you're at that it's like you're left with a dilemma.

02:08:56.000 Like, how do I catch this guy?

02:08:58.000 Is it even possible for me to catch him?

02:09:00.000 Because they had two fights.

02:09:01.000 And the second fight, Mighty Mouse won handily.

02:09:05.000 The first fight was closer.

02:09:07.000 The first fight was more dangerous.

02:09:08.000 He got hit a few times.

02:09:09.000 But in the second fight, Mighty Mouse just showed leaps and bounds.

02:09:13.000 And it was just a route.

02:09:15.000 He just ran them over.

02:09:17.000 The other arguments are Anderson.

02:09:19.000 Anderson is prime.

02:09:21.000 It's a great argument for the greatest of all time.

02:09:25.000 Outside the UFC, it's Fedor.

02:09:27.000 I think those are really the only arguments for the greatest of all times.

02:09:31.000 And George.

02:09:32.000 George is in there, especially coming back and beating Bisping.

02:09:35.000 That puts him, you know, right back into the mix in terms of argument of one of the greatest of all time.

02:09:41.000 Yeah, I think it was an important step for him because, as I said, there were three persistent criticisms and he answered all three in one night.

02:09:47.000 So that definitely helps his case.

02:09:49.000 What's your thought on Khabib Nurmagomedov?

02:09:52.000 Extremely impressed.

02:09:55.000 This kid is deeply, deeply impressive.

02:10:00.000 He's come into the academy a couple of times before fights.

02:10:03.000 I've never actually seen him train.

02:10:07.000 After his fight in Madison Square Garden, he fought himself and a group of his friends, his training partners, came into the academy and trained in my Monday afternoon class.

02:10:16.000 Khabib didn't train, he just sat on the bench because he just fought on Saturday night, so of course he's not going to train.

02:10:20.000 But his My training partners came in and trained with the squad.

02:10:25.000 That was a fun afternoon.

02:10:26.000 They rolled with, I think, mostly Nicky Ryan.

02:10:31.000 It's hard for them, of course, because it's submission grappling.

02:10:33.000 That's not really what they do.

02:10:34.000 They do more the interface of grappling combined with striking.

02:10:38.000 So they had a hard time with it.

02:10:40.000 But he struck me as a very, very nice person.

02:10:42.000 He's shockingly big for his weight division.

02:10:44.000 Shockingly.

02:10:47.000 Like all the people coming out of the Caucasus regions of Russia, his wrestling is extremely good.

02:10:54.000 They have probably the best wrestling program in the world.

02:10:57.000 That whole area stretching from Ossetia through Dagestan, through Chechnya, all the way down to Iran, that that area is just the hotbed of wrestling in the world.

02:11:07.000 And it shows with all their fighters, they're all strong in wrestling.

02:11:10.000 And then they just add to that the various skills and you've got a tough, tough group of people.

02:11:15.000 Yeah, it was extremely...

02:11:16.000 I've been impressed with every single performance he's had in the Octagon.

02:11:19.000 I mean, he's undefeated, which is incredibly rare in and of itself, but in the 155-pound division, even more impressive.

02:11:26.000 But the way he mauled Barboza was just like, Jesus Christ.

02:11:30.000 And you could see the fight was essentially over halfway through round one.

02:11:34.000 Yes, yeah.

02:11:35.000 You could see it in Barboza's face.

02:11:36.000 He was drained.

02:11:38.000 Yeah, that was an incredibly impressive performance.

02:11:43.000 Obviously, you can't put him yet in the greatest of all time category.

02:11:48.000 He hasn't won a title.

02:11:49.000 He hasn't even challenged for it yet.

02:11:50.000 But you definitely get the sense that if he had had a title fight by now, he probably would have been a champion by now.

02:11:56.000 Him vs. 0.99

02:11:57.000 Conor.

02:11:58.000 Jesus Christ.

02:11:59.000 That's what I want to say.

02:12:00.000 Him vs. 0.99

02:12:00.000 Conor in Russia or him vs. 0.99

02:12:02.000 Tony.

02:12:03.000 Tony Ferguson and him would be a very interesting fight.

02:12:06.000 What's interesting about those two fights is you have basically polar opposites.

02:12:10.000 Khabib Nurmagomedov is a control-based fighter, whereas Tony Ferguson is a scramble-based fighter.

02:12:17.000 And just that clash in styles is going to be fascinating.

02:12:21.000 With regards to Conor McGregor and Khabib Nurmagomedov, the feeling one gets is that if they did fight, it would be a complete shutout in one of two directions.

02:12:32.000 It's either like a man beating up a child on the ground, or it's just a flush knockout.

02:12:40.000 A guy unable to cover distance properly and walking into a left hand and just being catastrophically KO'd.

02:12:47.000 You feel like there's potential for it to go in both directions.

02:12:53.000 That's a fight I don't think goes the distance.

02:12:55.000 It's one way or the other.

02:12:57.000 Yeah, I agree.

02:12:58.000 I feel like what Conor presents that's interesting in terms of danger is speed and one-shot knockout power with his hands.

02:13:06.000 And Khabib has been hurt coming in.

02:13:08.000 By Michael Johnson.

02:13:09.000 It's really the only adversity he ever suffered inside the arc.

02:13:11.000 And he dealt with it well.

02:13:13.000 That's a good sign for Khabib. 1.00

02:13:14.000 It's the sliver of hope that every opponent clings to.

02:13:17.000 They watch that one moment where Michael Johnson clipped him.

02:13:20.000 And he's like, look, look, he's human.

02:13:22.000 He can be hurt.

02:13:23.000 It's like the scene in Terminator. 1.00

02:13:25.000 If it bleeds, I could kill him. 0.99

02:13:27.000 I believe that was Predator. 1.00

02:13:29.000 Oh, yeah.

02:13:30.000 What did I say?

02:13:30.000 Terminator?

02:13:30.000 Yeah.

02:13:31.000 You just fucked up your honor of reference. 0.69

02:13:33.000 Sorry. 0.82

02:13:34.000 I'm sorry.

02:13:35.000 Yeah, I did fuck it up.

02:13:37.000 But I think that Conor has been overwhelmed on the ground, though.

02:13:42.000 And he's been overwhelmed by Nate Diaz, and he's been controlled on the ground by Chad Mendes.

02:13:47.000 One gets the feeling that whatever amount of control they were able to impose on him would be nothing compared with what Khabib could impose. 0.77

02:13:53.000 Yeah, I know.

02:13:53.000 Moreover, Khabib is a much more dangerous form of control.

02:13:58.000 Khabib has a program of hitting people on the ground which is substantially better than either of the two athletes you just mentioned.

02:14:07.000 And the big difference is when Khabib gets you on the ground, you're not getting up.

02:14:13.000 No.

02:14:13.000 You're getting mauled.

02:14:15.000 And it's almost like a spider.

02:14:16.000 Like he's injecting venom into you and slowly but surely weakening your body.

02:14:22.000 You see after the first round when Barboza gets up, it's like, okay, he's alive still, but this is a different person now.

02:14:32.000 And going into the second round, Barboza gave an admirable account of himself.

02:14:37.000 He showed himself to be a true warrior.

02:14:38.000 He did try a couple of spinning back kicks, and some of them were relatively close.

02:14:42.000 Barbosa's kicking-heavy strategy, though, is very different than Conor's.

02:14:46.000 Conor's kicks are just the opposite.

02:14:48.000 His kicks are just probes.

02:14:50.000 He's sort of poking at you, poking at you, and putting things out in front of you, and he's just trying to ding!

02:14:57.000 He's just trying to drop that hard left hand on you.

02:15:00.000 He's a fascinating guy to watch.

02:15:02.000 Fascinating guy to watch.

02:15:03.000 I always undervalued him.

02:15:04.000 When he first came in the UFC, I said, oh, it's hype, it's hype.

02:15:07.000 But the more I studied, the more I saw.

02:15:09.000 Yeah.

02:15:09.000 He's very, very skilled.

02:15:11.000 Well, he's also, he mindfucks people. 0.99

02:15:14.000 He mindfucks people in a way that, but I don't think he's mindfucking Khabib. 0.99

02:15:18.000 I don't think that works on Khabib. 0.98

02:15:20.000 I don't think that's going to happen.

02:15:21.000 I just think that you're dealing with a totally different kind of human being.

02:15:25.000 Those people from Dagestan are just so hard.

02:15:28.000 It's just a hard part of the world.

02:15:31.000 They're made of hardier stuff.

02:15:33.000 You know what I mean?

02:15:34.000 It's just like they have to deal with way more.

02:15:36.000 Not that people in Ireland are soft. 0.99

02:15:38.000 They're fucking hard people, too. 0.98

02:15:40.000 I just think that with, I've always said the most important, if you have a pyramid of technique when it comes to mixed martial arts, the base of the pyramid, the most important thing is the ability to control the grappling, the ability to take a guy down. 0.99

02:15:57.000 If you can take a guy down and control him, you have a significant advantage.

02:16:01.000 You can choose where the fight takes place.

02:16:04.000 And if you're competent in the stand-up, which Khabib is definitely competent in the stand-up, so you are adequate in the stand-up but overwhelming when it gets to the ground, you can present problems with a guy standing up, in which case problems the guy has to deal with the striking aspects which open up the takedowns.

02:16:23.000 I wholeheartedly agree with you, but I'll go a little further.

02:16:26.000 Whenever someone asks me, what are the programs, what do you look for when you see a guy dominating fights?

02:16:34.000 What makes someone go in the right directions with their training and their fighting itself?

02:16:40.000 I always say there's three things.

02:16:42.000 If you show me a fighter who can, one, dominate the setups, two, dominate the pace of the fight, and three, How can I phrase this?

02:17:00.000 Dominate the simple direction of the fight.

02:17:03.000 Three things.

02:17:04.000 Dominate the setups.

02:17:05.000 Dominate the pace.

02:17:06.000 Dominate the direction.

02:17:07.000 You show me a fighter who can do those three things and I'll show you a fighter who can win 95% of the fights he gets into.

02:17:16.000 Dominate the setups, dominate the pace, dominate the direction.

02:17:20.000 Think about someone like Khabib or anyone who comes from a strong wrestling or judo jiu-jitsu with takedowns based fighters.

02:17:28.000 They're always going to be able to dominate the direction. 0.80

02:17:30.000 They determine whether it goes down to the ground or whether it stays standing.

02:17:36.000 Khabib always dominates the pace of the fight.

02:17:38.000 Once you're on the ground, you're on top.

02:17:41.000 The other guy's just reacting to what you're doing, trying to get back up to his feet, etc., etc.

02:17:45.000 You're dominating pace.

02:17:48.000 If there's one weakness that Khabib has, it is he's not as strong at dominating the setups to get to those areas where he can dominate pace, etc., etc.

02:18:02.000 If he's going to lose a fight, it's going to be in that area.

02:18:05.000 And Connor, more than anything else, is a guy who dominates the setups.

02:18:10.000 You said it before.

02:18:11.000 The kicks are probed.

02:18:12.000 They're not kicks.

02:18:13.000 He's not trying to hurt you with the kicks.

02:18:15.000 He's probing.

02:18:16.000 He hurts you with this.

02:18:17.000 Yeah.

02:18:18.000 Okay?

02:18:19.000 So Connor's skill He's a master of dominating setups, especially in the standing position.

02:18:25.000 But Khabib's mastery, out of those three critical areas for domination in all forms of fighting, is he's incredibly dominant in determining the direction of the fight and the pace of the fight.

02:18:39.000 That's why he never gets tired in his fights.

02:18:41.000 He's got a very high work rate, but he never gets tired.

02:18:43.000 You never see him just completely shattered, despite the fact he's working hard the whole time.

02:18:47.000 And despite the fact that he significantly weakens himself to make 155 pounds, which apparently he's done far better now.

02:18:54.000 He had a real nutritionist heading into this camp, and it was much easier for him to cut the weight.

02:18:59.000 I'd be fascinated to see him fight at 170. Well, that's a plan.

02:19:03.000 Apparently, that was a plan, and Woodley was joking around about it, saying he'll send him nutritionists. 0.99

02:19:07.000 He'll say, keep his psycho ass down at 155. That's funny. 0.98

02:19:11.000 That's funny.

02:19:11.000 That's his exact quote.

02:19:14.000 But yeah, with regards to your point before, this core combat skill, the most important one that you as a commentator look for when you look at fighters, can you determine, you put grappling skill as the number one thing, whether it be wrestling, whether it be sambo, whether it be jiu-jitsu, or whatever.

02:19:33.000 I would go further and say, yeah, there's three things that I look for.

02:19:36.000 Who dominates the setups?

02:19:37.000 Who dominates the pace?

02:19:38.000 Who dominates the direction?

02:19:40.000 Now, what are your thoughts about strength and conditioning for mixed martial arts fighters?

02:19:45.000 That's a huge question.

02:19:47.000 But the question is, like, what takes precedent?

02:19:51.000 Does skill training take precedent?

02:19:52.000 Like, there's several schools of thought, and one of them would be, one of the more interesting ones is Nick Kurson and Marvin Marinovich, that camp, they believe that you already know how to fight.

02:20:03.000 And that what the camp really should be about is just radical strength and conditioning to the point where...

02:20:08.000 That's a mixed question.

02:20:11.000 Are you talking about a fight camp?

02:20:13.000 Are you talking about fight training over the year?

02:20:17.000 Let's talk about a fight camp in specific.

02:20:19.000 Okay.

02:20:21.000 Okay, average fight camp is around six to eight weeks, and the longest you'll ever hear is like a 10 to 12 weeks.

02:20:28.000 That's a very, very long fight camp.

02:20:32.000 How much physiological change can you affect in the body in six to eight weeks?

02:20:39.000 You could tighten everything up.

02:20:43.000 You can certainly increase your endurance, your threshold, your ability to work.

02:20:47.000 How much could you increase your VO2 max in six weeks?

02:20:50.000 That's a good question.

02:20:51.000 A few percentage points, I believe.

02:20:52.000 I think considerably less than that.

02:20:54.000 Really?

02:20:55.000 Yeah.

02:20:57.000 Hmm.

02:20:58.000 I don't know.

02:20:59.000 How much could you increase your vertical jump in six weeks?

02:21:03.000 Not much.

02:21:06.000 Not much at all.

02:21:07.000 I'm not a big believer in the idea that you're going to create big, significant, fight-changing physiological changes in six to eight weeks.

02:21:16.000 It's not really my experience.

02:21:19.000 But I can show someone a single technique which can have a direct impact on a fight.

02:21:25.000 I can show them that in five minutes.

02:21:29.000 I'm not going to claim to be a medical expert who has a deep understanding of these things, but my experience in coaching is that physiological changes take time, and you're not going to get it done in a fight camp.

02:21:41.000 Yes, you can make physiological changes over a year, two years, absolutely.

02:21:46.000 George went up a weight division, but it took quite a bit of preparation to do so.

02:21:50.000 It didn't happen in six weeks.

02:21:51.000 What kind of strength training was he doing to do that?

02:21:54.000 I know he's very involved in gymnastics.

02:21:55.000 He likes a lot of that.

02:21:57.000 George's primary physical training outside is gymnastics.

02:22:01.000 He loves it.

02:22:03.000 He also for a time did Olympic weightlifting.

02:22:06.000 Less so now than before but there was a time that was a big part of it.

02:22:10.000 Recently, he started taking on training in water with various fins, et cetera, et cetera, to increase resistance.

02:22:18.000 Oh, okay.

02:22:19.000 And he's quite a fan of that.

02:22:20.000 But the truth is George goes through cycles.

02:22:22.000 And, you know, boredom is a factor.

02:22:25.000 You get bored with a certain kind of physical activity and you want to try something new.

02:22:29.000 Right.

02:22:29.000 And so he's gone through various cycles.

02:22:31.000 I can tell you this.

02:22:34.000 George's strength has not significantly changed despite the various changes in physiological training.

02:22:43.000 Like when he did Olympic lifting, he wasn't massively stronger than when he did regular weightlifting or when he did swim training.

02:22:51.000 I don't feel like, okay, one mate, I'm stronger than the other.

02:22:54.000 There's so many interesting questions in the one you just asked.

02:23:03.000 Do I believe that strength is important?

02:23:05.000 Absolutely.

02:23:07.000 Anyone who says that strength doesn't make a difference in a fight is just straight up ignoring the obvious facts.

02:23:14.000 There's a reason why men don't fight women, because there's massive strength differences.

02:23:18.000 There's a reason why there's weight categories, because there's big strength differences between heavyweight and lightweight.

02:23:24.000 Strength makes a difference.

02:23:25.000 The proof of that is simply easy to observe.

02:23:27.000 Why do people take anabolic steroids?

02:23:30.000 Because they know that strength makes a difference.

02:23:32.000 There's a reason why they're illegal, because they do change the outcome of fights.

02:23:36.000 So yes, strength is extremely important.

02:23:38.000 The question is, how are you going to build it?

02:23:40.000 And are you going to do it in camp?

02:23:43.000 Is your fight camp going to be based around strength?

02:23:46.000 That's a risky strategy.

02:23:47.000 Can you really get that much stronger in six weeks?

02:23:50.000 I've always believed that the whole idea of fight camp is to prepare an already well-trained athlete to get around the problem of one individual.

02:24:00.000 It's programming one individual to solve the complex problem that another individual presents.

02:24:06.000 It's kind of like preparation for an exam, so to speak.

02:24:11.000 And for me, the whole thing, every fight camp is motivated by two very simple questions.

02:24:16.000 How are you going to win this fight and how are you not going to lose this fight?

02:24:20.000 The entire structure of the camp is based around that.

02:24:23.000 And almost all of that has to do with tactics and techniques rather than changes in the physical body.

02:24:30.000 Now, when George is in off camp, when he's out of camp, is that when he would...

02:24:37.000 That's a period of skill acquisition.

02:24:39.000 You're trying to acquire new skills.

02:24:42.000 So that's when he would...

02:24:44.000 I know he's notorious for taking trips to Brazil, to work at Jiu-Jitsu.

02:24:47.000 That's when you do your experimentation.

02:24:48.000 You bring in different perspectives, a different person.

02:24:51.000 This is interesting.

02:24:52.000 This has potential.

02:24:53.000 This doesn't really have much potential.

02:24:54.000 And you start changing things up.

02:24:57.000 Now, do you have that same approach with all the fighters that you've worked with?

02:25:02.000 It depends on the context.

02:25:03.000 Are they mixed martial artists?

02:25:04.000 Do they train with me full-time?

02:25:05.000 Are they part-timers?

02:25:06.000 It would depend on the context.

02:25:08.000 I can answer with regards to the squat.

02:25:09.000 Yeah, but what I was going to bring up is Weidman.

02:25:12.000 Like, Weidman's approach, you know, coming from that elite wrestling background and then developing a lot of significant mixed martial arts skills.

02:25:23.000 He is in an unusual situation right now, right?

02:25:27.000 Where does he stand in terms of future opponents?

02:25:30.000 Where is he at right now?

02:25:32.000 That's a tough question to answer.

02:25:37.000 Chris, I think, had probably one of the most meteoric rises into world championship level.

02:25:44.000 He literally beat twice in a row.

02:25:47.000 The guy that at that time was considered by most people to be the greatest of all time.

02:25:52.000 His run up to that was incredible.

02:25:55.000 I'm sure you commentated many of those fights.

02:25:57.000 Sure.

02:25:58.000 It's an animal.

02:25:59.000 The time frame with which he went from obscurity to world championship level is incredibly short.

02:26:05.000 And undefeated.

02:26:06.000 Yeah.

02:26:06.000 It was insane what he was doing.

02:26:09.000 So there was this incredible meteoric rise, and then there was a short period after that where he appeared to be crushing great former champions like Liotta Mishida, Vita Belfort.

02:26:20.000 He wasn't just beating them, he was just incredibly impressive.

02:26:24.000 And then I think people were shocked by what appeared to be an unbeaten record, and then suddenly three losses in a row.

02:26:32.000 And catastrophic losses.

02:26:34.000 Getting smashed by Luke Rockhold, getting KO'd by a flying knee from Yoel Romero, and getting dominated by Gegard Mousasi, and then all the controversy that led to that stoppage.

02:26:44.000 So it was three in a row on a guy who had never even experienced defeat.

02:26:50.000 And so you go from no defeats to three catastrophic defeats in a row.

02:26:55.000 That throws everything off.

02:26:57.000 But then he rebounded with Calvin Gaslam and finished one of the toughest guys in the division.

02:27:03.000 You saw what Gastelum went on to do with Bisping.

02:27:07.000 That was a great win.

02:27:09.000 It was a nice comeback.

02:27:11.000 But the question is, where does it go from here?

02:27:14.000 And I don't have an answer for you.

02:27:16.000 I'm so sorry.

02:27:16.000 How often do you work with them?

02:27:18.000 Not often.

02:27:19.000 Chris came to me as a student.

02:27:22.000 He was a student of Matt Serra, who's one of my great friends and training partners from the Henzo Gracie Academy.

02:27:30.000 And Matt was having some medical issues.

02:27:33.000 And he said, John, you know, can you take over this student of mine, Chris Whiteman?

02:27:38.000 This guy's incredibly talented.

02:27:39.000 And I'd heard of Chris because, you know, we're linked schools, fairly close by, and people were telling me about this amazing wrestler who's, you know, incredibly talented, picks techniques up.

02:27:49.000 And, you know, I always take these things with a grain of salt because people exaggerate and stuff.

02:27:53.000 So Chris started coming in.

02:27:55.000 And it was all true. 0.57

02:27:56.000 This kid, you can show him a technique on Monday and by Tuesday he's doing it better than you are.

02:28:00.000 And he has a gift for physical movement that you don't see very often in guys that big.

02:28:08.000 He's big, agile, highly intelligent, and had at that time A level of self-confidence that was deeply impressive.

02:28:22.000 I would show Chris a guillotine variation and then five minutes later he would be using it in the gym and then a month later be using it in an MMA fight.

02:28:34.000 He literally would see opportunities and immediately act upon them.

02:28:40.000 What I worry about with Chris is that in those three losses I'm not saying this has happened, but what I worry will happen is that fighters who are typically very dominant and were confidence fighters when they experienced defeat lose confidence.

02:28:59.000 And a big part of Chris's success was that ability to see opportunity and have the confidence to immediately act upon it.

02:29:08.000 So my concern, if I look at Chris, is will that still be there?

02:29:13.000 Will he still have the same confidence, which was such a big part of his rise to the top?

02:29:17.000 Will it be drastically altered by three losses?

02:29:20.000 And I'm very pleased to say that it didn't appear to be so in the fight with Gastelum.

02:29:26.000 He actually took a heavy hit at the end of the first round in that fight and came back.

02:29:30.000 It looked like he'd gone through those three losses and come back strong and everything was fine.

02:29:37.000 So I'm pretty confident Chris will go on to great success again at 185. Knowing how good Chris is on the ground, how shocked were you about the Luke Rockhold fight?

02:29:49.000 It was a hard one for me to watch.

02:29:52.000 Chris stopped working with me after the second Anderson Silva fight.

02:29:56.000 We did most of that camp together and then he stopped working with me, moved further out into Long Island.

02:30:03.000 He opened up a gym with Ray Longo.

02:30:06.000 I went back to training with Matt Serra.

02:30:09.000 Those guys were incredible training camp.

02:30:11.000 They did a fine job getting them through the machida fights, etc.

02:30:14.000 I was at that UFC. It was in Las Vegas.

02:30:21.000 Conor McGregor was the main event and Chris was the co-main event.

02:30:29.000 The fight had an interesting beginning.

02:30:31.000 Chris was doing well with the takedowns, but Luke Rockhold was doing a great job of controlling Chris's head with fake guillotines to prevent any kind of damage on the ground.

02:30:42.000 They're doing a good job of standing back up to the feet, so there was no really significant damage.

02:30:46.000 Then they got into an interesting kickboxing battle, where it seemed to go in one direction, then switch directions, and then Chris seemed to be getting the better of it, and things looked good.

02:30:56.000 And then there was just one episode where everything just came unstuck in a second.

02:31:02.000 And I remember watching, and it was like watching a bad dream, you know?

02:31:08.000 Yeah, it was shocking.

02:31:10.000 Yeah, Chris threw an ill-advised wheel kick, which is slow and telegraphed, and Rockhold took him to the ground. 0.93

02:31:18.000 And what I was most shocked with was, and I've seen it time and time again, I saw it in the David Branch fight, and saw it in the Leo Machida fight, is Rockhold's top game is fucking terrifying. 0.61

02:31:29.000 Deeply impressive. 0.78

02:31:30.000 Very impressive.

02:31:32.000 I attribute that not just to his skill, which I think is considerable, but also to training on a regular basis with Daniel Carmiere and Cain Velasquez.

02:31:40.000 His wrestling, his grappling, is severely underrated.

02:31:44.000 Maybe not so now, but his ability to control guys on the ground is just terrifying.

02:31:49.000 Yeah.

02:31:50.000 No, he's done an amazing job.

02:31:52.000 He's also got very strong submission skills.

02:31:54.000 Yes.

02:31:55.000 People, I don't think, talk about those at all.

02:31:58.000 And he's submitted good people.

02:32:01.000 Submitted Bisping with that one-arm guillotine.

02:32:03.000 And some of his finishes are like highlight reel finishes.

02:32:06.000 They're beautiful.

02:32:07.000 You know, he's got tremendous skills.

02:32:10.000 He's big for the division.

02:32:13.000 You talk about a guy who dominates the pace and the direction.

02:32:19.000 No one can hold him down for any period of time.

02:32:22.000 He's great at getting back up to his feet.

02:32:23.000 He wrestles the fence very, very well, like all the AKA guys. 0.57

02:32:26.000 They're all good on the fence.

02:32:28.000 He's a very, very impressive fighter.

02:32:30.000 I'm impressed with him in a lot of ways, but his ability to control top-level guys.

02:32:37.000 My thought was when he got Chris down, like, okay, Chris is a world-class grappler.

02:32:42.000 He's going to be able to get out of this situation.

02:32:44.000 There'll be scrambles.

02:32:45.000 There's a lot happening, but there was none of that.

02:32:46.000 It was just total control and ground.

02:32:48.000 And for a considerable period of time.

02:32:51.000 Yeah, it was rough.

02:32:52.000 It was rough to watch because it was one of those where you could easily make the argument for it being stopped sooner.

02:32:57.000 Yeah, I think so, too.

02:32:58.000 Yeah, it was a rough one.

02:33:00.000 And now Rockhold's going to face Yoel Romero, which is very...

02:33:04.000 He's the freak of all freaks.

02:33:05.000 That's like...

02:33:06.000 That guy was made in a lab.

02:33:08.000 Yeah.

02:33:08.000 Isn't Yoel Romero fighting David Brunch?

02:33:10.000 No.

02:33:11.000 Did this happen recently?

02:33:13.000 Yes.

02:33:14.000 Robert Whitaker got injured.

02:33:16.000 What happened?

02:33:17.000 The knee again?

02:33:18.000 Most likely, if I had to guess.

02:33:20.000 I don't think they released it, but there's been an injury.

02:33:22.000 Maybe it's a different injury.

02:33:24.000 When did this happen?

02:33:25.000 A couple days ago.

02:33:26.000 Wow.

02:33:26.000 I've just flown to California.

02:33:28.000 I haven't been using the internet, so yeah.

02:33:30.000 So, Rock, good for you.

02:33:33.000 It's only two days, Joe.

02:33:34.000 We should all say that.

02:33:36.000 But Rockhold and Yoel now are going to fight for the interim belt.

02:33:40.000 That's a huge development.

02:33:42.000 Yeah, big development.

02:33:43.000 Wow.

02:33:44.000 Yeah.

02:33:45.000 That's a...

02:33:46.000 I mean, Yo Romero, that's...

02:33:49.000 That's a different fight, my friend!

02:33:53.000 Yo Romero is probably the most uncontrollable man in the universe.

02:33:57.000 He is a difficult, difficult person to control in any aspect of the fight.

02:34:02.000 He's a fighter.

02:34:04.000 Some parts of what he does make no sense.

02:34:06.000 He's one of the greatest wrestlers of his generation.

02:34:08.000 Yeah.

02:34:08.000 And yet many people take him down.

02:34:10.000 Yeah.

02:34:10.000 And he gets taken down all the time.

02:34:11.000 But they can't control him.

02:34:12.000 He just springs back up.

02:34:14.000 He's not worried about being taken down.

02:34:15.000 I think that's part of it.

02:34:17.000 Yeah, because he comes so hard with the upper body, he leaves the lower body open.

02:34:20.000 And you're right, there's no consequence to it.

02:34:22.000 He can just get up whenever he feels like it.

02:34:25.000 He has a greater propensity to change direction at speed than anyone else I've ever seen in my life.

02:34:35.000 People always talk about speed.

02:34:37.000 They're always, you know, this guy's fast or that guy's fast.

02:34:39.000 To me, there's two kinds of speed that impress me in fighting.

02:34:43.000 One is the speed of decision-making.

02:34:46.000 If you can make decisions, good decisions, faster than your opponent, you're going to win a lot of fights.

02:34:51.000 And the other is your ability not to go in straight lines at speed, but to change direction.

02:34:59.000 Speed of directional change is the most important kind of physical speed in fighting.

02:35:05.000 There's plenty of people that weren't really that fast, but they can change direction quickly.

02:35:10.000 And that's the kind of speed that counts in fighting.

02:35:13.000 So the two kinds of speed that you needed to be a fighter is speed of decision-making and speed of directional change.

02:35:20.000 And you see lots of fast people.

02:35:22.000 Usain Bolt is fast, but he's not fast in directional change.

02:35:26.000 That's not his thing.

02:35:27.000 But the thing about Joel Romero is there's a certain twitchiness to his movement where it's so hard to read where he's going, where he's going to be in the next half second.

02:35:36.000 It's just a handful to deal with.

02:35:38.000 Yeah, that is a very good assessment of what's shocking about him.

02:35:42.000 His ability to go from 0 to 60 is just freakish.

02:35:45.000 And this is him at 40. What was he like when he was 25?

02:35:51.000 He just doesn't look like a 40-year-old man.

02:35:53.000 Just everything's wrong.

02:35:55.000 He doesn't look like a normal person.

02:35:57.000 Like you look at his body his proportions everything looks like something from a movie.

02:36:02.000 Yeah, it doesn't there is real Yeah, and that flying need that he hit Chris with was like Jesus Christ Yeah, no, he could feel it in the audience.

02:36:11.000 It was it was it was terrible It's just the the amount of force that he can generate is just stunning But he's also a guy that's carrying around a tremendous amount of muscle.

02:36:21.000 And I wonder what kind of pace he can keep up.

02:36:24.000 You know, and we saw that in the Whitaker fight.

02:36:26.000 He faded a bit in that fight, wound up losing that fight.

02:36:29.000 We've seen it in several of his fights.

02:36:31.000 The Tim Kennedy fight, he faded in that fight and eventually came back to win.

02:36:35.000 But he's got so much to feed.

02:36:39.000 There's so much tissue.

02:36:40.000 You know?

02:36:41.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:36:42.000 He's a fascinating character.

02:36:43.000 Fascinating!

02:36:44.000 And again, boy, wouldn't you have loved to have seen him in the UFC at 26?

02:36:49.000 Yeah, I mean, when he was just dominating everyone in the wrestling scene.

02:36:52.000 Yeah, no, he's as good as they get in wrestling.

02:36:55.000 Medaled in every single world-class competition he ever entered.

02:36:58.000 And not only that, but the best wrestlers in his weight division at that time, he beat all of them.

02:37:07.000 Crazy.

02:37:08.000 It's as good as he did.

02:37:09.000 Yeah.

02:37:10.000 Hard to imagine.

02:37:11.000 Yeah.

02:37:12.000 Yeah.

02:37:13.000 All right, John, I think we've covered basically enough where it's, uh, we're three hours in here, man.

02:37:19.000 Oh my God, I'm sorry.

02:37:20.000 It was awesome.

02:37:22.000 Longer than one of my Instagram posts.

02:37:24.000 Your Instagram posts are amazing, by the way.

02:37:26.000 I'm a huge fan.

02:37:27.000 You're one of the few.

02:37:29.000 That's not true.

02:37:30.000 A lot of friends share them.

02:37:32.000 They send them to me in text messages occasionally.

02:37:34.000 That's very interesting.

02:37:36.000 But your breakdowns of technique and strategy and what is actually happening, I think they're critical.

02:37:42.000 Your voice and what you're doing with the squad and what you're doing for jiu-jitsu as a whole and the way you're able to articulate that and break these things down.

02:37:51.000 It's really, really critical.

02:37:53.000 I think it's awesome.

02:37:54.000 Thank you.

02:37:55.000 Very significant.

02:37:56.000 Thank you.

02:37:56.000 I'm really glad we finally got a chance to do this.

02:37:59.000 It's better than meeting at Denny's.

02:38:01.000 Yes.

02:38:01.000 Well, Denny's meeting was fun, too.

02:38:03.000 What is your Twitter for people?

02:38:05.000 Is it just John Donaher on Instagram, rather?

02:38:07.000 On Instagram, I believe it's Danaher John.

02:38:10.000 Danaher John.

02:38:11.000 Yeah.

02:38:11.000 Okay, beautiful.

02:38:12.000 Thank you, brother.

The Joe Rogan Experience - March 09, 2010

JRE MMA Show #11 with John Danaher

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript