Cameron Hanes - Keep Hammering Collective - KHC 078 - Dr. Andy Galpin

Episode Date: June 24, 2024

Join us for a discussion with Dr. Andy Galpin, a professor of kinesiology and a renowned leader in the field of human performance. Listen in as Andy and Cam talk about how Andy got started, training fighters and more! Follow along: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cameronrhanes Twitter: https://twitter.com/cameronhanes Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/camhanes/ Website: https://www.cameronhanes.com   Follow Andy: https://www.instagram.com/drandygalpin/  Thank you to our sponsors: Ketone IQ: https://hvmn.com/CAM use code CAM for 30% your first subscription order MUD\WTR: https://mudwtr.com/cam use code CAM for 15% off  Montana Knife Company: https://www.montanaknifecompany.com/ Use code CAM for 10% off  Sig Sauer: https://www.sigsauer.com/ use code CAM10 for 10% off optics GoHunt: https://gohunt.com/ use code CAM when you sign up for $50 towards the gear shop + 10% off the GoHunt store Grizzly Coolers: https://www.grizzlycoolers.com/ Use code KEEPHAMMERING for 20% off Timestamps: 0:00:00 Intro: Andy’s Interest in Human Performance at a Young Age 0:09:50 Why Andy Loves About Training 0:11:46 Working for Athlete’s Performance 0:12:54 Hard Work vs Talent 0:20:17 Coaching Female Athletes 0:22:04 Coaching Boxers & Fighters 0:28:01 Ad Break 0:29:50 How Andy Got into Training Fighters 0:36:41 The Start of Andy’s Lab 0:39:25 Brian Ortega 0:49:08 Cutting Weight in Fighting & Performance 01:03:19 Preparing Yourself to be Fitter, Longer 01:11:21 Training Goals, Performance & Recovery 01:16:41 Andy’s Thoughts on Cam’s Training Method 01:25:56 Being Affective vs Being Efficient  01:29:16 Andy’s Wyoming Bear Hunt 01:40:24 Andy’s Podcast: Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin 01:46:06 Outro

Every step I take, I move my truth. Every time they tell me stop I use. Every comment hate that makes my feel, gather up my energy and boom. I hear them talking, saying the way that I'm moving so reckless. That is a part of my mind I've been blessed with. Giving my blood so I am relentless. All right, this is a Keep Hammering Collective with Andy Galpin. Dr. Andy Galpin.

And check this out. Thanks for the gift. Yeah, man, my pleasure. You earned it today. I'll actually, again, I'll say James earned his and that I felt bad not giving you one. Right. so I gave you one. I'm used to writing on James's coattails, or as we like to call him, Gideon.

You know, that's his middle name. Gideon. Great. Anyway, he, yeah, he sets the tone for us. Thanks, thanks, Gideon. So we're, man, it's an honor to have you here. It's, I don't know, we've had so much fun talking about human performance. I mean, I feel like, you know, I've said this before.

Anytime I sit down with somebody after spending two days with him, I'm like, God, what the hell are we going to talk about? But, man, I'm so fascinated, as are you, obviously, with human potential and performance. So I'm curious, how did that come to be for you? I mean, I know you were an athlete. You played college football. Were you, like, looking at things at that time?

Yeah, what I can say is, you know, when I was a kid, I grew up not too far from here. Yeah. in southwest Washington. And I played college, pretty close to here, actually. But I was a country kid. And, you know, my dad was in construction. And my parents were really positive.

And they really wanted the best for myself and my siblings. And they just said, you can do whatever you guys want, we'll support it, but you're not doing what we did. Because there's a grind. It's just going through hard. It's just, you know, have unpredictable income, hours and things like that. And so I'm a country kid, I'm playing sports, I was fortunate enough, and my brother was good enough to play college football.

But I wasn't really good. And that's important because if you're not good enough, it's like, hey, you can try really hard, you can do all the things right, and your training and your nutrition and recovery, and it's not going to matter. You just don't have talent. If you're the other direction where you're so good, it still doesn't matter, right? Because no matter what you do, you're going to perform. I was in the middle.

So I knew going into college, I was okay, but I wasn't very good. And I watched everyone else around me. And I thought, I could realize if you want to play and you want to play any substantial amount of time, you have to outwork all these people. And that was the biggest adrenaline shot I could ever have because I looked at all those kids and I thought there's no one of you who can work like I can work. I will pass all these kids. Now I'd have to know what I'm doing.

I have to do the right things because training really hard in the wrong direction is you know, obviously not effective. And so at that point, all they cared about was beating these kids. And so I'm like, I want to learn as much about training and nutrition and recovery as I can because that gave me something to do academically.

And I don't know, remember at that time, there was no exercise science field. There was no human performance college curriculum. It was kind of like public health and obesity prevention and, you know, walk more and stuff like that. And I don't want to do any of those things. But I'm like, well, if I can learn about how

the muscles work and the body works, and then I can use that and try to get better at sports, I can beat these kids. And so that was really all I care about. Is selfish. Yeah. I just for sure wanted to smash those city kids. I just wanted to play. Flatlanders.

That's what we used to call city kids. Of course, yeah. Because, you know, where I'm from, and my brother and I were one of the first people that I were to leave and play college football. So it was a big deal. What size of town were you from? It's called Rochester, Washington. Yeah.

We probably had 80 kids in my graduating class. Okay. So not like super small. Yeah. Not Powers Oregon. Yeah. Or 24 where I was. Mohawk.

Really? Yeah. Okay. So we are a little bigger. Yeah. Still 80 is small. Tiny. Yeah.

So it was a big deal for me. It was a big deal for my brother. And I wanted to succeed. I obviously wanted to play too. Yeah. Wanted to get more. So it started there. And then finishing.

college, it was like, okay, now what? Wait, but when you wanted to learn to, were you taking classes? Where were you learning this stuff? So that's great. It's a combination of both things. I started lifting weights when I was probably like 13 or 14, right? Because it's the same thing. I was really fortunate in my parents, my community, my kids I grew up with, my friends, their parents. I'm sure it's pretty similar down here where losing was totally fine. Right. Like there's going to be people that are more talented than you and skill, especially bigger schools and the Seattle schools and okay, great. Nobody ever really cared about that. But the mantra is always lazy was unacceptable. Losing fine, but you're going to do all the things in your power. So most of the kids I grew up with were cleaning stalls before school. You were leaving football practice. You were definitely going to hustle to bailing. Hey, like you're doing something all day of just a mantra of if you want something. It's your fault. Right.

It's your responsibility 100%. Yeah. And so that's why like things like stealing were so looked down upon why I grew up. Because it's the antithesis of what I just said. Of hard work. Yeah. It's everything that we stand for. Yeah.

It's the shortcut. Yeah. The opposite. Yeah. So from that point, I was like, okay, if you want to play, because my brother was older than me and bigger and really successful. So he's like, if you want to keep up with him and you want to. play with his class, you have one option. And if you don't get that, it's only your fault. It doesn't matter you're smaller. It doesn't matter you're younger. My parents never let that be an excuse.

Right. I know you know that like no excuses with your kids, right? Like it doesn't matter you're the smaller one. Your brother and his friends are going to go play and they don't want to let you play because you're not good. Right. And I'm not going to tell them you have to play. You got to earn it. If you're not good, you don't get to play. How much older was he? He's just. just a year academically, but about a year and a half. Okay. But just naturally 10% bigger. Right.

Okay. Right. So he's too much as taller and 20 pounds. Just. Must be nice. Yeah, right? Yes and no. So that was a carrot.

So when I was like 13, I'm like, okay, I'm going to start lifting. I don't know what I'm doing, right? I'm getting workouts from magazines. We're cutting them out and just doing them, right? That was really promoted. My high school football coach was really into same mantra, right? just like we're going to train, we're going to work hard, we're going to pick defense, we're going to do fundamentals.

Like those things were really important to everything we do. And if we, like our mantra is always, if the other team doesn't score, they don't win. Which is we did not really care about offense. Right. Like anything. Because you can control. If you don't let them score. Yeah.

You score once and it's a win, right? So we were always driven to that side. Which to us has been fine. You can always control your conditioning. you can always control how hard you work and you may not be able to throw it as far as they can and do all the skill-based things have the coaching, have the play design,

have the facilities, I mean, you name it, but we'll beat them with conditioning, we'll beat them with toughness, we'll beat them with fundamentals, all that stuff. Yeah, because defense can be a lot about heart too. If you want them more, you know, offense, they like getting cheered on and, you know, just being front runners,

it seems like. Of course. You know, it's fun. Style or substance, glamour. Yeah, but defense, yeah, it's gritty heart. Yeah.

And like no matter how much fatigue you're feeling, when you have the ball, you find more energy. Right. Right. But can you do the opposite? Right. Can you find the energy

when all you're doing is not letting someone score? It's terrible. Yeah, it's tough. Nobody wants to do that. So that was just set up at that age to me. And so it just carried through high school and it carried into college.

And you just kind of were teaching yourself about lifting. 100%. And then your coach in high school, you guys probably had a lifting program. Yeah, it was the same thing. It was probably there was an old company called Bigger, Stronger, Faster. And they had magazines and they had pretty common training programs. They're actually still not terrible.

So we had those programs that he would put up and he would just get him and the whole team would do them. So I learned a lot of the fundamentals from that stuff in terms of just training, technique and program design, but just what it feels like, what it looks like, what it feels like to, in that case, squat on Monday and come back on vertical jump test on Wednesday, and you jump higher. It's like, oh, okay, I see the feedback here. When I do that horrible thing on Monday, it was terrible, but I know on Wednesday I will be jumping higher.

Right. And when you're 12 and 13, like you just keep getting better every day. Yeah, for sure. Right. And you're going from, you know, I'm 5 foot 8. Right. and with shorter wingspan than average. Yeah.

And you're going from 13 years old and you could touch the net in a basketball hoop. And then 14, you can touch the backboard, right? Yeah. And then you're dunking volleyball and then you're dunking girls' balls. And you're like, wow, it's just like every year. I'm still waiting for that part, but I'll take your word for it. That part didn't get you?

No. But, hey, it's not over yet. No. You've got a chance, right? You can't get on top of that monument. Yeah, yeah. You got some bounce. But the carrot is there.

And you're seeing this is one. One of the things I love about training, there's a beautiful essay that Henry Rollins wrote years ago. Have you read it? I haven't read it, but I know his quotes. The essay is so good because he just perfectly encapsulated what strength training is for many of us, especially early in life, where the feedback is so direct. You did it or you didn't. You got progress or you did. I remember that 225 is always 225 or something like that on the bar.

It doesn't matter if it's raining outside. Yeah, it doesn't matter. I love that attitude. It's there, right? Like the rock, man. Yeah. Like the rock is going to get to the top of the snow. The rock, I know.

And like, there's no talking I can do. There's no science I can do. You just have to get that thing up. It's just going to go one way or the other, and it will land on that monument or it won't. It's a binary. It's very binary. Two options.

Yeah. Yeah. So pushing through those things, just set up the, infrastructure I needed to say, hey, I like human performance. And I really liked, obviously, I very much connect with people who have a similar, I don't want to call it a struggle, but a similar situation like I did, under-resourced maybe, under-talented, under-supported, undersized.

And once I started getting knowledge in this field, then I had a passion of going, man, I can help these people who are like me. What if they had better training And the other people who were more talented Or had other resources didn't And then these people can achieve their dreams Whatever their dream is to do their first pull-up To win a gold medal

I actually don't even really care that much To me the passion when I was working with people Has always come from somebody going I want to do something And when I initially started It was with people that This is before social media And this is in sports

because I actually, I'll back up. When I graduated college, I actually went down to Arizona and I worked at a facility called Athletes Performance. This was the very first kind of all in one training center. And so you had your physical therapists

and your dietitians and your chiropractors and your strength conditioning coaches in one facility. So we probably had 150 professional athletes in that Hall of Famers, All-Stars first round draft picks. We had like probably 16 or 18

first round draft picks in one year training there. Wow. major league baseball guys, right? So I'm coaching the best of the best. I'm interning, but I'm still coaching the best of the best really quickly. But along that path, I'm thinking, I don't really care about these people. I did it for five or six months and realized immediately, I don't want to do this.

I didn't have much interest. When I left there, I went back to get my master's degree. How come you didn't, what do you mean? You didn't care. I didn't care because there was nothing grabbing my soul. then they cared. Some of them worked really super hard. Some of them didn't.

I was curious about this. Do you think, who has a higher ceiling? A grinder with less talent who's had to outwork everybody to get where that or somebody who's born with the talent and just gets by on talent, I guess there's different levels to everything. It's almost always the talent.

The talent always wins? It's the talent. That's not fair. I get asked this a lot. Then I have no hope. People ask me that one commonly, like what is the difference between, because I've dealt with probably five or six

of the highest contracts in professional sports in America, right, across multiple sports. So the question comes up, like what separates those guys and girls from the next round? And it's, they're just better. And it's probably like the perfect storm is all the talent and all the work.

That's how you get a LeBron. And the Jordan. Yeah. Guys that sustain, guys that do things. And you're like, wow, girls. And you're like, wow, that's how you get Flojos. That's how you get people. You're like, oh, yeah.

Those are world beers that are going to have their names on flags. No question. But most professional athletes in terms of skill sports, golf, baseball, hockey, they're just better at their sport. Some of them are really good workers, really diligent. Authors are not. That's just fundamentally better. Yeah.

That doesn't mean the other people have no shot. But those people are guys and girls that are like on the bubble. Okay, so they're on the bubble. But because they do all those things, right? They have a seven or eight year career. They might be an all-star once or twice. That is where you're like, you know, you just changed your life, your family's life.

And because if you wouldn't have done that, you wouldn't have got there. Wouldn't even have made it. You wouldn't have made it. Yeah. Right. That's the bubble. So when I first left those people, that's the person I wanted to work with.

I wanted to work with that bubble person. I wanted to work with a person who has one shot and one preseason to make an NFL roster. And they make it that year, they get to say the rest of their life they play in the NFL. Or they don't. Right.

Right. That one person who's going to get to the Olympics one time, that one person to get one contract that changes the life and they can buy their family out of distress and there's just so many things that go into this that literally change people's lives it just resonated with me so much more i'm like that's the person that's the person i want to go help everyone's fighting to work with uh some you know the famous yeah so and so and because they

want they're really not telling you 10% of their contract it's not like that but it's a lot of times it's like oh i work with that person and then my name will get out and then i'll get famous yeah like yeah i don't think you know how this works right yeah i don't think you know how this works right I'm thinking how this works. But I resented the opposite. So I started working with people that were going to sell their soul, basically, for a dream. And no one would know or care. That's what got me initially.

And for probably the first seven to eight years, that's pretty much all I did. Who exemplified that? Who, like, was your first? It just was a grinder and made it. I could tell you 50 names and you'd never heard of it. Really? Because it's sports. Yeah.

maybe all they got to was a pro career in MMA. And they were four and three. Right. But that was the most juice they would have ever gone on. They made the show. They made the show. Yeah. Right?

They made, I trained with a handful of people in MMA in this little tiny gym. And we probably had six or eight consistent guys that would show up to practice. And there was probably myself and one other guy who didn't make it to the UFC. That had this tiny little sort of time. None of one did very well. Yeah. But they got to.

Made it. They got to the show. Yeah. To your point. I think probably one of my ones that I've talked about it a ton of times because it really does resonate. But when Helen won gold in Rio. And what's her last name? Helen Marullis.

Yeah. Yeah. So she's first American twin golden wrestling. I follow her. She's just such a beast. Yeah. She's such a beast behind the scenes. Hmm.

Which is what. What do you mean training? or just her mental approach or what? What, her training all that, her discipline, all that. Like to get to wait for the real Olympics that she had to make was a brutal process

for a long time. To stay on point, stay on track, and to be able to sort of detach what do I need to get done and then emotion, right? To just bring those two things apart and just execute. But then her thought process, in competition, out of competition.

So a little story there with her going into Rio, the girl in her weight class, and the stats aren't perfect here, but it's going to be somewhat close. Internet and fact check here. But the girl she was going to have to beat, I think it'd won three or four consecutive gold medals. I think she'd won 12 or 13 straight world championships.

I don't think she'd been scored on in seven or eight years. Whoa. So we knew, like, just a handful. It's kind of like, if today I had to get to the top of the mountain and then I had to wrestle three bears. Yeah. Like, tough task.

Just get to the top as most people. Right. Oh my God, I made the Olympics. Oh, God, I made it to the finals. And now you have to wrestle the girl who hasn't given up a point since you were a teenager. Right. Or since you were a preteen.

Right. So then she gets into that match and immediately goes down one to nothing. And me watching it was like, you know what? She got to. It's a good run. Yeah. She did great. That's incredible.

Yeah. And she got up after losing that point, and nothing had changed on her face. And I was like, oh, shit. She still believed. I don't think she believed. I don't think she ever even questioned her in mind she was going to lose. It wasn't a belief. It wasn't like, I don't think there was any self-talk in her.

Right. Actually, I know there wasn't. There was no like, you can do this. You can do this. It was just like, it was almost like a fly hit her arm. And she just didn't register. And she ends up scoring on that girl and going on winning. is this huge upset.

And I remember she had this incredible quote, I'll butcher it, but it's something to the effect of, she, in her mentality for that and the world champions the year after, she just had to realize, like if I have enough, I have enough,

and if I don't, I don't. Nothing else matters here. And so her ability to just let go of all of that. And she says it in different words with certain context, but that to me, like, So her ability, her introspectiveness was very unique. Her ability to really understand what's going on her own brain.

Yeah, freedom to perform at her best. Freedom to perform. That's a great way to say it. Without the, you know, without the worry of defeat or if this doesn't work or what are people going to think. It was just like that freedom just to, yeah. Yeah. So her process was really good.

And then her ability to be able to analyze afterwards truthfully, like her feedback to us. was actually what i'll hear's i'll say i haven coached a lot of female champions and a lot of sports in general oftentimes i prefer coaching females for that exact thing their feedback is unprecedented so my ability to come back afterwards and ask very specific questions i'm going to get really helpful answers where typically guys it's like i felt good they're more honest or genuine the women I think it's honest and genuine. Yeah. But it's also the fact that they're just more sensitive.

And not protecting an ego, probably. I don't know. I don't think I've had necessarily a concern with that. Generally, the athletes I've been around are pretty good about being honest. Yeah. It's just they don't even register. I see. Right?

It's sort of things like, hey, in this particular part of the competition, you know, you did A, A, E, B, and C here, what was going through your head? And generally, guys are like, I don't know, I'll punch from the face. But that's an honest answer. Yeah. Or the girls are more like, well, and then you're going to get a really analytical. Oh, I see.

Answer. And I'm like, okay, great, because I'm trying to tease out, was that a tactic issue? That's your tactics coach. Was that a skill thing? Was that a strength thing? Okay, that's my realm. Was that a conditioning thing? That's my realm.

Maybe we didn't do our warm up correctly. So I'm looking for a lot of clues to figure out, is this even my responsibility or is this a tactic thing? And so sometimes the guys generally, like if you ask, a daily check-in of a male athlete. I don't care what sport you're in. Like, how are you feeling today, champ? Good. It's like you're not going to get anything.

Right, yeah. When you ask a girl, that most of the time, you're going to get a ton of detail. I feel pretty good, a little dehydrated, but it's not whining. It's just like are actually paying attention to their body. Yeah. Or guys who are just like, I don't know, it's a bunch of things. You're like, great.

You know, I was curious when you're saying that, talking about tactics and so analytical and women thinking so much, Do you remember the fight that Rose had or they just couldn't get off? It was so tentative. Rose and the wrestler. She's down by me. Let me share some similar coaches. Mike Sufai is one of her coaches.

Carla Spars up. Yeah, do you remember that? There's just like nothing happened. And I just was wondering if they were both overthinking everything so much or what did? It's a handful of things when those things go down, sometimes it's just a flu. Mm-hmm. It's just a style match-up type thing. Sometimes it's style, but sometimes it's more of you just happen to catch both people

who are on the wrong wavelength. Mm-hmm. Right? So it's hard to sort of explain because typically in those fights, you're going a lot on instinct and you're going a lot on rhythm. And when it feels like just both records are scratching, right. Like you're just like.

Yeah, they're both out of sync. You're both out of sync. That's a great way to say it. Yeah. And so they're not, either one of them scared. Right. You're not scared in there, but you're just sort of like you can't catch. No, because it's like fighting a lot of the best fighters, to me, seem very fluid, very, you know, they got their combinations.

They like, but they got to be in rhythm for all this. Yeah. Another really good example of this, if you go back and watch when Damien Maya fought Anderson Silva. Okay, yeah. Really bad fight, same thing, like very inactive. Anderson got a lot of criticism. Dana was really upset about it, all that stuff. Damien doesn't like to.

I mean, he's like, once you get in your back, basically, choke you out. If you hear Anderson, and Anders actually, he's quite different too, but he said in that fight in his round, because I kind of asked him like, basically his corner was like, what's going on? And he's like, I can't find my range. Can't find my range. He just couldn't find his, that's his way of saying, like, I can't find my rhythm. Like, I don't.

Yeah. He just felt way out of sync. And it's not for lack of effort, obviously, neither one of those dudes are scared of. No. Any contact. They're a pro is pro. It's just a, it's just, it just wasn't, so there wasn't rhythm. They couldn't, they, they're unable or unable to perform on instinct.

And just things were clashing. And it just happens. I mean, this happens to our golf, our pro golfers. Like, how are you a best golfer in the world and you miss a one foot put? Like, it just happens. Yeah. Like, it's just. I saw somebody missed one just the other day.

Who was that? Like a three foot put. Oh, what happened was the U.S. Open. Yeah. which is the third major of the year. And it came down on Sunday, and it was Bryson DeCambo and Rory Macroy. Right, Rory, yeah.

And, oh, dude, Roy missed a two or three foot put on 16. And then Bryson missed one on 16 or 17. And then Rory missed one on 18. And so Bryson won. Oh, my God. And so Rory missed two, three-ish puts or so in the last three holes of a major. And if you don't know who that is,

why that is kind of interesting is Rory was this sensational teenager. I think he won his first major at like 20 years old. Won three or four majors by the time he was 21 or 22, but hasn't won one in 15 years. He's going to be the future, I remember. Yeah. Yeah. Any large part he is.

Yeah. He's probably the most famous guy on PJ Tour still. Yeah. And so this was a long time in the making to finally win a major again. And he went. Shit the bad. Oh, that's rough. It's hard, man.

sports are hard. That's rough. You know, when I think of like being in rhythm, when I think of fighting, you know who looked to me, it seemed like the highest level of fighting. I think he even lost this fight, but Charles Oliver in his last fight,

I can't remember who it was now. Do you remember who he just fought? Did he fight? Well, he fought Islam and lost. Oh, yeah, he fought Armin. Oh, my, that was such high, level it seemed like it's so violent so but so incredible on just like i mean even i think one time he did something wrong i can't remember what he did i don't know if it's hit in the back of the

head or something but you know just realized immediately and you said sorry they both acknowledge each other get right back to like this the highest level of fighting i've i remember seeing he uh he was in so many spots there where if arman wasn't perfect that day he was losing yeah Yeah. It was very impressive on both sides. I was shocked at how good they both were. Yeah, very talented, both of them. Yeah, and that just seemed like we're talking about people who are out of sync or out of rhythm.

They seemed like both at the highest level. Yeah. It was incredible to watch. You want to know the worst part about coaching boxers and fighters is you can do everything right for so long, everything. And then sometimes you just have that happen and you're just like, I like I like I like what yeah and then you're scratching like you kill yourself inside on my side of the equation because like there's so many variables running through like what if it was this

this this this is maybe we time something wrong maybe something was got out and and it could be that because he had like a darsh choke do you remember that yeah at the very end of one of the yeah third round or was it the third round maybe and it looked like he was I mean he was flattened out it looked like is is this is he out so close he thought he was so close so close Yeah, I just... You got to be so tough to win a world championship in the UFC. Yeah, amazing.

You have to be so, so, so tough. Yeah. It's incredible. You have to have so much skill and you have to be able to perform to keep your cool, make decisions, have all the talent, and you just have to be brutally, mentally tough.

There's just no other way to get through that. How did you get involved with UFC and training fighters? So when I finished with the NFL guys and I got to Memphis, so I'm working on a master's degree in human movement sciences. It was okay. But this is kind of actually your question earlier. So academically, I'm taking anatomy and physiology classes and biomechanics and motor control.

So I'm learning basics of how the body work. It's not particularly applied to sport performance because it just wasn't really offered. But it was easy for me to make that crossover and connection. If it does A, B, and C, what happens sort of here? So then I'm working on a master's. And MMA's starting to kind of come up. And I remember actually we had, I think it was a strike force card,

but it was Gina's first big fight. I think Gina fought Julie Kedzi on that card. And we walked into the MMA gym and all we just hear is like, thong, thong, thom. And I'm like, oh, what is going on? on. And the MMHM was like below a karate studio or something.

So we go downstairs and it's just boom, boom. And I'm like, well, there must be a pro fighter here or something like that. And I go down and I just see this dark-haired Italian girl just crushing time pads. And hot as hell. So hot. That's what I remember. My buddy Doug and I were like, what is this? Yeah.

We come around the corner and four. Griffiths there Randy's there And we're like oh there's a big Like the fight card is here Was in Mississippi right by Memphis there That year And so the bunch of the fighters

From the card and stuff And this is a pretty good card I think Frank Shamrock And uh Hanzo I think that was the main event So we're doing that So I got to watch

Be there live in person for Gina's first fight And she was one of the pre-lim fights And she blew the fucking stadium apart. I bet. It exploded. Nice. Remember, this is no Instagram. There's no these things.

So it was just like, who is this girl? And she was ferocious. So that was incredible. So that same year, my friend Mike Bledsoe and Doug Larson opened up CrossFit Memphis. Because they're like, we want to open up a gym and CrossFit was getting pretty big. And so, of course, like the first clients in that gym were the local fighters. And Doug fought himself. And so it was pretty easy.

in exchange. They're like, hey, if we can come lift, you guys can come train, that sort of all things. So we started training kind of local fighters and we started training at the gym and stuff like that. And so that was initially when we just started going with amateur fighters. And then I moved, they stayed there. I moved on to Indiana to work on my PhD, found my little fight gym and was training and competing with those guys. And then those guys started competing. And as I mentioned, a bunch of them got on to the dream, the old dream promotion in Japan. Yeah. got on the ultimate fighters, so we're like getting these people ready to go.

And time to time, real UFC guys would come into town. Right? So they'd come in, stop by the gym or whatever. So I'm just sort of getting acquainted with those people helping them out on basic physiology,

nutrition and weight cut and reload. Because it was kind of coming from almost like a tough man competition. Most definitely. It wasn't, there wasn't much, I don't know. It was very little science.

Yeah. There was no help. Just being tough. Be tough. Being a brawler. go after it, right? If you could wrestle a little bit, that, that was Matt Hughes, that was cool. But as far as like where it's at now, so much different now.

So much. But when, so you, it was just, just like evolving at that time. And it hit the exact marks I was talking about earlier. It wasn't important yet. Even the best fighters didn't have any money. Only the top of the top and they still didn't have that much money. So I was like, hey, man, you guys want to fight and you want to do this cool stuff. nobody cares about you.

None of the best trainers in the world want to help you. No one's reaching out to you on Facebook and being like, can I help? But I was like, this is the cool. The other thing about it was when I started doing it myself, I very quickly realized and interacted with these people. I'm like, oh, everything in my textbooks doesn't make sense with these people. None of our physiology lined up. So now I had a really interesting academic problem to solve.

How is this going to work? How are you going to compete with all these physiological parameters? right? How are you going to train this many times? I'll never forget we were doing a study in the lab. And as a part of it, you had to kind of fill in your training schedule and your exercise schedule so they could document it.

And we filled it out and the scientists running it came back and was like, what? Like, did you guys fill it out right? And we're like, yeah, yeah. It's like you have 12 training sessions a week. They're used to see in that per month. Yeah. Or whatever, right?

I'm like, yeah, yeah. And he's like, no way. You couldn't do that. You can do that. And I'm like, huh, I see what's happening here. There's nothing here. There's no science here. There's no physics.

And everything in the textbooks is not lining up. So I'm like, man, this is really interesting. A bunch of people who are doing some things that are going to be really hard. And no one cares about. And no one wants to help them. And now we can also break the mold and learn something new about how the body works and performs. And of course, loving it myself. I'm like, this is what I want to do.

Like, I want to go after these people. So I did that. And then when I got to L.A. and opened up my lab, it wasn't long. until the actual high level pros, being in LA and being in Vegas, sort of found out what my lab was doing. And then from there, the fighters came. And then, you know, you know how that's kind of going works in 2011. There weren't many people.

And so once Word got out, it was like, yo. And so the flocks started coming. So they would come to you? Yeah. Because how are they hearing about what you were doing? Word of mouth. Okay. It was always word of mouth.

Yeah. Because there weren't that many gems. There weren't that many people. like one day we had so I can't remember the exact story but I had a girl in my class whose dad was a wrestling coach

or something like this and somebody knew somebody who knew I think Mark Munoz and so Mark was said hey can I come up and do some of the testing I'm like sure and then he showed up with Jake Ellenberger Jason Miller

and like a couple of other guys that were pretty good. So I actually got pretty close with Jake. So I helped Jake for a number of years when he was kind of on his crush. And then from there, because they were in Orange County, all the people that were training with Mark, and then it, it was pretty spread. Basically, they're like, hey, here's this guy.

I think he can help you. Or maybe he can help me. Yeah. So actually, I'll tell you, this is a fun part of it. Actually, this is an important story for people to know. So those guys came up and they wanted, I think, to just do it. two max test. And it was like, okay, no problem. It takes us 30 minutes or something, right?

So they get all their data and then I went back and I analyzed all their data. And then I went and pulled every single paper that's ever been published on wrestlers, kickboxers, taekwondo, fighters, everything. I wrote them like a 95-page report. Here's your data. Here's your comparators. Here's if you're good, bad, great. Here's the science on what to do about it for this component.

Here's the training program. They asked me just to do the test. I think they paid like $100. And you provided all this. And I spent forever, like putting this report together, right? So I sent it to them, like, here's the recommendations. Here's what these things mean. You're not going to know what these numbers mean.

This is what this is what this is. Did you have a goal? Were you like trying to like, no. Drum up business? No. Or did you just, you just a passion?

I have a full-time job. Okay. Right. I'm a tenure track faculty member. Yeah. So it's just passion. I just was like, man, I think this would really help. And I also knew.

If I send these guys their data, they're not going to know what any of it means. Right. They're going to explain it. Yeah. Like, it's not going to help. Yep. So I just thought, like, if this was one of my fighters, what would I want to see? What would actually help them?

I just wanted to help them. Just like, okay, great. Yeah. And sometimes I just get deep into holes. And that one, I just got, I just went off to deep end. Yeah. I'm just like, oh, it's this, but then they should know this. And like, I just got there.

So I sent that report. And I almost immediately got a phone call in my office from a guy named Ryan Parsons. So Ryan is one of the original guys. I don't know if this is true, but I think Ryan named Team Quest. I think it was his idea to name. He still manages Chill.

He does all of Chill's stuff to this day. Okay. So Ryan went to Arizona State with Randy and Dan Henderson, I think. So he comes back from that original, this Portland group, you know, fighters up here and all that stuff. So he was managing these guys this time. So he calls me, he's like, dude, who are you?

What is this? Like this is. Yeah. And then he just started being like every one of his guys. You know, hey, can you help, chill? Can you help like everybody and just start doing all those things? I'm like, yeah, yeah. And then he and I formed a pretty good relationship.

And so from there, once that was opened, then we, you know, started taking off. Because once you get into agents and management, then they want all their guys to. Oh, yeah. So that's kind of how it got started in 2011, I think. And you've just, well, it sounds like you've loved the fighting sports or combat sports forever. Even you like to train yourself. But then now you've, I don't know, now you're helping Brian Ortega, right? Oh, yeah.

And what other fighters? So I've been with Brian for, God, five or more years now. Brian and Tatianas whereas get the bulk of my attention from the fightings and they had a similar thing so Brian came to me after the Max Holloway fight

so undefeated obviously got got let up Max never looked better I don't think as far as striking that day that was crazy got him pretty good but Brian's so tough

I cannot believe how tough that guy is almost to his own detriment however tough you think he is, it's more. Really? Because the things that you don't see behind the, behind the curtain. I wonder where that comes from.

Oh, I know where it comes from with him. But there's just things I can't. Dang it. Well, here's what I'll say, man. There's nothing fake about, about him. And man, I talk about somebody who's been through real,

like real life. Not, I lost a fight, not like the other side. He grew up in a real tough place. Okay. And so he's been through the things where, I mean. It makes or breaks you. Well, or like, you know, most of the people you grew up aren't around anymore.

I see. Yeah. Like real trauma and, well, I'll let Brian say more things if he ever chooses to. But he's actually talking about doing his own show. And I'm like, dude, if you tell the world a quarter of your life stories. Yeah. Like they're going to. it's insane what he's been through.

Yeah. Even since I've known him. I just like his, his, I don't know, just his presence and like, he just seems so genuine. So, I mean, you want to root for him. Yeah. When you hear him talk and you see him, you're just like, how do you not love this guy? Yeah. I don't know.

So he came after the Max thing. And his training prior to that reminded me of yours. but worse. Stupid. Yeah. He was just, he would, Matt. Not well thought out. I'm sorry.

These are Brian's stories to tell. I generally don't like telling fighters. Yeah. But I'll tell a few of these is because it's fun. I wasn't there for the max fight, but Henner and Ryan have told me these

and Mike have told me these a bunch where he didn't warm up for that fight. He sat in the back. They said, Ortega, you're up. He got up, put his mouthpiece in and walked out. Jeez. Interesting. Right. Routine.

He's eating like a jack in the box the week of the fight or something fast food or the week of the fight, right? He's doing these horrific weight cuts. And he didn't do, I don't think he did a single wrestling class in his life until after that fight. He would put his gloves on, hit the heavy bag, and do jihitsu. He's really good at jiu-jitsu. He got to like 12 and 0, like got to World Championship level. Wow.

But when he lost that fight, that's when he came back and realized, I'm good enough to get here, and he's good enough to win a world championship, but getting from almost a world championship to a world championship, you can't just make shit up. You can't wake up, figure out what you're going to do for a workout

and do it. You might be able to. He was this close to getting it against Volk. Can you believe that? I can't talk about that. I was, you know, seven feet away or whatever. Yeah. And I was standing next to, I think, Gilbert Burns.

And when he got, because he was on my side of the cage when he got the first Q-Tene. And like Gilbert grabbed me. He didn't know him. He's just like, just, you know, I grabbed people. Yeah, just excited. He just grabbed. And he's like, this is it.

Like, no way, no way. And I was like. Because he had a body triangle. Didn't he have the body lock in? No, he's his mounted trium, mounted. Oh, okay, got you. Okay. Which is actually not actually a great,

the best way to go about it. Yeah. So he got out of that, but then when he got the triangle on, I was like, okay, we're done here. Right. You'd think. But that's what I mean. How fucking tough is Wokanowski? And I think it must be strong, tough, everything.

All of it. Because it took everything for him to escape that. An inch, right? An inch, a quarter of an inch, a centimeter, right? This is what I mean. Like, people don't understand how tough. When you get to that level to win a world championship. And then to do something like what Volcanowski's done

and win five or six or seven or whatever it is, it's just levels on levels, on levels of tough. There's no way. Alex has insane techniques and skills and talents and IQ and all the things. And you add one more. Like he's clearly, like Alex is, even though again, I'm a coached against him now,

when that motherfucker went to Brazil, I don't know if you remember, but he came up in the UFC. It was 15, 16, and O'O or something, and they gave him Aldo in Brazil. It's a tough matchout. When nobody knows who you are, right? And they're trying to set Aldo back up

to go back for the world title. And he put it on, it wasn't close. He totally froze Aldo. Although couldn't get a strike off in Brazil, right? And that's when I was like, dude, this guy, it doesn't matter the talent. This guy has something very special upstairs. And then being able to,

you just watch his whole career with Islam, everybody. I remember seeing him. I think it must have been around the time you're talking about with Aldo, but I think he fought Chad Mendez. Same thing. And I thought... Dropped him. I thought Chad, like, oh, okay, Chad's going to win this.

I thought Chad was going to torch him. Yeah. And then Volcanowski was like, his punches were so fucking hard. And I was just like, holy shit. Yeah. This guy's light. And Mendez is good. Very good.

Really good. Well, Mendez, it's the same thing with like the hell in the story. So if I remember correctly, Melendez dropped him immediately. Big favorite. Way more talented, I thought, right? Comes out and puts him down immediately. I'm like, this is a quick night. This is like what we expected.

So that guy's ability to go, you're an underdog. Nobody knows you. All the nerves. You got floored. It's like just doesn't matter to him, right? He just, now you look back on it. You're like, yeah, okay. Yeah, it makes sense now.

Okay. Yeah. But at that time, I was just like, I thought, I'll maybe just chat had a bad night or this. guy is like really good. He's a monster. Because I didn't know about him at that time. He's like, I mean, I hope Brian gets a shot again there.

But, yeah, how do you not respect that? I know. So in Brian's fighting, he's coming up. Yes. So we got about nine days or something like that. So we got a 12 days notice for this fight. And who's he fighting? He's fighting Diego Lopez.

Oh, that's right. right, man. Yeah. Yeah, that's an up-and-comer that seems pretty hot right now. Like the, I think I told you, but that my podcast came out in the very first episode, and I was literally just open champagne to celebrate. And he, I got the text from him. He's just like, we have to talk right now. And I called him right back. And I'm like, all right, Connor's out and you're stepping in, huh? And he's like, yep. I'm like, fuck. Really, we have to do this? He's like, yeah. I knew. And he's like, what do you think?

Because he's pretty good about, he asks everybody kind of team. What do you think from your side? What do you think from the skill side? What do you think from the weight side? What do you think in any ways? He's very good about those things. And he's like, here's the weight. Here's how much time.

Can we make this? And I'm like, dude, he's sound worse. I think it was the Frankie Edgar fight. Yeah, it was the Frankie Edgar fight that he did some. I'd have to go back and look at the numbers, but it is some absurd weight. cut in a short amount of time. But that was many years ago.

And so I'm like, dude, I have to go look. I thought about it. And I'm like, we can get there, I think. But this is going to be a terrible 12 days. Right. And there was zero fucks on his concern. Like he did not care at all about the part. And I don't think people realize how hard that is.

So bad. Yeah. The weight cut you typically go through is bad. and you want to go into those things with a lot of energy and feeling good. But now we have to limp into this thing. But he just like, there's words that will come out of your mouth and then you can tell when somebody, those are not words.

There's just nothing in there that registered is, it doesn't matter. Like we're taking this because this is the things we're going to, it's like, this does not matter. I'm like, oh, my God. So on my side, I haven't slept in nine days. I'm just like, every night I wake up in terror. I'm like, bye, God. But he's just like, it doesn't matter.

We're going to get there. I mean, the terrible analogy is, it's that mountain on a smaller scale, man. Yeah. We're going to get to the, we will see a 146 on this scale, and we're going to fight well. No other options exist. We're not going to get 146 and then talk about how tired we were. Like, that's not an option. We're going to make 146 and then we're going to fight well.

The numbers wise, I mean, if you, you know, I mean, if you broke it down, there is a, there has to. be a performance. You know, if you cut right and then, or you make this big cut like this, there has to be a difference in performance. There has to be a measurable. Like, there's no way you can perform as well. So there's actually a lot of data on this.

It seems to be okay. Really? Not this kind of a, like a standard 15% body weight cut down well over six to 10 weeks. And then your final 5% or so, like final real cut. Yeah. There's been actually a lot of studies in different realms, and it seems to be okay. Performance seems to be pretty reasonable if you reload properly,

rehydrate, refuel. So you make the weight and then... It's okay. Especially now that they change. Remember how they used to do it, used to the way and it used to be Friday night. Like at night, yeah. And now it's Friday morning,

so we bought another for our main... We basically only do main event type of people. Yeah. So that bought us 12 more hours. Yeah. A lot of times. And that has helped. So muscle glycogen-wise,

you can pretty much get back there. And when you say reloads, like tell me how, how do you guys do that the best? You have a handful of things to pay attention to. You have to get fluid back in. The primary thing is fluid because that's the primary thing you're cutting. And it's a primary thing that's going to be of danger. And so the hardest thing is rehydrating the brain. It takes a very long time, probably more like 48 hours to get fully back there,

but you can get close in 36 hours. So we have to get that in. Now from a performance perspective, we have to rehydrate, we have to re-salt, and we have to re-carbohydrate, right? Because muscle glycogen is the primary fuel source for M.M.A. type of excursions. So we know we'll underperform if we're there.

Okay, great. So those two things have to happen. At the same time, we have to do that in a way that does not cause significant GI distress. Right. As you know, like carbs are great. But if you throw 300 grams of carbohydrates on a stomach that hasn't eaten in a long time and cut a bunch of weight, like this is going to cause,

significant. And sometimes this is people even think that the kidneys are hurting. And it's just a just a, yeah, it's basically a GI distress like you're having there. So it's all kinds of things. So you have to make sure you're not giving them diarrhea. If you under salt, then you're not going to hydrate properly. If you over salt, you're going to get diarrhea. You're going to throw up. And so we have to play a game of we have to smash a bunch of stuff into you in a very specific time. We have to smash in minimum carbohydrates, a handful of electrolytes, and then tons of fluid. And is it on a schedule. It's very scheduled for us. Like every hour or something? No, no. So it is everything from the second you walk off the scale. We have a very specific. So we test the shit out of them.

Everything is going to get tested. We're going to test urine, saliva stool, hair samples. And in this particular case, sweat. So I know exactly what they lost in sweat down to the milligram, right? We know exactly what's happened there. And so I need to bring all that stuff right back in. But as I said, if you put too much salt in, that salt gets pulled into your GI system. That pulls water into your GI system, and that's what causes the diarrhea. Also causes cramps and stomach pain. And so what you're trying to do is say, okay, soon as you step off the scale, we need to get in carbohydrates at around a 5% concentration,

and then depending on how much sweat they lost, you're going to put in a different amount of salt, rather, that they lost, a different amount of salt in that first drink. First drink is typically a liter or so 2.2 pounds, right? So kilogram. Now we know we can get there, and we're going to drink that. Try to go somewhat slow. But you're going to drink it pretty fast because you're pretty darn thirsty.

They're thirsty, yeah. Right. And so at this point, we've gotten a couple of pounds of water in. So we're on a good start. We've gotten a decent amount of salt in and some carbohydrates. The carbohydrates are there in that case, not necessarily you start building back muscle glycogen. Are they in the drink? The carbs?

In the drink. Okay. But you're trying to use that to shut up. fluid into tissue. So when carbohydrates come in that situation, they're going to get put right into muscle tissue and they'll bring fluid with them. You have to, it's called osmotic pressure. You have to make sure that the concentration that you're drinking is the same concentration as your blood. If you're overly dilute, like if you're to chug water, then what happens is the amount of, you sweat out salt and a ton of fluid. And so your blood is very viscous with low salt. If you put a

much of water in there, it gets really dilute. And it's a big volume, but it's hyper dilute. Your body will register that as you being overly volumed and it'll excurs. So you start peeing out water. So you don't want to do that because now you're already severely dehydrated and you're exacerbating the problem. If you over concentrate, it gets hypertonic is what it's called. It'll pull tissue water out of the tissue and put it into blood. So you need to put in the very specific concentration of elements. Electrolites and carbohydrates need to be factored into your equation. To understand is that an isotonic solution or halitonic solution?

How many fighters do you think are doing it to this level? The ones in the UFC, if they're working with the Performance Institute, those guys and girls are taking care of it. Okay. They have done a phenomenal job. Gotcha. Prior to the USCPI, people are chugged PDLites. Yeah.

Yeah. That's right. Just no rhyme or reason probably. Just like, I'm thirsty, I'm going to drink those. Old wrestling ideas. And it's like,

I wrestled in Nebraska in 1992. I don't give two shits what you did at the Olympic Training Center in 2003. Yeah, because this sounds fascinating. It's 20 years of science. Yeah. That's past that now.

So we'll have that. And then everything is very timed down to the minute for the first hour. Mm. Very specific and timed, the food intake and the drinks. And the drinks that we're giving, uh,

depending on the, the athlete are generally about a liter in size, sometimes even down to like 20 ounces. And they're timed and they're very specific with what they have. And so depending on their physiology, how much they've lost, how much we've had to cut water, how much we've had to cut carbohydrates.

We're gonna play different things. So there's different supplements we'll put in there into those combination of drinks in a very specific amount in a specific order. So we can kind of minimize GI distress. We'll start bringing things back in there. Once we get past that one hour window, Now we're playing the one to three hour game.

And so now we have a different protocol that happens there. Now we start bringing in food, different food elements and all that. So what type of food do you do? Initially you want high fluid, low fiber, low fat, easy to digest foods, right? So you're nibbling on watermelon, grapes, things like that at a very slow pace. Okay. Not too much fiber and water. But you're not going to get that much.

Okay, gotcha. In there, right? So watermelon's gonna be 95 plus percent water. Yeah, okay. And there, you want really high glycemic index foods. Mm-hmm. Sometimes like white bread and jelly. Like for some fighters.

Sounds good. I have that right now. Yeah. No kidding after that mountain. It depends on what they've been eating. You try not to give them, I personally try not to give them foods they haven't been eating. Because now you're just like,

yeah, asking for disaster. Right. But you're generally trying to get nibbling on, nibbling on on things like that. We don't need protein at this point at all. It's like we'll do some to settle the stomach a little bit. I actually think that's one of the big helps that you can do. But we'll do typically a protein powder in other drinks, right?

To just like keep things moving a little bit, get the GI welcome up a ton a little bit. And protein tends to settle the stomach when you're putting in. So they'll often put in somewhere between 8 to 1,200. grams of carbohydrates in, right? So you're going to put a lot of carbohydrates in. In how long of time? In a eight-hour span. Okay.

Whoa. That's a lot. So if you don't have any protein, it's not going to feel great. Right. Yeah. But you don't need the protein other than making this process easier. Calm the stomach, yeah. So we'll do that.

Once we get after like, so one of the marks I actually use is once they have their first, once they pee the first time. Mm-hmm. now we can kind of switch. Right? So if they pee within the first couple of hours, you've done something wrong. Hmm.

You shouldn't be, right? So if you're down six to 15 pounds, mm-hmm. And if we pee anytime before that. Yeah, because you haven't made up that weight yet. Not even close. Yeah.

Right. It's not always that way, but it's pretty close, right? So if it's been, like my friend, I won't say names, but a heavy weight, you would know, like a very famous one, woke up like the next day,

and they're like waiting to fight and his coaches he's like oh shit I haven't peed yet today it's like 6 o'clock a night whatever and they're like oh shit it's not because he's a heavy weight they had to cut yeah like a very ferocious physical big heavy weight um if you catch my drift there and yeah and he's like he had to peeved all that's like oh shit so that's a problem too but once once you get that system going you can kind of start getting back into a normal you still want to eat really high quality foods but we're not pushing a ton of vegetable down We're not eating fatty foods. We're not going for tons of desserts or anything like that.

We're still wanting to eat chicken and rice and just kind of nibbling on things like that. Maybe some pasta if they're used to eating pasta, it's a great way. And then getting the fluid back. And once I wake up the next day, I mean before that, but we should be shown pretty much normal the next day. So it sounds like with Brian, I mean, yeah, the cut's going to be rough. but as long as you come back out of it correctly. He'll be all right.

Yeah. Yeah. And he's really good about that. Before we started doing stuff, and he's throwing up and having all kinds of stuff after Wayne's, right? Always having it. But we haven't had that issue. We've been able to dial that stuff in pretty good.

Yeah. Okay. And he'll get through it. It's not like that big issue. And he, we've dealt with worse. I'll put it this way. So he, like his last fight, Rose's ankle in the cage.

Yeah, just bouncing around. We have to fight in Mexico City. Yeah. 7,500 feet. Brian lives below sea level. Yeah, that's tough. We shout, we did well on that. Like, we crushed that part.

And I'm like, okay, he's been hurt a lot. He's had a bunch of shoulder surgeries. He's been this and that. And he lost the fight. Now he's coming back. And I'm like, God damn, he's going to lose his fight because he rolled his ankle. Yeah.

Then he gets hit and he gets, I'm like, oh, my God. I can't. I was like convulsing. My stomach was convulsing. He took a couple good shots before, yeah. But then he, once he got the, I think it was the first take down to the end of the first round.

I was talking to Mike, his strength edition coach, and I was like, yo, I think we got him here. Yeah. I think this guy's done. And then the start of the second round, Brian, I took him out of me, he was like, oh, it's a rap. Yeah. Like, this is a rap.

Yeah. I know what this dude's feeling right now because he doesn't have the signs to prep for the altitude like we did. And yeah, and then Brian took over and Brian did his Brian thing. Yeah, choked him out, didn't he? Yeah. Modified like arm triangle, rear naked choke sort of thing that he does. Yeah.

God, I've always been a fan of his, you know, and it's like he's had fights that didn't go his way. So heartbreaking, the Volk, the Max wasn't really close, but it just was tough to watch when you're a fan of him. Totally. I love seeing him get that win. He's one of the fondest guys to watch train. And I've seen a bunch of his old DJ two competition videos and things like that. He just does stuff in training. And you're like, oh, okay, I'll give you another story.

Sorry, Brian. So I was there when he fought Cub Swanson. So you remember when he ate guillotine the cub, right? Yeah. Okay. If you remember how he got that finish, he did this like jumping guillotine off the fence. sort of thing, right? So he has, he gets kind of close.

He jumps to guillotine, puts his feet on the fence, and then hangs kind of backwards, switches his grip and does it, right? Hennar showed him that in the warm-up room right before the fight. Really? Yeah. Henner showed it to him, and supposedly Brian was like, no, it's not going to work.

And he was like, no, it'll work. And it goes out and does. That's awesome. Like, that is Ryan Ortega. Yeah. He just does stuff against really good people. and in the training room, I was like, what is that?

He's like, I don't know. Yeah. He just doesn't. Love that attitude, though. Yeah. Oh, man, I can't wait for this fight. Yeah. Yeah, Diego looked really good in his last fight.

Yeah. I think he lit somebody up, knocked him out probably. Yeah, UFC 300. Yeah. But Brian, like, doesn't. Yeah. I told yesterday, like, the amount of things he's tried to do, a step-in fight, short-notice fights, like against opponents,

you're like, he does not. have a button on there that is like, yeah, you should be afraid. Is he just, he just loves challenge? Yes. And it's not a money thing probably. Well, I mean, that's always motivation. Yeah, I mean, it helps. But it's just probably just something inside him like, hey, I can do that.

He, uh, I think the easiest way to say it on his behalf is when you've generally been through what he's been through, these things are not scary. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's just like, what am I going to do? Like what? It's one night.

It's one night. It's one thing. And he has a, we like, when you grow up in chaos, chaos is not scary. Yeah. I love that. And smash these people. And he has a ton of belief. And everybody has a lack of confidence here and there and stuff.

But he, yeah, and he's not so many times. He's pulled off so many of these haymakers. And yeah, it just that's also what he lives for, right? He's like, why else am I doing this if we're not going to see who's really about it or not? That's awesome. Who walks a walk. Yeah. I was just thinking about something like,

because you talked about your trainer, it's an ex-Laker trainer, right? Yeah, yeah. Tim D. Francesco, yeah. Right, and you talked about like, explain to me the difference between carrying a rock up a mountain and like what that could do compared to like the specific type training

that you're doing with movements with him. Yeah. Like, is one better? Are both good? Well, both are good. So a little bit of context there. I made a, so I hire and have a coach, right? Even though this is my field in my area,

it's, I always think it's very important that you're not in charge of your own. How come? Just because you don't make good decisions? You never make good decisions. Yeah, okay. Right? Like you always push too hard on the day

that it's supposed to be recovery when you feel a little bit better. And you don't do the other thing. And it is very hard to step back and look at big picture, right? And so doing what's doing the workout tomorrow and doing the workout the week after that is easy. But how do you look back and go,

what's this month going to look like relative to the last month and the month after that? What's this year going to look like relative to next year? Am I doing the right things to set myself up for the next 80 years of training? Right? I want to be lifting weights until I'm well into 100. I want to be playing golf.

I want to be doing all these things my whole life. Am I making stupid decisions in my 30s? They're going to cut that off on I'm 65. So that's the point I got to when I stepped back. Actually, Peter, it is, I don't know if a. Atia. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know if it was a conversation we had. Something, but he said something about he did something like this. He's like, I stepped back for a year, fixed his deadlift, and then his low back pain went away or something like that. He's like, it took me a year to reset. And I was like, pooh. All right. At the time, I'm like, I'm 30. I'm in my 30s.

and things hurt, what are you doing? Like, what are you doing? You have the resources, you have the not, like you have the people, like what if you took a year and tried to move better?

What's that going to feel like when you're 50? You're not going to forget the year of maybe losing a little bit of muscle mass. Right. Not being as fit. But you will remember the year you took to unwind yourself.

Yeah. And so I was like, it's a no-brainer. It's a no-brainer. It is a, it is a long-term investment that sucks in the moment. It's delayed gratification. I hate it.

The training is not particularly fun. Yeah. I've lost muscle for the most part. My fitness is lower. My conditioning's lower. Like I'm dying getting up this mountain, right? It was rough. But to me, it was an easy choice.

And so I hired Tim. He's a physical therapist by train, but also strength coach. He saves with the Lakers. And that's like, you have whatever it's going to take, cost-wise and you have however longness is going to take. Whatever the answer is going to be, we have to get healthier.

Joints got to get better. So the goal just make me healthier or more for longevity? Don't care about longevity at all at this point because I know the answer there. What I cared about now is I cannot be in joint pain. No joints can hurt. Like that's the thing, right? I can't have posture that's starting to get worse. So I can't have a shoulder that's kind of nagging me.

I can't have that elbow thing because what's going to happen is the worst thing you can do for longevity by a trillion miles is to stop exercising. The first thing that gets people to stop exercising is things hurt. Right, yeah. So I'm like, I can't.

And there's a little bit of like hurt that goes along with push, but there is also the, my back hurts every day. Yeah. Can't. Like, okay, great. So I just had a bunch of these things accumulating and my goal is, okay, stop.

So I said, whatever's going to take, how long is going to take? You tell me, if I have to do 20 minutes, every day of stupid Pilates, like whatever it's gonna take, right? So that was about a, it's been about a year, I think, can change. And we have slowly started making progress on a number of these areas, like my shoulders have zero pain

after 20 years of issues. Elbows feel good, a couple of areas where we have seen improvements, but aren't all the year there yet. And so the difference is in that programming, it is hyper-specific to my physiology, not my physiology, but my anthropometrics, my movement patterns and my pain right.

So it is a combination of, I can't even describe the exercises because it's things like, you know, put your right foot in this position, hold this angle, rotate your left shoulder over here, and then doing a modified step up or something like that. And you're like, what the fuck?

You have to like think through the whole thing. But every part of your body is very intentional. It's just like the shooting thing where like everything is trying to, everything is going, something's going on. And it's not about how hard you're pulling the string or it is going, can you actually just be learning a movement pattern?

So success is not a weight, it is not a time, it is not a score, it is, did we execute exactly how Tim wanted me to execute? That thing, right? The workouts take longer. You don't necessarily feel very smoked at the end. And oftentimes I feel like I didn't do shit. Because I'm like, mm.

But then I'm like, sometimes I wake up and be like, oh yeah, okay, like this particular muscle on my side of my core is a little tight today. great, like that's the thing he was trying to get after or something. So we contrast that to the, to the mountain today,

and it's the same, it's a Venn diagram. The overlap is still, we're trying to make a complex system move intentionally. So when I'm working with my training program, everything from my toes to my head is it being accounted for.

Everything is intentional. There's no limitations there. When you're getting up there, there's nothing from your toes to your head. That's not screaming at you to stop. Like everything is happening there, right? I'm having pain signals and quit signals top the bottom. Yeah.

The last 15% was it felt like almost a one rep max every step. Mm-hmm. Right? You're just getting through a step by step and everything is going after you. Where it differs, though, is the outcome. The outcome of this, getting that rock up there was whatever it's going to take. I'm still trying to move well. I was being very conscious in my foot position just to be more efficient.

But I'm getting that rock. to the top of that. And if I have to shift, I have to have to go high, if I have to go low, it doesn't matter. I feel like the training that I've done with Tim

has made something like today way easier. Because now I can get through today and I'm not compensating in really bad positions. And I'm not going to wake up tomorrow and my back's going to be thrown out. Right.

I'm going to be sore because I did a bunch of stuff at an intensity I'm not used to. But like I was telling you even halfway up the mountain, I realized I'm like, oh, I'm going to be good here because everything hurts

the right way in the right spots. Right. Because clearly my bracing strategy strategies and my pelvis are better now. Right. I'm not bracing through extension. I'm not bracing through bad positions. I'm not getting,

I'm not using my shoulders in bad position, so my neck's not going to hurt all these things. So I felt like I actually go as hard as I wanted today, which I definitely did. And I'm not going to wake up the next day. Not in pain. It's not the soreness. It is the,

I got to go the chiropractor through my neck out. Yeah. I actually don't. I feel like very good right now that I'm going to wake up very sore everywhere and be totally fine. But not hurt. Not hurt at all. Yeah. Yeah.

That's good. That's the investment. And it sucks. Yeah. I have a hard time with that. I always like to me, yeah, I can't do the maintenance. It's like I always feel like, oh, I just got to get miles in. Miles, miles, miles, more miles.

And if you did this many miles, you should have done more. Yep. So it's like, I'm like have the, I'm. the worst i need to have your mindset on uh i don't just being smarter about fucking training well what it so here it's not a smart thing the way that we always approach is when we do training programs for athletes and all of our non-athletes right we coach far more regular people entrepreneurs executives and we coach athletes right we do the same thing if you don't know what you're training for you have no shot okay and you're particularly

the case, you don't know what you're training for. Now, it doesn't sound correct in your mind, but the reality it is, have we stepped back and go, what does this month look like, Cam? What's this six month look like? What's this year look like? What's your five-year training plan? And what we do is we end up effectively,

we use a quadris system. So in the quadrant, you got four spaces, right? You get 10 points total for the quadrant. Okay. Not 10 per 10 points total. And we say, okay, let's have a discussion. where are the chips going? How many do you spend?

And then we outline that quadrant and we check in that quadrant daily or weekly and we make sure that your actions are following the quadrant. And that becomes really challenging. We do this in a couple of different ways, but in the broader example, quadrant one is your physical activity and your training.

Quadrant two is your business and whatever, whatever we call these things, your life, your job, I'm like that. quadrant three. that. Quadron 3 is family and friends, social connections, whatever those things mean to you. Don't care about that.

Number four is recovery. Don't care about that. Okay, great. Tana, 10-0-0. Here's the rule, though. You can never have more than a two-to-one relationship between recovery and training. Okay.

Right? Mm-hmm. So... Two-to-one, which way? Training. So you can train twice as much as you recover. Okay, gotcha. Good.

So wait, are you counting recovery to sleep? Everything is recovery. Whatever recovery means to you, whether that's going to a physical therapist, whether that's your ice, whether that is... Yeah, massage. Whether you need to meditate, whether you need to go shoot a bow, whether you've got to hunt. Whatever it is that gives you energy back.

That's what I'm after, right? So exercise is going to take energy away. What gives you energy back? For some people, that's going to a party. Some people that's going out and interacting with people. For people like me, it's like getting away from people. I have to be by myself. Interacting with humans is really draining.

Yeah. I have to be a way, right? Whatever it is for your recovery. Whatever it is for your physical activity practice, whatever it is for your business, right? And then whatever it is for your family and relationships part, right? Now, we got that quadrant figured out. Within that quadrant now, we'll do another one, just on your training.

Okay. Is it the same four? Same four. Okay. We're going to change the categories. Yeah. You still got 10 points, though, right? Mm-hmm.

So now we're going to look at, today's training. Right? We're going to look at, do we have a performance goal? We're going to look at what's 10 years from now look like. And we're going to look at limitations.

So I'm going to look at that and go, how much your training is dedicated to today, tomorrow, and how much that is dedicated to our 10-year plan? And now all of a sudden, when we look at that and we go, well, okay, nothing on my 10-year plan. I have no idea.

Okay, my recovery is zero. And then, okay, great. So we're just making up workouts. Yeah. What are we doing here, right? Mm-hmm. So I want to sit back and go, okay, we don't have to have like a competition picked out. But if all we're doing is running, we're not maybe doing enough efficiency work.

Maybe we're not doing enough strength training. Maybe we're not doing other components that need to get you to that goal. This is exactly how we build fight camps, by the way. So we go into the same thing. Like, how are we going to lose this fight? How are we going to win this fight? Okay. And now we determine what amount of time we're going to spend on wrestling and striking and all these different things based upon those 10 points.

Is that exactly how we design it? Is the risk on the loss? Is that based on the opponent? Oh. Okay. Very specific, right? So the style of training we do, how many points we allocate in each category, it differs based on the, are you fighting a wrestler? Are you fighting a wrestler?

Are you fighting a striker? What's your game plan? You're going to strike. You're going to wrestle more. We're going to clinch more. okay great we're going to need to have a higher fight IQ okay we need to do something different then

is this going to be a a tactical fight is this is going to be like we're going to go to hell here and see you stays alive we're going to build all of training camp around those questions okay so it would be the same thing with you right it would be like okay what are we trying to do here and how are we allocating our energy right just throwing miles of things

is miles but there is a much more intentional way we can go about it so that you can have higher reward for least amount of consequences or risk. It's going to be consequences with your mileage, period, right? Like we saw some of those, there's going to be some fine. We're okay with that. But we just need to understand what we're giving up. As long as we have that recognition, then we have expectations that are managed, right? So we would change all of our, not necessarily change things, but we would make sure that we are being intentional with how every calorie you're burning is going. And so we can put more it in the area we want and less of it in areas that we don't care about.

Yeah, for me, it's like, you know, we talk a lot about running for sure and I do races, but to me that's not even, I don't even really don't even give a fuck about that. To me, it's about I need to be able to kill a big bull with an arrow. Right. And so in my head, I've always been like the more I can sacrifice in training, overcome all these things, because a hunt, you know, it's about overcoming. It's about problem solving. It's about being at your best when everything is going against you

and then the animal, it's like you have to make these good decisions in crunch time, block out everything else and just focus on picking a spot and that arrow hitting perfect. So to me, my training is like, make my, just break myself down and still be able to rise up. Okay, so here's what I'd say. Okay.

At breakfast we were talking, I put those on spectrums of sensitivity versus resilient. You've maximized resilient, right? You need to be able to perform under any circumstances, situations, and that is phenomenal. I think way more people should spend way more time trying to be more resilient. That is by far where we need to go. At the same point, it's also a mechanism you have against having to pay attention, right?

It is a strategy you take to go, look, I don't want to have to pay attention, and I'm going to blind that under the veil of, I just want to be able to perform matter what. Like, that's exactly the mechanism, right? Yeah. Okay, fine. But at this point, like pay attention to what? What, like what? How many miles are you doing?

What are you doing today? Oh, why? Yeah. How are we trained that way? Yeah, I don't. What are we doing? Right. What are we doing before?

Yeah, I understand. Okay. Okay, right? I don't want to do those things. So for you, it's easier to block that out and use it actually as a tactic to go, oh, no, I'm just working on being harder. Mm-hmm. Great. At this point, do you question your mental?

toughness anymore. No. No. I already know that answer. I don't need you to go prove it anymore, right? This is the same for a fighter. I don't need you to spar five rounds at 100% attention and practice every week. I know you can fight.

I know Tatiana. I know when things go down, what's going to happen. And you know that answer, right? So I don't need to see that in training. Okay. What I need to see now is the opposite. How do we get more out of this thing? How do we play some games with specificity and precision?

I don't want you to live there. I don't want you to be precious. But I got to know what that looks like. Because right now it's blind. And so we don't have to prove the point over here of wondering, you know, whether or not when shit hits the fan can you perform? Because you've clearly found that out about yourself for 35 or for whatever years, right? We know that answer.

I know that right now if something happened on the top of that mountain and you had a broken foot, you would get down. Like, I don't have to question that. I literally know that. Yeah. Like literally, right? Great.

So now it's time to answer the other questions we haven't answered. What does it look like if we have some intention? Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe it does. And so now, rather than saying, okay, can I do a race under terrible conditions? Yeah, I know you will. But now can we do it better? Can we go faster?

Can we set a new speed record? Can we set a new? production rather than just got through it under terrible circumstance. I still want you to spend most of your time over here. Yeah. Like most of it. Mm-hmm. Just want to see what that looks like over there.

I see. That makes sense. Yeah. It's the same thing with our fighters, right? We want to say, or are, on an end of our players, our golfers, our baseball players, our basketball, NFL guys. I want you to be able to pitch when you have a fever and you have to throw 100 and you have to have command and you have to be, like you have, because you're getting paid a lot

of money and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like all the things. all the things, right? It does not matter. I know you're hurt. I know the things there, but we have to go play. We have to find that. Some people you have to find that.

Some people don't know what's there. It's not there. You have to develop that. You have to drill that. You have to build that. But at the same time, that doesn't mean I can't, I want to go the other side.

I want to know how to get you in the great spot as many times as possible because the biggest thing with professional sports is those competitions are set. I know, I can look at the schedule right now, and I know exactly when my pitchers are pitching the rest of the year.

I know what. the day they're competing in the Olympics. I know that day right now. Right. They have to perform on that day. Yeah. There is no moving it. There is no option. There's no second chance. And so for us, I want to go, I want no questions. I want no wondering. I want no guessing. Everything we've built in our coaching program has been that. Like, what if, what if we took every question away that we possibly can't? Can we give you the most consistent, repeatable results? So when you're a pitcher and you have to throw every five days, there'll be some bad days, there'll be some good days.

But how do we minimize the standard deviation? That is the difference between a guy making $5 million and $35 million a year. It is that standard deviation. It's not the great day. It's not the terrible day. It's the standard deviation. Right. And so we have to get consistency.

We have to have a known outcome for a known input. I want to know when I go A, B, and C, this is going to happen to your physiology. And this is going to happen to your performance. We can also use that a lot in contract negotiations. This is like behind the scenes start of stuff. When we have this kind of data, it's super valuable on contract negotiations. Because they can make arguments of going,

well, you're 33 now and, you know, hockey players or basketball players are starting. And we can go, well, look at our historical data. We have seven years of data on cognitive function, blood markers, blah, blah, blah. In fact, everything's getting better. Now argue with me. Pay me.

Tell me I'm going to start slowing down. Yeah, right. You don't have that. You start getting the back end. So it's actually very valuable for us to have a very large historical database of your physical performance and just rather than your stats on your sport, right? So we want to do those things and we can negotiate. Well, not we, but the teams could, the agents and stuff can negotiate a lot better.

So do you think that like the fact that, so you're talking about athletics and competition against other men or women. And I'm talking about hunting against an animal. Still performance is performance. Yeah, man. Right? So it doesn't really matter that I'm not trying to beat another man. I'm trying to kill a bull.

Same difference, right? But you still want to be at your best regardless of the competition. So when you go up and you got that draw and you got seven days to kill that thing, you put it 23 years of preference points on. Right? Like there's, you got some of those draws in there, right? Yeah. you have one shot.

And we have to minimize, there's no perfect, anything can happen on a mountain with a wild animal. We just want to minimize the controllables. So Michael Phelps said this the best. I didn't hear him say this,

but he said this to one of the golfers I coached John Rom. He said, look, your job as an athlete is to be 100% on the things you can control. And specifically, he gave the example of a basketball player.

A free throw is always going be a free throw in basketball. No one will ever get in the way, the same basketball, same environment, same 15 feet. If you are not insanely good at free throws and basketball, you are just letting points

off the table. You can't call the plays, you can't call the defenses, you can control that. So whatever it is in your sport arena that you have perfect control over, you have to start by maximizing that. In your particular case,

this is effectively what you've done. You're going to shoot every single day. at least you will know you have the ability to put that error where you want to put it. There'll be other factors, blah, blah,

but that part's control. You're going to make sure you're not going to miss an opportunity because your legs are tired. Right? You're going to do those two things. Okay, great. I just want to make sure

that that is as consistent as possible so when that seven-day window opens up and you get out there, you're not feeling a little bit run down because your training was non-specific. We're not feeling a little bit low. We didn't develop some micronutrient insufficiency in the last,

five months, like something else where it's like, man, why am I feeling lower down here? You don't know why. You maybe not even feel it because you're so dull to it. But that might be that 10%. That's that extra little distance you could cover in the day or whatever the thing is. And as you know, especially archery hunting,

I mean, that's that. That is the difference between that bull on the wall and that bull staying out there. Yeah, that's what I obsess over because, I mean, it could be this much where that the blade in my broadhead catches an artery or misses the artery. 100% catches the artery.

I got a drop of blood to follow, which leads to another drop of blood, which leads to the animal. I miss that artery because I'm low because I, maybe I'm fatigued, my arm drops or whatever. It's, as you said,

the difference between the bull on the wall and... Or worse, you hit it and killed it, but there wasn't the drop of blood, you didn't find it. Right. And you spent three days looking for it. Yeah. That's obviously the worst case.

So yeah, it is, I mean, The line between success and failure is so small. We have a guy that we've coached who is a trader. And he lives in Chicago, like a stocks finance trader. Yeah. And we have a good amount of historic sleep data on him. And he has his financial data.

And there is a very specific tie between his sleep and the money he's made. When he sleeps a little bit better, he makes a lot more money. Really? Very much. So he continues to go through. He's like, yo, I don't care what your program costs because even a slight bump in my sleep

is way more money. Like he makes more money in a day than the program costs. Yeah, that's weird because I would think like the more you grind, the more money you make. Sure. Awake grinding.

Yeah, but let's just say you work twice in an hour but you made a 3% worse decision. Right, yeah. It's money. Yeah. It's money on a table, right? It's true, yeah.

I have a hard time because I think I've always been like the guy, like you talked about, you know, do you have talent or do you work hard? I've always been no talent. I just had to outwork everybody. So to me, outwork everybody is more miles, more hours at work, more, you know, sacrifice. Yeah. You know.

Well, it is that too, right? When that's the only tactic you have, you just quadrupled down on it. Great. And that got you clearly tons of success. But now we go, can you keep that? But then also have some precision, some intention, some determination, some direction. in some direction, folded into that,

and you're still going to outwork people. But this is the difference between being effective or efficient. Right? So being efficient and effective, you have, let's say you have the most, let's go, we go to the archery shop, and they have the most efficient

system built to make a bow they've ever seen. It's most efficient in the entire world. But if they're not making the right kind of bow, that's effective. Right. It's like, well, who cares? You're going to go to business.

You didn't have the right kind of bow. you made that bow better than anyone in the world and no one wanted that bow. So you become hyper-efficient that side, but I don't know if we're being effective because I don't know if we're going off the right things. In that guy's example, in his particular case,

effective was not working more hours. It was not being efficient. It was not blocking his workout and doing his emails and getting his sunlight the right time. It was not a minute. It was simply, do you do more sleep? Yes, or better sleep. actually not more, better sleep,

than he made more money. And so we were able to wing down his program all the way to simply do just sleep great. If we sleep great, you make more money. Well, we'll layer things on later. We'll get to exercise and supplements and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But can you do that so particularly? So for other people, it's not the same.

For him, that was the big one. Other ones, it is, you have to manage stress. Other ones, it is you've got something going on in a physical health parameter, an enzyme, a metabolic thing going on, a health, like something else, okay. But all of us have this performance anchor somewhere. That's the one or two things that is causing most constrained in our physiology and our performance. And we try to find that one or two thing, give you specific strategies to get that out of the way.

And now just let your physiology do what it wants to do. That's awesome. Yeah, so get out of the way as much as we can. I don't want to get too sidetracked because you had a one. Wyoming bear hunt stormy to tell me. Yeah, man. Yeah, so we got to get to that. Okay, I'll do that right now.

So we originally were supposed to shoot this show, whatever it was, and Dates got a little moved around, and then we proposed another day, and I was like, I can, I'm hunting bear. And I was like, he's hunting bear too. Yeah. So I was out there, and I've actually been, so Aaron Snyder sent me one of the Kaffa packs. I've been using it for years.

I love it. I love this thing. It's great. I can't remember which model, but it's fantastic. But then I got, I got a new pack from Exo Mountain Gear. I was like,

okay, let me try it. It's really cool. I love the far one, but I wanted to try this one, right? So I take this out in this Wyoming hunt. And they have a cool, quick release system in your rifle.

It's just really slick setup that kind of sits on your side and then you have a little latch in case you're walking and you've got to get your rifle out real fast, which is way better than kind of having a, a scabbard or something jammed in there.

So the first day of the hunt, and you know, like hunting bear, bear are not particularly active in the morning. Right. So it's a lot of afternoon kind of evening stuff. So we're kind of messing around in camp before we get out there. And I'm trying to try my pack out and get everything done

and dialed so I don't have to figure it out on the field. And I'm like, okay, school feels good, got it all locked in. And I got that quick release. And I touched that quick release. Oh, no. And it's a lot quicker than I thought. The gun, yeah.

Gun just tanks off. the side. Oh no. There is a six foot boulder right next to me and it just smashes on the boulder. Yeah. And now I'm like, okay, okay, I have a couple options right now and none of them are good. Yeah. But I'm like, I think I looked around. I'm like, okay, I think it's okay. I think it's okay. So we get out, we get on the horses, we ride up, hike up to our spot and I'm sitting there and it's not 40 minutes. And we're kind of on a hillside. behind some rocks

and then on this other hillside there's this all timber and a little opening. 40 minutes this bear just comes trotting right out to this opening and I'm like, oh my God, like, just here we go. Yeah.

We're done. And he's just totally yogi bears just like sits there on his ass just like gorge. I'm like, this is just 243 yards. Bipods are down on pro and I'm just like set up

and I'm just going to tap a trigger and like we're going home. This is fantastic, right? So I'm on them. And we actually have the spotting scope up. And you know how you can attach your phone with the thing to the Scotty? So it's like, I'm going to get on a video. Perfect.

It's going to be all nice. This is great, right? And I feel pretty good. And I squeeze off the trigger. And the guy next to me, he's like, okay, left. And because the bear took off left. And I was like, oh, he went left. He's like, no, you miss left.

It's like, I missed? He's like, yeah. Yeah, you missed. I'm like, he's like, and he shows me the video and I missed by seven feet. Oh, my God. I'm like a two feet high in seven. I'm not even on. that the area code right and I'm like oh no and immediately I know what happened right and my first

thought is I got excited it's my first bear I pulled it and he's like that's a ways off to he's like punch a trigger he had the best like the best hunting saying thing ever he's just like I don't remember exactly what exactly said he said something he's like well nobody misses that bad and I'm like so now in my head I'm going yeah what if I did just pull this thing. What if I just pulled this thing? And I am the worst shot in the history of mountains. So I go down there. And now I have a couple of options. I'm like, okay, I can't, I can't cite this thing in right here because you can run a turret, but I can't, I don't go spend the turret 55 times to get it. Like there's no way, right? And I'm not just guessing.

And I'm not going to take another shot at an animal like that, right? So I'm like, okay, I don't have time to get on the horses, go back down to camp and get stuff. And then, so I'm I could also go over a couple of ridges and maybe shoot at something and see where it's at. But then maybe I blow this bear for life, right? So he kind of trotted off, but I missed him so bad. Yeah, he didn't really know. He didn't really, he's just like, what the hell is that, right?

Yeah. So I go down on the second, let's just shoot one. And I find a stump or something at 250 yards. And it's the same thing. Yeah, I left. Part of me is, right before I shoot that second shot, And I'm thinking half of me wants this thing to hit this dump perfectly, right?

Yeah, I don't run back there if that bear comes back on that dead bear. And I don't care. My ego is like, that bear is more important than my ego. Right. This guy can be like the worst shot ever, but kill the bear. But then when it pulls left, I'm like, okay,

it's way off. So we end up getting it back, go back the next to get back to camp, go out and figure it out in the morning, get it all dialed back in. And then four days, the bear, never. No bear. He came back the next night.

Oh. Right there. He ran right up to the morning. the tree line. Yeah. I think legal shooting ended at 9.03 or something. And he runs at like 7.30 runs right for that tree line that stops. And I was like, let's go.

Yeah. I'm just waiting. Dude waits an hour and seven minutes or whatever that is. And he waits and at 9-07 or whatever, he trots right back out. After legal shooting line. I think I had one minute left. Oh. And on the spotting scope, you could see him.

Yeah. And I was literally my head going, all right, you're going to count to 30. seconds and if he doesn't come out in 30 seconds and you're calling it right and I was like okay seven eight nine like to five four six three two one okay I get chapter trial oh I saw him in my scope but he was very dark and it was a blob and there was a stump there that's tough I could I could I could hit him for sure but you can't take that shot is your crosshairs black or did you have like a red dot I actually have an optic on that one yeah okay yeah Yeah, because it can get really tough.

Black on black, you know, I can understand now. But still, bear in a low light are so tough. You can't see that shoulder. No. You know, it's not like an elk where you see that crease. Oh, no. It's just a blob. I would have hit the blob.

Yeah, but I would have had nowhere. Nowhere where I'm hitting. And you hit a bear in the guts, they can go ways. A very long ways. And they're not going to bleed with a bullet. You know, a bullet doesn't bleed like an arrow will. But even an arrow in the guts, there's so much. fat and the hair absorbs blood.

It's yeah, good decision. So you just can't make that shot anyways. Like yeah, you're not, you're not ethically gonna take that shot. I could have hit him for sure and I'm pretty sure I could hit him twice before he got up and moved again. But yeah, you gotta feel good about it.

Yeah, I did not feel good about it. So then after that, he never came back. My brother and dad got one. But the reason I wanted to tell you that story is it's fun, but it really highlights to me the importance of this is why you don't do things in competition that you haven't done in practice. Because things like this,

had I pride this pack on before I left, I wouldn't have had this issue. But now when I tried it, I didn't do it on the hunt, but I did it at the morning of it when I'm already out there. And now I can't do anything about it. Oh, that's rough.

The lesson there is, you know, we always try it. It reminded me of, like when you said, your first archery hunt, you killed that bull elk the first. time, right, but... Yeah, 18 days. 18 days.

Yeah, first year. But then you didn't have quite so much success on the mule deer that year, right? No, it was on Blacktail. I missed 16. Oh, yeah, blacktail out here, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I missed 16 deer. So you missed 16 deer.

Yeah, it seems crazy to even think about missing that many times. I don't know if I... I don't know how I had that many arrows because I didn't have... Arrows are expensive. Right. I probably was like reshooting bent arrows, but whatever.

So always check your gear. Always check your training. and do all of it before you go out. Yeah. But it was, I actually cherish that story so much because I feel like every time you hunt, no matter how many times you've done it, there's always another thing.

It's like, okay, okay, now I know to, and so what happened is actually a handful of years ago, I had, I hit a, what I kill? Antelope, maybe, something what it was. And it was a pretty easy shot, maybe like 150 yards and something, but I was, maybe five or six inches left.

And I was like, oh, that's super, super odd. Like, how did I miss that shot? I felt good. I still killed it. But then I remember looking down and my turrets were spun because we were riding horses and so they're in the scabbards.

So ever since then, I'm like, completely panic. Every time I put that rifle ended out of the scabbard, I checked all the turrets to make sure I'm zeroed. Yeah. So I had done that.

I had gone out in that hunt. I'm like, okay, I'm good. Like, I got the thing. And it's not going to happen. Now I have another thing. It's like, okay. The release. So I have another thing to very attention.

to, but hunting's hard, man. Yeah. There's just a lot of variables. So many variables. It's so many variables. It's, but it's, I think being humbled, you know, it hurts. And you said, you know, you'd take the ego shot if it may kill on the bear or whatever, but it's, that's good for us too.

It's good for us to be humbled because you can go through life. You kind of cultivate your life where you're always getting these positive rewards. You don't really take too many chances. So you're always like kind of winning in our own little way. Yeah. hunting. It's tough to do that. I like sharing stories like that because of exactly what you said.

With what you and I do publicly, it's almost all of. Almost all the feedback I get. I'm sure it's the same way for you. Like people are so kind. I get so many messages and emails. People are so nice. They take their time out of their day to compliment and to thanks. I'm like, man, people are really, really nice.

So because of that, it is like what you mentioned, right? It is if I live in a very, people tell me how great I am all the time. So it's really nice to have some. That's actually rare for me. But that's nice for you. Really? I don't know. You're easier to like than me.

No, dude. Let's play a game. Let's name somebody who's done more for hunting than Cam Haines. Oh. That list gets very short, my friend. Joe Rogan? Well, okay. Again, the list gets very short.

Yeah, no, I appreciate that. that. It's, you know, it's, we take the good with the bad that what I focus on is like the reach that we have on how many people we can influence. Yeah, I'm going to get hate. There's always going to be, especially in hunting. There's a lot of, we're very competitive as men. So I get it. I mean, I was, I talk shit about people all the time when I was young. So it's like, but if we focus on the impact that we can make and not just in hunting, but social media, because I'm a bow hunter, has allowed me these opportunities. Well, then I can. you know, do things with you and learn from you and share things with people I care about.

And so, yeah, I can't. I'm so thankful for all of it. But I'm especially thankful of this time that we've spent and getting, I mean, to learn, I don't know, I've learned so much from you. It's like, it's been amazing to me and I'm so appreciative. I didn't want to talk about two real quick. You started to start at a podcast. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Tell me your podcast. The second episode just came out today. Did it? Yeah. And what's it on?

My phone is a disaster from Rob and everybody. I'm like, I'm sorry, I'm running them out with the camp. Yeah, I love Rob more. I love Andrew Huberman. And so those are like, you're part of that network, right? Yeah. So the show is called Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin. And it's through the psychom.

So Andrew and Rob's company platform there. And it's 10 episodes season one and the goal of that is what I'm always interested in that's helping people enhance performance. And I want to be really clear that we've talked a lot about sport. We have said this, but it's important to reiterate that perform doesn't mean sports. It just means perform. Everybody in the planet wants to look a certain way. You define looking good as something different than your neighbor.

I don't care. But everyone wants to look physically a certain way. Muscle big, small, whatever. Everyone wants to feel a certain way. You want to feel energetic. You want to feel strong. You want to feel compassionate. You want to feel like a leader.

Like whatever you want to feel. And then everyone wants to perform a certain way. You want to run. You want to recover. You want to have greater energy. Like you want to do these things. It doesn't matter what you use those skills for. Use those skills to kill a better bowl.

Great. You want to use those skills to just have more energy throughout the day. Fine. It's the same thing, right? There's actually a quote that we use in the show all the time for every episode. And it comes here from Bill Bowerman. You know, they'll coach up here, right? Yeah.

And he said, if you have a body, you're an athlete. Mm. I like it. Doesn't matter, right? Right. You have a body, you're an athlete. Yeah. Whether you want to use your body and your capability to shoot a ball better,

I don't care. Mm-hmm. But you still want to perform at your best, right? And so the goal of that show is to go over as much of the physiology and science of human performance in as many of the areas that we possibly can. So the first episode was on the heart. And in every episode, I try to cover what I call the three eyes. So eye number one is investigate.

How do you even know what to measure, what to ask for, what to test to get done, to know if your cardiovascular system is performing well? I want to be really clear. We don't do disease. So I'm not having you, take this test to see if you have cancer. I don't know, no care. What's your long-term risk of a heart attack? That's Peter Attia can do that.

I don't do medicine. And if you want to know, hey, are my, is my fatigue? Is my low energy because of my cardiovascular system? What should I even get tested? What should I look for? What should I ask for? So investigate. How do I run self-studies on these things?

Number two, how do I interpret? So I get those data back. How do I know if that's good, bad, terrible, great? What about for a 46-year-old female? Is that okay? What about what's the best ever in the world? Oh, good timing. Yeah.

So in that we tend to be clever like what's average, what's standard, and what's the best ever. So in almost every episode, we'll have a metric of what the world record is. What's the in the publication of science? What's the highest we've ever seen? That's interesting. What have I seen before? Yeah. So in the VO2 max stuff on the cardiovascular episode, one, I went over.

What's the highest documented ones? What's the biggest volume? Oh, that's why you knew so well when we talked about that. I've known that stuff for 20 years. Okay. What was that measure on? on my panel that was really high that you said. What was that thing?

On your blood panel? Yeah, you said that's really good. Oh, yeah, your hematica and hemoglobin were outstanding. So I think your hemoglobin was like 16.7 or something like that. Traditional pretty good fit man 15 and change. So you're pretty good. And then your hematica was 50 on the nose, which is basically ideal. Any higher that actually is detrimental.

Okay. because your blood just gets too viscous. Right, gotcha. But those numbers, now the rest of your numbers. Yeah, we don't even talk about those. We've got some work to do, friend. And then what was, would you say what's today's podcast on? The first one was heart, what's this today?

Today is muscle. Muscle, okay. Yep. And again, understanding what it is, what it's doing, why it's affecting everything from your immune system and how being under-muscled can be causing a lot of problems that people don't realize how much muscles should you have.

Again, not for aesthetics or performance, but from how do your body actually performs? It's just causing your issues. How to get that measured? What numbers should those be? And then the third eye with every episode is intervene. Which is, what do I do about it? If this number came back here, what do I do?

Right. So the first episode was, you know, this is your cardiovascular system. Here's what to measure. Here's what normal number you should look for. And now here are programs to enhance it. So the muscle episode will have the same. way the sleep episode the blood work episode um the brain injury episode all all these things have

those components right so what do i look for how do i know if that's good bad great terrible world record and then what do i do about it gotcha well i'm sure it's going to be people are going to love it i mean though just you talking and explaining things is like you're so good at it and it's uh so useful um How I end in this show is your brand new bow. Oh my gosh. Look at this. 102.5 yards. You broke the balloon yesterday.

Yeah, man. Shot great. There's your new bow. And we're going to, I'm going to send that with your arrows and all your gear down to you. And my knife? Yeah.

And your knife? Yeah. And we're going to, I don't know, can you turn you into a bow hunter pretty soon? Oh, man. I have to tell you, I've shot a lot of rifle in my day. And I'm not just,

saying this but I told my brother last night I was too it's not it's not as satisfying there's something about the air when you fling it yeah it's different uh I'm like man this is kind of I told them it's like we might we might have something different here we have to go figure around with wayne has his go-to stories on everything but he I don't think he told you the one where people shooting an arrow for the first time it feels familiar because we've done it for thousands of years you know as a species. I see. And so people do it and they're just like, man, just like you, this feels, there's something

here. Smooth. He says, it's because it's who we are. Yeah. And Fred Bear said, the history of archery is history of mankind. Ah. So that's, I don't know if that's just, you know, whatever, romanticizing it, but. I don't care.

It feels pretty good. I do know it feels pretty good to stand out there at 100 yards and watch out balloon pop. Yeah, yeah. The arrow tracks there. I think because what it take a, I think I missed the first, what, three or four? No, you hit it the first time. I hit it the first time. First shot of the day.

First shot of the day with no warm up. Right. Actually the first time I shot an arrow in my life. That was. Yeah. That was impressive. So I never got inside it in or anything like that. But it was super satisfying to watch that thing different than hitting a gong or a target.

And then, I mean, you're out there. Ring and steel. Yeah. Yeah. It was great. I appreciate everything. and Wayne was a great teacher. You know, I got a little memory on my arm from it.

Yeah, you caught the string cut your form a little bit. But yeah, the bow rack, I mean, shout out to them, Wayne and Lisa and all the staff there. Just love those guys. You got to meet John Rivet. John and Jen are there, who I bear hunt with. I already found him on Instagram and DMed him. Perfect. That's 100% true.

Okay, good. That's a 100% true. We're going bear hunting then for sure. I was like, hey, man. Yeah. How do I get some more information about this? Yeah, that's awesome. Because I'm like, dude, you got to send me the packet or the pamphlet or whatever.

And my brother, he's going to be all over this too, but he is an enormous Cam Haines fan. Oh, okay. He's got the books. He's got swag. He's got shoes. He's got all of it. So I wanted to give him a little shout out here because he's, he's his name. Casey.

Casey. All right, Casey. Hey, thanks for the support, following along. I mean, love your story. I've heard about you. from, you know, obviously from Andy. So shout out to Casey. Appreciate it.

Much love. Yeah, well, we got to get you back to the shit show that is L.A. Oh, for a few more weeks. All right. Well, thank you, Andy. It's been a pleasure. Loved it. I don't know.

I can't wait you do it again. I can't wait. All right. Keep hammering.