Mark Bell's Power Project - MBPP EP. 671 - Sorry, But Diet Doesn't Matter For Some Athletes

Episode Date: February 3, 2022

Today we give our opinion on Lex Fridman interviewing Georges St-Pierre, John Danaher and Gordan Ryan talking about how terrible elite athlete's diet can be. It turns out that most of them would rely on fast food, even before getting on the biggest of stages. Check out the Lex Fridman interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdmDtqB46Jc Special perks for our listeners below! ➢https://eatlegendary.com Use Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢Bubs Naturals: https://bubsnaturals.com Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% of your next order! ➢Vertical Diet Meals: https://verticaldiet.com/ Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% off your first order! ➢Vuori Performance Apparel: Visit https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order! ➢8 Sleep: Visit https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro! ➢Marek Health: https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Subscribe to the Power Project Newsletter! ➢ https://bit.ly/2JvmXMb Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

Hello, everybody. Welcome to Mark Bell's Power Project. If you would like to support this podcast, please make sure that you hit the like button and leave us a comment. Say something nice to us for once, you motherfuckers. I hope I don't sound that way. I don't know. I'm just trying to make stuff up over here because Nsema, I think, went to poop again. I mean, if he's back, I don't see him, though. Yeah, he'll be coming around at some point. But yeah, today we're going to be talking about John Donaher.

He was on Lex Friedman's podcast with his coaches, or I'm sorry, John Donaher and GSP, and who was the other guy that was on there, too? I don't know. I'm so dumb. Anyway, we'll get that filled in. I'm not smart enough to know that. We'll get that filled in in a second, but I think he was on there with somebody else. Anyway, John Donaher, who's regarded as one of the greatest MMA coaches, regarded nowadays as one of the greatest of all time even.

People are making a big deal about the style of training that they do. The Donaher Death Squad has really made a huge splash. So it's going to be interesting to kind of hear some of these comments that he has to say about nutrition. Who else is on there? GSP, Donaher? GSP, Gordon Ryan, Lex Friedman. Yeah, Gordon Ryan.

Yeah, Gordon Ryan is arguably the best no-gi grappler of all time at a very young age, 26 years old currently. And he was able to become elite within his first five or six years of grappling. Big reason, because of John Donahue and kind of revolutionized coaching and tactics and jujitsu and systemize certain things that allowed his athletes to just fuck people up. So Gordon was and a lot of his teammates were messing up guys that have been rolling for more than two decades. It's insane. And yeah, jujitsu has been around. Jujitsu has been around forever. And like I'm sure it's always advancing.

It's always moving, right? Especially with the UFC. You can kind of say CrossFit really seemed to help in terms of weightlifting, like any sort of weightlifting at all. You saw just massive improvements in the females and the males that participated in CrossFit. But because it was new, the difference between somebody that won the first CrossFit games and the athletes that are in there now has increased massively because there's more people doing it.

There's more exposure. People enjoy it more. And same thing happened with UFC, with Hoist Gracie, making jiu-jitsu popular. From that day forward, jiu-jitsu has increased rapidly, way faster than it would have had Hoist Gracie not been part of it. Absolutely. But there's been these deep traditions in Brazilian jiu-jitsu where maybe people weren't looking the same way that John – like John Donahue must see something slightly different when he's looking at the game of jiu-jitsu and it appears that he stumbled upon a lot of techniques and stuff that allowed his athletes to advance a lot faster than a lot of other athletes, not only

currently but in the history of the sport. Is that fair to say? Yeah, absolutely. The crazy thing about John Donahue and the crazy thing about jiu-jitsu is jiu-jitsu is grappling for most of the audience, that's what jiu-jitsu is. But you can submit everywhere on the body along with chokes. So I can submit your arms, at your elbows, your wrists, your neck. Any joint.

Any joint. But like the leg game has been part of jiu-jitsu forever. But for some reason, everyone kind of just ignored the intricate aspects of the leg game. Knee bars, toe holds, all that type of stuff. And John came in and he's watching people do jiu-jitsu. He's like, why aren't they paying attention to half of the leg game, knee bars, toe holds, all that type of stuff. And John came in and he's watching people do jiu-jitsu and he's like, why aren't they paying attention to half of the body? Or why aren't they giving half the body the attention that the back takes and the upper body gets?

So he quite literally started having his athletes focus on improving their skill at attacking people from the legs and submitting people from different parts of the legs and entangling them and making them stuck. And literally his athletes, like let's say everyone at jujitsu was here as far as legs or the leg game and here as far as everything else. John had them focus on the leg game and brought them here while everybody else in jujitsu was still here with the leg game. And that's how his athletes just trampled everybody else in the no-gi sector after just

a few years. It's like you had a tactic that other people couldn't stop because you're kind of the innovator of it. Exactly. And it's not like it was unknown. It's just nobody was really paying that much attention to the legs because no one was focusing on it. And that's just a wild thing.

Think about doing boxing, but let's just say no one threw jabs. Or no one went to the body. Yeah, no one went to the body. Everyone was just trying to aim for the head, and then somebody started like, what's that liver right there? What happens when you punch the liver? You know what I mean? That was John Donahue with jujitsu. Wow.

Yeah, it's crazy. No, it's unbelievable. I think it's important to give it context because it's important for people to understand what kind of thinker this guy is. So that when you hear what he says about nutrition, you're not like, that guy is nothing but an idiot. He's revolutionary. Now, however, someone can be really smart in a particular field. You could talk to a neuroscientist, but if you talk to him about geography, he might not know where New York is. And yeah, let's not forget too, John Donahue was part of GSP's squad.

Like when GSP was coming up through the ranks, if you ever watch, like who's on the cage? He was around all the time. John was around all the time. GSP was getting all of his grappling and not just his grappling like strategy but also strategies for dealing with other opponents from John because John is just such a great fighting mind. Like he knows how to see holes in people. So John isn't just some jujitsu chump. John, in the fighting game, people respect the fuck out of him.

And people like that, they just have such just awesome intuition. What are you mixing up over there? Oh, yeah. This is actually really cool. The Bubz MCT oil powder. Oh, it makes your coffee kind of smooth. It pulls out some of that boldness of the coffee, which some people like. It's like a creamer, dude.

And it's not intrusive at all. Plus, I don't get the shits. It tastes really good. So I got to do this off mic so people don't get angry. Yeah, I've been digging their collagen a lot. I've been using that for probably the last year and a half or so because it's been great to get hooked up with Bubz through Gabrielle Lyon. So much appreciated. Shout out to her.

Dr. Lyon is always looking out. But, yeah, I've loved the products since we got them. And there's one beef I have with these guys, though, is that those goddamn gummies. I can't. I knew that's where he was going. And I talked with a bunch of other people here in the office and they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're like, I just, I don't even, they're like, I can't open them.

I can't, I can't look at them. And it's weird because it's an apple cider vinegar gummy. It tastes fucking, it's like candy. And if you were to tell someone like, this is going to be like one of the dopest things you ever eat in your life, they would be like, there's no possible way, but they're, they're delicious. I have some in the office. I should have grabbed some.

But it is kind of ridiculous. Okay, the Bub's apple cider vinegar gummies, it's supposed to be two per serving. So you're supposed to only eat two. These fuckers know what they did. They know. They know. Because they make it taste so good. The consistency is like candy.

So you eat two, you're like, well, this was good for me. So you eat two more and you're just like, well, what's two more i've gone through literally a pack of that it's like 30 something in a day i've eaten it by myself in a day because i'm just like i need a it you actually take really good shits oh yeah really really awesome tapered stuff but no i'll i'll take like a handful on my way out of here because like i'm gonna eat this on the way home and then this is really fat so i ended up taking a whole bottle and i just have that in the car and so like i'll just like crack it open as i'm driving and then just like pop them in my mouth and it's just like i'm only gonna have like three or four okay promise let me let me and it's like let me get on the freeway i'm gonna have just

a couple more like ah like getting on the next freeway let me just just one more handful like it's not gonna hurt and i look down it, all right, I have like 10 more. I might as well just clear the whole thing out. I have too much trash in my car anyways. I'm just going to go ahead and eat them all. I'm going to top you on the fatness. So I did this. So I told you, this should taste like candy.

When I was a little sick last week, I had the apple cider vinegar gummies. I had some Ben and Jerry's and I was a little bit high. And what happened was I was eating the Ben and Jerry's. It was the Gimme S'more flavor. And I was like, let me just take a Bubz outside and drink the gum and see what happens. I chewed it. I had the Ben and Jerry's in my mouth. I'm like, God damn.

It was really good with Ben and Jerry's. So I ate like six with the 16. That's the way little kids eat their ice cream they put like the gummy worms on top it was like that put gummy worms chocolate yeah fucking yeah oh man it's a weird combination yeah and then this morning my wife was having the collagen uh protein and she's just like wow there's actually a lot like of protein like collagen protein per serving normally it's like i guess a little bit less. That I'm not sure of. But yeah, the MCT oil powder, I'm loving it.

I'm really, I mean, obviously digging the apple cider vinegar gummies. So definitely get those, but also take advantage of the awesome collagen protein and the MCT oil powder. And you guys can get all of that for 20% off. Head over to bubsnaturals.com and check out enter promo code POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your entire order. bubsnaturals.com and check out enter promo code power project to save 20% off your entire order. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes.

I would highly suggest the MCT oil powder though, because seriously, it really tastes good in coffee and it gives you like a little boost in the morning. Yeah. I like that one the most, but obviously the gummies just taste delicious. More recently, I've been hearing more and more comments from people saying like that our podcasts helped them with like this or that. And so much of it has been tied to habits. So if you're somebody that's looking to improve your habits, you do need to listen to some of these podcasts that we suggest. I think Lex Friedman is just an amazing resource. A lot of great interviews.

I know he's interviewed Elon Musk a bunch of times. resource. A lot of great interviews. I know he's interviewed Elon Musk a bunch of times. I think the first time he interviewed him might have been the best Elon Musk interview that I've heard, just because they could talk on a similar, I mean, both of them are just extremely intelligent. So looking to improve and make changes. We talk about Andrew Huberman and some of these other people, but Lex Friedman falls into that category as well. Let's play this clip so we can kind of get to it and see what John Donahue has to say about nutrition. I used to do like seasons where I'd have a very clean season where I was competing and I would have a lower body weight and I would do like an off season, kind of like a bodybuilder where I would eat a lot more food and a little bit dirtier food and I would have cheeseburgers and pizza at nighttime to have the extra calories. But now I can't eat those foods because they upset my stomach.

So now I pretty much just try to eat whatever I can and maintain the weight the best I can based on how my stomach feels. Can you pause it just for a second? I believe that Gordon Ryan had some sort of issue with digestion thing or something, right? There's something in maybe his small intestine, like a fungal growth. He goes through cycles where it looks like he walks into a room and he has to look for where the nearest trash can is because there's a chance that he'll just throw up. Is that like vertigo or something like that? It's not vertigo it's it's literally like something's going on in his intestine that's not allowing him to like digest food effectively and it's just like he gets in

massive pain he'll heard him talk about that before and he's like i would be way bigger but i can't barely eat yeah it's it's like what and he still kills everybody people think these grapplers are like and everyone loves to say oh they're all on. But like, Gordon Ryan's a big fucker. Like, he's 6'2 and a half and like maybe 230. He's a big dude. Extremely athletic. I mean, the athleticism is like not talked about because it's not basketball. You know, we're used to stuff of basketball, football, soccer, stuff like that.

When you don't see that, then you're like, I don't know, you just think it's fighting. Yeah, yeah. And fungal growth just sounds gross. Yeah, yeah. Good job. Chicken, eggs, fish, vegetables, fruits, and pretty much nothing else. Anything hard to digest, anything spicy, red meat, fast food, all that's hard for me. Which sucks because in Texas.

All the best things. Barbecue. And I mean, this diet is really important for you, John, I can tell. Is that something you think about for athletes at all? To be honest with you, I've never seen any measurable improvement in sports performance in jiu-jitsu by change of diet.

I do believe that diet is important for longevity in human beings. I do think it makes a difference, especially once you get past the age of 40 with regards to longevity. For older athletes, I do believe it makes a difference, especially once you get past the age of 40 with regards to longevity. For older athletes, I do believe it makes some difference. But my observation is in athletes and their youth

and working up into their prime, I've seen athletes have the worst diets. God bless Travis Stevens, but that guy won an Olympic silver medal. I'd give it a pause. Yeah. So just keep in mind of what we said about, about this coach earlier.

Right. Um, I think sometimes people like this, they have amazing intuition. And I think he's, I think he's like making a really, really good point. Now he's also making a point about observation of things that he's seen. Right. So just bear with me for a second here. Every time you go to do something physically, you are fucking way better than everybody else. Every single time. From the time you're a kid until you're in the UFC,

you're Gordon, I'm sure Gordon Ryan didn't suck at a lot of sports. I'm sure that every time he tried something physically, he was able to mimic it. He was able to do it maybe a little faster, maybe a little stronger, maybe to have the coordination for certain other types of sports. And maybe that's why he chose the sport that he chose. But my whole point in bringing this up is maybe this is just something they never had to really worry about because they were so – I hate the word gifted because it makes it seem like he didn't do any work at all. But maybe they were so gifted that this was an area that wasn't a major concern. But maybe they were so gifted that this was an area that wasn't a major concern. So I guess a question to ask the audience would be, you are getting paid to coach an athlete, right?

And you're trying to be their strength coach or you're trying to be their conditioning coach or maybe their jiu-jitsu coach, whatever it is. You're training this athlete for this particular thing. And let's just say the athlete looks like Nsema. And let's say that he doesn't currently have a great diet. Well, is Nsema not big enough to roll with other heavyweights in jiu-jitsu? No, it seems like he's at a good weight, and it doesn't seem like the guys that weigh 280 exponentially do better than the guys that weigh 240, 250. Does he have really horrible mobility issues? Like,

nope, check. Does he have an issue with this? Does he have an issue with that? Is his body composition off and it's hard for him to really show what a great athlete is? It's like, no, it seems like that's all intact, right? So if these things are intact, there's really not a lot of great reasons to address them. However, what I would say is that if you can improve your sleep, then you might be able to improve every single thing else that you have going on. And a lot of these athletes, they have these stories of these horrific blowouts every time they go to the bathroom, which is not normal. And I think that people kind of think that, especially when people are like bodybuilding and stuff, like oh yeah I fart all the time and my I'm I have I've shit five times a day like those things are a little bit abnormal something is like over stressing your system a bit so I think to his point a lot of the athletes that he's talking about are people that have

they've always done a little bit better or maybe they always showed up a little bit earlier. They put a little extra effort in whatever it was that they were doing to just be exponentially a lot better than most. And nutrition wasn't something that they really had to hone in and focus on. Yeah. And then another just quick example, like you're saying, if you were a coach of, I'll say if I was a coach of Russ Swole, who was just here, somehow we were talking off air about how he discovered Knees Over Toes Guy through our podcast. And he's like, damn, I guess I should pay attention to my knees. And I'm like, but do your knees hurt?

And he's like, no. I'm like, you can still squat a shit ton of weight and your knees are fine. He's like, yeah. So, again, I would never be anyone's coach. But if I was his coach, the first thing I wouldn't say is like, oh, we've got to get your knees stronger. He's going to be like, why?

You may not need to spend your time there. Yeah, exactly. Ready? Let's keep going, yeah. George St. Pierre, for 80% of your career, you were powered

by McDonald's and Coca-Cola. That was my meal of choice before a championship fight. Gordon, for him, his youth was just five guys, hamburgers, Gary Tone, the same thing.

I've worked with Japanese judo players who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day and won Olympic gold medals. I've worked with Russian wrestlers who just ate whatever was put in front of them and their athletic performance was outstanding. I've worked with other guys who did have what would be considered a very clean diet and their performance was no better than anyone else on the mat.

So I've never seen someone say, okay, I changed my diet, and because of that, there was a measurable improvement in sports performance. Another way to phrase it, though, is I have noticed with a lot of elite athletes, what they eat, they begin to believe that that either is not a hindrance or it's actually good. Like Travis Stevens is an example of somebody who eats shitty

because he believes it's like a power because whenever he's traveling across the world, he can't rely on healthy, good food to be there. So I'm going to eat shitty so that's like my body knows how to perform under whatever Skittles or whatever

everywhere's got McDonald's everywhere's got McDonald's so it makes and they've convinced themselves and you talk about Russian athletes a lot of them have very strong beliefs about like this

particular food being good for them but there's no agreement among them exactly no agreement so belief is more important than the actual diet

pause it again so Gordon Lex Donaher Donaher just chimed in again Exactly. It's an agreement. So believe is more important than the actual diet. Pause it again. So Gordon – or – Lex. Donaher. Donaher just chimed in again by saying no one agrees. Like he said it in a split second. Boom, like that. No one agrees.

What does that tell you about nutrition? I mean it doesn't tell you that it doesn't matter at all, but it definitely tells you something. No one can agree. There's not really agreeable things amongst the community when it comes to how you should diet exactly. You got one extreme. You got people eating primarily vegetables. There's another extreme of people primarily eating fruit.

There's another extreme of people primarily eating meat. And it's really just kind of all over the place. I would say like, if you are an athlete, probably the worst thing that you can do is under eat, just to under eat your calories, be macronutrient deficient. Micronutrient deficient, like probably doesn't matter so much that it can negatively impact your performance if you are one of these people that they're kind of referencing. However, there are people that like every little tiny thing matters. And if you're the kind of person that really kind of worries about stuff a lot, then you would probably most likely be somebody that would try to follow as many guidelines as you possibly can to be the best that you possibly can.

However, your eating is like you train all the time. You're really not supposed to drink. I guess you can smoke here and there, but you have to kind of be a little cautious with probably even that, right? So there's certain things like these athletes are so dedicated to everything. And now like the dude can't have like some ice cream. He can't have some cookies. What does that do when the guy is able to eat those things?

Maybe the guy is just a little happier in his day to day. Like no, mood is a big thing right there. If you're McDonald's, you know, you're McDonald's cheeseburger and fries, you know, you feel good and then you then are in a good mental space so you perform good, that makes a big difference. But we can't forget like these athletes are burning an extreme amount of calories.

Fighters, jujitsu guys, football players, basketball players, soccer players, these types of athletes, when they eat a large amount of calories, when they go to practice and they do their drills and they're going and going, they're going through that fuel like more than the general population. So the thing is, is like, if you're someone who's just trying to change your body composition, maybe you do some bodybuilding or some powerlifting. This is something to be careful. This, this, this idea here, it's something to be careful of because in a powerlifting workout, you do not burn that many calories. In a bodybuilding workout, you generally do not burn that many calories. And then if you, if you just start eating junk and then do that, that's why you see in our sports of powerlifting and bodybuilding, you can see a lot of people that practice these things and they're very fat because they don't have good – they don't – if you're in these sports, you need to have good nutritional habits as far as your caloric intake because it's going to be very easy for you to get very out of shape. And then because of the sport, you can excuse it because you're like, gets me strong.

And I agree. And I think that I believe that this is the way that people think this stuff works, right? Let's say somebody puts me through a workout on the bike. Dr. Baker puts me through some sprints on the bike. So people believe that if your nutrition is off, that you can't have the capacity to work as hard on the bike, right? Like you test somebody day one, Dr. Baker puts you through these sprints, you got these short rest intervals. And sure enough, there was a huge decline in your force output for every set that you did because you're not in shape enough to

really recover from those things. I think that people think that if your food was correct, that that would be improved massively. And I don't think it would be improved all that much. I think what would matter more is your skill set going into it, right? Your previous training, your previous history. And same thing with some of these people that run ultra marathons and people that really push the extremes, I don't think you're going to find a crazy extra energy burst by eating healthier. Again, however, how does eating better hurt you? How does eating healthy, having good sound nutrition, how does that hurt?

And what a fucking savage it starts you start to sound like, right? Because you're like, this guy's on top of his game with stretching. He fucking trains. He lifts really hard. He's always here on the mats earlier than everybody. He's fucking mopping up the mats. He's helping other people. He's got his nutrition down.

He's got two kids. And you start running through the stuff and you're like, I might as well just never roll with that guy because he's going to kill me every time I come in because somebody has everything kind of put together and fit together. But different people have different interpretations of what they're supposed to do. I'd like to add one more thing. And I mentioned this many times on this show. Anderson Silva, the spider, they did a documentary on him. And one of the first things they asked him, they showed a couple of his cars, they showed his home. They talked about how he grew up poor and they're like, how did all this happen? And he's like, this is just the way it is. I started when I was seven years old and never stopped. For him at what, I think about how much

people think about their sport and how like, wasn't like it was hard work i stayed up late at night studying tapes of everybody i knew my opponent he didn't say any of that he said this is just the way it happened so of course he's one of the greatest of all times because it came to him a little bit easier again hours and hours that he spent on the mat traveling the world fighting people i mean he's he studied the game like a motherfucker. But I love the way that he put that because that sometimes is the difference between a Bones Jones and everybody else. Absolutely.

And one thing that was actually mentioned towards the end of this podcast, Lex, I think, asked them, you know, advice you'd have for younger athletes. I think John and Gordon mentioned something that was pretty important for people to think about, especially athletes to think about. When you're heading into a sport or you're heading into an endeavor athletically,

like, yeah, you want to have true interest in that. If you're a really good baseball player but you hate the sport of baseball, it's going to be pretty hard to stick with that for a long time to get actually good enough. But if you end up entering something and you have't, there's, there's a, you have maybe a skillset that puts you ahead of other people and you like it. That's a good place to be. And if you don't, it can end up being a hobby.

But I mean, when they're talking about, these are literally three goats at a table. GSB is arguably one of the best mixed martial arts, if not the best mixed martial arts at all time. John Donovan is the best grappling coach of all time. And Gordon Ryan is the best no-gi grappler of all time. Right.

But they also had a propensity for this before they started. Like there was something there. So that's something to think about. And Anderson Silva, same thing. He started from a super young age. It was, it was his thing.

It was the thing he went towards. Ended up being an amazing fucking fighter. There's another side of it too just if you believe that you're gifted then that's huge like i i've always felt kind of special like my mama instilled that in me you know um probably a little too much sometimes but i always felt good about myself and to me like that's been everything so if i imagine if you feel good about yourself and then you hear good things about yourself, I remember when I was a kid, like I've said on the podcast before,

my brothers would tease and they would just, they'd call me the chosen one. Cause each guy, each person in my family like played football and they did other things, but I was always able to do them like slightly better. Even when it came to lifting, like the lifting just clicked real quick. I was a little taller than some, I was a little taller than some, I was a little stronger than some, I was in a little bit better shape than some. And so they just thought that, they felt that. I felt that from them thinking that of me. Now imagine, and you multiply that times 10, because I was like decent at stuff, but I was not the man, right? Like in high school football, if every time you touch the ball, you score and you start hearing people talk about how good you are and how

talented you are. And you go to college and you're dominant there. I mean, these guys are like that. Like, it's not like it's just, I don't want to make it seem like it just came to them, but it's almost like the sport sort of pick them, like their attributes that they had in their life, It's almost like the sport sort of picked them. Their attributes that they had in their life, all the different things they had in their life, allowed them to start off maybe in a place where they were able to understand stuff a little more rapidly or be slightly more interested than the next person. It was something that allowed them to have a spark to take off faster than everybody else. Do you know what's one thing?

When you talk about their training, right? But you know what's one thing when you talk about like their training, right? You know, it is – I think a lot of people, more people than one would expect can have a talent or an underlying skill for a sport that they're interested in. More people than you would expect would have a little bit of maybe an edge in a certain aspect of that sport. But when they talk about the amount that they trained, for example, when Gordon talked about the amount, he would do four to seven training sessions a day. A day.

Four to seven training sessions a day. That means that potentially a low week of training was him doing 28 jiu-jitsu sessions. That was a low week. Low week. A month's worth. A month's worth of jiu-jitsu sessions. That was a low week. Low week. A month's worth. A month's worth of jujitsu training in a week. On a low week. So as much as some people are going to say,

oh yeah, he was talented and he's big and he takes drugs, no motherfucker out there is training a minimum of 28 sessions a week. Right? To attain the amount of skill that he had in that period of time. No one is doing that. I actually think that this craze is going to leak into fitness more. Like where people are – I think it's healthy for a lot of people to integrate exercise into their life rather than thinking about like working out.

Although working out can be effective. You go to the gym. You got your gym bag. You got your BCAAs and you have a ritual and you do your arm training. And like there's definitely merit to some of that. But I think if we're going to try to get people away from what this country has turned into with so many people being sick and so many people being overweight, I think incorporating exercise into your day to day. Maybe waking up first thing in the morning, you do some knees over toes stuff. Maybe later in the day,

you actually do some resistance training. Maybe later on in the day, you hit a walk and maybe before you go to bed, you do a couple squats, you meditate, you go to sleep. And then repeat. Imagine doing that for eight years, 10 years. You put in so much time.

And that's what you're seeing from these guys. Um, Louie Simmons was a huge fan of like working out multiple times a day, who he would say, you're not working out enough. And you're like, uh, I'm here every day. And he's like, when you're trying to be great at something, it's irrelevant. The time commitment is irrelevant. I remember James Smith saying that as well. He had me doing these workouts to help my pec and to help my deadlift. And I was like, man, these workouts, I'm not bitching, but it took me around two and a half hours to get through it. And then he was just like, and you know James, how straightforward he is. He's like, like okay that's the

amount of time it takes you know how good do you want to how fast do you want shit to heal up you know he's like okay maybe it could be a little faster because you're not used to the setup or the exercises or whatever so you can get it down to two hours but yeah he's like time is irrelevant when you're trying to be great takes as long as however long it takes yeah and one other thing thing I'll say is I think that a good example of an athlete – because John mentioned in the beginning of this segment that maybe it's something that helps with the longevity of the athlete. I think an athlete that you're seeing that has been ticking all those boxes since he started in the NBA is LeBron. LeBron is someone that everyone is like, oh, he spends millions on his body a year. You can't think that he's not actually paying attention to his nutrition too. I think that's because like we've all, you definitely heard a lot of stories and I know I've heard stories since

I've been around the podcast and had some great coaches come of people who have coached some just amazing athletes that continue to eat like shit, but they're some of the best in the world. And that honestly, initially it shocked me, but I thought about it. I'm like, if this athlete is getting enough calories and then they feel good and they can go out and perform, okay, it makes sense. But do they last a long time? Is their body, because we know that as you get older, your ability to get nutrients from certain foods is not, it diminishes.

Insulin resistance gets harder as you get older. So your ability, it's like the shack effect shack was really jacked when he was a younger player but he kept that diet mcdonald's and coke and he got fat and caught up to him it caught up to him and he was still big and bullying people but he couldn't move the way he did and so that longevity factor if you're an athlete and let's say this is one thing that makes me so pumped is that if you're an athlete, and let's say this is one thing that makes me so pumped, is that if you're an athlete that started a sport a little bit later, let's say you started a jujitsu or mixed martial arts or even powerlifting a little bit later, if you pay attention to your nutrition, it could allow you to be in the game for a longer amount

of time and maybe hit those goals at a slightly older age because you have longevity on your side. at a slightly older age because you have longevity on your side. You maybe shouldn't be trying to eat like shit and have a bursty career, but you can maybe be in the game in your 40s and mid-40s if you pay attention to your nutrition well. And that's a really cool thing to realize. I think it's awesome. I think if you think about as you get older, the bar gets lower and lower for how strong you got to be on certain things.

So let's say that you had a goal like you wanted to hit like a 700-pound deadlift, but you're starting lifting at like 40 and you only currently deadlift 500. Well, how much cooler would it be if when you're 60, you're still able to pull 400 or 500 pounds rather than that other goal of pulling? Like the 700 is a great goal. It's really awesome, and hopefully you can figure out a way to get there. But if you have sound nutrition, you have a good training plan, and you can last a really long time, you could do some really cool shit when you're older. And not only do cool shit when you're older, be super competitive with it as well. Yeah, I've mentioned it several times on the podcast now but you know the story of chris weber before games he would have 240 piece chicken nugget meals 240 piece 240 piece yeah and so that's what he ate throughout at least

his career in sacramento but what you guys brought uh donna her or maybe it was donna her and you guys brought up about like as you age um his teammate, Pages Diakovich, once he was past his prime, I remember saying like or hearing that he was going to come back for another year, but he was going to start paying attention to his diet. So this was towards the end of his career, and I remember being like pay attention. Like I think it's a little late for that, but then hearing again that like he didn't really pay attention to anything he ate.

He just ate what he wanted to eat, and he, he dude i mean one of the best shooters of all time but again once that age factor started coming in that's when he was just like oh shit i guess i better start now which is insane to think that somebody at the top of the of the game is not paying attention to that it's wild there's some athletes that are just they're unbelievable i don't think uh deon sanders worked out all that much alan iverson yeah chad otrasinkos talked about it too ate like shit yeah it's it's uh it's insane so i think i mean the overall message here that i mean something i agree with is that maybe your exact nutrition doesn't matter as much when you're talking about some of these people.

However, a better diet is a better diet. Better training is better training. One of the reasons why so many of these athletes have gotten so much better is because there is better training. They're like, they don't have the old, well, some of them still have it, but they don't, not as many of them have that old wrestler mentality of just like running all the time and just killing themselves with conditioning and doing drills all day. They understand the importance of, you know, just being like really optimal, trying to figure out a way to be optimal. But in these guys' case, I would still say that, you know, better nutrition is probably always going to lead to better results.

It'd be hard to prove. It might be minimal. But again, what if it helps your sleep? What if it helps you recover a little faster? There's kind of these what-ifs. And why? Just why would you leave anything on the table? It's why George St. Pierre decided to take that very seriously later in his career.

It's still an interesting thing I've heard GSP say is because he does a lot of fasting now. He talked about that in this. But it's something that he said he wished he did during fighting because he has a little bit more mental acuity or the ability to focus a bit more when he's in a fasted state. Like I've noticed it too. When I train, when I'm fasted, at least when I'm doing martial arts, I am more focused. I can – it's just – it's weird. And you've mentioned you've had workouts before where you're like, oh, that wasn't great. Like I need to eat more tomorrow.

Right. You've had workouts like that, right? Yeah. Yeah. I'm very in tune with that now. So I can, I can tell when, okay, calories got to come up for the next two or three days. But it wouldn't matter if you had Ben and Jerry's and pizza or something, right? Like if you wouldn't know, you wouldn't, well, maybe your stomach would bother you.

The stomach would, the stomach would hit me a little bit because I don't eat like that all the time. And if I like – yeah, the stomach would bother me a little bit. But outside of that, no, it would not be that big of a factor just because I burn so much calories when I do jujitsu that if I did choose to just consistently eat like shit, I could still perform. It's just I wouldn't feel as good and that's a big deal. And I think also, since I'm here with you guys and we're getting all this nutrition information, I can't let it just go over my head. My belief system now, as far as my nutrition,

I don't think would allow me to consistently eat like shit and perform because I would believe I'd feel like shit and I would be shit. Yeah. It fucks you. Yeah, there's so many things. It's like I'm trying to work on having my fucking feet straight and i'm thinking i gotta get do my knees over toes drills it's like how many fucking hours are there in a day for me to get through all this stuff it's even worse i'm looking

at my son and i can tell his left foot is not bowing out or bowing yeah around as much as his right and i'm like dude you're gonna develop some imbalances like i know where this road is going but he just doesn't listen to me he just keeps crawling um but one thing that like in sema you're talking about like you can still perform we're not necessarily talking about like going to the gym and power lifting for an hour or two whatever um and then also you know like uh what mark said about uh anderson silva like he started at seven you started at like i don't know like same age we'll just say yeah so if somebody's listening and i don't i mean i'll be mean a little bit but like you know you had you turned 30 and you started your new year's new year's resolution to get in shape right now and you're like oh wait these guys are eating whatever they want they're performing it's like

we're not the same i'm more like you guys i'm I'm not like in SEMA and Mark, like I can't get away with it right now because I don't have that many years under my belt of performing at a high level in sport. I'm just lifting. I'm not really doing any like super high level exertion like every day like you guys are. So I can't get away with it. I'll still enjoy it. That's for sure. But that's another thing that someone like me in the past would definitely overlook and not understand, oh, they've been doing it for three decades by now. So that's probably why they're able to consume and burn so many calories. a little bit too where if body composition isn't a real strong feature of the sport that you're in, an example would be like bobsled. Like it would be very difficult to have a lot of excess body fat on you for the bobsled

because you have to be like a near like a world-class sprinter. And then you think about like, okay, world-class sprinters, people you think about like okay world-class sprinters people that qualify for the four by 100 meter and people that do the 100 meter um do you ever are they ever fat like they're net they're never fat like like literally they're never fat right they never have excess body fat i mean it's hard to find any body fat on any of them they look look fucking amazing, right? So there are sports where there's like a strength to weight ratio that sometimes needs to be factored in. If you're in a particular sport, we have to move your body weight around really well. Like gymnastics, again, you know, not that someone couldn't do gymnastics proficiently, but it's not going to be far from optimal. If you're

trying to do stuff on the rings, I've never seen anybody on the rings that's like really, you know, heavy, much less, or even tall sometimes, right? It's like these are not, it's not advantageous all the time, but there are sports where your nutrition is really, really hypercritical. I think when it comes to nutrition performance though, I think that we're're i think that we overthink it a bit i think if the calories are there i think you're just about okay but if i was gonna like you know be in the ufc and try to do something really hard just the way that my mindset is i would lean towards finding the thing that i thought was in my best interest and most optimal for me yeah i mean i think like a concept a basic concept for a high level athlete is maybe just try to stick to whole foods if you can like i mean yeah some of these because i've

heard i've heard some athletes just eating candy up the wazoo and i'm like nowadays if i eat candy immediately i'm just like like i want to sleep because of that spike i just wanted like i so i stay away from stuff like that but i mean i mean, I think the big thing, and we talk about it all the time, stay away from processed foods. Try to just eat real food. It's hard. And enough food. If you're an athlete, enough food to fuel your sport. I think, Andrew, actually, going back to what you were mentioning, right, where you were like, you know, you can't get away with that, right?

If you think of somebody that is, like, let's say they're a new athlete in their 20s say maybe 25 years old and again it's crossfit that's a place like i'm not saying you should but again that's a sport where you could get away with some shit because there's so much caloric burn right so a lot of this comes it's and you know more experienced athletes will probably burn more calories so they can get away with more shit. But it's, again, like we were talking about earlier, the nature of the sport. If you're just powerlifting or just bodybuilding and outside of that maybe you just take a few walks, et cetera, don't be surprised if you get in really bad shape because you're eating really bad food all the time, really calorically dense food. You can't do some of the things that some of these guys do because you're not burning the same amount of calories.

Yeah, the CrossFit prototype body, right rich roenings jacked like all those guys are fucking jacked girls too yeah yeah also all of those people in crossfit are fucking jacked is there any more to play here or you think we're good let's see yep see if i can after you know after a night out when you're hanging over oh thing, and I'm saying this in all sincerity, I think the best thing to eat, to me, was like cheeseburgers. We call that a putzin. Because it's very fat. It's greasy.

I want to touch upon this for a second. Processed food, interestingly enough, seems to digest pretty good. One of my favorite pre-workout things ever is to have cereal before I go to the gym. I absolutely love that. I used to just mix up like a whey protein shake, dump it over top of the – just because if I have regular milk, it kind of would tear me apart. So that will digest too slow. But the whey protein and some like Cocoa Puffs or some shit like that, freaking delicious. So it's interesting.

Those processed foods you would think that they would just completely wreak havoc on your stomach and maybe they do later on like we've talked about the seed oils and all the other bullshit like maybe it has some prolonged negative effect but in the interim you know immediately afterwards it doesn't seem like it bothers you at all yeah man and the second you take those out and you try to eat whole foods your body's like whoa hold on and then that person believes that that food hurts their stomach now they ate an apple and it hurt their stomach yeah right yeah i cannot allow cereal back in like that's one of the things we're just like that's a kryptonite for me real cereals like

cinnamon toast crunch race brand crunch because you can't stop you can't i will eat the whole box i will get fat no no no no no no it doesn't matter why i don't eat certain foods and this whole podcast is about how it doesn't matter what you eat but i do like what what uh gsp is talking about let's keep going i think you feel better because it absorbed the alcohol there you go my. You got trained. My mom told me the same story once. And then I tried it. I was hungover for some party. And I woke up. I was probably 19 or 20.

I woke up. And my mom was like, yeah, just have a cheeseburger. Go eat something greasy. And I did. And I was like, oh, I feel kind of better now. I do not know the science, the exact science behind it. But I always notice. And I don't know if it's placebo.

But I always notice that if I party hard and I've been drinking a lot, if I don't eat before I go into bed if I don't eat shitty food the next day I will wake up and feel worse than if I eat shitty food

I feel better I know it sounds crazy I don't know why but it works for me well that would definitely just most likely be like a volume thing like cause he ate

something shitty he probably ate more but also too like I do believe that like certain foods things stick to him better you know like sobs up the alcohol yeah I think I think so in some weird way But also, too, I do believe that certain foods, things stick to them better. Sops up the alcohol.

Yeah, I think so in some weird way. I think if you were just to eat meat and get pretty wasted, I think it would feel a lot different than if you had some sort of bread in there or something like that. Yeah, GSP looks like he can party, too. But that was the move. It was get drunk, go to Taco Bell. Yeah, I don't know why. Taco Bell. Yeah. What's wrong with you people? Because it was the only thing that was that was the move it was to get drunk go to taco bell yeah i don't know why the taco bell yeah it was what's wrong with you because it was the only thing i was open but yeah that's what we yeah we would do that quite a bit one place that i think no human should ever go and if you have gone here your trash is del taco what del taco i've never stepped

foot in that place i've never gone near its drive-thru it is trash i've never been you're really not trash if you've eaten del taco you're just kind of like bro del taco with the fries with the fries though fries yeah they're not delicious but they taste good with tacos the fact that you even know what del taco fries are like get the fuck out of here i used to go to del taco for breakfast like i don't know like three four times a week you got you still underestimate how shitty i ate oh my god that's actually crazy i did not cook for myself i didn't know how to cook for myself i didn't have somebody to cook for me all i did was i had a work truck and i got in that bitch and I went to drive-thrus all day long. That would feel terrible.

I didn't feel great, but I was fine. McDonald's breakfast? Why did you choose Del Taco? Because it was right next to one of my stops. Like literally next door. So it's like,

well, I'm here. And so I would just drive through. That's the life of bad decision-making, Mr. Zaragoza. Yeah, I know. It all stopped like 10 years ago.

There you go. Well, you're here now. That's all that matters. That's what makes it so difficult to communicate with people. Some people are still stuck on Del Taco. Yeah. Or, well, I'll tell you something off air that's kind of mean, so I'll wait. I think that was pretty much it from this clip, though.

I think that was the meat of it. That was great because the podcast with Nick, I can't pronounce his last name. A-Bear on the the like the opening trailer clip you know i asked like does it even matter and somebody kind of singled that out like what a stupid question a host to ask but it's like well here we are like and fucking legends are saying like yeah it didn't matter and i was talking about something hyper specific in regards to like the seed oils i got a lot of messages about that show oh you did well dude people were going nuts like a lot of comments

before it even aired there was like a hundred comments i got nerdy friends and they were like what anthony gustin was like super pissed the uh perfect keto guy yeah he's like what is this about he wants to come out here and he's like, I got to get on the show and talk about it. Wants to fight him. I love this. Dr. Gold does the same thing. Oh man.

People are really worked up. Ron Penna checked it out. He didn't have any like real disagreement, I don't think, but. He didn't want to stoop. It was beneath him.

Exactly. Well, I just told Nick, I was just like, hey, do you like the, the nutrition space is a big pot and you just stirred the shit out of it.

Yeah, he really did. That was awesome. I love it. I love that we get some people that just like, hey, here's a bomb. Take that. And they just walk away. Oh, and people get so upset about that. So mad.

He was in the live chat uh going back and forth with people too so he's he's not he's not hiding you know like it's it's hard right because like you would think like why let's just let's just hypothetically say that these seed oils and stuff let's say that they're really unhealthy let's say they truly are very like toxic unhealthy there's like a side of you that's like well why would they be allowed in our society and then there's other side of you that says well there's a lot of dangerous shit out there that they allow and that the government profits from and they tax multiple times like alcohol and things like that. And so it's hard sometimes to like try to figure out. We do have an FDA.

We have – we seem to be pretty smart. We do study these things. be pretty smart. We do study these things. I guess I would say like the closer they get to like proving something, the more likely they are to put some sort of government restriction on, but the government restrictions are never without government like subsidies. Like there's always money that follows behind it. So then you don't know, you're like, I don't know what the hell. Me and Jake were talking just the other day about uh lowering the age of drinking and jake was like yeah if it was done out of nowhere it's like you might have some problems but because i was just like i don't even think there should be who cares but jake was like i think there's like funding and

stuff and it's the it's a specific way because you know and i don't know much about it but i was just like fuck you're probably right probably never be able to change it you know yeah i get very um selective when it comes to that stuff because like with seed oils or uh certain medic medicines i'll say i'm just like oh it's fda approval that's fucking bullshit but then uh lane norton says that artificial sweeteners are fda approved yep i trust them 100 because i like my sugar my sugar-free soda with our personal bias so it's like it's yeah but you know i'm really happy that we had that podcast and i think that some we're going to be able to do some cool podcasts because of it but again at the end of the day like i just don't fuck with seed oils somebody yeah somebody who asked me like well what's your real opinion on i was like well i said it on the show but like i just don't fuck with seed oils somebody yeah somebody asked me like

well what's your real opinion on it I was like well I said it on the show but like I just don't eat them I don't eat them yeah there's occasion where there might be like

some dressings or stuff or like at restaurants but I just I don't care because I just would imagine that the amount that I'm consuming

is probably really low yeah couple ounces a month maybe I don't know like it's got to be not very substantial. Andrew, take us on out of here. Sure thing. Thank you, everybody, for checking out today's episode.

Sincerely appreciate it. And thank you to Bubz Naturals for sponsoring today's episode. Make sure you guys head over to BubzNaturals.com. Again, promo code PowerProject to save 20% off. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Please follow the podcast at MarkBowlesPowerProject on Instagram, at MBPowerProject on TikTok and Twitter. My Instagram and Twitter is at IamAndrewZ and

Seema, where can people find you? And Seema Inyang on Instagram and YouTube and Seema Inyang on TikTok and Twitter. Comment down below and let us know what you think about this nutrition thing that we just talked about, guys. It's a very interesting idea that some of your favorite pro athletes, whether you think they're on drugs or not, don't care about

shit when it comes to their nutrition. They're out here eating fast food before championship games. GSB said he had fast, like, McDonald's and Coke before a championship match. Imagine if he had In-N-Out. Bro! That's not even going down. Yeah, get In-N-Out. Man, he probably would never lose. He'd still be in the fucking game right now.

There we go. I think, you know, people want to point to Tom Brady. There's that. But then there was George Foreman at the end of his career that was just eating hamburgers and hot dogs and shit. There's stories of Babe Ruth eating a bunch of hot dogs before he went and smacked a bunch of home runs. I just want to make it perfectly clear that we're not,

by any means, by any stretch, saying that your nutrition doesn't matter. A better diet I think would be a better diet. It could lead to better outcomes. But when it comes to body composition in terms of you getting leaner or it comes to body composition and you trying to gain just weight in general and or just gaining muscle to get stronger, it's just very clear that your nutrition is a huge part of it. There are always outliers or people that your nutrition is a huge part of it. There are always outliers or people that really don't pay much attention to it. And you can look at powerlifters. They eat pizza and ice cream and they eat extra stuff. But a lot of times it's to stay a certain body weight,

to stay a certain size. And for some athletes, it just happens to be that they don't really have to worry about doing anything in particular to stay really lean. Someone like John Hack, like the dude's totally jacked. And if he wanted to be like insanely, disgustingly shredded, it'd probably take him like six weeks. And he'd just look maybe more ridiculous than anybody you've ever seen before. So some of us got to worry about it more. Some of us don't. It's just the cards that were dealt. And you have to make a decision for yourself on how much you think your nutrition matters.

Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later.