The UFC Performance Institute is a state of the art facility for training, recovery, and nutrition for the UFC s athletes. In this episode, we sit down with UFC President Dana White and Vice President of Performance, Forrest Griffin, to talk about what it's like to work at the Performance Institute. We also talk about the importance of nutrition and how important it is in order to be an elite martial arts fighter. We hope you enjoy this episode and stay tuned for our next episode! Subscribe to our new podcast, The Ultimate Fighter Unfiltered, where we cover all things UFC! Subscribe today using our podcast s promo code POWER10 for 10% off your first pack! Thanks for supporting the podcast and supporting the cause! If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts! or wherever else you get your stuff! We appreciate all the support and look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Peace, Love, Blessings, Cheers, EJ & Rory - The Cheers! -Jon Sorrentino & Rory Mcgregor. -The Cheers. -Jon & Rory <3 - Derek Videll and Cheers Jon and Rory - AKA <3 Thanks Jon & Rory & Rory. - The Jerks & Cheers - - Cheers - EJ and Rory. ~ - Derek and Rory! -Jon and Rory, . - <3 <3 Jon & EJG& Rory . . Thank you for all the love and support you all of your support and support. - Rory and Rory's love and respect and appreciation. -Chad & Rory's support is so much. -DANGS! - Thank you so much for all your support & support! -Curtis CHEERS! -CRYGS! & CHEER! -JON & CLADY! -ROBBIE -JORDY & JACOB & JOSH & JUICY & DANGS -DALLAS & JOSEPH -THANGS & JAY & GRAVY - CRYGSVY & KELLY AND KAREN & DALLAS - JACOS & JAMIE'S PODCAST (AJ & KEVY)
00:00:25.000Well, I'm really glad you guys are here because I was blown away when I went to visit the, you know, you hear the Performance Institute and you go, well, what is this going to be like?
00:00:34.000You go there like, oh my god, they thought of everything.
00:00:35.000It's like the ultimate state-of-the-art facility for training, for recovery, for nutrition.
00:01:17.000Well, we appreciate the kind words, obviously.
00:01:19.000I mean, ultimately, yeah, the vision of the UFC was to build a performance institute that was truly a world-class high-performance center that had everything that fighters would need.
00:01:29.000But not only are we trying to align ourselves as the leaders in mixed martial arts, but certainly leaders in human high performance.
00:01:39.000My role is the Vice President of Performance.
00:01:43.000I essentially direct the philosophy of how we're going to interact with the fighters, how we're going to support the fighters, and obviously manage our world-class staff that are working within the performance facility.
00:01:55.000And Clint, you came from a background in amateur wrestling.
00:01:59.000Tell everybody what your job is over there.
00:02:02.000I'm the director of performance nutrition.
00:02:05.000Anything related to feeding of athletes is essentially managed by myself and our ever-expanding team.
00:02:12.000So it can be as broad as working with athletes for their general training plan, integrating within the other performance services, as well as feeding athletes on the ground, integrating within our kitchen at the Performance Institute, supporting athletes as they prepare for fight week, weight descents, etc., and then supporting athletes on fight week and preparing even at the last moment of fight day to fuel up and to be really well fueled for their performance.
00:02:39.000My background is, like you said, in amateur wrestling.
00:02:41.000I wrestled and coached at Cornell University.
00:02:46.000Was on the U.S. national team with a number of actually current fighters right now.
00:02:50.000So Daniel Cormier and a number of other athletes, Chris Weidman and some others.
00:02:55.000And then I went back to school and got all my credentialing to be a registered dietitian.
00:03:00.000And so that's kind of led me through developing a program at Cornell to the UFC with a pretty unique combination of the nutrition, the dietetics, and then obviously the experience in combat sports and weight cutting.
00:03:14.000Yeah, and in my opinion, the most grueling combat sport.
00:03:18.000We talked about it on the last podcast.
00:03:20.000It's a crazy way for a kid to learn hard work and to learn real competition and the actual physical struggle of getting through wrestling practice and strength and conditioning grills.
00:03:30.000Most kids that are coming up in high school and college, they don't really work that hard in any other sport.
00:03:37.000I remember in high school like walking into the wrestling room and it's a bunch of gross dudes like in a sweaty hot room and then it was like basketball was right next to it.
00:03:46.000I walked next to the basketball there's like dudes in tent tops and some like cheerleaders.
00:04:15.000But the difference in an elite wrestler like yourself and a person who doesn't have that skill, it's so hard to bridge that gap It's hard to learn later in life.
00:04:24.000GSP is one of the few people that's just like, I'll just take this up and be amazing at it, because I'm GSP, and then I'll become a gymnast.
00:04:34.000We were talking about this almost on the last podcast as well, that he used to do that karate blitz.
00:04:39.000So he was so used to that lunging in stuff that he sort of incorporated that with a blast double.
00:04:44.000And he's so physically strong and such a smart dude and so good at learning things that he just figured out the essential techniques that he needed to master and just got better and better at them.
00:04:55.000Way back in the day, obviously, UFC 1 was kind of a discipline versus discipline kind of grudge match, and having been a lifelong wrestler, that's when I started tuning in, actually, and taking pride in all the wrestlers, taking names, and growing within the sport, and obviously with the evolution of the sport.
00:05:13.000It's a different dynamic, and obviously...
00:05:16.000Each athlete coming from their own discipline is really fun for us to work with as practitioners, having their own kind of sport culture.
00:05:22.000But wrestling is obviously a core component to what each athlete's doing.
00:05:26.000And when I'm working with athletes and talking through their weekly training plan and how to feed and fuel for each of these types of training sessions and hearing them bitch about how hard those wrestling practices are...
00:05:37.000I always get a little bit of pride there.
00:05:40.000And imagine doing it for eight months straight for a college wrestling season and grind that out.
00:05:44.000But it's definitely been fun for me to watch wrestling as a component of MMA grow and be able to contribute to the sport on a few different levels.
00:06:27.000I mean, at the Performance Institute, we always talk about mixed martial arts as the decathlon of combat sports.
00:06:35.000And I think, you know, our philosophy is to try and understand all the respective components that makes a world-class MMA fighter.
00:06:42.000I think, you know, if you're in the UFC, you've got some certain X factors that allow you to be world-class, and, you know, wrestling is a huge component of that.
00:06:52.000But what we try to do is understand limitations as well.
00:06:55.000Because in a decathlon, you're only ever as good as your weakest event, right?
00:06:58.000So if you're a striker, if you're a grappler, or if you're a wrestler, we're trying to support each of those to understand how we can elevate the whole thing.
00:07:05.000Now, how much input do you put into fighters, if any, into how they incorporate their skills and how they combine their skills together?
00:07:14.000Do you guys offer coaching on technique and approaches?
00:07:20.000We don't do sports-specific coaching, so physical therapy, sports nutrition, strength and conditioning, sports science, and then Duncan oversees all those to make sure that they work.
00:07:31.000All right, so our philosophy, anything that doesn't make you better in the octagon is pretty pointless.
00:07:37.000So what I do is I'll just go over what your training schedule looks like with you, and then, you know, Where do we feed accordingly for this practice?
00:07:46.000And then Roman, our sports scientist, when can you be recovered enough for this practice?
00:07:54.000If you think about it, if you guys are fighting and the Performance Institute is working with both of you, we make you as big, strong, healthy, have the easiest time making weight, go into your fight as fueled as you can.
00:08:06.000But if I start saying, hey, you know what?
00:08:53.000For a young fighter to have the access, first of all, just the access to the physical facility, just all the different modalities you guys have, and the strength and conditioning stuff, and the fact that you can...
00:09:06.000One of the most impressive things was the camera setup around the octagon, so that you could film sparring sequences and technique sequences, and the fighter, you can back them up and rewind them and watch it, and you can see how you drop your leg here, see how your chin is up in the air, and all these different...
00:10:48.000So it was going on about two weeks in.
00:10:51.000I heard this was happening and I was like, oh, hey guys, I work for you.
00:10:55.000I'm doing community outreach right now, but I've been trying to figure out the best way to train for mixed martial arts for the last 18 years.
00:11:38.000Do you guys do it on heart rate variability?
00:11:42.000When you determine whether or not someone's recovered enough to- Tell them about Omega Wave.
00:11:47.000Yeah, I mean, there's plenty of different ways to do it.
00:11:49.000At the most basic level, it's just speaking to a guy and getting subjective feedback, right?
00:11:53.000How you're feeling is one of the best questions that we can ask an athlete.
00:11:57.000But, yeah, I mean, we're blessed and we're privileged with pretty high resource at the UFC Performance Institute, so we have some pretty involved technologies.
00:12:05.000One of the ones that we use is a system called OmegaWave.
00:12:08.000That gives us real insight and removes the subjectivity where it can get objective understanding around physiology, particularly looking at the DC potential of the brain.
00:12:42.000And this Omega Wave, is it something you wear?
00:12:46.000Yeah, so ultimately it's a three to five minute assessment.
00:12:49.000You wear something that resembles a heart rate strap, lying at rest.
00:12:54.000We also have electrodes on the third eye of your brain, essentially.
00:12:58.000So we're picking up cardiovascular stress, and we're picking up the autonomic nervous system, and we're looking at things like heart rate variability, which you've already mentioned.
00:13:15.000It's a first thing in the morning measurement, too, to understand how well you recovered from the day before and those windows of trainability for the next day, that coming day.
00:13:25.000I think it all comes back to what Forrest says.
00:13:27.000Ultimately, what we're trying to do is understand individual responses, right?
00:13:31.000At the end of the day, everyone's on a pathway of performance mastery to be a world champion.
00:13:37.000And people respond to the workloads, the intensities, the volumes in very different ways.
00:13:41.000If we take a basketball team and put them all through the same workout, you've got 15 different guys that are responding in very different ways to the same workout.
00:13:49.000So we're privileged in that we work with an individual sport and that's our mantra is that we're looking at every single athlete as an individual and we're building our programming strategies and our information in an individual way.
00:14:03.000So you guys have been doing this now for how many years?
00:14:07.000We're coming up on two years on May 22nd is our second anniversary.
00:14:11.000And do you have like a log of all the different cases you worked with so you can kind of review like what methods were more effective than others and you're constantly trying to improve this protocol or...
00:14:23.000I mean, we've obviously been involved with numerous fight camps, but we're also working with fighters that are not in camp.
00:14:29.000Last year, we presented this journal, our first journal, which is an overview, a cross-section of all the data that we accrued in our first 12 months, and we continue to aggregate that data.
00:14:40.000Now one of the privileges that we have at the Institute is we get the opportunity to work with just under 600 fighters on our roster, so we can create real clear cross-sectional awareness of what different weight classes look like, what the challenges are to a fighter, and then the fighters can compare and contrast themselves against their immediate peers in their weight class.
00:15:00.000So that's one of the most powerful benchmarking tools you can create.
00:15:03.000This Omega Wave technology, can people buy that?
00:15:06.000Oh yeah, it's just a commercial product off the shelf.
00:15:08.000And it looked like it worked off an app?
00:15:19.000Plates can look at neuromuscular responses.
00:15:22.000Some of our nutrition variables will change across time.
00:15:26.000So it's not just one tool that has given us all the answers.
00:15:28.000The Windows of Trainability concept is something that really helps us on a day-to-day basis to understand can you go into a strength or power type session today and really maximize the opportunity to create the adaptations.
00:15:40.000Another day, it might be an endurance emphasis.
00:15:42.000So what it allows us to do is just give kind of kudos and credence to the athlete to understand where's the best approach and where you're going to optimize your responses.
00:15:50.000Every other sport is easier to train for than MMA. If you think about it, I was a defensive end in high school.
00:15:57.000Every defensive end needs the same physical abilities.
00:15:59.000You think about the combine, the NFL combine, for instance.
00:16:03.000They've figured out over a million years what they want to test for.
00:16:06.000And the guys, they run the same, they jump the same per position.
00:16:12.000So quarterbacks don't need to necessarily be that fast if they can throw.
00:16:15.000But for everybody else, the numbers are kind of the same.
00:16:18.000For our sport, and they've collected, I don't know, I don't know how many data points at this point, but it's a lot.
00:16:24.000So they're anonymized, normalized, so you know what average looks like.
00:16:28.000So you can give a guy like Anthony Smith, say, hey, look, man, and I bring him up because he's mentioned it before.
00:16:35.000He's been outspoken about working with the PI. Hey, you know what?
00:16:38.000Your force power measurements, they're pretty average for 205. You're not a weak guy.
00:16:44.000You could think about going up a weight class.
00:16:46.000So it's just objective information so the athletes and hopefully their coaches can make those choices.
00:16:52.000Do you think they would benefit from more weight classes?
00:17:00.000So I thought, ah, 65, you know, look at the percentages.
00:17:03.000And then, you know, I was talking to actually Dana and Sean, and I was like, well, this guy's going to go to 65. This guy's going to go to 65. Everybody's going to go.
00:18:16.000We've actually had a number of athletes, I would say over the last year, come to us specifically, and sometimes it's matchmakers who are saying, hey, this guy wants to go down, come take a look, meet with the PI staff, see what you guys think.
00:18:29.000All those things that Forrest said are really valid.
00:18:32.000We do have a lot of battery of tests, both in the nutrition space around body composition, around metabolic health.
00:18:40.000Function, oftentimes bad weight cuts will diminish and depress the metabolic rate, the resting metabolic rate, as well as it progresses over time through training.
00:18:50.000And then, like we said, some of the energy systems, a lot of the strength and power diagnostics.
00:18:54.000How does an athlete compare to the norms and the standards that are set for that division?
00:19:00.000So first thing that I look at is how does their body fit into a division?
00:19:06.000Everybody's body is broken into three components if you think about it in terms of bone, muscle, and fat.
00:19:11.000And if somebody's fat-free mass, it's everything except for their fat, is bigger than 99% of the athletes in that weight division, it's not going to be a good fit.
00:19:23.000So a big thing is benchmarking and understanding how somebody's body fits into their division compared to others.
00:20:02.000So it happens all the time, whether it's a week or eight weeks.
00:20:05.000That filters into every single member of our team, especially as we're doing more and more on the ground at fight events.
00:20:11.000But that gets filtered up to Duncan, and then Duncan handles the coordination of that.
00:20:15.000He could literally be there with, say, if he was going to fight Marlon Marais, they literally could be in the Performance Institute at the same time.
00:20:30.000The guy wouldn't be doing MMA in the octagon.
00:20:32.000You schedule them first come, first serve.
00:20:34.000Do you ever anticipate a problem with guys that are supposed to be fighting each other, like what just happened with Masvidal recently, where an actual fistfight breaks out?
00:20:45.000Man, you find most of these guys want to get paid to fight, not pay to fight.
00:20:49.000When the cameras aren't on, they're not so...
00:20:55.000The other thing is, when you're leading into a fight, my thought was you cannot let that person think they intimidated you.
00:21:01.000And if that means you actually have to hit them, maybe it does, but the idea is that I can't let you think that you have a mental advantage.
00:21:17.000I was like, you guys are getting paid!
00:21:21.000Yeah, like if it was a basketball player, sucker punches another basketball player in the face at some sort of a press conference like that, like Masvidal did.
00:24:10.000So we went around benchmarking, yada, yada, 60-plus facilities.
00:24:14.000And you notice a lot of the people that we hired worked with international Olympic sports, and that's kind of our athlete model, right?
00:24:22.000So Olympic athletes, they might go to Colorado Springs for two weeks or for four months or for a week and do like a skills camp or something.
00:24:32.000You come in three, four days and then go home with like a program, you know, a diet, strength conditioning program, PT program, your training load goals, et cetera.
00:26:06.000Our guys, if you look at mixed martial arts, that is 6 to 36 seconds of high intensity work followed by 2 to 3 times as much low intensity work repeated throughout a 5 minute round.
00:26:18.00077% of fights are won in those high intensity efforts, right?
00:26:23.000So that's where the fight is won and lost.
00:26:24.000But you don't know if that 6 seconds is going to be the first 6 seconds of the fight or the last 6 seconds of the fight.
00:26:30.000So Usain Bolt knows that he's going 100 metres.
00:26:34.000Our guys don't know if they need to be the best starter or the best finisher.
00:26:39.000So you've got to prepare for everything.
00:26:40.000So all these degrees of freedom, these external variable things that come into mixed martial arts make it the most complex sport to figure out and build a structure and a development pathway against.
00:26:50.000It's so interesting too that so many different fighters have a completely different approach.
00:26:55.000A low-volume, high-power approach, like maybe a Tyron Woodley.
00:26:59.000And then you've got a guy like Nick Diaz, who just smothers guys.
00:27:01.000He just stays on you and keeps punching you and talking shit to you, and he sees you starting to lose your breath, and he keeps coming after you, and he can push a pace because of his long-term cardiovascular condition.
00:27:11.000And you can't tell him he's doing it wrong.
00:27:54.000I mean, that's what the best fighters do, right?
00:27:56.000They take the fight where they want it to go.
00:27:58.000But it's just so interesting to see that everyone does have a different approach that they make work with their body structure.
00:28:04.000It's quite unique because we've looked at a lot of our physiological assessments, and when you take the data and you compare and contrast, for example, people with grappling and wrestling backgrounds versus striking backgrounds, you can take something like power and you can differentiate between those two.
00:28:19.000So, alright, I want to get a competitive advantage as a striker.
00:28:24.000I might need to improve my strength work because the wrestlers are already stronger than me.
00:28:28.000We can look at the strength characteristics.
00:28:31.000Our data shows that the guys that come from a wrestling background are far and above stronger than the strikers, which you would expect, right?
00:28:38.000But if you look at things like, can you differentiate our top 15 in the world versus the rest of the roster in that weight class?
00:28:50.000And at the end of the day, ultimately in a complex, chaos-based sport, skill is always going to be the best determinant of performance.
00:28:58.000So we're not saying that the physiological variables aren't important to the sport of MMA, but it's really hard to tease out where you need to push your strategy and where you need to optimise your training.
00:29:08.000Because in a homogeneous population of world-class fighters, it kind of gets absorbed and it becomes invisible where the differences are.
00:29:24.000And that's where the individualization, personalization for every single athlete comes in.
00:29:28.000We find their strengths and some of their gaps where it might be the lowest point-scoring component of their decathlon of MMA. And if it's a deficiency that maybe hasn't been taken advantage of yet, but will, that's where we fill those gaps so that they can start to fill those holes and become more complete, more comprehensive.
00:29:54.000I mean, we have We're trying to assess every component of preparation that can support or limit that athlete's performance in the cage.
00:30:04.000In terms of how all those things work together, it's really vital that if somebody's working on their strength and power, they're not feeding their body in a way that's actually limiting their ability to perform the high-intensity training.
00:30:17.000Because then that limits the adaptation that we're looking for as a response to that training.
00:30:23.000And that's a really critical point where nutrition really is a foundation that supports the development of all the other adaptations that are required to become that complete mixed martial artist.
00:30:36.000So as the strength and conditioning plan is being laid out, as the physical therapy plan, as the recovery plan, all of those are coming to fruition.
00:30:45.000The nutrition, obviously, is really near and dear to what I'm doing, is really critical at supporting the adaptation so that we're not pulling the athlete in two different directions in terms of the adaptation.
00:30:56.000Now, in terms of when you take fighters and athletes into your performance institute, have you guys ever worked with young, junior, amateur mixed martial artists, kids that are coming up?
00:31:12.000Show them, give them a peek at what it's like to see the world-class fighters?
00:31:17.000Well, we don't at the Performance Institute in Las Vegas because we're very much aligned to supporting our current roster, and it's a facility and a philosophy that's been designed to support our current roster.
00:31:28.000What we're doing in June of this year, however, is opening up a facility in Shanghai, China, which will have a completely different business model in terms of that will be very much a developmental program for guys that aren't currently in the UFC. So obviously we're trying to improve the talent standards in China and develop that market and break that new territory, but the mechanism to doing that is going to be very much through talent development in the Performance Institute.
00:31:52.000So over there, we will have MMA coaches and grappling coaches and striking coaches.
00:31:57.000We don't have that in Las Vegas because we're currently working with guys that are already on the roster.
00:32:00.000Well, it's such a unique sport in the fact that even though it is one thing when you get into the UFC, the paths to get there are so widely different.
00:32:09.000And you really don't know what the right way is.
00:32:12.000Is the Krokop path the right way to do it?
00:32:13.000Or is the Daniel Cormier path the right way to do it?
00:32:22.000Where your pathway in, you could say that if someone is an elite kickboxer or an elite grappler, that going in with that one major advantage in that one skill set could take you very, very far versus an overall game approach that some guys have where they're really good at everything.
00:32:40.000Right, and the true specialist, if you look at the day, the true specialist, the GSPs of this world, still hasn't necessarily risen to the top in the sport of MMA. You still see guys that are stylistically, they have a stylistic emphasis, and that's their X Factor that keeps them at the top of the game.
00:32:54.000Yeah, and then there's execution, which is creativity, and their ability to perform under pressure, their ability to maintain their cool during camp where they never overtrain, and they stay in a good space, they stay in a good headspace, and I've When you first asked about, you know, something I've seen that I love, training partners, right?
00:33:23.000Bring your training partners to the UFC PI. And we've had, I don't know, six, seven, eight guys that came in as training partners and are now on the UFC roster.
00:33:32.000So that's why I'm not an asshole to anyone.
00:33:52.000The services, we would argue, are even better than the facility.
00:33:56.000But training partners, coaches, those that are on the Contender Series, those that came through for the Ultimate Fighter, they have all been able to use and to access the facility in short periods.
00:34:06.000Training partners can come and access the facility, eat on campus.
00:34:11.000Strength train with the UFC athlete, use the facility upstairs, and train in the MMA space.
00:34:16.000And when they get the chance, when they get the shot, then they tap right into services.
00:34:21.000And it's an opportunity for us to, you know, essentially influence the community even before we're working with them directly, which is a really huge component of our philosophy and really what we're looking to accomplish.
00:34:32.000I think it would be massively inspirational for the fighters too, the young guys.
00:34:36.000Yeah, I mean, our philosophy is to accelerate the evolution of the sport of mixed martial arts.
00:34:40.000That's in our mission statement, as you've seen.
00:34:43.000When you walk through the door, it's right there on the wall, you know?
00:34:46.000And to do that, we're trying to shift the barometer in terms of, not the professionalism of the sport, but the expectations of fighters within the sport.
00:34:54.000You look at someone like Brown Ortega, and listen, what we're not trying to do is take the wild out of the stallion, right?
00:35:00.000We're not trying to just push science at fighters.
00:35:03.000At the end of the day, these guys are world-class fighters for a reason.
00:35:06.000But you can train and shape the stallion and it still has the wild at heart, right?
00:35:09.000So what we're trying to do is shift the barometer so there's an expectation of what a professional athlete should really expect.
00:35:16.000Brian Ortega has worked out in his garage most of his garage.
00:35:20.000LAUGHTER But in terms of what's the expectation that a professional fighter should expect, the Performance Institute demonstrates that not everyone can have access to it, obviously, but that's an aspiration and it's where people should understand in the sport of mixed martial arts the standard that as a professional fighter you can expect.
00:35:38.000And it's so important, I think, that you put all these things under one roof like that and create this environment because it seems to be trickling off into other places.
00:35:48.000The level of training and recovery and everything is so intense and so severe that people are starting to try to mimic certain aspects of that in their own gyms, in their own different places.
00:35:58.000The problem is you can't do things in isolation, alright?
00:36:01.000If you just say, I'm going to really hammer the recovery piece and forget about the nutrition piece, it's a large machine, right?
00:36:08.000There's cogs and all the cogs need to work together.
00:36:11.000And that's what we truly feel we can offer and we can deliver is this, not necessarily a multidisciplinary service, but an interdisciplinary service where we have multiple aspects coming together to fill the whole picture of an athlete's portfolio of needs.
00:36:25.000And that's what we can offer through the Performance Institute.
00:36:28.000The other thing we want to do is figure out what the best practices are and disseminate them.
00:36:33.000Like, we don't want to just know a bunch of stuff so we can keep it.
00:36:35.000Remember, we want every other gym, like, hey, here's what we've learned.
00:37:16.000That comes with the X factors, that comes from the fighters, their passion and their commitment to their sport.
00:37:22.000But what we're trying to do, back to your original question, I think, around this 1% is so hard to measure, but what we're able to do is to help them to do it more consistently and to do it longer into their career so that they can optimize, they can maximize their ability to train, to adapt, to perform, and give themselves the best chance to be successful on fight night.
00:37:43.000Yeah, and there must be so many fighters that come from a discipline, whether it's judo or something along those lines, and then they start fighting in MMA, so they get a boxing coach, and they have a few guys working with them with leg kicks, but they don't have a nutrition guy, and they don't have a recovery guy, they don't have someone who understands deep tissue massage.
00:37:59.000They've got to find someone to organize a diet for them.
00:38:01.000They've got to figure out how to cut weight healthy, properly.
00:38:04.000And these things are so difficult for fighters to put, especially if you don't live in a place that has something like an American top team or some gigantic institution.
00:38:14.000Yeah, I mean, there's fighters, even top fighters on our roster might potentially hire a nutritionist for a short period of time in the fight camp, you know, for an eight-week period.
00:38:36.000That's what our philosophy is, as Clint has already talked about, in terms of plugging the holes and being able to offer the services that you need as a particular athlete.
00:38:45.000So there's large gyms out there, American Top Team, AKA, they've got their own guys.
00:39:03.000And we're not trying to displace the programs where athletes already have resources, but I don't know of another MMA gym globally that has the capacity around assessment that we do.
00:39:14.000So yeah, we have some really great practitioners, but Bo Sandoval, our strength coach, and his team cannot write programs for 570 athletes.
00:39:24.000But what we can do is assess those athletes, provide that feedback back to their strength coaches, and have conversations about how those coaches can use that data to support the development of that athlete.
00:39:34.000And that goes across the board for all of our performance services.
00:39:37.000Well, it's a pretty amazing resource because if you're a young fighter and all you have is access to the people around you, if you're fighting in the UFC, you get to have access instantaneously to this gigantic group of people.
00:39:50.000Forrest, when you were coming up, you were a real pioneer.
00:39:54.000That was not available to a guy like you.
00:39:56.000No, I mean, I tell the story all the time, but so I was actually a little bit ahead of my time.
00:40:01.000I had, you know, I had an actual strength coach that had letters behind his name.
00:40:05.000Went to college to be a strength coach, not that was like an ex-bodybuilder.
00:40:09.000I had, you know, a relatively good nutritionist who at least had a degree in chemical biology.
00:40:15.000I had a good physical therapist, but I didn't really have, like, I was my coach.
00:40:21.000You know, at the end of the day, I was the head of performance.
00:40:23.000So I'd go do jujitsu and, you know, jujitsu coach wants you to go hard and then you go kickbox, but you're going to go light, but it's kickbox, so you don't.
00:40:30.000And then, you know, and now, you know, nobody's the strength coach and nutritionist on different pages.
00:40:36.000So I think just understanding that everything has to work together, which I didn't really understand.
00:40:42.000Well, what I'm saying is that you kind of had to pave a path.
00:40:46.000Because when a guy like you was doing all that stuff with a real legitimate strength and conditioning coach, a real legitimate nutritionist, how many other people were doing that at your time?
00:40:55.000Not that many, but I got to be around good people like Randy Couture, Chuck Liddell.
00:40:59.000Those were kind of guys I got to hang out with and say, well, he does this, he does that.
00:41:03.000Chuck actually wasn't into that much of this stuff, but Randy was.
00:41:10.000Yeah, he just existed on pure savagery.
00:41:12.000When you step back and look at your career, how amazing is it to be able to step off from there and Do something like you're doing now for the UFC Performance Institute, which is very meaningful for young fighters.
00:41:26.000I mean, you really do get a chance to give back with your experience and your understanding of the right way and the wrong way, the mistakes that you've made.
00:41:50.000Every other sport so evolved, been around so long, our sport changes all the time.
00:41:54.000I forget who was talking about it, but, you know, even the guys fighting 10 years ago probably couldn't compete with the guys fighting today, you know?
00:42:02.000I mean, what I would say as well is not only for the fighters, Forrest is a huge resource for us.
00:42:07.000The best piece of technology we have is the door handle that leads from my office to Forrest's office, right?
00:42:12.000Because ultimately, he's a massive resource for us that are not necessarily coming from an MMA background and are trying to support the MMA community to bounce ideas off, to essentially beta test things from a thought process perspective.
00:42:25.000And he's a huge part of the Performance Institute philosophy because we can use and call upon his expertise.
00:43:01.000You know, nutrition actually was a little different because the rest of the world does not understand a weight cut for an MMA fight.
00:43:09.000It's not like, you know, you go to Exos, you go to any high-level facility, and you say, I'm going to lose 8% of my body weight and then compete on Saturday.
00:44:09.000It was a prime Diego Sanchez performance 15 years into the game.
00:44:13.000I mean, that's just into the UFC. He had amateur fights, or professional fights rather, before the UFC. He's been in the UFC for 15 years, man.
00:45:07.000And then when you look at the data, it's like, oh, no, I'm just average.
00:45:11.00035. That's when you start to fall apart.
00:45:13.000When you look back now with what you know now and all the athletes you've worked with at the UFC PI, do you think you would have done anything different in terms of the way you prepared?
00:47:10.000The level of guys now is so extraordinary to see.
00:47:15.000When you see the elite champions of today, you just have this insane level of fighter.
00:47:21.000As a person who's been involved in the sport as long as I have, I still never cease to be amazed at the level of talent of these guys coming up.
00:47:30.000Because some of these guys coming up, they just could do everything.
00:47:32.000And they can do everything at such a high level, and you're realizing you're seeing the results of kids that started out learning MMA when they were like five, six years old.
00:48:10.000Yeah, but it's just incredible, too, that the sport, when you look at women's MMA, like particularly Amanda Nunes, Chris Cyborg, that fight, I mean, that is as crazy exciting as any fight you will ever see in your fucking life.
00:48:23.000And Amanda Nunes bombed on one of the greatest, if not the greatest, women's MMA fighter of all time and KO'd her in the first round in spectacular fashion.
00:48:33.000Like, if you're not a fan of MMA or women's MMA after watching that...
00:48:37.000Yeah, like, that's funny you mention that.
00:49:33.000What I was getting at before when you were talking about little kids, when I was...
00:49:36.000I was rather talking about kids coming up and amateur fighters.
00:49:41.000There would probably be something that would be really beneficial of having some sort of a program like that in America where kids can understand the right way and the wrong way to do it so they don't have to repeat these problems and these mistakes that have already been kind of gone over.
00:49:59.000That's your background in the British Olympics system, right?
00:50:14.000I mean there's no clear performance pathway into the highest level of the UFC for the sport of mixed martial arts.
00:50:21.000But there's guidelines for training that I think kids might not have the resources.
00:50:25.000Every gym has a curriculum, and what we're trying to do is obviously add to that curriculum from a training perspective, a recovery perspective.
00:50:32.000But ultimately, what's the best pathway?
00:50:34.000And as you've already contested to, people are coming to this sport with so many different backgrounds.
00:50:38.000So are you going to chop that access route to the UFC in half, or are you actually going to promote it and find many ways to get into the UFC?
00:50:48.000I think we can look at things like the Olympic Games.
00:50:50.000Does MMA ever enter into the Olympic Games and create a pathway?
00:50:55.000And I'm sure the UFC are looking into that type of thing in the future and trying to be ambitious.
00:51:00.000But right now it's hard to define what's the optimal way and what is the optimal route into the UFC. I'm sure it's the same for other disciplines of martial arts, but I have a lot of experience in youth wrestling development.
00:51:25.000And when MMA came along, it was a little bit of a fear.
00:51:28.000We're going to lose a lot of athletes to MMA. And we did originally lose a lot of athletes on the Olympic level to MMA. Johnny Hendricks is a great example.
00:51:36.000Promising young wrestling star, went to MMA, became a UFC champ, did not become an Olympian.
00:51:40.000But what it's really done is it's created this popularity in wrestling in no small part to, I think, some of the feedback that you've provided around wrestling being so vital to the development of mixed martial arts.
00:51:52.000But there's been a real boon, I believe, in youth wrestling and, you know, youth and high school wrestling because people realize and recognize that this is a pathway into, you know, into becoming an elite mixed martial artist.
00:52:08.000Of all the athletes that are in the UFC, there's a very high level of champions right now that were 2008 Olympians.
00:52:15.000But if you look at the roster and how many people wrestled in high school, it's staggering.
00:52:19.000And so just getting this base, not only technique and the grind mentality, but the strength that you double-legging somebody from when you're 5 until you're 18, you develop strength that you can't develop when you're 22. And this core strength and the ability to do it.
00:52:35.000And I know that other disciplines are likely receiving similar windfalls, but in terms of developing that curriculum for development, that's definitely part of what we're interested in, alleviating some of the big mistakes, but there's still innumerable ways to get into it.
00:52:53.000Think about when you were doing jiu-jitsu.
00:52:55.000You had to struggle to find people to roll with when you started, right?
00:53:22.000It really is interesting, too, and it's dependent upon if a kid lives in an area that has a strong jiu-jitsu program or a strong Muay Thai program.
00:53:30.000Oftentimes, that's what dictates what path they get into the sport from.
00:53:39.000I'm on the advisory board, so I'm not only women's MMA, but women's wrestling as well.
00:53:45.000What's really interesting working on the clinical side of what we do at the PI is every discipline has its own, not only sport culture, but physiology that goes with it.
00:53:56.000As we talked about the strength dynamics for wrestlers, Are going to be different than the reactive strength for our strikers.
00:54:04.000And then nutrition and just overall lifestyle type sport cultures is really interesting coming from the different disciplines that you came from.
00:54:14.000They're doing a lot more fast and morning training.
00:54:16.000Wrestlers have obviously a weight cut culture that they bring with them and have a little bit more experience there.
00:54:21.000A lot of the Brazilian jiu-jitsu players, especially from Brazil, have their sport culture.
00:54:26.000So it's so intriguing being able to We work with one sport, but with so many subcultures within that sport.
00:54:34.000Really, really interesting to get to work with.
00:54:37.000Obviously, working with the female athletes, like you alluded to earlier, adds a whole other layer in terms of the dynamics that we're working with in terms of the physiology with our athletes.
00:54:47.000The female physiology and the weight cut, that's just the whole...
00:54:50.000You really need to go to school for that.
00:55:26.000What happens in the walls stays in these walls.
00:55:29.000Because if there's this place like the Performance Institute and it's run by the UFC, oh, the UFC that pays me to fight people, I'm worried that that's going to get to them.
00:55:39.000That was one of the biggest things when we started this.
00:56:36.000Every other athlete we work with comes in with sensitive injuries, and we have a private treatment suite within the Performance Institute, the PT area.
00:56:44.000So they can come get private treatment.
00:56:46.000And then in terms of supporting him for his weight cut, that starts 10 weeks, 12 weeks.
00:56:52.000For Camaro, three, four months in advance.
00:56:55.000How much are you trying to get him down to before the day of the cut?
00:56:58.000So every athlete is going to be a little bit different based on what their background is.
00:57:04.000Yeah, what their historical weight cutting practices have been, how hard they've been on the body.
00:57:11.000So we're assessing somebody like Kamaru for their metabolic rate, where they fit in terms of their body composition into that weight division, their lean tissue versus their fat tissue.
00:57:21.000Those that have a higher degree of lean tissue are going to have, muscle has more water than does fat and bone.
00:57:27.000So you can push the body a little bit further.
00:57:30.000For those that have a higher lean tissue.
00:57:32.000And so all of that planning and preparation starts many, many weeks in advance.
00:57:37.000And having heard Kamaru on your show a couple weeks ago, a lot of what we do with an athlete that doesn't have a history of missing weight We're good to
00:58:20.000They have to be doing pads rounds that are crazy hard.
00:58:24.000In every athlete, each one is going to have a different intensity relative to their body type.
00:58:29.000And so if somebody's doing pads, it's a 9 or 10 out of 10 in terms of intensity, and they're doing that fasted or they're doing that without carbohydrates available to do that work, they can't, A, hit those training intensities repeatedly, And then they can't adapt as a response to that training.
00:58:45.000So they end up just getting slower and more beat up instead of faster and more powerful.
00:58:50.000So if they're doing high intensity, we need to fuel the body in the specific way that supports that training effort and then the longer-term adaptation to that bout.
00:59:00.000Additionally, if they're doing lower intensity, we can adjust our fueling strategies based on what that dictates.
00:59:06.000If it's kind of a base aerobic training session or if they're doing skills and drills, we want to be feeding the body to adapt differently than if they're doing the high intensity sparring, strength and conditioning, or pads, or whatever that might be.
00:59:20.000So for every athlete, we're looking at how their body uses substrate energy, the energy that they're using, the substrate between carbs and fat, At each of these intensities.
00:59:28.000And then we also need to base our recommendations on where their body fits into the division.
00:59:35.000If they're 20% out from their weight division four weeks out, then we're going to have a little bit of a more aggressive strategy nutritionally because weight becomes a primary factor.
00:59:46.000If they're 10% out four weeks out, then we're going to have a little bit of a different conversation and prioritization around the fueling strategies.
00:59:54.000And all of these conversations integrate within our strength and conditioning program so that we're working in concert and tying in the workload into our own system as well as the training load that they're engaging with with their skill-specific training.
01:00:08.000Now when you vary the diet that you give them dependent of the workout, what is that based on?
01:00:13.000Is that based on a hard accepted science of carbohydrate versus protein versus essential fatty acids?
01:00:45.000Again, if we're a shot putter or if we're a 100-meter sprinter, Then we're going to be much more dependent on carbohydrates and really the creatine phosphate system.
01:00:54.000We're not even getting into the glycolytic system.
01:00:56.000And Duncan could talk a lot more about the energy systems.
01:00:58.000But essentially, we're reliant upon glucose and ATP for energy at those lower intensity bursts, right?
01:01:05.000So to hit repeated max or sub max efforts, we require blood sugar.
01:01:10.000And without it, we will deplete our initial stores.
01:01:15.000And then we can't We can no longer hit 90 or 95% of our max.
01:01:19.000We start hitting 80 and 70 and 60 and diminishing our ability to do these high-intensity efforts.
01:01:25.000Now, do you guys see anybody come in and try to fight on a ketogenic diet?
01:01:29.000Because I know quite a few guys were doing that for a while.
01:02:04.000So essentially, the more we can regulate blood sugar at rest and low intensities, then we can expand and to support the development of that kind of aerobic oxidative system.
01:02:14.000And by adapting to use fat as a primary substrate, we're doing a number of things.
01:02:18.000One, we're balancing blood sugar at rest so that we can really limit the insulin spikes and essentially adipose development.
01:02:30.000Driving the body towards the oxidative aerobic system.
01:02:35.000And then as we increase in what we do is we assess how the body adapts through the training intensities.
01:02:41.000And we'll repeat that kind of on a monthly basis to see how the athlete changes.
01:02:45.000And then as they increase in the intensity of a training effort, then we will adjust the ratio of fat to carbohydrates as a fuel substrate.
01:02:55.000I thought it was going to come up organically, but it didn't.
01:02:58.000The trifecta fight prep system, you guys and your team are going to 22 events this year.
01:03:11.000So, essentially, we're assessing and then we're programming based on each athlete's needs.
01:03:16.000So, like Forrest said, one of our most valuable partners at the UFC Performance Institute is this meal prep company called Trifecta Nutrition.
01:03:26.000And they essentially have an all-organic meal line that can be developed a la carte, ordered a la carte.
01:03:34.000And so with Kamaru as an example, we worked together for his past two fights.
01:03:39.000And many athletes, like I said, are not fueling the type of training in a way that leads to their long-term adaptation, but can lead to overtraining earlier in camp.
01:03:49.000And so what we really want to do is to understand how that physiology works and then program and then provide those athletes with the nutrition, whether it's on-site at the UFC Performance Institute.
01:04:00.000At the events as well is what I was getting at, like 22 events they go to.
01:04:30.000But if it's one of those 22 events, they would go and you could get the UFC PI to fuel you through the entire event.
01:04:37.000Yep, so there's a number of levels, so I'll get there in just one sec, but essentially we'll take them through the fight camp, fuel them for adaptation so they show up to the event.
01:06:10.000He's their executive chef and is building out the Fight Week meals based on me and my team's programming.
01:06:17.000So we work with every single athlete that we've connected with at the PI. It's gotten up to, on average, between 14 and 16 athletes at all the events that we're working.
01:06:28.000So all of the food calories that they put in their body from the time they step on foot on Tuesday for fight or check-in all the way through 30 minutes pre-fight, including all the supplements, NSF third-party tested supplements for supplement safety to make sure they're not getting adulterated products.
01:06:44.000We're keeping track of everything that they're consuming on the supplement side.
01:06:50.000We're not there to be a weight-cut coach.
01:06:52.000We are the sports dietetics team to support them on a programming and on a science evidence-based level.
01:07:01.000So we will consult with their teams around what's the safest, what's the most effective way to support an athlete making weight.
01:07:08.000And then we instantly, once they make weight, we have supplies that was developed Cooked, prepared by our chef that morning and the night before to support rehydration, electrolytes, to optimize the gut repopulation of gut microbiota, as well as balance the osmolality so that they're not getting gut cramping and issues that happen when you ingest a ton of sodium and glucose that causes a lot of water to rush into the gut.
01:07:36.000And then we essentially feed them all the way through, like I said, breakfast, lunch, and then pre-fight to support their performance on fight night.
01:07:45.000I'm an outspoken critic of cutting weight.
01:07:48.000I don't necessarily think it's the best thing for the sport or for the athlete.
01:07:53.000I mean, I think one of the benefits that we would get out of having more weight classes available is that fighters could get their body to the weight class where they're optimally at.
01:08:02.000I know you guys have had discussions about PED usage and how to stop adulterated supplements from getting to fighters and making people test positive, but what about Some long-term goal of potentially eliminating weight cutting the way they've eliminated PEDs.
01:08:19.000So, as we already talked about, I come from college wrestling.
01:08:23.000Tragically, in 1997, three college wrestlers died.
01:08:45.000But the NCAA dramatically overhauled their weigh-in rules from the day before to the day of.
01:08:53.000And there are a lot of similarities in terms of the types of athletes that are wrestling versus the types of athletes that are competing in MMA. But we work in and we work with professional athletes and we work for a professional fight promotion and the dynamics of a professional fight promoter is completely different than the NCAA. And the level of autonomy with our independent contractors versus the
01:09:47.000I personally would like to make it safer.
01:09:52.000There are less than ideal, I think, safety concerns that we've all heard of and a lot of us have seen.
01:10:04.000And from my perspective, The closer that you can bring it to the fight, the better.
01:10:11.000But because of the promotional nature of the UFC, it's limited.
01:10:15.000And then we have limited ability to affect change with the UFC because the commissions really are the ones that are really making the rules.
01:10:26.000I don't mean to sound like that asshole, but dude, pick your weight class, make the weight, or just say, you know, I'm not going to be able to do it.
01:11:46.000To have a guy dehydrate themselves or a girl dehydrates themselves literally to the point of going to the fucking hospital 24 hours before a cage fight is insane.
01:11:54.000If you could eliminate that, why wouldn't you?
01:12:08.000The best way to figure it out is to, first of all, you can definitely avoid a lot of struggle and tragedy by figuring it out, right?
01:12:15.000I mean, the fights that happen where fighters in several organizations cut weight and died during that process.
01:12:23.000That's heartbreaking, you know, if we could avoid that.
01:12:26.000It's already a dangerous sport as it is.
01:12:29.000We are collecting data at the Performance Institute.
01:12:32.000We all have some opinions around what works best in terms of reducing the extreme weight cutting, creating some competitive parity in the cage, I think is a really critical point so that it de-incentivizes that weight cutting process.
01:12:46.000If you can't be as big in the cage, well then there's not as much of a benefit.
01:12:54.000And the regulation in mixed martial arts is such that we're the promoter and we abide by the regulations of every single state athletic commission.
01:13:03.000And so we're collecting data so that we can understand the issue better.
01:13:08.000We're working to come to an understanding to then share with those that are the legislators of the system so that they can help make it safer as well.
01:13:18.000Because it's not just a unilateral decision where we tell our employees, this is what you do.
01:15:05.000It's very complex and I think that we, obviously here at the table and at the Performances too, have that as a primary kind of area of focus.
01:15:16.000We're working to affect the systems that can implement change.
01:15:37.000It's just such an unfortunate aspect of it that I get has been there from the beginning, or at least from the time the weight classes started being instituted.
01:15:47.000But it just seems to me that, boy, if there was a way to avoid that.
01:16:36.000The sports science landscape is vast, you know, and we try to keep abreast of all the latest technologies, the advantages in theory and philosophy.
01:16:44.000So, yeah, that's at the heart of everything we do.
01:16:46.000You know, we're trying to stay at the cutting edge of sports performance.
01:16:51.000So, how does that, do you have to go to conferences and find out what the latest stuff guys are doing?
01:16:55.000I mean, I did the math this week actually.
01:16:58.000I always say the church isn't the building, the church is the people.
01:17:01.000Our staff has got a combined experience in pro and elite sports of 106 years.
01:17:06.000We've got 18 Olympic Games supported within our staff alone.
01:17:10.000So our people, our staff are what is so precious to the Performance Institute, and we're very proud of our staff.
01:17:18.000They're respective world leaders in their own individual areas.
01:17:21.000But yeah, of course you have to go and speak to people.
01:17:24.000Of course you've got to listen to seminars and collect and gather information.
01:17:27.000They love their conferences, I'll tell you that.
01:18:17.000Yeah, I mean, again, Bo Sandoval, who's our director of strength and conditioning, puts it intimately in terms of, in the UFC, everyone's training hard.
01:18:27.000You know, you're not training harder than the guy next to you or in the gym next to you.
01:18:31.000What is the key is how fast you can recover and train again at the intensity that you need to the day after day after day and be robust enough to tolerate that.
01:18:40.000So, recovery and regeneration is just as important as the training exposure.
01:18:45.000In fact, your body obviously changes and adapts during the recovery and regeneration process.
01:18:50.000Yeah, listen, we've got hot tubs, we've got aquatic capabilities, we've got cryotherapy, we've got compression, we've got, you know, everything that you would expect in a world-class facility.
01:18:59.000What we're starting to do is really try to be a bit more prescriptive around that, as Clint's already talked about, you know.
01:19:06.000It makes no sense to us to look at a high neuromuscular striking session where you're hitting mitts or hitting bags and use the same recovery strategy as a high metabolic grappling session.
01:19:17.000These are totally different physiology challenges.
01:19:20.000So, yeah, to be prescriptive and to be a bit more strategic in our approach.
01:19:25.000But at the end of the day, what is core to recovery, it's such a personal thing.
01:19:29.000You know, some people don't like getting in the cryotherapy chamber.
01:19:32.000Some people can't swim, so they're not going to get in the water and do hot, cold plunges.
01:20:42.000Well, I think what Heather, who's our director of PT, will tell you is that the fascia and the fighter posture and the way fighters are putting their bodies through particular challenges obviously creates a lot of muscle tone, it creates a lot of tightness in the fascia, and just methods and mechanisms to free that up, to allow the joints and the articulation of the body to work effectively is huge.
01:21:07.000If you have greater than a, I'm trying to remember the numbers, but a A 10 to 20% imbalance in the joint within your body, you now have a 70 to 90% chance of injuring that joint, right?
01:21:21.000So just the difference in terms of symmetry and balance within the body and its influence on injury is massive.
01:21:28.000So why not be proactive in trying to utilize manual therapies and recovery modalities rather than working in a reactive process and waiting for the injury to happen?
01:21:38.000And again, that's core of our philosophy is that there's been a big shift in the barometer for some of the fighters that come through the Performance Institute.
01:21:46.000You know, the clinic and the therapy is somewhere where you go and you're injured.
01:21:49.000Well, you know, what we do is we promote it just as much as the strength and conditioning piece.
01:21:54.000So when you're talking about range of motion, are you including flexibility exercises?
01:21:58.000Do you guys incorporate a lot of that stuff as well?
01:22:17.000We're going to put that in your routine, right?
01:22:18.000So everything is needs analysis driven, right?
01:22:21.000So, you know, Brian Ortega don't need to be any more flexible.
01:22:24.000He can put his legs – he just needs to maintain his current flexibility, right?
01:22:28.000So it completely varies – And if you've got like a stiff wrestler, someone who's like just never really worked on it.
01:22:35.000Yeah, and think about the combat posture, that internal rotation, that combat posture where you're constantly throwing.
01:22:40.000I mean, just chronically doing that year after year is going to set you up for some amount of tightness in terms of fascia.
01:22:45.000So again, I don't want to get outside of my scope of expertise, but we're very proactive in promoting fighters using modalities proactively rather than reactively.
01:22:55.000So say if a fighter came in and they did a hard grappling workout, and after the training, what would you recommend and how much time?
01:23:04.000Because there's some thought that the body should exist in an inflamed state post-workout.
01:23:36.000In camp, when you're sharpening the knife ready for the fight, you want to remove any type of fatigue because you're getting close to the fight.
01:23:41.000You need to optimize your training and obviously peak to the performance on fight night.
01:23:46.000So, you know, there's got to be a strategy.
01:23:48.000We've got to periodize your recovery as you would periodize your training loads in camp or off camp.
01:23:53.000But yeah, there's different approaches and different modalities that you've got to utilize.
01:23:57.000So if you look at grappling, And the metabolic demand that goes into the wrestling and the grappling, that's a lactate kind of response.
01:24:06.000That's a circulatory issue in terms of those metabolites that are circulating around the body.
01:24:14.000So is that going to be something like a muscle pump type recovery strategy that will help it remove it through the liver and into the lymph system?
01:24:22.000You mean like one of those compression pants?
01:24:23.000Yeah, it might be a compression panel or it might be hot-cold.
01:24:26.000If you go hot-cold, the vessels will expand in the heart and they'll contract in the cold.
01:24:31.000You get a natural kind of muscle pump.
01:24:33.000And how many times do you ask fighters to do that when they do a hot-cold thing?
01:25:44.000In terms of measuring the actual inflammatory markers in the body, but some people don't like it.
01:25:49.000I'm just making the point that if you like that stimulation and you like that sensation and you walk out, you can forget the physiology because now we're tapping into psychology and that's still part of the recovery process.
01:26:08.000Just in terms of recovery, nutrition is a core value of the recovery process as well.
01:26:12.000So as much cryotherapy as you do, if you're not recovering, stimulating muscle, converting from catabolism to anabolism, providing nutrients for substrate regeneration, that's a critical component as well.
01:26:44.000It blunts the adaptive response based on the body's recovery process.
01:26:50.000So if you blunt your immune response to micro-trauma, muscle tears that need to be rebuilt stronger and faster, well then you limit the adaptation.
01:27:02.000So yeah, we want to provide nutrients to support recovery.
01:27:05.000But we don't want to eliminate the adaptive response to the training session.
01:27:10.000That's what's so fascinating about the science of it, that you can get that specific, that you know that if you consume the high levels of antioxidants post-training, it's going to blunt the recovery time.
01:27:21.000Curcumin, tart cherry juice, there's a number of spices that are included in a lot of different things, whether it's cooking or in our supplement protocol, that we will include, but we're going to target them away from the high-intensity training.
01:27:33.000How far away from the high-intensity training?
01:28:03.000It's like it's open to everybody who fights for the UFC. Yeah, and the other Another thing which I would say is this is at no cost to the fighters.
01:28:11.000They can decide how much they want to engage with us, as much or as little as they want.
01:28:15.000And again, that's the same with the trifecta program for meal prep.
01:28:19.000It's the same with our strength and conditioning program.
01:28:21.000So again, it's all bespoke and customized programming at no cost to the fighters.
01:28:25.000It's so exciting for me because having seen the fights and the sport and the level of sport evolve over all these years, it's so exciting to see constant and continuing innovation.
01:28:37.000And when you guys came along and built this thing and I had a chance to go and visit, I was so excited.
01:28:42.000I was like, this is what, man, every sport needs something like this.
01:28:55.000Right now, my left hip, I fell down skiing.
01:28:57.000You make a great point because what's been one of the really exciting things for us and refreshing also for the UFC Performance Institute is that sports like the NFL, the NBA, the English Premier League, we're having representatives from all of these teams, NHL, coming through and trying to understand or just be...
01:29:16.000Trying to understand what we're doing, how we're working our sports science into the sport of mixed martial arts, and to try and capture our philosophy and our approach from a facility development perspective through to kind of our educational processes, through to the way we're interacting with fighters.
01:29:29.000And again, we're trying to shape mixed martial arts.
01:29:32.000We're trying to influence the UFC. That's our number one mission.
01:29:35.000But the global awareness around the Performance Institute is really exciting as well.
01:29:41.000Now, I know you guys, you were talking about your place in China.
01:29:43.000Are you planning on going anywhere else?
01:29:46.000Well, right now, you know, the expectation or our desire is to influence mixed martial arts globally.
01:29:54.000So, right now, we don't know what that's going to look like, but the ambition is to obviously have performance institutes around the world that can help the development process.
01:30:02.000I want to build one like South Africa.
01:30:13.000What is cool about us operating and athletes being independent contractors and accessing us however they see fit is we have so many different case studies and utilization.
01:30:24.000We'll have people come out for a week at a time.
01:30:32.000We had Macy Barber, actually, she talked about it publicly, but she worked with us quite a bit for her last fight.
01:30:38.000She booked a flight from Nashville to Vegas to reconnect, to get updated nutrition, strength and conditioning, whatever metrics that we could update based on her health status, as well as orthopedic support post-fight.
01:30:52.000So we were able to get a number of days post-fight as part of essentially the completion of her fight camp to get her ready for the next phase.
01:31:00.000So there's a lot of different ways that athletes can utilize based on just whatever their needs are, whatever they perceive their needs to be, and then whatever influence we're able to kind of make over their preparation.
01:31:12.000And Macy Barber is a perfect example of someone getting that kind of high-level treatment very early in her career.
01:31:31.000When you treat these younger fighters, how much emphasis do you put on giving them just a smart protocol to try to minimize the potential injuries, to get them to understand the relationship between range of motion and injuries, to get them to understand balance?
01:31:51.000I know you guys have a machine that you actually can measure the muscles in the body and show the left and the right side what's weak and what's strong, right?
01:32:00.000I mean, we use force plates in certain particular...
01:32:03.000There's something you lie down in, though, isn't there?
01:32:05.000So we have the DEXA scan, which is essentially a low-dose x-ray that measures the mass of the tissue between bone mass, muscle mass, and fat mass.
01:32:17.000And so we can get a balance of the musculature and the skeleton bilaterally.
01:32:24.000When we see a big imbalance on that front, because that is a nutrition-related test, we will share that with both physical therapy and strength and conditioning.
01:32:32.000And then physical therapy could break that into more nuance around strength imbalances around joints using the biodex.
01:32:38.000And then strength and conditioning will do very similar kind of understanding using the bilateral force plates that Duncan was mentioning.
01:32:45.000That stupid machine told me I had two pounds less muscle in my left leg than my right.
01:33:30.000What's the injury risk, like Duncan was saying, in terms of strength imbalances?
01:33:35.000She and her team, Heather Linden, our director of PT, would do that orthopedic screen.
01:33:40.000See what the imbalances are and break it down and then that would lead to probably programming in her space and then also to strength and conditioning to build programs around whether it's mobility, range of motion or just around kind of hypertrophy to make up for some imbalances.
01:33:55.000So that's where the comprehensive approach comes in.
01:33:58.000I might assess something and then kick it over to them.
01:34:00.000There's many cases where they would assess something whether the strength coach happened this week So-and-so is having a bad training session.
01:34:11.000They talk about not being able to recover or get up for the next training session.
01:34:14.000That's an immediate referral over to my side of the fence.
01:34:18.000So that's where the integrated care becomes really, really critical.
01:34:22.000So, if you had someone that had a two-pound weight difference between their left leg and their right leg, how much time would you give them to gain that weight back?
01:34:29.000Would it be dependent upon the individual?
01:34:30.000You would probably want that to be a priority before they went into a heavy camp or something like that, right?
01:34:35.000You can't resolve that immediately, but that would be part of the...
01:34:39.000I mean, it comes back to the return on investment, right?
01:34:42.000What's the return on investment and the reduction of an injury risk to try and influence that two pounds?
01:35:26.000But again, in physical therapy and strength and conditioning, that's not revolutionary anymore.
01:35:30.000That's part of just another tool that we add to it.
01:35:33.000It's a way to augment or accelerate hypertrophy.
01:35:39.000So if you have someone that's coming back for returning from surgery or an injury, And you're looking to get muscle mass back onto the limb without necessarily loading it through free weights or whatever it may be.
01:35:49.000You can use blood flow restriction methods to try and increase the hypertrophy mechanism.
01:35:53.000What are your thoughts on electrical muscular stimulation, those little pads and shocks?
01:36:15.000I think with a lot of those things, there's some short-term relief, and again, you're influencing the nervous system, the long-term changes are potentially not there.
01:36:42.000So again, when we're talking about fascia and changing fascia and releasing fascia, if all you ever do is massage and depress the tissue, You're not getting that mechanism of lifting and bringing it up into the cup.
01:36:54.000So that's kind of the philosophy behind it.
01:40:27.000Now, how much time do you spend on sort of educating fighters about having to strengthen up all the surrounding tissue around knees and shoulders and necks and things along those lines?
01:40:39.000Things that are commonly your core, your lower back, commonly injured?
01:40:43.000Tissue resilience is massive in our sport because, again, it's end-range resilience, right?
01:40:48.000With the submission and the grappling exercise techniques, obviously you're taking a tissue and the tolerance of that tissue to its end range.
01:40:57.000So by being able to train that over time in a progressive fashion, of course it's going to have an influence.
01:41:02.000And yeah, part of our programming is going to approach that for sure.
01:41:06.000Now, you guys have been in action now for two years.
01:41:09.000You've had a bunch of different fighters move through and do their camps there.
01:41:14.000We've had a roster of 570. We've had over 430 of the fighters have already been through in the first 22 months.
01:41:21.000And we have a retention rate of about 73%.
01:41:24.000So they're either coming back for repeat visits or they're getting remote programming from ourselves.
01:41:28.000Now, how much has this changed over the two years?
01:41:51.000At the end of the day, the IP sits with the coaches, with MA coaches and people like Forrest.
01:41:55.000So just being able to understand how we can collect that information from a technical, tactical perspective and try and fit it into our philosophy of sports science being complementary to that, that's evolved all of our processes extensively over the last two years.
01:42:09.000Have you guys ever thought about putting any of these sessions online?
01:42:13.000Yeah, I mean, I always say the Performance Institute's got three responsibilities.
01:42:19.000The first responsibility is to service athletes, to service our fight community, either face-to-face or remotely.
01:42:26.000The second thing which we're trying to do, something like this, is to aggregate more information and more insights around the sport.
01:42:50.000But the second thing is we need to understand the sport.
01:42:53.000The sport of mixed martial arts is only 25 years old professionally.
01:42:56.000So aggregating data is the second thing.
01:42:58.000And then the third thing off the back of that data is dissemination and education across the global fight community.
01:43:04.000So we're called the Performance Institute for a reason, not the Performance Gym, because we are truly trying to do project work, do research work, work with partners to try and aggregate that information and our awareness and our understanding so that we can push it out there.
01:43:19.000So the plan is obviously moving forward to really ramp up our educational platforms to support the global community.
01:43:24.000And hopefully we'll have kind of certifications coming online and those types of things as well.
01:43:29.000So Strength and PT are filming stuff to put online to like a full, like, this is the way this exercise is properly done, these are things to look out for, for physical therapy and strength conditioning, you know?
01:44:07.000Well, I think what you guys are doing is amazing and it would be even more amazing if young fighters, people coming up really could influence a lot of folks.
01:44:59.000So, the goal, right, so the mission statement is to elongate careers, to help athletes make their weight class, stay within the weight class, fight great at their weight class.
01:45:10.000So, again, specific mandates like the exact KPIs, I forget what they are.
01:45:17.000Just off the back of the bar, so what I would say is that we can legitimately say in the first 19 months of our existence, we've saved 22 fights.
01:45:28.000Either through medical intervention or the work that Clint has done around someone that's behind their weight descent and we've really expedited that process.
01:46:19.000I was just going to add that a lot of what we're doing and the athletes that we get to interact with are the cases that require huge interventions.
01:46:28.000You know, people that are coming off a six-fight win streak are not looking for how to fix their metabolism or how to stop missing weight or how to improve their power because it's a deficiency or an orthopedic injury.
01:46:41.000So we're working with Those that are really successful and those that are struggling and everything in between.
01:46:47.000So it's around those interventions that have led to fights actually happening.
01:46:53.000There's a huge amount of, I guess, risk for lack of a better term, that we're taking on as we're really working with the athlete's best interest at heart and doing everything we can to support that athlete to be more consistent and to be able to do it longer into their career.
01:47:10.000So they could, you know, do the best for themselves, for their family, and for, I guess, the UFC. Beautiful.