Dr. Andy Galpin

00:07yes and we're live what's up man how are you fantastic thanks for doing this appreciate it appreciate you letting me come up so uh why don't you tell people what you do uh I am a muscle physiologist so I'm a PhD in human bioenergetics and I'm the director for the center for sport performance which all that basically means I study muscle physiology why it grows shrinks repairs dies and all that crap now when you're you're dealing with athletes and you're dealing with like state-of-the-art performance how much does that stuff change like year to year like protocols like what people used to think was the way to go what's the new way to go well the if you take a look or if you examine just the idea of Science in general it's the understanding that we're wrong like that's really what science is if if we knew what the answer was we wouldn't look into it like what's the point of

00:51doing a study if we know the answer right so by definition we're always evolving in that sense but it's quite funny how the central tenants are really not that different you take nutrition you take training the vast majority of those things are are similar to what they were 20 30 80 100 years ago so the bulk of it what matters for the bulk of athletes is fairly standard what where it differs is the last few percentage points it's getting us that last 10% gains or being very specific so you on a personal level need this little bit of difference and then you need this tiny bit of difference but the bulk of it really is not that different well when you watching uh MMA ERS in particular you see so many different methods mean so many different ways to approach things and I never know who's right you know it it really depends upon who's successful and then you go well that guy

01:41obviously has it down yeah that's a major fallacy called the fallacy of authority so or appeal to Authority which is somebody really good did it or somebody who coaches somebody really good they did it right or a lot of people did it all three of those are examples of major logical fallacies right to break down on Aristotle's reasoning that's not what we do now they can help us with some ideas of where to go but that's a really bad approach so we have to understand like what works for somebody at a very high level is not necessarily going to work for the bulk of people and particular if like the great example is is Schwarzenegger so when he came out with his book of the encyclopedia bodyb building everyone was like fantastic I'll go do those workouts well you're not Arnold and if you should be doing what Arnold did when he was at your stage not at his stage well also

02:27he's doing a bucket of steroids well that too right that's a big factor like if especially back in those days they didn't come clean about that stuff no so guys are like hey how come my biceps are ripping off the bone right you know or how come it's not working for me yeah yeah so so all that is is really important to understand um with the context of recovery the nutrition he has all the other stresses that are limited from his life all of that Chang is what's going to work or not work for you now there's a bunch of different ways of approaching things like uh I've always been fascinated by the Marv marinovich MH method and now Nick kerson takes that method as well and their idea is that strength and conditioning is especially when a Fighter's in Camp is more important than anything more important even than skill work like because you already know how to fight just so

03:13strength and conditioning should take precedent get all that done to so get your body to the point where you have the most horsepower the biggest gas tank the best tires you know the best handling and then you already know how to fight so just approach it that way yeah so the the guy actually trained Marv Michael yesus is a Fullerton guy oh scy Fullerton so he was the the sci Michael yesus that's his name yeah y SS Russian name ah he's awesome he's like 85 now or something and if you want to get massively entertained by somebody like he's a good one yeah because he's just very opinionated but nonetheless uh yeah that that is I think an important one if you look at Joel Jameson a friend of mine who trains Demetrius Johnson like all those guys they have very different approaches and I don't I think the massive fallaces this actually goes back to your original question is

04:01thinking that there is one single answer that's the problem right whether we're talking training nutrition recovery ice any of these modalities the the major reason we have so much internet fighting between experts and why it makes it so difficult for so many people to figure out like what's the right answer is because searching for a right answer is the problem to begin with we're having The Wrong conversation with all of this crap it's not the right place to go so those are two very different approaches for Demetrius they reduce a lot of the strength conditioning they do during Camp because they want to get very good with the train with the fighting so all that stuff is gone so Joel believes in training as much as we can prior to camp and then in Camp it's time to get better at fighting H someone like Nick is apparently has the opposite approach yeah I don't think that either one of

04:49them is more or Le less effective than the other it really comes down to the combination of coaches as well as the athlete so some athletes and and you could attest to this and I've seen this a bunch of times times if they're two days out 3 days out a week out some of them get really anxious if they don't get to practice the skill like I want to be really sharp with my combinations I want to be really good with my transitions Etc and if you take that away from them they get very anxious and they don't like it and so you almost have to do is program it based on this combination of physiology and psychology and that's a bit outside of my realm but this is what makes coaching so complicated is saying okay well you know what for you athlete one you're going to do the opposite approach athlete two you're going to be doing the other approach because you just don't feel as

05:35good you're not as confident you're not feeling as smooth and and more than anything when they walk down to that cage or particularly two or three days before they have to feel amazing yeah you have to have that combination yeah it is weird that like there is no answer no you know like there's one like a mark Hunt is going to have a completely different set of requirements than you know a Derrick Lewis or a Mighty Mouse Johnson or anybody body so like everybody's got different needs and and everybody's coming to the table with a different set of skills and a different set of problems yeah especially when you look at experience too so what worked for you in your second fight when you were 20 is maybe not the same approach you have to take when you're 30 I just I just got back from New York um I was in there the last three days and I was with one of my guys Dennis Bermudez and we

06:20had this conversation and when I first started working with him we had to take a very different approach the week of and especially even you know the hour before the fight cu the way that he got ramped up for a fight is very different than some other people that I've worked with what we had to realize and I remember he called me right after um one of his recent fights maybe four or five fights ago and he's like I'm freaking out because I didn't freak out in the cage this time we were I was like what and he's like you know I'm usually like really freaked out in the cage and this is what drives my performance but this time I was really calm and collected and I saw everything and I'm nervous that I'm not nervous enough so I had to get him in with with my good friend Lenny weo who's a sports psychologist it works with a lot of combat sport athletes and say okay we need to get you in a place

07:02of optimal arousal because if you're under aroused that's a problem but if you're over aroused that's a problem as well so we had to change the tactics a little bit between everything from his walk down to the week of before the queuing the things that we say to him to make sure he's in an optimal state every other athletic work like all those approaches are completely different we can't have the same thing how do you train a guy to do his walk down oh there's there's a lot we can do really oh yeah and I'm not a sports psychologist so I don't go too much do you know what they do absolutely everything from breathing drills right to the the queuing the words you use so for example in the back if if you're a a Dennis Bermudez five years ago you know Ryan Parsons would have to say like real vile horrible like rip his head off I want you to bring it back in a plate like murder him rip him to

07:49shreds that works for some guys for Dennis at that point at that point not anymore right now it's a little bit different approach and and Ryan could tell you the details of what he does now but some guys like you tell some other people that backstage they going to be like what huh like don't don't say that just like right tell me what to focus on remind me of my cues of my timing and so the guys that are too ramped up they're very specific breathing drills for example we can have them do as they're walking down the cage as they're in the cage uh especially if they're the first one down or the second one down so if they're first down sometimes that's a 10-minute delay between when they're standing in the cage and when they actually start throwing right if you're not taking advantage of that time or if that time is getting taken advant of you that can have a real problem with your

08:31energy especially if you get a guy who's really Savvy like a Connor or a Jon Jones who takes their time coming down and they mess with you they do different things on the way down that really influences what's going on with the guy in the cage especially if they're less experienced or maybe atten to the underdog or other things like that so that can all be be be messed with now a guy like Dennis Bermudez is a good example right you you're working with him he's obviously a worldclass fighter yeah but but he always seems to fall just short on these big fights MH yeah there's you know this is where it's outside of my expertise I'm a muscle physiologist not a psychologist right but with his last performance against Darren Elkins who's a really tough guy very awkward really just Blood and Guts type of fighter but that was a good match up for very good fight good

09:20matchup skill-wise it should on paper it should been a good match up it should have favored Dennis in a lot of Ray there's no way to beat around that uh I feel like two things are happening in that fight one I feel like Darren Elkins is getting better for sure and he was super motivated and energized by his performance over mad Beck which is like amazing comeback incredible crazy yeah so but a lot of people felt like he was the favorite that Dennis was the favorite going into that fight yeah on paper clearly he was um from a lot of Vantage points but it's really difficult um you know without telling too much of Dennis's story for him it was it's quite funny what happens with the game plan sometimes and what happens when they get in there even with a seasoned guy like Dennis and I don't know if a part of that was because it was in New York in denis's Hometown or if that was because

10:09of Pat who was his good friend fought right before and W A really you know crazy fight in the fight before if he saw that you just don't know what goes in and then you know sometimes like in the middle of a fight you're like the fight's over and you're like I don't even know why we did that like I just we got into this weird Rhythm thing and we started doing this and that was I don't know what happened and and that the Rhythm can kind of take over the and Darren fought an amazing fight he did exactly what he needed to do um but it was just the from my perspective as a scientist one I try to stay away from those things it's not my job but it's it's fun and this is what makes it exciting for me it's why I work with these folks is because you can have the the perfect Camp physically and sometimes you win sometimes you lose and so then you go back to the drawing board

10:54you go well do we throw everything out do we try something different do we have what was it though is it psychological was it physical that's the thing to think about phally fantastic What were what was the physical game plan like you planned on you must have planned on knowing how Darren fights a super high paced in-your-face type of fight yep that that part's not a problem for Dennis uh he doesn't really get tired in the vast majority of his fights but he looked a little bit like he was getting tired in this fight uh again he can say that but from the feedback and from what we saw like he was like no he just um maybe had a hard time focusing honestly I didn't I haven't asked him very specifically uh what was going on there I kind of gave them a few weeks to kind of get through that stuff before we start going back all right let's watch the tape let's go

11:33through it like what he went through so I want to be careful not offending him or or his direct coaches like that um but yeah I mean for my advantage it was like this was not this is not what we were looking for um he should have just been more active particularly in the second round which is what really got him and you saw in the third round once he kind of got into it Dennis in our eyes at least was pretty dominated that round or was at least clearly ahead yeah where one and two were H not so good for him um but yeah just potentially a focus potentially a lot of things uh he wasn't nothing physically that happened to him in the fight that he was he like oh we didn't prepare for this we didn't think this was going to happen this is throwing me off he was just like I just I just didn't go in the second round so it's a weird job you have because you're

12:18kind of relying on someone else to pull the trigger you're relying on someone else to to make the moves and you could train them all you want you can get them in incredible shape but then know ready go they're on autopilot they're they're doing their own thing especially me because I'm not the guy who's in practice all day every day with them right like I'm not the Nick K on I'm not seeing him 12 hours a week right I'm out there I'm just like like Dennis I won't even see Hall Camp sometimes because he's in New York and I'm in in uh in LA and so it's like so what do you do you give them a protocol do you give them a a schedule so my role depending on which fighter I'm with is completely different so sometimes it's one phone call the beginning of Camp sometimes times it's just like hey this came up what do you think we should do how do we go about this sometimes it's a text three times a

13:04day every day for the whole Camp sometimes it's phone calls like I try to do like this is not my full-time job like my full-time job is to research muscle physiology I work with MMA fighters in combat sport athletes just because I I love it really so almost like a side job a side hobby yeah yeah if you want to think of it that way um because you know I have my full-time living I've got multiple labs to run like this is what I do is publish research right I take biopsies of people I isolate hundreds tens of thousands of muscle fibers at this point in my life and when I can help if I think I can I will but I I try not to I don't work with general public I our lab is different we'll put it this way most Labs that do the type of muscle research we do are focused on disease prevention or treatment right so how do we fight cancer how do we get people back I'm one

13:51of the few that actually do this on the other end of the Spectrum which is well let's study optimization like how do we Thrive how do we not just get to 80 years old but how do we kick ass at 80 years old and becoming from the performance background that I have my athletic background it just make so much sense um I didn't come from martial arts background at all like I didn't do anything until much later uh in life but I I once I started paying attention to MMA I was like there's something energetically physiologically far different about the demands of this Sport and it's really exciting and it's a really complex problem to solve so I just started helping out and chipping in and then once you get help a couple of people and they're like this is fantastic Etc kind of the ball gets rolling so right now basically what I do is think of it like coner service if you

14:36will like I don't I'm not like you can't email me for a training program like I don't have an online website you can buy stuff from I'm here like if somebody's like hey I know a friend who could really need this or something maybe so do you coach people for diet as well do you do you go through everything with them yep depending what they need and and how do you like how do you decide like what a person needs like say if you know Darren Elkins came to you that he might be very different than J Jones like how do you how do you decide what a person needs so it's depends on if they're local or not uh blood work is is the easy one but the vast majority of what I do is a lot of conversation so I spend a lot of time on phone calls and Skype with them saying basically walk me through what have you done where you at how do you think I can help the number one thing I do then is say okay do you

15:20have who else on your team does this who's helping you let's get on a call with them not so that I can tell them what to do but just let me know what what your world is like and then see if I can add some advice maybe we try this I can help you track things I can tell you with my experience about I've seen this happen before or I know someone that's happened before um this is what happened with the best example was do you remember last summer at the Rio Olympics when that Helen maruis won the gold medal the first American ever female to win gold in wrestling no I wasn't paying attention oh dudee Joe go read the article on Sports Illustrated that she wrote afterwards she beat um yo I think Yoshida was her name but she was a three-time defending gold medalist and a 15 time straight World title it was just like rouan Gardner when he beat Kellin but the female version so Helen

16:10went down there it was crazy she was down uh 2 to one with like 30 seconds to go in the semi-finals came back and won she was down a point to Yosh in the finals ends up ends up upsetting her first American to ever win gold well I worked with Helen for about a year on straight nutrition because she had to cut a whole bunch of extra weight for the first time and the whole wrestling Community was like you'll never get down to 53 kilos like don't do it you have to go up because what happened was wrestling is this really weird thing where World Championships is a different weight classes than the Olympics so she was a world champion at 55 kilos and either had to go up to 58 kilos for the Olympics which had a three-time defending gold medalist and a 15-time straight world champion or go down to to 53 kilos to to wrestle somebody who also had that 15 times certain world titles so pounds wise

17:00that's like three kilos like six pounds yeah roughly which not a big deal but when you're already like scraping to get there right and so she had to make the decision to go up or go down and what happened was she had a nutritionist uh Eric reev who you may know Eric uh he works with Barnett he's been around Josh big huge dude okay wrestler But Eric was her nutritionist and Eric reached out to me because he's right down where we're at and hel's down here and he was basically like I know what I'm doing obviously but like let's get as big a team as possible to make the right decisions as possible so that's how I like to work uh so when a new person reaches out to me I go like well who else do you have on board don't fire them I don't want anybody to get fired let's all put our heads together because with MMA specifically they're not making any income uh Olympic wrestlers are the

17:46same thing she makes like 15 grand a year or something like she's poor so it's what you have to understand when you're coaching them like it's not team Dr Andy like it's team Helen and all of us have to be focused on her and it doesn't matter if anyone knows what I do with her or not or anybody I don't care if you get the credit another nutritionist gets the credit if you want to actually help these professional athletes you have to let your ego go completely out the door and say why throw people out let's take every information I have about everything you've ever done and come together with Solutions and if somebody else has an idea that you don't like that's up to you to figure out and give it to the athlete okay so what' you find out with her like what was the what was the issue and how'd you get her to lose the extra so actually it was like a year of issues

18:28a year yeah I mean like every day every week every month something else came up so it was like we tackle this problem and then we had another problem iron was a huge one for her iron as in deficiency M and we had she was basically almost flatlined on her iron like anemic mhm and we had to come in and go okay well we're going to add this but she was also traveling to Mongolia she was going internationally so she kept getting sick Mongolia yeah for tournaments because she had to qualify the spot damn and she's cutting she's I would imagine wrestling a Mongolian chick is terrifying well when you're a world champion it's not that terrifying they're hardcore though yeah they scare the out of me so she we had to put her on um we had to basically play a game of saying if we give you the things that keep you from not being sick that's also the stuff that actually harms iron

19:13absorption keep you the thing like vitamin C for examp vitamin C to keep you from getting sick right so that can help you this you're talking about while she's dehydrating is that what you're saying anytime so if you're going to go travel internationally for a long time you can take a big bolus of vitamin C and it may help you from getting sick from getting a cold does that really affect it better than probiotics do oh probiotics weird on that too but the point was if you're going to go in like a two- we thing to Eastern Europe I'm going to give you every Advantage possible to not probably get a cold right but would wouldn't you do that on a regular basis like why would you accentuate the diet on a traveling trip and give it some stuff that I mean wouldn't you want that boost everywhere so the probiotics are basically a no-brainer all the time but I mean even

19:55vitamin C and everything else yeah but you have to be careful because anytime time you go with a vitamin specifically you're going to have potential toxicity in vitamin C absolutely really yeah what what what's the toxicity rate of vitamin C like how it's not going to actually well put it this way at generally anytime you're getting a vitamin from a food source you're probably nowhere near toxicity level so natural consumption of food you're not going to be in a problem you start taking three five six grams of vitamin C at a time you're potentially going to have problems and it's a whole host and what makes it really complicated is there's interaction with other vitamins and minerals so the iron for example if you give them with vitamin C it's going to help absorption but zinc is going to do the opposite and so if you do these other combinations you're going to you potentially have

20:40problems or you're potentially safe and so you say the opposite what does that mean you mean zinc doesn't help vitamin C absorption or doesn't help iron absorption iron so zinc actually messes up your iron absorption anytime you have an vitamin or a mineral you have potential either co- absorption or you have uh confliction so you're going to you're going to cut things off how does zinc conflict with iron I don't know the chemistry behind it that's weird yeah you have a lot of that I mean you look up basically vitamin A vitamin D vitamin K magnesium vitamin K with bone absorption so so you have to make sure that like say if you're eating one at breakfast you eat another one at lunch is that how it works well if you get it from food You're basically safe right like we don't really this is stuff we don't worry about even if you supplement like during your lunch or during your

21:22breakfast yeah this is why the general answer is don't supplement with vitamins and minerals unless you have a very specific reason right like and we did that for the vast majority camp but she was continually getting sick because of a variety of reasons some that I probably you know shouldn't say but so we're like okay fine we addressed that and then it was like okay now you're super anemic so let's get away from that but what we did basically is get iron back to a decent level as soon as possible and then go off of everything go right back to food how are you feeling and that one she was so low on iron as soon as we got her at a decent level like within days it was just like tears of joy of like I feel so much better I'm not lethargic I'm not sleeping all the time but it was continual the hard part with her was getting her down and then you would be

22:06shocked what the food was like in Rio like what they told oh yeah at the Olympics oh my God like they told them you'd have ABC and we get down there and she called me the first day and she's like they they have nothing we've got McDonald's we've got popcorn and cookies like there's nothing down here wow she's like the Olympics oh horrible I mean the basketball players probably had something but like she's a wrestler she didn't have anything so they they had better food for the more prominent Sports probably probably because they probably brought their own chefs yeah oh okay yeah right so she's down there with the team and then she had to be shipped out of Rio to some other City two hours away or an hour away or something and she's like there's no grocery store here I can't even walk to the store to get any anything decent so we had real problems she was um about to do uh Opening

22:54Ceremonies and we had a plan um you know for food like basically we're going hour by hour how do you feel like where are we at these types of things and she wanted to do Opening Ceremonies and she called me she's like I want to do Opening Ceremonies we're like fine cool no problem this is what I want you to eat and whatever it was and we'll do next and she's like I'm right next to Michael Phelps I'm in the front like I don't want to get out of line I don't want to go back out and eat because I don't want to lose my spot next to Phelps in the front I'm like okay fine well she was supposed to eat whatever vegetable and and food and fat Source we had I don't remember but she's like all they have is cookies and popcorn she's like I guess I'll just like starve and we actually that was one time we didn't do we didn't want to do that because she was at a problem where she

23:33was so calorically underserved for so long she her body would crash quite often so we had to keep her nutrients really really really high her vitamins and minerals to keep her at a low calor count but her body not freaking out so she was like what do I do not eat and we had to actually go to the popcorn because of the good fat in there the butter that I had to keep her from not feeling terrible to get her through Jesus Christ you had to go for popcorn for nutrition at the Olympics and she was there for like six hours they were supposed to be there for like an hour and go in just it was a show that's a mess now what about other athletes like I mean forget about this specific requirements of someone who has to lose a ton of weight now when you when you deal with uh most athletes like what what what kind of like uh strength and conditioning protocols do you have them

24:16on what kind of recovery protocols like are you using cryotherapy or sauna like what kind of stuff are you using so all that is again I think the problem is thinking that there is one answer there I don't have any athletes that I'm like this is what do hey this is our method this is a I think it's generally a terrible approach It's a combination of where they at who are they with what have they done what's their past history what do they like or they not like what do we really need to get so I try to identify what's compromising their performance and let's pick the best solution for that issue so you show up and you're like your problem is agility your footwork you're just too slow in your feet well we're going to have a different approach your training than when someone says you're getting out stren you're getting out strength here like someone's pushing you around too

24:56much I don't need to rebuild your your feet I don't need to improve your maximum speed because you're already the fastest in the division maybe your strength is your issue so do you do a bunch of tests on them when they come to you and then you try to like what kind of test do you do so we have a entire Center for sport performance we've got six or eight Laboratories in it with a whole host of equipment do that thing where you put the mask on them make them run F2 Max yeah yeah if we need what does that do so we can actually measure the amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide coming in and out of the body which allows us to get a number called the V2 Max which is the maximum amount of that you bring in and exhale so it tells us basically your your maximum cardiovascular capacity and it's pseudo important for MMA um so the average person's like at 40 45 just to give you

25:40some context that number anyone past about 60 if you continue to go up it's not going to really make you fight any better so that's one of the things that we did or we found doing all the research on MMA folks is point of diminishing returns somewhere around 60 so if you show up and you're a Jake Ellenberger and you're at 52 and I can get you to 58 then that's going to help your performance a lot but when you show up and you're at Pat Cummins and you're 66 and I get you to 69 that's not going to make you fight any better right that's not your problem what makes you lose in a fight is other things that you need to spend that precious training time on so when you get a guy or a girl and you have them in your studio and you uh start work like what's like the first thing you do with them so it would honestly the first thing would be well what did the manager or why did they

26:24reach out to me do you because usually when they come to me it's problem fixing they don't come to me and like hey I've won seven fights in a row I feel fantastic right usually it's this is going on I'm losing because of this reason that's got to be frustrating though because you when someone's losing the problem is like that's a slippery slope it's hard to catch yourself oh yeah yeah well it's it's the game too of like sometimes they just want another answer which is not like you're just not good enough right oh that's a that's a rough answer right like I'm not gonna tell him that I'm not a fight coach but I'm like okay so we I'll watch the fights of course talk to their team this so I'll give you a specific ample example so they come to me and go hey like um we're I don't think we're fast enough on the feet this is a problem okay well we've got Force Spates they're the're really

27:05really sensitive uh measurement equipment built into the ground and we can have them do a variety of of of jumping tests moving tests um lifting tests Force plates how does it work so it's a it's a really expensive scale basically built into the ground and it how big is it uh they're as big as your laptop or as big as the table oh so it's fairly small well some stand oh as big as the whole table Yeah they can be okay not ours but we have one that's maybe the size of uh I don't know small coffee table Yeah and then there's two of them back to back okay so we can do your right foot on one your left foot on another one so we can test everything from not only your Force which is like if I if I measure your maximum deadlift I would know how strong your back is and your hamstrings and your glutes but how do you produce that force is the big key so uh a good example is years ago we

27:54had some Fighters come in and one of them was clearly not not fast enough but he wouldn't believe it so he was strong but it took him a long time to produce that Force so to give you a number let's say you could do you could produce 100 Newtons of force right just making the number up and I produced 100 Newtons of force but if it took you one second to get there and it took me a 100 second or a half a second to get there in an MMA fight I don't have one second right so you don't have a 100 Newtons of usable force in your sport no what it's interesting you just said he didn't believe it mhm so he didn't think he was slow NOP he thought the problems were other things what did he think the problems were who knows coaching like I'm not getting the right things uh you know they had my walk out song wrong just like so you told them you're slow dude that was my thing I'm like I don't

28:44think so his coaching staff was like we think this is a problem well let's put him on the force plate and let's see not only how much force you produce because his strength numbers were high he squatted a lot he deadlifted a lot but the time it took him to produce that Force What's called the ra of force development uh his Peak velocity the time it took him to get to that velocity all that when I compared him to the other athletes in NFL players and stuff was just like off the charts bad so like what exercise do you do to to measure that so now that's a great example so when we have two individual athletes they come in so say one is the opposite so one of them is really really really good at producing fast quickly and the other one takes a long time so the one that doesn't produce fast or Force very quick we would put them on a drill where we say okay the goal of your training is

29:29to maximize how quickly you produce Force I don't care how heavy you get but this is a reactive strength thing this is a speed thing so you're going to do uh maybe little bit lighter squats but you're going to explode you're going to transition out of the bottom you're going to bounce you're going to use momentum you're going to swing you're going to generate fast as possible you're not going to go to maximal strength the other guy would get the opposite where we would take the speed Advantage away from him or her and so you need to be able to produce more strength without taking advantage of the speed and it's basically comes down to using the muscle for force or the connective tissue for Force that's really what we can tease out now how much of speed and athletic performance is genetic and how much of it is what you've been doing and how much can you

30:12improve yeah so that's a f we actually just completed a really cool study on monozygous twins so monozygous twins means you're the exact same DNA so it's uh sperm went in implanted two implanted one egg the egg split and you became identic right and so we found two twins that were the exact same DNA H but one of them had been doing uh like marathons and and endurance stuff for 35 years the other hadn't done anything in 35 years so we had this exact question wow that's crazy identical DNA one variable different which is well one major a huge variable though one is a super endurance athlete and the one the other one's a lazy something like that or maybe maybe studies a lot yeah uh something uh I think he was a truck driver or something oh wow it's so weird that's that's unusual isn't it like don't extremely unusual they usually kind of share similar interests if not if their

31:10difference there their difference is mild yeah I kind of do this and you do a little bit more but so what were the differences in their body types so we tested them for everything uh cardiovascular stuff VO2 max strength all these same tests that we do with the mm Fighters muscle biopsies fiber type how much fast how much slow twitch uh all the ones in between what we found was of course the endurance athlete had higher VO2 max like no-brainer you you you run 100 miles a week for 30 years and your brother doesn't do anything you're going to have a better cardiovascular system blood pressure cholesterol all that crap better than the trained athlete but the strength did not favor the athlete the muscle quality didn't favor the athlete the total amount of muscle didn't favor the athlete the speed didn't favor the athl athlete really no and want to hear

31:59the craziest part is the fiber type the trained athlete in his quad was 90% slow twitch 10% fast twitch the untrained was 40% slow twitch about 30% fast twitch and then about 30% of some of the hybrids in between does that make sense to you because the guy was just constantly running work now what what that's really weird that the muscle quality yep didn't f the athlete I think what it tell I mean what do you mean by muscle quality when you're saying that so yeah that's a good question you can take an ultrasound and you take an image of of the muscle and it looks at like a combination of how much men muscular fat there is with the how much total muscle mass is in the size and a bunch of different things so you get this rough idea of quality how does it not favor a guy who's exercising constantly well you have to be careful it's only one subject like well two so we don't know but the

32:58one implication could be that yes endurance running and cycling is great for you there's a clear Health Advantage to that but if that's all you do for 30 years that's probably not enough to save the muscle capacity we know things that are that are actually going to predict mortality VO2 max leg strength is one of the most significant predictors of how long you live leg strength is absolutely how weird well sort of Tom plat should live forever yeah right some of these guys that squat 900 now obviously there's diminishing returns right if you squat 400 and I take you to 450 you're not living a day longer right but think about it this way what's the one of the big reasons why you go uh from living by yourself to an assisted living home can't walk can't walk yeah can't stand up and the biggest one that they're actually starting to look at now is foot speed foot speed why why if you trip and

33:53you're about to fall and you can't put your foot out and catch yourself you have to have the foot speed to get yourself out there but the strength to stop yourself from falling that makes sense so balance and yeah well it's Ecentric strength the ability to block all those forces into the ground to catch your whole body mass from falling or the wouldn't it be also your ability to manipulate your body like yoga absolutely to be able to control yourself in awkward positions yep the other thing they see is huge increases in general just physical activity when you're stronger so when you're really really strong and you're 70 you're much more likely to go to extra yoga class oh I'll go take the dog for an extra walk I'll go grab the thing but if I'm super weak and getting off the toilet is a maximum effort squat I'm more likely to just keep in my chair just stay on the

34:39toilet yeah right wow that but that's incredible that there wasn't an increase in muscle quality so that well that's also one very specific type of exercise right endurance work where this guy was a bodybuilder who knows so that's exactly the point when you the first I think the first question you asked when we started talking was you know what what's the best type of workout what do we well or what's the um the new age stuff right well it goes back to I think every one of us would agree if you want to be as healthy as possible you need to do a variety of training yeah it can't just be one modality so if you've only done yoga your whole life you're probably going to have strength problems or foot speed problems if you've only run if you've only lifted weights if you've only Expos yourself to a few of these stimuli you're probably in a real problem yeah what we've what we've done

35:27recently actually is expanded that thinking um so my friend Brian Mackenzie and I uh have a book that we just came out a couple weeks ago on this whole idea called unplugged where we need to expand past just lifting and running and think about what other physiological exposures do we need that are important for longevity how well do we do when we're hungry how about cold how about thirsty hot how well do we do yeah meaning performance- wise meaning everything thing so like are you manipulating diet to make people perform better when they're cold like what are you doing every combination so if we want to be able to sustain and perform as well as we can throughout life we probably need to be able to handle a bunch of different challenges you're talking about longevity now not like necessarily athletic performance and professional athletes we would use this under that

36:17umbrella but very very carefully so for example I would not recommend uh extensive fasting in during the middle of a six week Camp prior to UFC fight right like this is not at all what we're saying but this is something maybe we Implement outside of Camp okay so for example we have somebody who's very very carbohydrate dependent right and we have a hard time using fat as a fuel source okay well maybe in during that six week Camp before UFC fight I'm not messing with a tremendous amount we're not going on a new diet five weeks before a fight like that's not going to happen but maybe oh you got hurt you got you know you got a extended layoff now we start to work on that other part of your physiology so that next Camp we've got more what's called metabolic flexibility so we have an ability to switch back and forth before between fuel sources right so when you're preparing someone for a very

37:01specific event exactly like here you're ramping up for September 12th boom this is we have a protocol let's get ready but then after the fight's over then you might be working on very specific balancing exercises or that kind of stuff exactly so I I'm of the belief that during those last few weeks you need to be very specific to what you're going to do get on weight get focused get right all these things but now if we because if we over specify for too long we have problems we have this complex these fighting forces called optimization versus adaptation so generally when you're optimizing you're not adapting and vice versa how's that work so for example uh you brought up ice earlier so we do this stuff a lot we've done a lot of studies um and published in this area so we're just learning some of the physiology behind what's going on with ice and a lot of people ask me this like

37:57well are you for ice or Pro or against it I don't understand why we have to be in one side of the camp well there's um there's one guy who does who who doesn't believe in ice Mesa Tate had him on her podcast he's like the anti ice guy he's like saying you shouldn't use ice but I've looked at some of the pub Med studies and some of the various there's a lot of benefits to ice like I don't understand why anybody would be anti ice does that make sense at all to you no it totally does and this is exactly where I'm going anti ice make sense to you or no it can can what in what way CU there is there's good scientific evidence to show that there are consequences of the ice as well like in post injury or post-workout for so it depends on the workout context okay so we'll go two easy examples so it's not so vague and like theoretical uh post a workout that you try to get bigger and add more

38:48muscle mass you don't want to do that right afterwards Bingo yeah and why well because your body has time to recover and the actual inflammation is supped be good for you exactly it's not good for you it is the signal to grow right so people have a this really weird thing where they like to personify or humy chemicals and Physiology like it doesn't know it's not good or bad like inflammation isn't great or bad like it just is right it's a chemical like it doesn't give a at all it doesn't know it's not conscious right so if you were to do and hop on an ice path post a a lifting session when you're trying to add muscle mass you're actually going to up your gains probably yeah but you're supposed to wait like 2 hours right isn't that the right number the more the better probably more probably four to six oh okay why not why mess with it like why read I read something

39:32about two that two hours is good after a hard lift well we don't have any numbers to say optimal yet like it would take a lot of studies to figure out well two is not good but three is better so everything you're hear rough we would have to tight trat it out we'd have to do a study that says one group gets two hours one group gets three hours and then you have to like concentrate like effort like how much effort is this guy putting versus that guy they all have to be in the same training program we'd have to buy UPS see them all pre andos take blood marks God damn you got a lot of J jobs to do there's a lot of work that's why I'm so busy and there's creativity involved in it too because you have to kind of like manipulate things and figure stuff out and and contemplate and well that's why I'm the director or the co-director and I am the run my own lab and I've got fantastic

40:12postdocs and students that are actually The Operators that execute but it seems like everything is constantly evolving and shifting and changing and it's like well I find myself honestly spending more time being in the middle of saying like let's stop all the fighting between things and let's spend time saying well what was good about this and what was bad about this now when it comes to ice what about an injury like what if somebody twist their ankle or something like that do you do you believe in in icing it right away I have to defer that's not my area I'll get it but just just to finish the the example so post lifting session maybe not great but maybe if you wait six hours or do it the next day and when we're talking about icing we're talking about ice baths is that what you're talking about or you talking about like a crry chamber we don't have a tremendous amount of crow

40:54chamber research so have to say well actually I should say this with everything like this is as we know it now right but as I started the show with like if I'm wrong in a year I'm going to say like actually all that was wrong yeah this is part of it so what I've read about cryo Chambers is the the big thing is the um anti-inflammatory markers in the blood or the reduction of inflammatory markers in the blood um improvements in cyto cold shock proteins things along those lines that those would be beneficial but if it if you're saying that you got to be care beneficial okay so beneficial for some things but they're always going to come in a compromise with something else okay so maybe not beneficial for a powerlifter but maybe beneficial for an endurance athlete does that make sense yes but I'm going I'm going to make it worse oh no what so you have physiology which is

41:45what I do right and this is what science is we we biopsy we took blood we measure one marker but that doesn't take into context anything else in their life right so for example if you get a lift in and you're like oh man my elbow always things up on me after I lift and I but I got a competition in8 weeks or a show in8 weeks this would be like a powerlifting competition or a bodybuilding competition and if you get in the ice that takes that pain away for whatever reason physiologically or anic or anything and that allows you to train more well then we can't say that that was bad for you right or if you were like some of my fighters who they like they feel more accomplished when they do it they feel like they've done some work so they feel less anxiety cuz they got in work well then now we we're playing a game here yeah physiology feel more accomplished when they in the exercise

42:27or the ice bath in this example the ice bath but it would be true of anything right so setting them up for a a a psychological win oh that's fascinating so you you factor that in you have to like we're dealing with human beings right right but it might not even be real totally but real is but real is perceptive right right right yeah I guess so for sure I mean confidence is is a giant Factor abut especially with combat athletes and there's some preliminary evidence that suggests perhaps an ice bath I think specifically post exercise improved M increased mitochondrial biogenesis yeah so now you say like well it's bad or good post exercise well I'm like well what's the goal of the training session now when you say increased bio mitochondrial biogenesis um is that within uh a certain time period post exercise or is that just period well it would be a it would be when they took

43:17the biopsy of the blood marker right but I'm saying like within an hour after exercise within 5 hours yes yeah so this one I believe was immediately post yeah huh wow so now you got a conundrum but this is physiology right it's crazy this is why I get so irritated when people say like no this is the thing and then they pull up PL Flags about like this is what we do what we don't do cuz I stand in the middle going like you're going to be a terrible coach mhm because you're going to be in a situation where you're going to need to violate those rules right wow that's just complicated it is I mean this is why we're eternally wrong do you find that that's the case with diet as well like I am a big proponent of variable diets and I think that there's a lot of biodiversity and well obviously there is where people are allergic to certain type of foods you know um but I just

44:10think this one size fits all approach to diet seems the more I study diet the more it seems crazy so I would ask you this what do you think about if I came to you and said I'm gonna do one workout style the rest of my life everyone would be like that's that's stupid well if you want to be a yogi I'd say that's the way to go oh right but most of us would say yeah no I we also I just don't think it's fun but why do we so why is that acceptable to do that with nutrition then yeah why is that I have to be ketogenic and this is what I do the rest of my life or I have to be uh paleo I have to be anything else why in fact it's you you when you said variability I assume you mean having a wide variety of foods in your daily yeah I think also a wide variety of foods in your daily life but also I think what works for you might not work for Jamie or might not work for me I think that's the the

45:03biovariability but we're going to go Inception on that one because you ready we're going to go another level okay it's that is absolutely true and most people recognize that but what we don't appreciate is the fact that there's not one diet that works best for you right so there might be one diet that works best for me if I'm powerlifting but it might be different if I'm running hills or it might be the exact same oh what the what the bro yes it is I mean what you're highlighting is a real issue and it's also one of the reasons why there's a lot of what I would call confidence Men out there and I don't use that in a good term okay I mean yeah I mean confidence Men like conmen because there's there's a lot of people out there that tell you like this is my diet this is the way to go you got to follow my way and you know and they almost always mock other diets

45:53which is yeah how helpful is that not good no it doesn't a big issue in the MMA Community I see a lot of these guys popping up where they're trying to make a name for themselves it seems super common that someone wants to diminish the the other people out there doing different things and like this is our way and this is the only way this is the right way and and that's a straight ego shot well also I think what they're playing to is that fighters in particular want someone to come along go Andy I got the solution okay you come to me this is uh Joe's house of power we're going to get this right we know what we're doing we got a team of experts dude he's got a team Joe's got a team yeah and then you you go I'm I'm with the team yeah yeah yeah I start I signed up with Joe's team and and you really start believing like okay this is going to work but did you

46:44think do you think physiology is that precious it's pretty precious not like that it doesn't care what do mean in terms of like oh it has to be lined up perfect and there's one magical combination of everything I don't think so but I think for some people clearly like some diets fit better like I had a bunch of friends that went plant-based and uh not maybe not even vegan but the majority of their food is plant-based and they just feel better their body just works better the vast majority of us would yeah then I know but I know a lot of other people that went fat-based and they feel better too I mean like a lot more a lot of coconut oil a lot of avocados that seems to me especially true with people that are in intense exercise and I don't know why that is but it seems like a lot of dudes that I know that lift a lot of weights or that are involved in Jiu-Jitsu or wrestling

47:33or anything or there's a lot of explosion it seems to me like a lot of fats and and U uh fish oils and things along those lines when they add those to their diets fish in particular seems to have a big effect on Grapplers it seems to help them with uh joint issues and a lot of pain and maybe inflammation yeah it could um I would say that most people are going to far better on a more traditional carbohydrate diet that are in the more explosive power strength stuff especially at the volumes that MMA fighters are on because of the amount of output they're doing like the amount of the glucose requirements of the muscles exactly and you have to be careful because this it's the exact same principle either you're adapting or you're optimizing and if you're optimizing all the time then you're not adapting and vice versa so if you push yourself to one end of the spectrum

48:23you're going to probably compromise the metabolic ability to go back to the other side of the spectrum so Spectrum meaning what like when you're defining it in any way but in this particular case I mean so say for example you get very good at metabolizing fat as a fuel that may come with the consequences then of being able to use carbohydrate as a fuel so if you're in a sport that requires that that's potentially problematic what sport would require you to use carbohydrates versus ketones anything that's Anor robic so almost by definition so anything that's maximal intensity uh difficulty is going to be heavily carbohydrate man I wish I had got you in here with uh Dom de austino oh you just had him on right yeah and he's he's great all fat-based I mean he's 100% keto and he believes that ketogenic diets have a host of benefits and that the human body just it functions better

49:13on them well so here's a good example uh I mean I don't know Dom and I wouldn't say anything about him without him being right here it's not not fair um but everything I've seen of him has been fantastic like I I I'm in very much supportive of the vast majority of what I've heard him say but his main lens is being focused on cancer prevention epilepsy these things but if you look at some of the research and I'm not an oncologist so I'm going to speak a bit out of turn here but there are now actually identification of several cancers that thrive on fats rather than carbohydrates really yeah I have not seen this cuz he was talking about a host of different cancers that thrive on sugars and you stop them dead in their tracks by I'm sure he's ful right I'm I'm sure he's totally right on that but I did read something about a type of brain cancer though that um is not does

50:01not feed on sugar right yeah so again it would be like well good for cancer well what kind of cancer right oh for pro maybe 80% of them he's right maybe maybe 90% I don't know what the number is it could be environmentally caused cancer who knows right but the vast majority of high-intensity exercise is powered by carbohydrate for most of us now why would it be carbohydrate versus keton it's more efficient and it's faster man see I wish I had you in here with him I think he would disagree with you well there's not really I mean I got to be careful faster and it works better like well you have carbohydrate directly in the muscle cell that's where it's stored is muscle glycogen okay and so it is an immediate fuel source so when you're ketones work then those are systemic those are coming from the entire circulation so when you use carbohydrate for fuel you're using the carbohydrate

50:49in the muscle that is exercising so if you're doing bicep curls you're burning glycogen from the bicep fiber not even the muscle but the individual fiber that's Contracting and how would that be more beneficial than systemic so it's faster I'm right there Contracting I don't have to move it throughout my bloodstream when I use fat as a fuel source it has to be has to be go through lipolysis which means it's say it's stored fat in your entire body see people right now listen to this podcast go I don't know who the to believe man you got a dude on Monday who says one thing you got a dude on Wednesday says another thing so that's a I guess that's what I would say my biggest message is it's not like a right or wrong thing that's the wrong question entirely is who's right or wrong do you have any athletes who are on a fat-based diet abely who totally u i probably

51:35those ones I shouldn't say that there's been specific athlet no they're just like hey don't talk about my diet stuff o really they say that yeah some do okay the vast majority don't but Helen did I heard Helen we we go through periods of that with her for sure for a lot of reasons that uh it's very successful with her periods of that but not when she's competing even during training but not when she's competing yeah not like on competition day no but sometimes the week of so on competition day no because you feel like the glucose-based diets are more efficient in terms of actual physical performance well most specifically for rehydration purposes too okay so oh right because she's dehydrating heavily and if you don't consume carbohydrates in the rehydration process you're going to have a real problem okay that makes a lot of sense so we don't go there but we'll do it

52:18even maybe like five days out or the working of or something um but what we have to be careful there and this is one again this is no I'm not bad mouthing Dom at all okay no like nothing but he's not dealing with somebody who's generally hypochloric right so when we're going through an athlete who's six weeks of coming down in calories and if we start cutting out carbohydrates we actually did address that he was saying that when you're talking about um ketogenic States in particular when you're talking about most people during a a regular Life 50 grams carboh carbohydrates would keep you in a ketogenic state but when you're talking about like some you know pro athletes power you're in the hundreds 100 250 and you're still ketogenic because your body has much more requirements so like I told you he's smart guy like I'm I'm generally Bard with what he's saying he's a scientist

53:10just like you but the the problem is micronutrient quality mhm so if an athlete's coming down in calories that and especially if those calories are coming from carbohydrate and carbohydrates are their main source of carbohydrates are plants so if we've compromised that and they're really low in calories then they go down to nutrients and biochemicals and that's a real problem so we have to be very careful with getting them into keto if it comes with a compromising of vegetables of nutrition right what about like cold pressed juices or anything like that that's exactly what we do actually a lot of the times um we did that specifically in fact that almost single-handedly saved Rio for her oh interesting it was a real problem she had a real physiological crash like that just sucks to to think that at the highest level of amateur competition they have poor food yeah well we had we

53:56had to do like because especially because she was basically broke we had to like go out real struggle to find cold press things we could get to her that because we had she was on like 40 ounces a day of that for a while wow and it's you know what's funny we did that and that's I don't know you could do the math but 200 grams of carbs or something mhm and the second we did that her weight just started falling really oh yeah interesting so we added 200 Gr of carbs and boom weight just flew what what did you attribute that to a combination of of phys phological and psychological factors psychological she felt better so it caused her weight to drop yeah she was stressed out she was freaked out the and that cortisol level keep your weight higher AB absolutely oh interesting so she was panicked and she was freaked out and she was stressed cuz she didn't feel good and she's like I'm

54:40not losing any weight and once well one part of it was we gave her a system that she believed in okay and so she like oh okay we can do this oh now I also physiologically pump some nutrients into you so I don't know like honestly I don't know know what part of it was it could have been all psychological it could have been all physiological I don't know but what we know is it worked right and we gave her a bunch of nutrients and we're like 40 ounces a day or up to 60 ounces a day of of of fresh pressed vegetable juice and just like clockwork every day you know this this this is such a complicated subject and it's so nuanced and there's so many different variables that I feel like you have to be a scientist to really truly understand this I mean yes or no it's one of the problems with the Bro Science people people that do not have the real education and this stuff that are out

55:28there you know coaching athletes and and teach them what to do and what not to do it's like yeah you don't really know what you're talking about and that becomes a real problem you have to get care like it's funny because I don't know Don like said but he's an example I've never heard him plant a flag and be unov movable on an idea and it's funny because those of us that do this for a living yeah rarely do we do that right it's the other dicks that do it I think you're right it's like everyone else is like what do you mean I get this one on fi F Type more than anything in the planet fiber type that's what I do for a living like I could tell you more about that than vast almost anyone in the planet and then yet I'll still have people who like I read this guy's Instagram post bro you're wrong like I've I've biopsied hundreds of people I've isolated tens of thousands of

56:09fibers and ran them under lasers and study Dum and you're going to tell me because you read one Instagram post or one review from two years like what the well people love doing that though oh driv me nuts and they love it because of that reason they love they love to call on you I don't respond so it doesn't but still gets you now they know yeah good luck well now they can't because I bombed him with YouTube videos showing them walking him through the science and it's like all right yeah but they don't read that or watch that like blah blah blah dude you're wrong saw an Instagram post I had somebody on something a few weeks ago some Instagram or something was like going through she was being super respectful so I didn't mind like helping but I was like okay we're done here because I already told you about my three-hour video on this and you didn't watch it right off bingo

56:56but you know the 3our videos are hard man and by the way a three-hour video is a goddamn gift from God because if you stop and think about how much schooling you would have to go through to get the information that's in that three-hour video it would take a decade it took my career and you could boil it down to three hours and people are like man not interested I went to an Instagram page and this guy had some that said you're you're an well I did five minute video is why the first one was like a 5 minute video and I just kept getting so much like blah blah blah yeah you didn't do this and I'm like you think really you think I missed that you think I didn't read that one and I was like this like here we go here's the whole shabam and there you go just There's the link that's it I'm done and threw it all up there and then I still get the they don't change they don't

57:42change when you train like oh my God here we go again now um so if someone has like a lot of fast twitch muscle fiber like let's see like like Mike Tyson in his prime as an example it's like a ball of fast twitch could you turn a guy like Mike Tyson into like an ultra marathon runner no I mean he could maybe complete one right for sure but he wouldn't be elite okay so genetically he's Elite at fighting he's just an explosive individual but making him like a you know fill in- the blank David gogin type character no I mean we have so the the easiest way to understand this is plasticity your ability to change your adaptability MH is far higher than what people understand and in fact there's almost a a direct link between the increase in technology and the increase in our thoughts of what change and how much they change oh so our ability to measure it Bingo okay so the reason why

58:36we didn't think fiber type changed 20 years ago is because we didn't have the technology to actually have the Fidelity to measure all the ones that we were missing and there are also probably a psychological factor in there as well as from the people that are measuring it it's probably easier to say that it doesn't change than to say that it does I don't know that it was just more of like that was the evidence yeah right so it's confirmation bias the first 10 studies had not shown it so therefore you're not looking for it really hard okay got it move on because otherwise you'd be chasing your own tail Forever on that well I can tell you right now like it's hard to post to to get things into into publication when they completely challenge an entire uh entire thought can you give an example so for example if uh if you were the first one to try to publish a study that fiber types

59:22changed as response to exercise training and 20 years of research suggested otherwise you'd have a very hard time getting through review they would hammer you for every little thing that like wow you do this and did you do this and and because they going to be very skeptical and reason yes that that's how it should be that's how it should be right extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence right so I have no beef with that it's what the problem is when the other people who aren't scientists and don't pay attention like if you don't know it like I do then you need to you can talk about it that's fine I talk about stuff I'm an expert about all the time but you need to be careful when someone else walks in the room and goes like well I do this for a living U then you don't just can see the point but you need to be a little more open yeah with listening and going oh

60:06really right didn't know that H yeah that's uh that that's interesting can you think of anything that has CH other than the fiber types that's uh changed the way people look at things recently because of Technology yeah I mean that's a good example um the the hyperplasia is probably the biggest one and what is that people so when your muscle gets bigger mhm you the diameter of each individual muscle fiber gets larger so it just thickens right well hyperplasia is a concept that you actually add more muscle fibers total so you add cells to the entire muscle and for decades basically you say that doesn't actually exist in humans well now as we're improving our Fidelity of our measurement techniques it looks like uh it happens a lot we know what happens in other mammals how it happens in humans when it does it's going to be very difficult and probably impossible

60:56to ever show but we have more and more evidence because we know the mechanisms now behind the cell growth so once we see the physiology and the mechanics behind it and the molecules and and the gene expression then we say okay it lines up with a b c d and e we just can't show it with f because of Technology now we need to really think rethink our position here and that's probably the the biggest one now when you're dealing with athletes and especially athletes that are trying to make weight like a like a fighter and do you ever tell them like say like a Jake Ellenberger who's a pretty thick guy gets down to 170 lbs and you you got them exercising and doing all these things you you do a body composition of them do you ever tell them like like you got to lose a muscle like there's do you ever say that like you're 205 lbs getting down to 170 is really going to kind of you up

61:49we've done that a little bit in the past people have come and said hey will you test me and tell me if you think I can go down to 55 or yeah 85 or something um my general approach is uh you're better off staying or going up it's almost almost always better if they're that to go stay at weight class or go up a weight class I could not agree more and you've seen the performances of Fighters when they do go up they look so much but Jorge mazal is a perfect example fought at 55 forever fought at 170s one of the best in the world now yeah uh Donald Cerrone another good example there's been a ton of Fighters that move up and look so much better because their body Kelvin Gastelum he's another great example yeah he's a he's a diet one though for the most part like he he gets that dialed he should be able to make 70 no problem but but godamn he looks good at 85 he looks good everywhere when you

62:35see he's awesome but when you see a guy like him and you know he got outp powerered by a guy like Chris Weidman what's the Line in the Sand you draw where you say Okay Kelvin let's put on some muscle and some strength so you could deal with the yel Romeros of the world or let's lean you out and get you off the tacos so you can uh you could fight guys that you're supposed to be fighting right yeah that's a man like that's an internally question that if they if they really Buy in to what I say it's it's an needed conversation but a lot of them won't which is fine like um so I I don't I don't think you have a good answer there man like it's tough he's a classic example though like there's this almost I mean I gotta be careful I don't know his camp like I've met him a handful of times we've never been to my lab I don't know like how bad his stuff is or or how like if he's got

63:22maybe medical problems that no one knows about or if he has other issues that are going on to make it hard so that happens from time to time so you don't want be ice cream could just be ice cream man there's a lot of guys that are super talented they just love to eat you know man it's crazy like a lot of those folks will will go to food for their comfort for that and for the control like that's what they for control yeah that makes sense especially in such a crazy world of the world of competition and Combat Sports especially in this sport where like winning and lossing is so finite and when you get to the top like nobody well rarely people win more than they lose right like it's just so hard so hard and there's so many with you know like in in NFL and major league baseball and soccer there's a clear pecking order you beat this person then you beat this

64:05team then you beat this team then you get to play for the championship or in MMA it's not like that well it's definitely not anymore you know in the UFC it's real weird like especially the 185 pound division like good luck oh you know everybody's waiting in line to fight Michael bisbing he's probably going to fight George St Pierre and people like rockholds all these other guys like what the when he beat rockold that's my single favorite MMA moment in history really I'm not like a obnoxious bisbing fan or anything but that just was a culmination of a dude who put in so much time and he did everything to make it a business he did everything and then he not only steps in and fights just a a killer in rockold who I thought was been underrated his whole career like he's just insanely good but he'd already got he'd already lost to him convincingly like you know

64:53bad get subbed in the first round yeah and older guys don't come back and beat younger guys in the rematches ever right especially on short notice on short notice when he had a whole camp and has every reason to not have confidence and like 90% or more Fighters would have just been like no I'm out like no way he takes the fight like no one would take that fight because if you lose twice to the champion you're you're done right because you're not gonna get third just every risk possible and he just nails like just unbelievable Clips him and knocks him out yeah amazing like I loved the rock hole but that was just incredible it really was crazy and you could really tell that rockold just thought he was going to win that fight no matter what this is a done deal totally underestimated him bis being so Scrappy like he's one of the most mentally tough guys in the sport because

65:37he doesn't have like some freakish you Romero athleticism or anything he's just it's just hard work he's not particularly fast no he's not like he's not super mobile he's he's very skilled and he's got a lot of physical issues too you can't even see out of one eye you know he's had a bunch of issues with like like joints and discs and he doesn't movees no and he's not big for the division or anything doesn't people up well he's pretty big for 185 well not like amazing he's not like towering over wiid men or rockold like he's not beating those guys are giant yeah those guys are giant and he doesn't have some amazing skill set either way he can fall back on a world championship in wrestling to get through like he just is like pretty good at everything yep yeah and still just finds a way he's a guy I would love to biopsy and figure out like how much slow twitch and fast

66:20twitch does he have 34 beats per minute resling heart rate yeah he's yeah that's a big factor it's a big factor and then he could push a tremendous pace and then keep it going like one of my favorite fights of Michaels was uh when he beat Kung Lee oh yeah cuz he just overwhelmed him and and just you see Kung starting to get tired and and Bisping just ped it on yeah just gave him a beating and that was sort of uh in a lot of ways like u a shift towards I mean he was always a world class fighter there was a shift towards like the upper end of the of the division it was a big moment for career too cuz if he lost that that's probably about night night for him in terms of yeah he could say that but he doesn't give a he got knocked out by vtor comes right back you know got knocked out by Henderson comes right back he's one of the guys I've been around him a

67:07bit uh he's hilarious but he's one of the guys where again like he doesn't you're just not going to shake him like that no not at all he's undeniably tough yeah and he's undeniably like when he says like I'll fight that dude he he legit oh yeah he's there yeah and you can say like oh he's scared of no he's not like he's not scared of any of these dudes he's trying to cash in when he should like well I think the Bisping GSP fight is a fascinating fight it's fascinating first of all gsp's never fought at 85 he comes back he fights for a world title it makes it compelling yeah I just wonder this is unfortunate but I wonder how many of these young new fans like I would like to say like post Ronda Rousey fans how many even even know who the GSB is I think there's a lot of my wife definitely does well she's a fan yeah but I mean I wonder of how many of the new ones you know the

67:57people coming up actually know who he is and I mean it's been a long time yeah you know a couple years right more than that when did he lose to Johnny Hendricks I want to say it's three years ago at least at least yeah well beat Johnny Hendricks yeah I I I'm not I'm not a big believer in that decision I feel like at most that was a draw I felt like Hendrick got the most of it my buddy Troy's brother had 50k on Hendrick on that fight did he yeah and afterwards he's like here we go like we're done that Hendrick thing was interesting because uh Hendrick is one of those guys that like you go like what happened to that guy yeah you know like what a lot of speculation on that where you can all read between the lines there uh well that's that's the problem right yeah there's the usada speculation there's the motivation speculation there's a lot of speculation you also

68:52have that thing too a guy like that that put in that many years of wrestling mhm and you start competing that hard that young mhm like that that where you there's a time frame that you just run out of yeah there's a like people believe there's a nine-year window as a world class fighter I've heard that before it depends on the sport but yeah that's probably Fair as a fighter M and that as a fighter like when you get to MMA in particular guys have like nine years to compete at a world class level and then the wheels just fall off yeah get in get your money get out yeah if you can yeah if you can yeah that's why the 38 I think bisping's 38 that GSP fight's the right move oh for 100 it's the right move anyway and what does uh bisbing typically do well with like the fighters like he handles wrestlers decently well he's a very good defensive wrestler yes his style is can to be

69:39fantastic he doesn't get tired which is what GSP relied on a lot is is his stamina conditioning was great but that stamina like is dependent upon activity like do even if you're just physically fit but you haven't fought in a long time I don't necessarily know if it's it's applicable yeah well it's also going to be different too with we'll see what he does Weight Wise yeah so what people don't understand about when you watch professional athletes fighters in particular is a lot of what happens in that fatigue is either psychological or it's bad weight cut stuff so now he doesn't have that but if he's lugging around extra weight U that he's not used to potentially problematic depending on how he does it now he's got some smart people in his Camp so he's probably going to be fine yeah but that's a real problem um that that he may or may not be ready for yeah if he's lugging around

70:25extra weight but he was always walking around somewhere around 185 190 he might just decide to compete at that weight that's what I mean like if he stays there he's probably fine but if someone gets in his head and tries to get him up to 202 or something and then come back down like he's probably not going to feel normal there yeah which he's not going to run out of gas because of that like having more muscle doesn't make you fatigue more it's the training that does it now do you have Fighters uh use cardio machines like do you have do you have them use Versa climbers or treadmills or anything along those lines I don't feel like those are super important uh differences in terms of we're generally trying to get most of their physical activity from training like if you have an extra hour worth of training we could get in the week you mean by martial arts training right

71:09really yeah interesting so but having said that if we want to do a small circuit or something that incorporates one of those things in there sure but I'm never going to prescribe if they're not doing it like hey let's hop on and let's get an hour on the elliptical like that's never going to come out of my mouth hm um that's not to say I would never use it right I'm not throwing anything out I'm not pro or con but that's that's traditionally not where I'm going to go because it's far easier for us to help them lose weight through food than it is adding on an extra hour and that adding on of extra hour of activity can be real harmful for them muscularly right but we're not necessarily just talking about losing weight we're talking about incre increasing performance do you do you believe in any of those machines or it's not a believe in or not believe in I

71:48would go to it if I needed it I don't feel like in Camp it's a huge need with the exception of maybe like a recovery so you want to do like hey let's go an easy 45 or something on the bike uh but as like a 45 hard um with the exception of when you start moving to championship fights I do think there's good cause for doing maybe once a week of saying uh like we do this with Dirk and all the time like hey he loves to ride mountain bikes so go out in the mountain bike and go ride for when you're saying dirt you mean Pat comms yeah sorry it's okay for people not listening don't know but he that's big part of it is because he loves that that's like his real mental release mountain biking yeah it's a great workout too right yeah it's fantastic it's he gets in the sun he gets away from people he gets to breathe and we're not counting things which can be a problem but if I had another

72:33athlete who was like I absolutely hate jogging like it's the worst thing I got knee problems hurts my back I'm never going to ask them hey go jog an hour what do you do with them like what if you if someone has knee problems and you want to get them to do cardio 45 minute or something like that maybe in the pool uh a lot of pool work can be really helpful if they have access if they can't uh um no one has ever not loved the Airy or air assault bikes like those are fantastic Versa climbers are great I got no problem with those things what is uh is there a one machine that you is like your standby or a go-to when it comes to like a cardio machine well those would probably those are the rower the Versa climber the rower and the airdine yeah airault any of those things anything that allow them to move that minimizes um the amount of technical teaching you have to do so that's most

73:23people run horribly um this is like a real real real problem especially wrestlers if you ever watch a wrestler run it's like you're you're a you're a knee pain you're your busted ankle waiting to happen so I'm not going to throw that on them and then try to teach them a new movement skill right it's just not needed there's a thousand ways we can get there if they already run well and they have a running background and we could go there if they if they want some of them do like it okay fine we can get there but if they don't run well I mean technically well um if they're Landing in bad positions that their fear out every where uh and they don't want to take time to go to a running coach like Brian McKenzie or something then like we're not going to add that we're not going to add a new skill I know a lot of uh Greg Jackson's uh work a lot of his Camp they do these

74:06uh Hill runs in uh Albuquerque seen that stuff yeah going up a hill is a little different though yeah because uh generally the foot position of the hill is much easier to get to and it's harder to run bad uphill than it is on flat ground generally so it is something you go to but that's also probably something where you don't have as much teaching and your an altitude so that by itself is going to reduce how hard you work which is going to reduce the stress on your joints and bones and ligaments right so that helps so all that can be integrated where you have you reduce the likelihood of them getting a sore back or knees because you added some 45 minute running on there that didn't really have to happen well Hills seem to reduce that anyway because you're really almost like doing squats it's almost like doing her a lunge or something like that cuz you're just kind of running and

74:53pushing your body up in instead of like the pounding the Ecentric pounding is gone yeah this is a a very good a one of the most important things we stress during fight Camp is you want to minimize the Ecentric contractions because that leads to more soreness and if you got really sore legs and you got to go to movie thae practice and somebody Jacks you in the leg like that's a problem and so you have to be able to get work in without getting extremely sore so Hills are a great example aerodine is like the same thing right it's pushing the whole time it's not Landing in sing rowing all these Versa climber that's why they're so good or one of the reasons you can do a lot of work is Airy or verse Karma are those things Limited in the fact that like the movement is like very specific in that in terms of doing that versus like maybe like a kettle bell cardio workout yep

75:42you should do that's why you need to do a combination okay so it's a bunch of different stuff just like we talked with nutrition it's variability that gets this is what we're looking for especially when the gold is not that modality so for example if you're competing in a kettle ball swinging competition like you should be focusing on that right but when you're using that for another modality that doesn't transfer over then you need to have a wide range of stresses man how do you know like what to tell them to do though well so that's the thing is I I don't I don't think that stress is necessary like who cares what do you mean so the stress of worrying about which one to do is not important you shouldn't focus on being like ah should we pick first a climber today or should we uh it should be what's the training outcome we're looking for right oh we're trying to

76:28improve your ability to repeat maximal sustained 15-second intervals with short rest and all at the same time keeping your breathing mechanics okay that's the goal now what modality do we want to use today to introduce that insult and so you think the good move would be to introduce a bunch of different things like one day yeah one day do the kettle bell cardio workout another day do the Air Salt is that airs salt bike what's it called a air Bunch another day do averse climber as a general quick statement yeah absolutely but I would say the the smarter approach would be to step back and say well wait a minute what's the goal of that workout what's the goal of today this week this camp this fight that's where you then that guides you to make that exercise choice right so don't like you should never choose the exercise because you love the exercise that's a stupid reason you're getting

77:20angry yeah it really irritates me now do you measure uh resting heart rates body fat all that jaaz not really no no uh some folks do it um it's not super important for me you don't feel like it's important in terms of like finding out whether or not a fighter is overtrained oh that's a little bit different question so you can use things like HRV to track those things what's that heart rate variability so it'll effectively think of it like a heart rate monitor but it's going to look at how so your your heart doesn't just go beat beat mhm beat right it has variabilities be be beat be be be beat well that actually is has some relationship with your autonomic nervous system so if it's really variable you're in a good spot if you lose your variability and it becomes beat beat beat beat beat you're actually potentially getting overtrained so your your nervous system

78:15is a little bit shot there so you can use those and Joel Jameson again has done a ton of this work um and you can look at that to to have an idea of whether or not they're overtrained so you can use that I don't particularly use those things for a couple of reasons uh number one I know what's going to happen for the most part over the six weeks like as Camp's going on like it's based on performance the coach the athlete when I've been around them like we plan it out so that this is a this is the volume this week this is the volume this week this is the volume this week so that we don't get ourselves in the situations and how do you know how to plan the volume out like say if you got a guy like you know fill in the blank Chris Weidman kind of and he wants wants train with you he's getting preparing for a round fight how do you know how much work to give him

79:01like how do you how do you schedule that so I would never have the arrogance to step in and go okay this is the volume you're at Chris I've never met you great to meet you but here's your volume right like that'd be stupid would you have him come and do a test workout for you I would have a conversation with as many of his coaches and honestly the first time I work with them for something like volume I generally would just shut up and watch and go okay like here's a here here's what you're going to tell me you did so write on a piece of paper what you did for the camp what's your plan for the camp what have you done in the past then I look and we can assess some volume and then I can generally tell okay this is normal for a person of your caliber of your agid and your experience or like you're way over what's normal but I don't know how that lands on you

79:41and then I watch and as we go along and it's conversations continually and going this is happening your other coach told me this you're telling me this is going on blood work came back here don't know if we're the the right spot here and then the second or third Camp around then I can have a feel and I can go back at the previous notes and go well this is 10% higher this youve farred three more times here I think and then it always almost always matches up with yeah I'm feeling terrible etc etc right what are your thoughts on like Plyometrics box jumps things along those lines yeah box jumps are generally misused so people don't understand especially in in CrossFit or in MMA or in wrestling people use CrossFit for conditioning for the most part which is fine but they don't get the the biggest benefit out of it which is strength speed power training the reactive part

80:29of the system training muscle spindles so absolutely fine as a modality what do mean by they don't get that out like how do they not get so for example someone does a box jump and they're like okay box jumps I want to get better power in my legs so they'll go and do like all right uh let's Spar for five rounds and then I'll go do 100 box jumps as fast as I can you're not getting any faster like that you're just getting more tired that will not improve your power at all it won't no because you're not jumping fast you're actually jumping at a very submax speed the whole time because you're already fatigued oh I see what you're saying so if you want to use those for power now if you're using it for conditioning fine M no problem but if you're using it for the sake of improving your foot speed or your power or your strength or your explosiveness you should be W well rested yes yes 1

81:16two three reps take a break Etc what do you think of like that strong first protocol do you know the pavl idea that you know he he feels that strength is it's along the same sort of lines what you're talking about that strength is essentially a skill ABS you should not be doing things to failure that the best way to do it in his estimation is to do more sets with more more break in between them that is that's like very strength 101 like you'd have a hard time for a true strength person disagreeing with a lot of that it's hard to get wrer when you're tired so going to failure is not as now I've talked to a bunch of people about this that have started doing this recently like within the last year or two and they've all experienced great results and that the idea being that you used to go to failure and then you'd be wrecked for like three or four days instead of

82:11that like say if you could do 10 reps or something you do five and then you take a big rest and then you do five again and you take a big rest and then you wind up instead of doing 15 reps you wind up doing in like 30 over the course of an hour and a half and then you're fine the next day well I mean you had Louis on like Lou Simmons right this is Maniac that guy is he was awesome I love that guy I always tell my kids my students to Google him CU you're not going to get like you're not going to get bored oh listen to my podcast with him it's one of the most entertaining things I've ever heard in my life he's such a character the basic idea um well we'll have to back up for a quick second because it depends on the goal right strength if goal pure strength is the goal failure also has to be defined so what do you mean by failure now am I failing because of fatigue right then he's

82:58totally right right am I failing though because they're too heavy well you do want to go to that failure for strength how so though so you need to at some point pick up something that you can't pick up or really close to can't pick up to get stronger really close to it like you can do right but you can't do a second one so put it down or maybe you could do two but you couldn't do three or something like that the the very textbook answer is anything below five repetition is is going to be good for strength yeah he believes anything more than five is bodybuilding that's what pav says he that's the that's pretty dead on I mean he's not too wrong there and what like what reason I brought Louie up is is he's classic for saying first reps so if you did three sets of 10 right well you had three first repetitions right so you had three reps that you did after rest but if you did 10 sets of

83:49three now you had 10 first reps H oh interesting right so now you did the same total repetitions but 10 of them were done after full rest which means you're going to have more power and more force that makes sense that seems smarter that's basically it so you're better off doing 10 threes than three 10 for strength for strength or power or speed and then taking a big break in between them is sort of counterintuitive to a lot of people they feel like oh I don't want to be a and and then let myself get fully recovered I want to push while I'm still Al come on bro come on bro we got to go to one more one more and they'll help you up come on come on come on I see that all the time Meatheads in the gym and they think that's the way to go and I'm like man I don't know and they're gonna well they're going to it's the way to go if they want to get sore if they want to maybe mus to do that

84:37though they love to walk around sore you know what's funny checked this is like the number one reason I got into MMA was that that question like right there people kept coming to me with this and I'm like you don't know basics of speed training or strength training and the MMA guys were so so wrong and then I that's how I got into this for the most part is people were like oh my God this is changing like everything I'm like well MMA training is it's weird it's really strange because MMA training is essentially it's still in its infancy right it really didn't even exist until 1993 and then it didn't even really exist even then until like I feel like Frank Shamrock was the first real professional MMA fighter cuz he was the first guy to figure out that you have to be an insane car and he was the first guy to be able to strike and also be able to Grapple be

85:27able to fight off of his back and piece it all together and the cardio is was a was a huge Factor you know he he was like the like when he beat Tito Ortiz it was way smaller than Tito but he beat him because of cardio but one of the things that I used to see early on that was so confusing to me because I came from a striking background was how many of these guys were willing to beat the out of each other in the gym and like that they were just going to war but not even going to war with like good skills like going to war while they were learning for the sake of War yeah I mean I mean I'm watching them getting coached and they're beating the I'm like you guys are professionals like this isn't like this isn't like some idiots at the why like you guys are you're supposed to be Pros like you're going to damage yourself you're take years off of your career the vast majority of you

86:18know me working with athletes is doing these very very basic things like I'm not I'm absolutely not the guru who's like oh I know the the 18o blood test and we're going to get these the vast majority of what I do is go oh okay I see the problem here we need to do this basic thing right you haven't eaten a vegetable in a week got it like did you get that not as much anymore but I used to really yeah we get a lot of that a pro athlete that doesn't eat vegetables you know what we get is honestly it's because probably because like you and they watch your show or something Kidd I tell people to EV all the time no they watch this and they're like okay they'll come at me with a thousand really weird nutrition questions or something or really weird Advanced Training ones cuz they went to seminar or something and I'm like back to train up like you're sparring six

87:03times a week o yeah we've got a whole another conversation like oh we don't do that no that's not normal really no okay or you're doing that or you're running 35 miles a week got it that's the vast majority of what I do is is bring these guys back to life and go like let me help you sift through all this internet stuff that's really complicated and let's take what's actually good and bad and and dial in a very usable system you think people just get overwhelmed with options from the internet absolutely because too many people get on exposure get on shows or platforms and they try to make sure that that they are known as the guy that knows something different right right right it's like it's not very exciting if I come up here and tell you oh Joe that's pros and cons to everything great like well that's not fun but it's good I mean I think what you're saying is very important for

87:52people to hear yeah like they way they get bogged down in the details way too much of things that really don't matter your body's not that sensitive or insensitive enough where it can't convert something from to from something to something else and if it needs it it will do that for the most part so there are some real small things at the end but a lot of what we can do is like just just get you on a reasonable program that's actually possible for you to implement and that doesn't drive you so crazy or so is so difficult and so confusing for you that you get halfway into it you abandon it and then you want to start over well you know I always think about Dan Gable when Dan Gable was young he pretty much outworked anybody and he was just an unbelievable Savage when it came to his training and then that manifested itself in the competition he was just like the

88:36momentum behind him because of his ruthless training was so intense but now he's can't even walk I mean his hips are gone his knees are gone he's got artificial everything you know he's just up because of it and some guys are willing to make that sacrifice yeah but is that here's the question is that sacrifice necessary like are can you be too tough versus Smart in your training it's impossible to say right because like you said here's where it gets so tricky is physiology versus psychology so if that gave him that extra mental confidence that he needed to perform better well then it's hard to say that it wasn't necessary yeah like he was always talking about guys on steroids that he liked competing against guys on steroids because he knew they were mentally weak and they would break right who the hell knows right like you got you have all this conflicting stuff and

89:25you try to do this dance which is why again you need people you need a team to do this stuff and say okay this is what I think so people have a really hard time with physiological truth or scientific truth and implementation so a very easy one sugar right now like I don't know anyone in the world who Advocates adding sugar to your diet is a good thing like no no one's gonna say that right but what you tell somebody a scientific Truth Versus what the message you Spread spread to either your athletes or a bunch of people that can be very very different because because of unintended applications or Consequences so for example there's no physiological harm with sugar it's not bad for you in any way but as a message to the general public that's not the worst thing to say and so most of the fighting that goes back and forth between any conversation like this is people saying yeah yeah

90:21yeah but the actual effect of it is good yeah but the science is wrong and they're not conceding they're actually talking past each other far more than they're talking let me that you don't think that Sugar's bad for you no it can't be it can't be unless imp sugar no no no no what you say so now we've okay sugar in your diet NOP sugar this is where it gets confusing exactly because you want to break down sugar yeah well having sugar in your diet like eating sugary foods and snacks having an excess of sugar has dire Health consequences totally correct absolutely but there's a key word you said there which was excess excess excess okay so like meaning a piece of fruit like a nectarine not bad for you at all no of course good for you and plus fiber absolutely yeah but processed sugar whether it's removed from that fiber and put into a Coca-Cola that becomes an issue yeah because of

91:11concentration issue CU now you can consume it at a concentration that probably wouldn't happen normally right and quantities that would never happen normally bingo so now you could have person in the corner of left who says like no you're an idiot look at the science Sugar's not bad for you for a thousand reasons and they're technically right but when we have conversations to 350 million Americans they don't want all that detail in between they want do it do I do it or do I not and so if I have to take a hard line and I go you know what sugar is bad don't eat it it actually causes a generally good effect on people they go oh okay I didn't know this adding sugar to my stuff is not good don't do it right which is a net good thing although technically individually it's not true I see what you're saying so sugar in and of itself is not bad excess sugar and

91:59process sugar and added sugar in mass quantities is bad exactly and that's what you're dealing with with the average American diet whether it's through breads or pastas are actually sugar and soda itself right or you know sucrose or sucrose or any of those things and added to it and so when people like go they poor souls go on the internet and they're trying to figure out like wow got our carbs bad for me or not right it's like well your we're fighting over stuff that's not important and we're missing the message because people want real answers and you're not helping them right give it to them in a way I don't care if it makes you look right on the internet we need to come together and say oh okay well here's good here's bad about it here the pros and cons Etc now here's the information for you folks and it doesn't matter whose book it is or who wrote it like that's not the

92:43important part well even having this conversation though is going to be really confusing to a lot of people because you're you're talking about so many different variables and by you're uh being intellectually honest about all this stuff and saying well it's you know there's no real good answer yeah you know and it's different for one person that is for another person some some people might get over really well on like macadamia nuts and almonds and get their protein from you know and other people they might actually had an alery to those things yeah and you know trust me try to be my students they get irritated as when I do this to him but it's probably a good thing but when a fighter in particular is thinking about their career they sort of exist in these 6 week to 8we lifespans like their whole life unfortunately yeah it's really or fortunately when it works out

93:30well right that they go through these ruthless training camps and to have any variability and to have any unknown to have any so this is yeah I mean you bring up a good point this is not the kind of conversation I would have with a fighter right not during not especially 10 weeks out from a fight overload their brain with possibility no no no no it is very clear like what do you do what do you like to do what do you hate to do what have you done before what's worked well Etc okay uh so I have an analogy called The Cook The Baker and the chef I give you the very quick story of it uh you can listen to the whole episode on my podcast if you want podcast called uh the body of knowledge okay so it's on iTunes all that CH yeah yeah all that stuff body knowledge.com it's it's actually uh not to talk about that too much but it's only nine episodes It's not like an on-running podcast it's

94:22like Radio Lab Dan Carlin but for physiology strength conditioning so not to that extent but you get yeah okay so I like to look at people as either the easy one is either a baker or a cook right so do you know what the difference between baking and cooking is no cool most people don't baking is chemistry basically right you can't like Oh I'm a little T tablespoon here maybe a teaspoon baking soda baking powder same thing that does not work you can't bake like that right you will not make anything you're you would have a mush of crap in an oven baking is chemistry you do this in this order and this and then you add this and you cannot do these in other orders it's very specific like roughly cooking is like well all right what's left I get some oil get some hot um kind of dices yeah throw so some whatever that you give them mish mash right so people generally I find work

95:13well with nutrition information either one of two approaches so if I said Joe I'm going to do a a nutrition program for you for the next six months um whatever you want and I said you can either do this one or two ways uh we can work together every morning weigh every single thing you eat on the scale text it to me I'll tell you exactly how many slices of avocado to have how many jalapenos and we i' tell you exact weights and volumes for everything or we could maybe text once a day or once a week and we would just go over Concepts and ideas here's what we're trying to get to do what you want which would you like man I don't know what should I like it's not a should it's it's a personal preference okay so some people would a cook just wants ideas right give me the concepts like one or two things to work through cool I don't I get anxiety with all those rules all that information

96:02like I I can't implement it like it's too complicated I don't have that much time Etc I call those people Cooks other people get anxiety like my wife Natasha when I don't give her exact numbers she's like is it six grams or is it eight almonds or is it nine almonds like what is it right so giving people the information the way that they absorb it is important so if you talk to a baker so chemistry details weighing everything out and I go all uh just here's what I want you to do a little bit of fat a little bit of protein some grains it's not going to work for them you have to give them a very very specific system half a cup of this a tablespoon of that even if that system isn't perfect what about a chef so a chef is someone who knows the chemistry of baking but has the years of experience of mixing it in different ways now you can go ahead and break those

96:53rules right chefs break cooking rules all the time baking rules so a chef is like Anderson Silva well a fighting yeah yeah but a chef would be maybe where you're at in your nutrition where you go you know what like I can do that I could follow a very specific diet but I know the concept and I know these rules let me experiment here and you have the room to maneuver the problem is most people want to jump in and be chefs people want to fight like Anderson Silva their first day and get overwhelmed I see what you're saying so get a detailed understanding about how your body functions under very specific protocols and then start around with it or the opposite start off with a cook approach which just say let's give me let me give you one or two concepts this week I want you to eat one fresh green every day and I want you to make sure you have protein every time you eat

97:38that's it it's my only rule okay next week we add a rule maybe or we add another concept and as you get better and you get more confidence and you get more comfortable you can go okay well how much protein exactly H let's just's try 100 gram all right well that that let's try 150 and we've we've slowly pushed you but generally being a baker all those rules weighing everything generally that's not sustainable for most people H now when you co do you coach them as far as their diet goes do you do you actually tell them what they shouldn't shouldn't eat depends on if they're a cook or a baker oh so a cook I do not I tell them basic concepts right so I talk to them how what's going to be helpful for them they go what do you think I should do should I add more or sh here's what I'm feeling I'll go all right where we at like here's our diet yeah yeah let's add more carbs how

98:26should I do it uh this or this uh this one do you generally tell people to avoid any specific Foods or are there any things that interrupt training or get get into the way outside of the obvious no I mean the basics candy Pizza like right not really um unless we have some very specific history with them that hey remember you don't react well when this happens um but generally I don't then when you say like protein do you specify fish or chicken or meat or if it's a cook uhhuh no no if it's a baker absolutely absolutely and whether it's important that I chose fish or chicken almost doesn't matter as much as telling them that the fact that they oh go he's got a DI for me great I got a system you eight ounces of halit there it is Bam right right cuz you be like the vast majority of the ones I work with are already pretty good with their nutrition and it's really more Concepts

99:19um some of them just want the stress relief telling them what to eat and they want someone to come in hey like do you know anyone that'll come in and food prep meal prep for me and yeah okay we can do that but some of them like it some of it's it's their de-stress some of them like that control so I I I try to help them again it's not about me like I don't care if my system worked I don't have a system my system is what do you want to do how can I help you and your team what can we do that's the approach right wow God that seems so it's there's so many variables and it's so complex yeah which is this is why I get so irritated you you're teasing me earlier about getting all fired up about it I could understand but I appreciate this intellectual honesty about these variables and about how there is not one approach because again there's so many out there that are teaching

100:07their method in air quotes so here we go let's take those right if you're a baker landing on one of those systems is going to be fantastic for you and you're going to five star review them and you're going to Tweet it out everybody CU you're like this is great right cuz you're Baker yeah and you needed a system mhm yeah and if if you're a cook though you're like well who cares and if a scientist could step in and go like well these are all the problems and this and this and this and this and then and everyone's fighting back and forth you're like well do I guess do I eat fat or do I not eat fat like I'm so confused that's not the right question I think what irritates a lot of people is that some people are finding like this insecurity that people have and they're exploiting it by telling them exactly what they think is right it's human nature right we want

100:54the next solution we want all this stuff we want it all dialed into one it's I call it FY of unicorn MH like I'm just going to keep searching because there's there's this one thing and if I fix that one thing everything else will line up doesn't work like that yeah now what about vegetables like do you specify the type of vegetables you like do you prefer a dark leafy green vegetable general statement beats or the more color the more texture the better right and like you said actually earli it's the variety that matters with these folks as sustainable now having said that here's what I'll do outside of Camp these are the conversations we're having like I want as many different vegetables as you possibly can different colors different countries different seasons all this stuff right let's let's cook them sometimes let's steam them let's eat them fresh let's eat them raw

101:40there's pros and cons to exactly oh now you got to fight in four weeks and we're 25 lbs overweight sometimes I will take those options away because it's easy then to control control numbers if I say okay here's the approach you're going to have a b and c at these three meals every day M every other day will rotate then I've just removed a bunch of variables from there and they can just real focus and go okay boom and we can watch the weight we're down half a pound we're down half a pound down a quarter pound we're great let's maybe exchange out kale for spinach this time or something but the hard part about extreme variability is lack of control and so sometimes if you're like well I'm eating all everything you're telling me I'm eating a bunch of this different stuff and I'm not losing weight well maybe they don't understand yeah but this type of vegetable has a

102:26lot more calories than this type of vegetable so we're getting really high up in your numbers or when you eat this the way you prep it the way you like it is calorically dense so I will reduce options for them so it was funny because if you looked at you know one of my nutrition programs for my athlete you could look at it and be like oh this guy's an idiot he doesn't have this this this and this he's stupid he doesn't have any of this and you're like dummy you think that that 3day plan is what we did the whole year round you're arguing with someone who's not even real oh they're real you of all people know they're real I know what about water now I've always wanted to ask somebody this I hope you know the answer there's all these these ways to treat water alkaline water right mostly yeah I would assume so yeah we've actually did a study on that six weeks

103:13alkaline what does it mean like what the is alkaline water that's pH right so it's the opposite of acid right right alkaline base but I mean how do they make the water that way like what are they doing to it oh so generally water comes uh probably a little bit acidic especially our tap water uh and so I would imagine they just do some sort of combination of salt or desal thing pretty easy right chemistry wise so they get it a little bit technically just adding little salt to your water I think somebody did um actually did a study of a bunch of those alkaline Waters and tested them in the store like bought a different brands and they were all over the place aity wise yeah I would imagine they were not even close to line cuz you also have like remember it's going to change when it sits on the Shelf when it's exposed to sunlight all that crap I call it holy water yeah it's kind of

103:58silly but I mean I always feel like like oh yeah that's the Blessed water like come on man it's water I mean dude look I'm I'm open if if studies came out and we kept doing it we're like oh there's something here but there's no studies that's happened before with things i' been like that's nonsense that's stupid uh I mean a bunch of things um the training mask is the training mask absolutely is it good well it's not good bad depends on what you use it for how dare you yeah I need an answer I'll give you an answer okay so what I like to do is give examples of of when good when bad right and this is uh Brian McKenzie I keep bringing him up but he taught me this lesson this is a great lesson in humility uh so he's a if you don't know him he's a he was really disruptive in the running community in the movement he's he came up Kelly starett like they came up together okay

104:44um so I wasn't interested in him people kept getting at me like hey you got to look at his stuff and I'm like he's a CrossFit coach out like not you don't like CrossFit coaches I have nothing against that but at the time I was like what does right okay CrossFit coach know right again arrogance on my part mistake and second I'm like you're a running coach like I'm doubling uninterested y again this is me highlighting my mistakes understand so but then I actually you know funny enough paid attention to what he was saying and it turns out there was something there so it's funny how much you hated someone when you don't actually listen right or read their stuff so uh he was promoting the training mask and I'm like you know like everyone else I'm like doesn't work evidence shows doesn't work etc etc etc and then I listened to what he was how he was actually using it so he wasn't

105:27using it to simulate altitude because that's not really effective but he was using it to teach people how to use their diaphragm and that's when I was like oh I get it here so I'll come back and I'll finish this in but the quick analogy here would be if I handed you a pen and said you know like does this pen work well it may not work as a dagger but it worked pretty good as a pen so the problem with the mask was it's flipped it didn't work for what it was told you to work for but it worked because it in this case the act of restricting people's breathing sometime can help them learn to use their diaphragm people who breathe with their shoulders up and they don't use their stomach and their diaphragm a lot when you put that n in front of their face they don't have that option and so they learn to breathe through their belly and use their diaphragm interesting and so I just

106:19didn't give him the time of day cuz I'm like Training Mask doesn't work elevation etc etc etc right oh that's not how you were using it and what's the benefit of breathing through diaphragm with a mask on it's not the mask that's important it's the fact that it would use it's a quick way to identify if you're bring this so you figured out it's like a a weight belt boss rutin has um some sort of a breathing device and he um he was telling me about some studies that they did with it where it showed was it you that was mine oh beautiful my lab well what he was saying is that what makes his better is that it's easy to breathe out that the valve opens so you can exhale really good dump your carbon dioxide whereas other ones that have just smaller holes are not as good MH so we did that study oh okay um and this is actually that's what turned me on to Brian initially because I'm

107:08like when boss came to me with the O2 trainer I was like like this stuff doesn't work bro turns out it does but here's a good example um so his device restricts uh airflow in right but you can change the setting so it can be a lot of restriction or a little bit of restriction yeah he has like filters that you put on it there it is right there boss Rootin yeah the O2 trainer exactly uh so all those little valves on the left and right hand side they're thick they you know increase air flow or decrease air flow so what we did is we had people come in four times and they either got the high restriction low restriction medium restriction or no restriction and what we saw is in every person under one of those sorry let back up they they came in and either they did some breathing drills like and blowing it out inhaling as hard as they can blowing it out and they did that 30

107:59times and then they did basically v toax test so they ran to exhaustion which took them five to eight minutes kind of thing so we want to see like I was interested in performance like does this actually make me perform better and so they either got a lot of restriction a little restriction medium or none every single person got substantially better like 20 to 30% better under one of the conditions but they also got worse under one of the conditions as well so what that told us was this if for example you went under the high restriction so you're like and you can't get any air in it actually fatigued your intercostals which are the muscles between your ribs that open up your ribs that allow air flow in the diaphragm and those got fatigued so when you did your performance you got slower because you were already gassed but if you had really strong intercostals the lower so the real open

108:54valve wasn't enough resistance to actually cause those muscle to warm up so that didn't help your performance so what we found is my point here basically is the individualization of the approach here is really really important so there's something there for all of us but you're going to have to titr trate out you might need heavy you might need light you might need the middle and one of those situations might actually make it worse for you so the the individual variability is the important point there how would you figure out which one you needed a performance test and what kind of performance test would you use in this partic you could do anything you could say I'm going to run a mile and a half recording by time and put that thing in your mouth as you're running or as your warmup as your warm up yeah so you sit there you put it in your mouth and you

109:35do so you only use it to do drills you don't necessarily use it to actually work out the vast majority of the time that's what I recommend you could do it in your workout um but it would be for different reasons so when you do it uh what would you recomend recommend doing like say say if I got an O2 trainer I put it in like what kind of workouts am I doing with this thing in my mouth what am I or breathing exercise you're going to hate this probably some of your fans are getting irritated by now but it depends on the goal of the workout God damn it so if the goal of the workout is to get the best score possible right then you do probably 30 or 40 breaths with the optimal resistance feel great okay but if the point of the workout is to actually improve the strength of the diaphragm Bingo then you then you put yourself in suboptimal positions it's right back to

110:24what I said at the beginning adapting or optimizing talking about the the muscles in between the ribs can you actually strengthen those to the point where I mean that's a huge issue with guys getting injured absolutely you can strengthen those with that O2 trainer thing with with that's one mechanism but you can do it a bunch of different ways we have done uh you've had um you've had whim HF on right so I've been working with whim for a couple years now so doing initial stuff with him and it's very very clear like we we can mess with a lot of different breathing protocols and get you a lot of immediate and delayed of sorry a Brian one more time uh he had his conversation with Jon Jones on Wednesday before the fight first time thatd ever met someone put him in contact Brian put him through some of these breathing protocols soon as they hung with the phone or soon as

111:10they were done John was like hey we fly down here on Saturday blew him down that day had him in his Corner walked him all the way down was right next to probably you and Dana's doing all the things so like this is how impact some of these breathing things are our whim is was great to get us like started boss's device was awesome the training mths were were Concepts but now Brian is really evolved and developed and said actually there's a bunch of different ways we can do it and he has protocols you're going to have to ask him but he is the one that can say like do this for this thing do exactly this way for this thing you want this adaptation you want this effect wow and he has it all dialed in I go to a cryo chamber um cryotherapy place where you put a um surgical mask on ear muffs and your whole body's immersed it's not just below the neck oh yeah you seen those and when I use the

111:54Wim Hoff breathing method it's almost like somebody made it 50° warmer oh yeah it's way easier I just got back from on talk I spent three days and jumping on Ice Bass the whole time out there uh but we actually have multiple protocols so that's more akin to what some will call the Breath of Fire is this when you were with Dennis is that yeah we were at on an event out there with lar Hamilton and and those folks O'Brien also they lared and Gabby and Brian Gabby Reese and lar Hamilton started a company called xpt that kind of puts a lot of this lifestyle stuff into practice and so they put on these Live Events they also sent me some of their uh new superfood stuff that they had to the creamer stuff it's really good amazing yeah it's a little espresso based powder plus super stuff too I like it it's fantastic um so I've been working with that company for a couple of years um since they got

112:41started but we go out there and we do these things and so we can say okay we'll get you through the Breath of Fire protocol and you'll feel like wow you get hot you get warmed up there's other ways we can do it that'll bring you back down where you're like yeah I'm going to take a nap there's Euphoria ones where you can get like wow I'm feel like I'm on psychedelics right now I'm super high holotropic breathing bunch of apnea stuff um prama stuff all these things can have different um outcomes depending on on what you're looking for so they' Brian has got the system developed now where uh like it's that's what he did with John the first one he did um it was like 10:00 at night and he's like all right let me relax you and kind of bring you down he's like oh this is amazing but then he's like actually got to go train right now he's like can you get me back up he like all right

113:27let's go back to other way s them back up so is there any benefit to um using those breathing techniques versus an O2 trainer or is it different situations exactly it's situation based there's things I like so you mentioned what boss says uh the opening valve at the end of the O2 trainer allows you to dump out carbon dioxide okay the training mask for example wouldn't right right so it's not right or wrong it's just depending on what you're looking to do because one thing you can train your body to do is how well do you perform when you've generated a bunch of carbon dioxide right so carbon dioxide is what actually makes you feel like you want to breathe right it's not lack of oxygen right right so I can put you in a situation where you get a bunch of carbon dioxide buildup and if I don't let you dump it then you're going to fatigue a lot faster but that's not necessarily a bad

114:17thing you could learn to then deal with lot of fatigue deal with it mentally psychologically as well as physiologically there's going to be adaptations so because of the fact that your body has more carbon dioxide in the system you your body adapts to process that carbon dioxide more efficiently this would be the Assumption like yet to be scientifically shown but this is you know where we were this is the thought process you can feel this intuitively you're like wow um and it's also a way for us to get a lot of training volume in or sorry a lot of cardiovascular training in because your heart rate goes way up without actually doing a lot of physical work and so for MMA guys this is what we're looking for sometimes because the physical work in their training camp so high we can't add any more volume to them it's going to beat them up so now we can get them a

115:03cardiovascular workout in that's easy on the joints and ligaments and and the bones so the other approach would be dump all the CO2 or do other things like nasal breathing only so the whole workout you're only allowed to breathe through your nose when you breathe through your nose it actually can release nitric oxide which is a basil dilator so this is why when you only when you breathe through your nose not only but especially when you breathe through your nose huh why why does your body produce more nitric oxide when you breathe through your nose I don't know I don't know that's weird because you would think that just breathing like whm Hoff I was asking him like breathe through the nose just breathe breathe yeah he always says like any hole I don't care yeah um but so again whims not wrong or anything like that but uh whims style is great but there's many styles is the point I

115:54guess like he's great we've done some signed stuff together but how do you feel about saunas same thing amazing benefits there um potential but there's no free passes in physiology so when you get something you're probably coming at the compromise of something else what would the compromise be when you do a sauna don't know huh we just don't have enough evidence on this stuff we know we focused on the heat shock proteins that's like everyone knows about those by now right um the ability to deal with uh uncomfort fatigue like there's a lot of stuff the difficult is when you run a scientific study you get one or two or three variables you don't get a thousand right so you focus on the one or two that you're like wow this is moving something here but I mean just like the example we went over with the cold it's like well yeah it's great for this or actually

116:41it's terrible and then people say no they want to make blanket statements like Heat's good or Cold's good or Cold's bad well as we study it more we start to finding out well actually it's good for this and it's good for this and it's bad for that and that and that and that so we'd have to assume sa would be the same way there has to be consequences to it it's just depends on implication but there's got to be some sort of benefits in terms of recovery right so do you think that someone should do maybe like cryo one day sauna the next should they do them in the same day like so for example a fighter in Camp I generally don't go out of my way to recommend sauna because they already get really hot in training you're grappling especially if they're doing Gees stuff they're getting heat shock protein I don't yoga Hot Yoga in particular right there's this study

117:22they're doing right now at Harvard apparently uh somebody was telling me about it the other day where they're uh they're concentrating on hot yoga and the benefits of hot yoga and heat shock proteins yeah I'm sure they're going to find a lot yeah like that that's pretty I mean that ship's sailed a little bit like we're we're confident something there's a lot of detail to work out but something's going on there probably something similar to sauna right so I generally say for people uh like you and like me I don't go out of my way to do too much sauna work because of the way I train I get really hot and sometimes we'll train specifically with a little bit more clothing sometimes and get kind of like well instead of sitting in a sauna for 45 minutes let me wear a little bit of extra clothing during my training session and get real hot actually but for the average people I

118:05think it's a fantastic modality because they're maybe only working out once a week or less and you can get them hot and we can actually work on those health benefits while we're building good quality habits and we can eventually lead them down the path to more exercise Emanuel Stewart used to run the cron gym um he used to crank the temperature up in the gym over 100 deg that was his thing like he wanted guys to box yeah like in essentially like a hot yoga room well there's a couple of things um to that I've done a lot of that in my life and I used to hate it we used to just fight for the door like wait for the round to go over wrestling yeah wrestling practice they always have it really hot we used to do MMA with it all the time and like the problem was it was scary because the floor is water oh yeah and you're like I'm not kicking like you're terrified just not that's not

118:51good it was awful I hated it that's real bad for kicking skip those practices a lot Joe um but so example uh I don't think that's particularly needed with the exception uh one time when Pat cumins fought in Brazil it was like 110 outside and it was 80% humidity or something which fight was that uh it was um cord or F yeah I remember was that fight it was outdoors I think no it was indoors but everything was open oh that's what it was yeah so it was super super hot now we didn't like train for that or anticipate that but you could see if you knew you were fighting in a venue like that yeah um like what they used to do in bodog in Costa Rica like oh yeah they would fight on the beach God yeah right just ho outside so you could say like Well in that situation maybe it's needed but you're fighting in you know Vegas or something indoors and maybe we don't

119:41need it for that right but that doesn't mean you couldn't implement it once or twice I I wouldn't go out my way to do it though right so it wouldn't be a daily thing but no cuz what's going to happen is you're going to compromise performance uh pacing is a real problem Bisping is a great example of this too Dennis was a bunch of people if you fight in an environment like that your pace and the amount of output you can do is going to slow way down in the gym right it's going to be hot you're going to gas out and then when you go to fight in your fight and it's temperature controlled you're not used to that pace so if you're used to fighting at the pace that it takes for you to sustain 10 rounds of sparring in the gym at 110° and then we come in and you and I fight and I'm ready to go with this speed you're not ready for that pace so it's not that you don't physically have the

120:25conditioning but you're just like oh my I'm just not this gu's just and you know you don't feel right so you have to be careful of training too far outside of what you're actually going to encounter um which is you know some of these guys run into those problems when they do you know I'm going to spar 10 Rounds so that I can go five easy yeah yeah but your pace for your five is way different than your pace for your 10 yeah so you have to be careful there wow lot of questions man physiology dude that that is part of the problem right that there are so many variables there are so many questions that there is no real definitive protocol to follow no there's a bunch of different ones the pursuit the way I always say it is like truth is mostly a lack of perspective so when you think that you are on some unbreakable truth it's because you haven't looked at it from a big enough

121:13perspective for the most part right right and there's some we'll put it this way in um in biological truth that's almost always true in physics truth that's a lot less true like we're pretty sure gravity's real like we're pretty sure right and we can mechanic sure water's good for you pretty sure uh now quantum mechan physics those get kind of weird right but for the most part that is true but science in terms of biological or medical is a lot less true I mean how many times we have to see that where it's like this is true this is true for 50 years oops it's not is this all fun for you do you I mean it seems like you're you're very passionate about it but I mean it's it also seems like wow it could be kind of stressful having so many variables and possibilities and I don't I don't think stress is even close it's I would say 99% fun like it's stress for me in terms of I don't want I

122:05like it would break my heart if I gave someone the wrong advice and it ruined their career like that would be the stress stress in terms of being right or like saying a bunch of some stuff and being proved I don't care about that at all yeah that is an issue with a lot of trainers right like where they give bad advice and you see it play out in a fight I I I mean one of the reasons I I I used to do a lot of professional athletes in other sports work with other ones I gave that almost up entirely and I gave up I've done some actors and things like that but I generally sh away from that even though the the money is far far higher for me in those things but I did it because like these MMA folks like I have a real passion for someone who's going to put all that on the line and they're going to risk everything and they're going to go out there and that is more exciting exciting

122:49to me and I'm like that's a fun a really fun investment to me and and it's worth me investing my emotion I mean when Helen won golden Rio like I just lost it like emotionally I was like gone for weeks like just exhausted because I invested so much into that I don't want to do that for somebody so they can make an extra million right on top of their 30 million like it doesn't motivate me that much so I like working with these folks and so because of that like it breaks my heart if you're like man you gave up everything for this kind of a living and the best outcome for you was that you made 20K instead of 10K and and then I lost that for you because I gave you really bad rehydration advice or something right that's a stress for me um but the rest of the stuff man like it's fun it's invigorating for me to Contin to be like well we we answered that but now we don't know this or this

123:36like it's continual progress and and by like I take Carl popper stance on this one in terms of like science is not about identifying truth it's reducing uncertainty H that's good way to put it that's all it is right I wish I could take credit for it good way to put it so we just we get closer and we know more okay we know this is this but we're still do you anticipate a day when we do like when it comes to biomechanics or phology there are some things that I would be confident in saying like basically we know that this is true now you need to drink water like we basically say that that's true uh we need to have a lot of Vy like the very standard stuff then those are things I'm comfortable saying this is basically true and as we go on we only keep adding to that list so more things get piled on now we know for uh I told this story also on um my podcast about the history

124:27of strength conditioning and how it went from the 1900s to where it is now and the quick story is there was a guy named um Peter karpovich who was a scientist and he was extremely he was the guy who started the idea that lifting weights causes you to lose flexibility and uh it's bad for your health and and all these things right this is 1950 2 54 something like that and he's a scientist PhD and he calls in a guy he gets a guy named Bob Hoffman he's called in do you remember Bob Hoffman you're from the generation you may remember York barbell um muscle and strength like the magazine okay you may recognize all this stuff but basically uh there was a show and they said bring in this these weightlifters because back then weightlifting powerlifting bodybuilding was all kind of the same thing they said bring him in and uh let's put on a demonstration and so they bring in all

125:20these lifters and they put on this demonstration in front of the whole school and front of Dr karpovich and and uh everyone's like cool they're great they're strong and athletic and everyone knows like The Showdown is coming like everyone's there to watch the show but everyone's really there to watch like the just like they are on the internet now it's like let's watch the show afterwards right so everyone's done and carpage stands up and he's like that's great you're strong and got a lot of muscle and all that but um let me ask you a question can you scratch your back the guy was like sure you know where at's like what where and he start scratching boom Landing everywhere what he want to do what do you want me to do drops into a full splits grabs 50 PB dumbbells does a standing backflip and at this point karpovich is like uh oh like my entire career is that strength

126:07training is bad for you it's unhealthy you lose flexibility and these dudes the strongest in the world just showed up not only are they not inflexible but they just did a splits their their bodybuilders are raining world champions so he was at a cross was right there in his career to say like do I admit in front of the whole world about how wrong my entire research line was or do I find some excuse well you well he does the The Honorable thing and goes I'm sorry I'm wrong and changes his entire career of research going on to actually studying strength training and of course shows that doesn't do any of these things we do so this is the nature of science is we're mostly wrong until we actually study and then we get less than less than L wrong so that's really where we're at with with everything that's an easy example but if you told somebody 50 years ago ah

126:55flexibility or strength training makes you inflexible so they're like well I don't know look at this study look at this study well that used to be an issue with boxing right they used to always say boxers should never strength train till Vander Holyfield came along with Mackie shellstone right and won the title yesterday yeah at the airport he looks great oh man it's crazy huge he was pulling the like walking out of the bathroom by himself and he had like his cell phone up to his ear like I'm on the phone but I think his cell phone was dead but he's like didn't want anybody talk that's funny which I don't blame him no he looked fantastic I just signed a buddy of mine to his he's doing do you know he's uh he's like coach or managing Fighters now or something is he yeah hopefully not financially I don't know if V's like buy the biggest house that exists yeah yeah remember he had that

127:37stupendous mansion in Atlanta it was like 150 rooms or something like that dude you put that much money in front of people in a sport like that especially when you're balling when you're balling have other people balling trying to ball harder you got to do what you got to do I don't think mma's ever caught up to that in terms of financially yeah it's getting close with Conor McGregor but honestly his biggest wifall right now is a boxing match so who knows right um the the thing about Evander that's weird is that he never got out of shape he he looked fantastic yeah he's still fit he's got to be plus he's one of the rare guys and I think he had a fight as recently as a year ago no oh yeah yeah find out when a Vander Holly Field's last fight was I really want to say he had a fight like a year ago oh that's terrifying yeah but he's okay it's weird he's not like um oh

128:27what's this dude uh just retired or just got smashed really bad uh Hopkins Bernard that gu amazing yeah that was a freak incident man that's one of the things about like why don't they have pads around the ring in case guys fall through the ropes like I can't imagine that they didn't they've seen that happen before guys are getting up from that before that's all fight style right he fought M Ro yeah yeah yeah but that was like a fake charity boxing match what does it say though in terms of uh when is his last fight that's that's what popped up when I hit last fight yeah but that's not real I think you're lying Joe I think just pull up his uh his record it's Wikipedia record I'm sure there's a Wikipedia on a Vander Holyfield Brian n neelson uh this says 2011 oh okay so six years ago yeah that's pretty recently in consideration oh you know what it was I believe he was

129:22planning a comeback a few years ago and he was having a really hard time getting licensed oh I think that's what it was I would still say if you would asked me I would have said 12 years ago like I would have guessed way longer than that well he how old is he now 50 I just lost it 62 60 what no he's not he was born in 62 so 55 yeah so he essentially had his last fight when when he was like what 48 49 something like that yeah makes sense that's the style well I don't know I don't really remember his style that much he didn't take a lot of shot did he take a lot of shots oh hell yeah yeah Bruiser yeah I mean he talk took some he just had a tremendous chin he's just a unbelievably tough guy and unbelievably fit you know that was the thing about Holyfield was that unbelievably fit unbelievably game like when he beat Mike Tyson in the first fight like I remember

130:17uh it was you know Kevin James Kevin was actually over my house we were watching it together we're jumping around screaming like a bunch of school girls couldn't believe it it was insane yeah yeah cuz nobody saw that coming you know I was like right yeah that was amazing yeah he had a spectacular career though oh he certainly did yeah hope he still got it together upstairs like that's just a tough one mhm yeah it certainly is yeah that has got to be weird I wonder what you ever have that conversation with a fighter I do uh it's not my role so I don't bring it up at all but if they ask me on like a friendly advice thing um and we'll get we'll be very careful with names here um but I generally tell them all to retire like regardless my Approach is no this is a this is the the risk is not worth the payout in the UFC it's just not like there is the occasional Conor but this

131:10is this is the anomaly that proves the rule actually so my advice to all of them is if if it's not a good investment like it is not worth the risk because even if you get the win bonus in the fight of the night one fight like that is potentially years and how much income could you make in those 10 years of working probably more than that 100K well in terms of income for sure but for a lot of them it's not really what they're doing it for they're doing it for Glory right so I mean that's but I'm taking it from a logical perspective I'm not telling you what to do I'm saying though like me as your friend I would love you to never fight because it's great but having said that you do that so let me help you as much as I can to get there but but I I mean you can kind of tell too like if you're if if you just don't um if you're not on that X Factor Charisma wise and

131:57stuff you're never going to make that real like life-changing money right we're just talking about money though in terms of damage do you do you notice in terms of physical performance when you're seeing an athlete move around I haven't gotten to that I haven't gotten anybody like that where but if you had someone come to you and say hey I'm thinking about you know when I get out I'm not exactly sure when what do you think yeah I mean I would I would look at them from the performance side of it I wouldn't look at brain damage and all I would say well here are your numbers in the room sacked up to other folks we've had in this room and you're if you're far below their performance- wise I would say you might have a performance problem in terms of you might not be talented enough physically to compete like I'm not going to make a comment about your other reasons to retire but

132:37if yeah if I tested you across the board and you were terrible at everything MH um then I might be like well physically from my perspective I don't know if you have what it takes anymore right do you see a deterioration in physical skills from like punishment I I don't know if I could really say that um but that's just because I don't like I don't have enough exposure to enough of those folks to make a qualified comment on that over long periods of time yeah you I would need dozens and dozens of guys over years to really fairly what's the longest you've ever worked with a guy uh five six years probably yeah probably six years that's a lot of time it is and it's not like uh like some of them it's not every I'm not talking them every day and sometimes it's like once a camp uh generally what my goal is is to teach them how to think as much through the stuff as they can and so ideally

133:29they don't need me after more than a couple of camps other than a few check-ins right I want to come to the lab get this tested I got a hunch about this or we did this type of training for six weeks we think we are addressing this problem can we come to get it tested to see if it actually got better yeah no problem but the lot of the other stuff I do is like I said it's so much usually helping them calm down through all the nonsense that I can give them a settling presence in terms of this is not something you should worry about or right get to hear so um but yeah multiple five six years and we've got data we've got biopsy data off them from over the years which has been very very interesting actually that was one of the first reasons I wanted to get into the sport because I'm like I wanted to biopsy these dudes yeah that's got to be really as a scientist got to be really

134:11an interesting opportunity to yeah we had um we had one fighter who was pretty crazy because he's a he was a wrestler and a very very um he he wins through attrition like that's his style he's not like a knockout artist or anything like that and he was almost 70 75% fast twitch which is wow yeah and then we also looked at this other things so one of the things that we measure in our lab is called myclear domain so the nucleus is what holds the DNA and it tells the cell the grow shrink die like repair well like human violet or human muscle is really unique it's one of the only cells in all of biology that is multi-nucleated so that means it's got not only more than one but it's got thousands of nuclei per cell the obvious Advantage is that allows us a lot more plasticity so we can recover and repair and adapt and adjust really really quickly which is

135:07why we see people's fiber type change in a matter of weeks uh paper that came out last year showing actually a high fat high sugar diet can change fiber type we've seen carbon dioxide concentrations alter fi type uh things like this so the the nucleus is really interesting because the more nuclei you have the faster you recover it's also what determines how big a muscle will grow um you've heard of like muscle memory yeah so that's this is what's doing muscle memory oh that makes sense I always wondered if that was real uh well working right now through it um a lot of people are but the old Theory would be a satellite cell would come in and it would turn into a nuclei and the cell will only grow as big as the amount of nuclei that are around it or that are inside of it right and so what that basically means is uh there's a certain domain or a certain size that each

136:02nucleus will control and it won't exceed that size because it loses control so if if you all three of us and you know we're all a nuclei and this whole room was one cell if we wanted to expand the wall we would have to bring in another nucleus because you'd be like dude like it's too much area to control so when you go through like about a training a year or something of heavy lifting and we add those those satellite cells that turn into Mount nuclei and we expand the size well we used to think like if we stop training and this and the room gets smaller we used to think that all right like time to kick Jamie out of the room he's gone but now what looked like happening is he's staying around so then when I go to retrain I've got more of those nuclei right there and so it's e it's easier sorry I got excited hit the mic it's easier for me to expand my size because

136:48the nuclear are there oh that makes sense okay so there's an actual scientific reason for muscle memory yeah oh and you can increase the amount of nuclei just by increasing the size of the muscle and that makes it easier to go back to that if you lose some muscle well right the the my nuclei would allow for the muscle get bigger yeah so a little bit inverse but basically the same thing dude this was really fascinating anything else to add before we get out of here um the book man I I got a book out on all this stuff uh called unplugged uh evolving from technology to upgrade your Fitness performance and Consciousness is it on Amazon all that all that stuff is there an audio book available there is but I'm going tell you uh no sorry there's a Kindle but I would highly recommend you don't get it uh because don't get the Kindle no you mean that's the digital

137:35version right why get the hard copy why because the book is really a guide for how to use some of these training Technologies uhhuh in your training and how it can ruin your training and how it can help your training so a part of that is the importance of doing a couple of things getting back to Nature and how that the physiology behind how that helps as well as this concept of choosing suffering and and choosing discomfort and how that's physiologically important for you so a part of the book is built in a way where the photos the layout the quality of the paper is all part of the reading experience they don't have that in um like Kindle with photographs no it's not even close this it's you know it's all black and white uh texture of the paper different what if you have one of those Kindle HDs the ones that are digital and color uh maybe maybe yeah maybe that

138:26would be good but that's what you're saying though but you recommend the hard property yeah I mean I don't change I don't really care like but for the experience of it yeah it's it's still cheap it it's not expensive what's the physiological benefit of Getting Back To Nature oh we have so much yeah um it's pretty incredible um in terms of everything from visualization or sorry eyesight uh did you listen to that amazing podcast eyesight yeah Radio Lab did one on the color blue I didn't hear that one what's what's it called This is a teaser I'm not going to tell you the whole story what's it called the episode I don't know the episode find it if you Google the Radio Lab episode on the color blue okay but basically we as humans didn't really recognize the color blue until the Bible what yeah so we had the cones and like the physiology didn't change but we

139:17didn't have a word for the color blue until the Bible came along so if you look at anything past or prior to that yeah that's Pro why isn't the Sky Blue on radio that yep exactly so what uh what they basically identified is we didn't have a separate color for or a separate word for the color blue because we didn't differentiate blue Shades it wasn't important for the world because blue doesn't happen very frequently in in biology in nature it wasn't until we had textiles and we started Printing and making cloth and paper and stuff like that that we had all these different dieses and shades of blue so then we developed different shades of blue and different colors so because of that we started perceiving and focusing on different shades of blue so now the average person that comes to the room would be able to identify all these different blues or prior to this we

140:04didn't care about it we didn't focus on it so we all just saw that as one color blue so things like that are important so what are we paying attention to what are we being conscious of what are we perceiving what are we focusing on has a direct influence on our physiology it's very adaptable to those things so how does that make like going to Nature so if we think about it from this way what's happening in the exposure when we're in this artificial environment versus being in the external environment like nature so what are we not being exposed to now that we could be exposed to out in nature the third part of the book is the Consciousness aspect which is we talked to a lot of people um Tim Ferris wrote a section or did a little interview thing for it stepen Cotler did one as well and they talk about the things like getting into Flow State and the stress relief of

140:53it and all the other psychological benefits that we have from detaching a little bit from our constant Tech exposure um dopamine is another great example right so if we look at the dopamine Rush that we get from the constant exposure uh not from the actual Tech but from things like oh I want to look at my likes I want to continue to look at this that's completely different than when we when we get out in nature and and expose our yourself to physiological elements similar to the cold and the hot and the Thirsty the hungry I mean you've been out in the woods and stuff before like you know what it feels like going a full day without food or being extremely cold for a few days and then getting back and like the Euphoria like the sensations like you can't re well you can but it's really beneficial to have ourselves exposed to that um and and it's a problem now but really the the book is

141:42about I wait 20 years and think about the problem that's going to be in 20 years when this technology thing only gets more advanced and it takes more portion of our life all right dude one more time what's the name of the book unplugged evolve from technology to upgrade your Fitness performance and Consciousness beautiful thanks man I really enjoyed it great conversation really appreciate it and D cpin ladies and gentlemen see you that was great dude