The Joe Rogan Experience - #1200 - Ross Edgley

Episode Date: November 12, 2018

Ross Edgley is a former professional British water polo player who currently works as a model and personal trainer. In November 2018, he became the first person to swim around Great Britain.

4, 3, 2, 1... Dude! First of all, what possessed you to want to swim around the entire UK? How many thousands of miles is that? Yeah, 2000 miles altogether. 2000 miles of swimming? Yeah, yeah yeah it seemed like a good idea at the time and then halfway around i realized how big great britain was but you you've done some long swims before but not like nothing even remotely like what's the longest swim you

did before this yeah i did um this is a bit of a strange story i did um i tried to swim between saint lucia and martinique uh two caribbean islands um it's only 40 kilometers from point to point um and and for charity i was trying to swim uh from point to point with with a hundred pound tree attached to my trunks um so i was pulling the hundred pound tree uh six foot waves crashing down and i actually didn't make it from point to point i was like five kilometers from the end and um when i didn't make it i decided to swim back the other way so i ended up swimming over a hundred kilometers with a hundred pound tree took me 32 hours um but still didn't make it so so what what went wrong where you didn't make it tides currents you know and and i just get swept away yeah yeah. Yeah. And especially attached to a

tree, right? How big was this tree? Uh, so a hundred pounds, but I mean, it floats, but it was more of the drag. Right. So if, if there's any influence from tides or currents and it's pulling you in one direction, I mean, I was basically going to miss Martinique. So I don't know. I was, I was heading to Cuba, you know, somewhere like that. And then on the way back down, you know, I was, they turned to me again and they said like,'re gonna miss saint lucia you're gonna end up in i don't know whatever's further south than saint lucia um and i think i realized is as physically fit as you are um the ocean just just doesn't care you know it doesn't care and so after that this was last year this was november last year um kind of felt i had unfinished business with with the ocean um

came but came back to england uh rung up friends of mine at the royal marines i said guys look this is going to sound so so strange i said but i just i need to get out my system i just need to see how far i can swim in 48 hours so i swam 48 hours um i can't remember what it was in there i think it was 160 kilometers something something like that and i finished and and i had basically trench foot so where your your your feet and your hands are so kind of i've got so much water in that it's almost going moldy you know yeah so i had trench one i'm sort of sitting there nursing nursing my feet and uh one of the one of the officers a good friend of mine and they came over and they just said uh they went you know real english raw marine they said you boy and i said yes and they said oh what are you training for

i said uh oh i'm training for uh potentially attempting the world's longest current neutral swim and then just paused and he he sipped his cup of tea and he looked me up and down he just goes that just sounds a bit lame i was like okay, what do you want me to do? And he pauses and he says, you just need to man up. You need to man up and swim around Great Britain. And I was like, whoa. And I couldn't say no. You should have said, why don't you swim with me, bitch?

I'll do it if you do it, motherfucker. That's a crazy thing for somebody to be asking you to do. No, I know, right? So I said, fine. that's a crazy thing for somebody to be asking you to do no i know right you know so i said fine once the idea stuck with me i mean you know we've got this real history and heritage of british eccentric explorers and for me growing up there's a story of captain webb so the first guy to swim across the english channel and for those who don't know english channel uh you know the tides they believed were too strong the water was too cold they said you just can't make it across the English Channel it's impossible

but Captain Webb refused to listen and 1875 August crossed the English Channel and this is the part I love on a diet of beef broth and brandy in a woolen wetsuit he swam I think it was 23 hours breaststroke with his head out the water because and quote, front crawl was ungentlemanly like. And there was that element that I just thought, that's amazing. Front crawl. What is the front crawl? So basically that's front crawl. The regular one.

Yeah. But way back in 1875, it was like, no, that's. He thought it was ungentlemanly. Yeah. The movements themselves. Yeah. It was still being developed as a technique. Whereas, you know know if you were a gentleman and you were a swimmer you swim breaststroke you know wow exactly head out of the water the whole time the whole way 23 hours and

again like the the the support boat was saying you know get out you're not you're not gonna make you're not gonna make it and he just refused and 23 hours so you know that's part of a night swim as well head out the water just all the way. Why brandy? Is he getting fucked up or just a little bit of brandy? You know, I don't know. Maybe.

It might have been a bit of Dutch courage, but I think there was, you know, certainly back then, sports nutrition isn't what it is today. Right.

So I think there was an element. He was even like lubing himself up in goose fat. You know, this is way back. To make himself slicker? Slicker.

And I think there was an element of warmth or that was certainly the belief. Right. So the tour de france guys didn't they drink wine that was like a big thing back in the day way back yeah i mean it wasn't until longer i mean me and jamie were just just talking now about football back in england and it wasn't till you know too long ago i think maybe 100 years ago they used to just keep brandy in the dressing room in case you needed to warm yourself up. Really?

Yeah. Wow. So they would play soccer drunk. Yeah, kind of. Just like with a little bit in there. But like I said, just warm yourself up. Just a little bit of something. Exactly.

Get the old engine turning over. Exactly. Yeah. Wow. Wow. And I think, you know, people don't understand that it's taken, you know, people like Captain webb maybe me to a smaller extent to just raise the bar push the boundaries and and you know you've seen that i think our generation have seen that um with the ufc with mixed martial arts that has evolved so fast um i always remember

forrest griffin used to kind of liken himself to the basketball players just shooting three pointers with the ball between the legs you know and that always resonated with me because i was like yeah the the evolution that we've seen and what sort of bruce lee had the the foresight to predict is amazing and i think in a much much much smaller way again to go back to sort of british athletes and adventurers um roger bannister you know first guy to run a four minute mile right and people said couldn't be done and he was a medical student at the time leading physician said you can't do it your lungs will explode your legs will fall off all sorts um but no he said you know oxford uh laced up his trainers and and ran a four minute mile similar right now to what i think we're seeing with kip choge you know and the two-hour marathon and so that's why in again in a much

much smaller way, when I had that conversation about swimming around Great Britain, everybody said, it can't be done. Yes, it's 2,000 miles, but there's giant whirlpools in Scotland called the Corrie Vecan, Penland Firth, renowned around the world. If you get that wrong, you're disappearing backwards at 10 knots. There's no way you're swimming against that.

And 10 knots, that's no way you're swimming against that and 10 knots that's that's a dolphin speed jesus yeah so what is 10 knots in miles per hour basically 10 miles per hour yeah oh my god 10 miles per hour backwards as you're trying to go forwards basically yeah penland first at the top of scotland the currents that go across there so it's running at a good clip but yo yeah backwards. Backwards. Yeah, I mean, we got it good. We managed to basically predict it so well that I think that was probably my top speed, which I did 8.7 knots. 8.7 miles per hour, I was basically cruising along the top, which is like a dolphin. So you were having the waves behind you, pushing you almost. And see, now that's what's interesting because I had the tides and currents with me, not necessarily the waves. Yeah, I said it wrong.

And when you get, but actually you made a good point in terms of when you get wind over tide. So if you've got 10 knots going this way, but you've even got a little bit of wind and waves going this way, it can get choppy. Oh, okay. And again, sort of looking at West Scotland, wind over tide, you can get 40 knots coming straight down the barrel, but you're trying to swim with the tide. Whoa. Yeah. So the wind is coming at you, but the tide is going the opposite way. And as you can imagine, that just…

Oh, my God. Yeah, yeah. So how do you predict this tide that you have to get right? Yeah, I mean, it's completely in theory. And this is what I realized when I sat down and we started sort of plotting the Great British Swim. What is it called again? What is the issue that'll push you back?

Oh, just the title, yes. What is it called, that area? Oh. That you say you got to get right? Oh, so Pendland Firth. Pendland Firth? The Pendland Firth. Pendland Firth.

Yeah, yeah. And that's that, like I said, renowned around the world. But equally, if you imagine the shape of Great Britain, there's all sorts of kind of compression where the water will just come rushing through. And as well as the Pendland Firth, you can get, you know, six knots around Wales. There's an island called Skoma. And if you get that right, you are disappearing, you know, and you're winning. You winning you get it wrong again you're going backwards and for me for me to do a continuous stage swim if i'm going backwards i've got to start where i was going backwards so for me getting every single tide right and that's why

i was so for the team were amazing there was a uh the captain uh matt was just incredible that every night the homework j, are we okay here? No? Did we crash? All right, folks, if you're listening or watching, we had a little technical difficulty, so this is not streaming live. It will be uploaded later.

We were just going over how you predicted you had to, and your team had to predict how the tide was coming because if it went wrong, you'd get pushed backwards at like 10 miles an hour yeah basically and and this is the thing i think with the great british swim we were kind of taking swimming as most people understand it and we were we were removing it and putting in in an arena that was so different so and i think that's why it was it did so well kind of online as well the community around, because obviously swimmers were interested.

But, you know, surfers started to get involved because they understood the waves. Sailors, fishermen, you know, all sorts of people started to say, you know, sometimes in Great Britain, it's not safe to take a boat around the top of Scotland. You know, for instance, never mind a swimmer. So that's why it was amazing that on the entire series, it became a melting pot, an exchange of ideas, because nobody knew how to get a human body around the coast of Great Britain. It wasn't just about swimming. And that was what was really cool. How do they know, like when the tides are going one way or the other? How do they predict that?

Yeah, I mean, tides are so predictable. So in theory, they change every six hours. So in theory, when we sat down and we looked, we know that if you do six hours on, six hours off, for 157 days, you'll make it around the coast of Great Britain. And that was the theory. So you do this biphasic sleep and you swim for 12 hours a day. But that's all theory. There's times when, as I mentioned, giant whirlpools or the tides might not necessarily.

If you imagine sort of that's Great Britain there. The tides don't necessarily go always like this. So they're not that predictable. Sometimes if there's kind of like this, like that's kind of whales there. The tides will do this. So you're doing all these different things that people are not going to see. If they're listening to it on audio. So just try to just describe it.

Right. So basically, rather than the tides just going up and down and working with you, sometimes they cross cross. Yes. So you're just kind of getting slapped across the face by tides, essentially. And it's not just helping you. You're going to basically zigzag all the way up the coast of Great Britain. So as predictable as tides are, we found there was so much stuff that when we were out there, we were like, oh, it wasn't meant to do that. Or a giant whirlpool wasn't meant to be there.

But it is. And that was what was pretty sketchy at some times. When we were out there, if a whirlpool just decides to appear, there's not really enough time to say, oh, hang on't on the map can we look at that can we speak to the met office and talk about you know weather reports no you just you either had to swim through it or try and get out there as quick as you could so when you encounter something like that and you get stuck do you pull out of the water and try back again later at the same location you do but quite often if it was there it's still going to be there oh

it's just it is what it is yeah so so sometimes there's there's no option and perhaps the best example of this um i mentioned it before it's called the corrie of eckon so uh sort of west coast of scotland and it's a giant whirlpool and and matt the captain turned to me and said look ross you know i need you to swim and i need you to swim hard. You need to swim six hours. You just need to be clear of this whirlpool. So as we were swimming past it, I set my watch and swam hard for six hours. But about three hours in, I got stung by a jellyfish. And I've been stung by jellyfish a lot before. It's just, you know, it's painful, but it was it was bearable. But this one particular jellyfish, it just it was searing into my skin. It just it wouldn't stop throbbing. And so I carried on swimming three hours past and it was just unbearable.

So I popped my head up and I looked at Matt, the captain from the boat. I said, Matt, I'm so sorry. I've been stung. I'm going to have to stop. I've been stung by a jellyfish, but the pain's just not going away. And as I said that to him, he looked down at me and he said, yeah, I know, because the tentacle still wrapped around your face. So I'd basically been swimming for three hours with a jellyfish on your face, wearing a jellyfish. So it wrapped into my goggles.

So I took my goggles off, unpeeled this fat tentacle, threw it away. And then, like I said, I'll show you in a minute but there was a picture where my face sort of changed shape and the goggles wouldn't fit on my face anymore because my eye sockets were so swelled but I knew that again for all of this happening the Coria Vecan, the giant whirlpool was still to my left

so Matt was like you still need to swim you still need to swim so I ended up putting the goggles over my face and to try and get them to seal I just punched them into my face so you just had get them to seal i just punched them into my face so you just had these perfect rings and then i managed you were so swollen yeah so you had to push them through the swelling basically yeah oh my god so you swim um i made another hour we got clear of the korea beckons we managed to clear this giant whirlpool i collapse onto the boat

and um and this is the thing it was at that point that I collapsed, exhausted, face now a different shape to when I started that particular swim. And the team looked at me and they saw how bad I was, how beaten up I was. But they also knew that the sea just doesn't care. And in six hours, the tide was going to change and I'm not going to have to do that all over again. And it was that kind of brutal lesson from nature

that from a sports science background, I'm interested in, you know, rehab, rest, recovery, nutrition strategies, all of this. But with swimming around Great Britain, it very quickly became apparent that the sea just doesn't care. It just doesn't care that you need to rehab your shoulders. It doesn't care that the ligaments and tendons in your shoulders are hurting. You might get impingement from swimming too much.

None of this. And that's why it went from swimming, as I understood it, and how a lot of people understand it, to something completely like surviving, basically, in the water. So your swimming schedule would be six hours on and then you would try to rest when would you eat uh during the swims or or between during the swims yeah yeah so quite often just you know throwing bananas at me and and just wow uh salty bananas basically yeah yeah just salty but i need to eat them while you're in the water yeah wow yeah because because again going back to what we're talking about with the pendulum first you could get out and you could get on the boat but sometimes in a really good tide if you are just in the water you could be making four knots you don't have to swim but if

you get in the freezing cold water of scotland and you are quite happy getting hit in the face by tentacles you can still make four knots and so that's why so often it became about uh something different than swimming it was just it was just mental fortitude it was physical fortitude it was um basically and i always remember actually uh first day of autumn um i got up it was two o'clock so it was a night swim two o'clock in the morning and i left my wetsuit out to dry and um i had to scrape just a thin layer of ice off the wetsuit before i could put it on but if i didn't if i didn't get in and i didn't scrape that that that wetsuit then that would have been you know 15 miles potentially that we would have missed out on and if you miss those

15 miles that the window of opportunity to swim around great britain because of the british summer being notoriously unpredictable and quite short um we wouldn't have made it round because even towards the end, there was two storms, Storm Allum and Storm Alley and Callum, who kind of stopped us for those two days where we couldn't swim because you just couldn't swim in a storm. It wasn't safe. So when you were swimming, this was all during the summer? Yeah, yeah, through the autumn, and then we finished November the 4th, which was going into the winter as well. And you started what month? June the 1st. So since June, you've been swimming?

Yeah, basically. God damn, man. That's so crazy. You know what's interesting, too? You're not built like a guy I'd expect to be doing this. You're built like a tank. That's not normal? You're not built like a guy I'd expect to be doing this. You're built like a tank. That's not normal. You're a big jack guy. You look more like an MMA fighter or a powerlifter even.

You don't look like an endurance athlete. Yeah, and we were speaking about this because I loved the episode with you and C.T. Fletcher. I loved that guy. I loved that. And I was a big fan of Cameron. There you are. Look at this fucking picture. Yeah, dude If someone said that guy's gonna swim around great, but I feel like that guy's gonna swim for half an hour And he's gonna have a fucking heart attack. No, you're right. There was a lot

Yeah, and I'd probably be inclined to agree with you But what I find interesting is when you start looking at the strength and stamina for so often people believe the two couldn't coexist right and robert hickson uh and his his uh sort of research around concurrent training that um basically saying if you train for strength and stamina you dilute the potency of the stimuli so what i mean by that is if you know we went into the gym just now and uh you know me you and jamie walked into the gym and we were like, okay, okay, let's, let's go and see, uh, what we're doing on, uh, in the squat rack, you know, that's strength, your body's ability to generate force. And we trained that. And then

all of a sudden I was like, okay, no, no, no, no. Now let's go over to the rowing machine or let's go for a swim. Let's go and swim 10 K. Then all of a sudden our bodies are going to go, well, hang on, which one do you want us to adapt to? You know, looking at, you know, molecular biology, which one do you want us to adapt to strength or stamina? you know molecular biology which one do you want us to adapt to strength or stamina and again you dilute the potency of that stimuli however there's the theory that if you separate them within the laws i'm going off on a little bit of a tangent here but please thank you good looking at um verka shansky so one of the greatest strength and conditioning coaches to ever exist he talks about this idea of adaptive energy saying that in any given day you have a certain amount of adaptive energy and if you are able to fit

both a training session that that like i said causes your body to adapt to both strength and stamina you separate them under those conditions they can coexist so you separate them by how much time as much as needed for optimal recovery so so yeah yeah, if we did, and this is what I find fascinating about MMA, because you're essentially saying to an MMA athlete, I need you to be strong, fast, quick. I need you to be muscly endured, but I also need you to have plyometric speed strength. And their body's going, you want us to be all of those things.

Right. You know, and that's why quite often it's the athlete with a higher work capacity who can you know adapt to those looking at like you know the diaz brothers who just do triathlons for fun you know they have this insane work capacity you know so so that's kind of your your body's ability to perform and positively tolerate training of a given intensity or duration right so if you have the diaz brothers and you say okay we're gonna now do weight training in the morning but by the afternoon i also need need to go swim a 10K, their bodies could tolerate that. Whereas if you have another athlete who perhaps doesn't have that work capacity, their body's not going to positively tolerate it. Right. A person who's used to working out

maybe only an hour a day. Yeah, absolutely. So that's essentially how I would approach anything like this. But what I found really interesting when you were talking with C.T. Fletcher was when you look at strength and stamina, it's so specific. So, you know, said principle, specific adaptation to impose demands, you know, you get good at whatever you continually practice. continually practice and when you look at endurance in weight-bearing sports absolutely you know you can argue that that running for instance is is just you know power to weight ratio it's a series of successive jumps um and when you start looking at that there's research that will show adding and we we did this with the royal marines back in england when you just add one kilo of extra weight in a backpack its effect on pulmonary ventilation lactic threshold time to fatigue all of those things just one one kilogram that's it and so that's why when you see

tour de france and people like chris froome bradley wiggins you know from team sky they are just looking at the body saying okay your vo2 is what it is your power to your power to weight ratio that's what we need to improve we need to treat you like a formula one car we need to take away anything you know so when you look at chris froome you know an unbelievable athlete and they say well you don't need biceps you don't need triceps so they will remove those controlled muscular atrophy and how do they approach that intelligently i i suppose looking at anything from you know a calorie deficit tell them not to pick anything up ever kind of yeah and it's just exactly that's crazy there it is there you go got no triceps they don't they went away exactly but i mean that is

that is the perfect example of you know you know said principle specific adaptation to impose demands that all he does is he lives on a bike so as a result his body is is a byproduct of what he continually practices just got bike muscles yeah yeah and so so looking at that and sorry going back to strength and stamina that when you look at running you could argue that you know being jacked and being heavier yes absolutely your power to weight ratio is going to impact you so for instance i like to run but i don't stand a chance against some of my friends who are you know fell runners and they weigh you know 30 kilos less than me rich rich role exactly yeah thin lean long guy just yeah you look at an unbelievable specimen of a man you go yes you were built for endurance but as soon as you go in the water things might start to change a little

bit because now it's non-weight bearing so the power to weight ratio is a little bit different so then you could and this is all theory for the moment but looking at the body shape to swim around great britain because no one's ever done it before so you can say okay what does that body type look like and when writing down a checklist you say we need someone who can swim in you know 40 knots of wind wind over tide that we're talking about so you're not going to break um on top of that as well you can start to look at um all of a sudden we need someone who's never going to take a day off so i wasn't sick throughout those 157 days so there you start looking at adaptive energy and and work capacity that we just spoke about and then all of a sudden you can start getting real into the detail of looking at okay someone with a higher muscle mass if they're able to effectively swim and their biomechanics are are on point so that's not you know this muscle mass isn't interfering with their biomechanics

could it be argued that that stored muscle glycogen can almost turn them into a human whale you know that yeah you're right you put me into the pool with michael phelps and he laps me you know he he to look at him swim it's unbelievable he looks like a dolphin it's it's beautiful but when it comes to something like swimming around great britain it's just it's just an eating competition you know with a little bit of swimming involved and you just need to make sure you don't break and that goes back to the tides as well, your body working with tides. If you can just keep getting in the water for 157 days, 12 hours a day, and not break, you'll make it around Great Britain Bay.

So you think the muscle mass aids you in that way? I would argue, yes. Yeah, I mean, and this is purely anecdotal, and I'd love to actually do more research into this, but certainly with a lot of athletes that I train with, it's almost like a bell curve. So if can imagine you know for those listening like a bell curve like that how do you describe that just um just a like a horseshoe yeah yeah so you can argue that here around endurance so if you've got somebody who's you know to use rich role as an example

amazing swimmer that over 10k he's going to be amazing because his efficiency and everything but then past this point so when we start looking at the mileage that we were covering so it sort of english channel swim is 20 miles plus a day at this point this leaner swim is going to start running out of muscle glycogen his biomechanics might break down because he doesn't have the strength to hold that position continually all of those things the waves start crashing and starting to swim into 40 knots of wind what's going to happen are you going to be would you favor the the leaner quicker more streamlined swimmer or would you argue that the guy with more muscle mass here is going to continue to swim not necessarily at the same pace but would continue not to break i think it depends on who the man with the muscle mass is because a lot of guys with muscle mass

They got that muscle mass from doing very low reps high weight I mean what what kind of exercise do you do that gives you a bill like that see and that's a good point I mean, I loved what you did with them with Dorian Yates and I think when you start looking at the the three mechanisms to build muscular hypertrophy you start looking at metabolic stress so metabolic stress being exactly what you just said lots and lots of reps dorian yates been a great example of that that is more muscular hypertrophy bodybuilding centric work okay that's metabolic stress lots and lots of reps but then you can also look at mechanical tension so that's more your power lifters you know really really high weight lower volume just

real strength your body's ability to generate force that is what i do um and yes it's shown to induce muscular hypertrophy so to increase muscle mass but arguably more functional you know than when you'd be looking at a you know bodybuilder mr olympia something like that and then you have a muscle damage which is more eccentric contraction some more arguably sort of crossfit so a bodybuilder to achieve that physique besides using steroids they have to use lots of repetitions yeah is that the idea yeah that's it so so when you say what do do i specifically use it's more mechanical tension so it's more power lifting cleans deadlifts things along those lines is exactly it yeah yeah yeah because you're not built like a bodybuilder but you're you're built

like someone who's very strong yeah yeah and i think that's it where you start and that's not to say you know when you look at you know to use you as an example so if we had you in the sports lab we would say okay what is your strength deficit so your strength deficit is is i know say we had you on the leg press and we said, Joe, we want to look at how much force your legs can generate with you just using basically your training strength. Your training strength is defined as

the strength that you would use just leg pressing, not getting you all like sides of pre-workouts, smelling salts, none of that. We would just say, joe go and leg press and you just leg press and that's what you can generate there but then in the sports side back at loughborough university we would start using uh basically electric basically using electrical impulses to to make the muscles contract beyond what you could generate yourself so that is what your body could generate without you trying to send those impulsive bodies you the actual the actual potential muscle the the strength of the

muscles themselves how do you determine that like i said basically um electrocuting the muscles and stimulating it involuntarily and through that do they measure it how so oh so then that measures your uh your maximal output with you not trying to use it yourself it's involuntary so that is something that you wouldn't have control over so they what do they how do they do that like essentially electrocuting you but what kind of what is it like electrodes that slap on your legs and they force you to extend your legs yeah you would have seen it yeah exactly that you lift a weight with that yeah you can do yeah so that's what they do yeah yeah i've never heard of such a thing yeah so you would be sitting in a leg press

oh or anything so cord extensions and make your legs extend yeah yeah wow so they would monitor your strength so the so the difference between that so all of a sudden they'll say okay this over here your training strength is what you could do, Joe, when I was just saying, okay, lift that. And it's what you were going, okay, I'll lift it. And then over here, when it's involuntary, that is what you could actually do. That's the potential of the muscles. What's usually the higher number? Oh, absolutely.

Well, so it's always involuntary. Really? Always. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. By how much? And that's the strength deficit. So do you see what i mean so okay so over here this is what you could generate when you're just going okay one two three and i'm lifting it myself ah okay that done and over here is what we do when

it's involuntary now if there's a big deficit okay so if there's a huge deficit between the two that means you're a pussy it means it means your words no it means if there's a large deficit between the two it means that you have muscle mass but you're not fully using it right so you might see a large deficit between the two if you had a bodybuilder for instance because they've got a lot of muscle mass but they're not using it does that make sense so why aren't they using it because it's it's strength is functional so they've got all this muscle mass but they're not using it. Does that make sense? Why aren't they using it? Because strength is functional. So they've got all this muscle mass, but they're not recruiting it.

They've not actually trained strength because strength is neuromuscular. So when a bodybuilder does high repetitions, and what was the type of load that you were calling that, how that was causing hypertrophy? So that's metabolic stress. Metabolic stress. So just a sheer number of sets

yeah just constant repetitions over and over and over again with not that high a weight yes yeah and that's medical but then mechanical tension is when um it's more power lifting right so there's your difference between the two so the reason being is meta but so when you start looking at mechanical tension that might produce an athlete who has a smaller strength deficit. So when, again, using you as an example, if there was a smaller strength deficit between what you could voluntarily leg press, leg extension, hamstring extension, and then involuntarily, there's a smaller deficit. It would like, I would liken it to, okay, Joe, you have this much muscle mass, but you're using a lot of your potential. You're using it already. It's almost like you've got a Formula One car with a huge engine, but you're using it to its full extent.

You know, and this is why I'm going off on a slight tangent here. But this is why when you start looking at bodybuilding centric work so this idea of increasing muscular hypertrophy it can be a good thing when you understand that strength deficit so you might have an athlete who you go okay you have a small strength deficit it's very small so for the muscle mass that you have you're using it to its absolute full potential it's like you have a very small car but you are just pushing down the accelerator so hard and it can't go anymore it's just redlined exactly so the option that we have is to increase the size of the car the option we have is to increase the size of your muscle mass does that make sense it does yeah it does um what kind of training were you doing to increase your

capacity for work while maintaining the mass yeah and this this goes it's a bit of a strange story so this goes back to something i almost call um you know horsepower programming which i think is is so often lost now i think training is very specific when you go into the gym are you training for strength speed stamina whereas horsepower programming i almost borrowed from um soviet union principles you start looking at a general physical preparedness as it was as it was known and this is this just idea of you take an athlete certainly a younger athlete and you're trying to increase their work capacity by non-specific movements so you'll get you know an athlete you're handed imagine okay you're you're a young

uh kid just growing up and and your parents hand you to me i'm your coach and i say okay i don't know if joe's going to be big strong i don't know if he's going to be able to run far or fast i don't know so what we're going to do is just increase your sort of neuromuscular efficiency and work capacity and so by doing that it's kind of jumps throws non-specific these natural movement patterns and we get you to do lots and lots of this what that's doing is is work capacity your body's ability to to positively tolerate training and given intensity or duration and i think from the great british swim when a lot of people will say how was it that you were able to tolerate those 12 hours a day the jellyfish

things and everything it for me one of the biggest things was going back to and this is going to sound so odd but i um i ran a marathon pulling a car uh three three years ago i think now um and so that is almost the perfect embodiment of horsepower programming in that that sheer stress on the body but it's not a specific skill when you say you ran a marathon behind a car pulling you mean pulling a car pulling so in front of a car yeah not behind a car no yeah so it was um you pulled a car and ran a marathon yeah what the fuck dude look at you yeah you seem so normal that's what's so confusing to me like if i met you there's something about a lot of these

endurance people well i guess not courtney courtney dalwalter she's so carefree and silly but you're very loose and relaxed i always consider like those people like dark there's some darkness to those extreme endurance athletes yeah there's darkness that they're they're running from some darkness you know what i mean no i do i've had this conversation with a few people because they said something similar and i think it's um i mean you know to slightly go off on another tangent here because i think we've covered the physical aspect and work capacity which which i've addressed but um i think and this is one thing i genuinely just wanted to almost quiz you on and get your thoughts on this is uh certainly the throughout the great british swim it it subjected my body to a fatigue like i've never experienced before it was just yeah sleep deprivation just ligaments

tendons in my shoulders just wondering what was going on and um for me you almost develop a split personality in that there's times when i i'd quite often say you need to swim with a smile because you know it's 157 days if you're stressed or it's like a marathon where you grit your teeth and you try and get through it um i think we're very aware that you know the body is this complex biochemical organism and if you're stressed cortisol levels spike inflammation your immune system everything's affected so for me i was treating it not like a marathon i had to treat it swim with a smile you know think this is this is life now right see um but then equally there were times when you know i wouldn't swim with a smile it was just you know cory veckham being a great

example you know i certainly wasn't all that happy then. And for me, it's those times when I say you've got to just get feral. You know, you really just got to. And a good friend of mine, you know, back in England, SAS trained. And he said to me, Ross, you're a really nice guy and everything. But there's going to be times when you just need to, you know, no smiles and just get which which i thinking about it and because i had 12 hours to think a day i was mulling this over in my head um for me it goes back to tim noak's central governor theory um looking at how fatigue is an emotionally driven state that we use to pull that physiological handbrake so you know for those listening sort of

16 miles into a marathon you might be saying no way i can't keep putting one foot in front of the others no way um and then all of a sudden 25 miles in your family and friends are clapping you and you get that second wind and you start sprinting um and for me looking at that the sort of central governor theory i found that in complete exhaustion like when when you absolutely have nothing left you almost go into this feral state you know so like a like a like an injured dog you know where a lot of people will say oh you know remember why you started think of your family and friends and i was like no no i was at a level of fatigue where i wasn't thinking about you know family and friends i was thinking

almost you know maslow's hierarchy of needs where it starts with just food shelter oxygen i was at that sort of level where there was cls's i mean my neck's kind of healed now but you know there was times when chafing on my neck my my tongue was falling apart it's fine now by the way your tongue was falling apart my tongue from the salt water yeah yeah and and falling apart like how so it's what it's called salt tongue and after 12 hours in the water every single day um your tongue would essentially start to disintegrate so oh jesus yeah so i was i woke up and there was parts of my tongue on my pillow and yeah no so this is is there any concern that this is permanent or it was permanent at the time were you concerned absolutely and i think that's that's that's but that's what goes back to that that

hierarchy of needs where you're not thinking about family and friends or what motivates you and what you know you know you're thinking i want to keep my tongue you know you're like fuck man because no one has really people have gone on long swims before but has anybody done six months i don't think so there there um there's ben lecompte at the moment who's going across the pacific but he is using a snorkel so he kind of cleverly thought about that whereas for me i thought no this has to be done without properly were you thinking about the guy who was just doing the breaststroke and saying well if he did it captain when then this is it yeah it was wow so yeah so no that and it was at that point that i think you are feral. You're just thinking. Survive.

Yeah. One arm in front of the other. Keep going. Keep moving. Exactly that. Wow. So here are pieces of your tongue. This is a video that you made where pieces of your tongue were falling apart.

Wow. The effect of salt buildup on the tongue. And this is on Ross's Instagram, which is RossED E-D-G-L-E-Y. I put it up on my Instagram too. I retweeted or reposted one of your things to let people know about this. Oh, that is so nasty, dude. That was bad. You can see the taste buds on it.

That's how thick. So was it fucking with your taste buds? Oh, yeah, yeah. Like the way you tasted things? Oh, yeah. And that started to have an impact on the food the food as well because i mean like granola i was eating so much granola but when then that happened it's like rubbing sandpaper on an open wound yeah right the grit and the oats exactly so and that was how we had to just adapt on the day so it's during

that that video is great actually i mean that was in the cabin and i remember just thinking like now i'm not thinking you know family and friends to talk about those as you just said those those darker moments i think now it's very easy for me to be very grateful i'm warm sitting in the studio with you there's no jellyfish but there's times there where you know it's dark on my neck as well i mean my neck was bad but we didn't actually catch the the moment was probably the worst on that where i went to bed with this open wound from the wetsuit chafing basically and um as i woke up the bed sheet had fused to my neck oh so i just had to rip it off from the pus on your neck oh jesus christ son and then you had to get in that salt water which must have felt great right yeah fuck man yeah what was it like when you finished what did it feel like when the last stroke

and then you got out of the water and you're like holy shit i just swam for six months it was yeah it was it was so strange because when we left in june we came back obviously to the same point and we left in the british summer and everyone was on the beach and and then i came back around people are putting up christmas decorations and i was like wow i'd been gone for so long at sea it was just it's so crazy how many days was it total 157 oh my god that is so insane it's just so much change and oh here yeah here we go that was the the finish so this is swimming back then this is you who are all these people waiting for you my legs were so shaky joe at this point i'm thinking don't fall over don't fall over wow because it has i mean this is the thing i think i stumble in a little minute that is such madness man yeah

that is such madness and you cross the red bull finish line i got a trident that was pretty cool wow that's at home at the moment oh they hooked you up yeah what's that made out of it was really sturdy i don't know i think it was like a bronze type thing but this who are all these fucking phonies you didn't do it with them get out of the water you fucking posers but i i said i was like i feel that the the way that it it captured everyone's mind it just only felt right I get it to do that do you swim yes you do yeah what just in the pool why didn't you come and get involved I didn't even know about it you know how I found out about you because I was I was reading on the internet and I found out about it and I sent it to all my friends after sober October to

show what pussies we were I was, you guys think what we did was hard? We did ain't shit. I sent it to Tom and Bert and Ari, and we were all just like, fuck. Because whenever you hear about someone doing something crazy, there's always someone who does something far crazier to one-up the crazy person, and then it keeps going and going and going. There's a race that Courtney Dilwalter, who's been a guest on the show before, she won the Moab 240, which is a 238-mile race through the Moab Mountains. And it's just an insane race.

Not only did she win it, she won it by more than 10 hours ahead of the second-place guy. She's just a fucking straight savage. So she recently entered a race, and she came in second place guy. She's just a fucking straight savage. So she recently entered a race and she came in second place. In this race, they would run for four miles in an hour and then they would stop when the hour was over.

They would stop and then when the next hour started, they would run another four miles, like four point something miles and they would do it for six days. That's crazy they did it's like a last man standing and then at the very end one person won like it's like who's gonna drop out last so they just kept doing so the guy who created this race see if you can find anything on this guy because he's apparently very sadistic and his idea was that people run these 100 mile

races or a 50 mile race and if you just finish you feel like a winner and he's like well bullshit he goes there can't be a winner if if somebody comes in first place and then you're your second place you're not the winner yeah it's like there's one winner oh berkeley marathons yeah yeah he's apparently chain smokes too he's amazing so this is the ber Marathons. You know about this. Did you see last year? It's the same guy. He created that race, and this is another race he created. So he's amazing.

So did you see? I think it was last year. Jamie, is it right? What's the Berkeley Marathon? Is it the Berkeley or Barkley Marathon? Barkley. Berkeley or Barkley? Is the Barkley the one that nobody could figure out how to?

Yeah. Barkley. It's Barkley. That's the weird one. Yeah. And I think it was, if you search this, Jamie, as well, I think it was last year or the year before. I believe it's the 24 hour race or 14 hours. But the guy missed out on finishing it by, I think it was a minute.

So he ran the entire, and then at the end, and you see him on the floor, he's absolutely devastated. And he didn't, he take a wrong turn somewhere along the line yeah because it's really difficult to follow that yeah path yeah and but admirably he just got up and he shook his hand and just said i just want to thank you you know for that he said sometimes you know the barclay barclay marathon wins but you know that that takes something different right well definitely takes something different. Find out if I'm correct in how they do it. I retweeted the Courtney Dolwalter one. I retweeted it from Courtney where it says it's like getting punched in the face very softly over and over and over again.

Yep, that's exactly it. I compare it to being punched in the face. Can you put it up, though? Can you put the article up? Well, this is a version of the article. I don't know if that's the exact one you have. Yeah, that's exactly it. So if you scroll down, you'll see the specifications.

Yeah. Yeah. And, yeah. And this is what I find amazing because then it becomes about something completely different. I mean, we were just talking now about Kipchoge and the two-hour marathon. But it's like if you put Kipchoge into this, you know, who's going to win? Yeah, it says they had an hour to complete the 4.1667-mile loop, and then they finished within 15 minutes to spare.

The bell clangs again. At 7.40 a.m., they run it again. And then at 8.40 a.m., they run it again. At 9.40, they run it again. run it again and then at 8 40 a.m they run it again at 9 40 they run it again so every hour you run this 4.1667 mile loop and then the bell just keeps clanging forever why do you why do you think there's more people doing these events now well i think it's the same thing as everything else. The same thing as if you buy a car today,

you want it to accelerate from 0 to 60 in 2.5 seconds. A few years ago, that was unheard of. If you buy a computer today, you want it to be 3.8 gigahertz and 5 terabyte hard drive. It's the same every year.

We want improvements. and i think when you hear someone's going to run a 100 mile race you go that yeah that's cute uh but i'm gonna run 200 miles and they're like that's not even possible the same as the four minute mile right someone runs the 200 miles like holy shit i can't believe a guy ran for three days he ran 200 miles and then someone like courtney comes along goes i'm gonna do it in two days yeah and they're like what and then she runs she runs it in two days and then someone they're talking about now doing a 500 mile ultra marathon Yeah, but and what I find amazing who what's the athlete look like who completes that? Do you know me?

He's Courtney's very thin. She's very light and very thin and you know, she's not the type of person that would win a She's very light and very thin. And she's not the type of person that would win a regular marathon. This is what was interesting. My friend Cam Haynes, who also runs these, he ran the- He's quite big. He's pretty jacked. Yeah. He lifts a lot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he cuts a lot of body weight when he does those. Okay. But the way he does it is he's a hard man. He's what I was talking about, like these people have darkness. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's got some darkness. He'll burn 3,000 eat 2 000 and so he'll force his body to eat itself right and so he drops

down to the 160 something pound range and then that's what he likes to weigh when he normally walks around like 185 he's pretty built yeah but then he drops way down he'll lose like 20 pounds of muscle because he's always lean. He's not losing body fat. He's just forcing his body to literally eat itself just through mental toughness. But he's still quite big. Even when he's turning up on the start line and he's lost that, he's still big for an endurance athlete. It's amazing.

But maybe that's one of the reasons why he doesn't win these things. He comes in like third, fourth. And also, you know, he hasn't been doing it as long as them and he's 51 years old now but he's an animal man and this is just that that kind of mental fortitude that it takes to do one of those things or to do what you did it's a very unusual kind of drive and people are very excited by that drive and they're very intrigued by it and it's very attractive it's very attractive by it. And it's very attractive. It's very attractive to attempt to do. It's very attractive to pay attention to and watch.

Because everyone knows how difficult. It's undeniably difficult. Like if someone says, you talk to someone who doesn't know how to run at all. They don't do anything. They just sit on the couch. Hey, man, get up. Get up. We're going to run three miles.

Like, fuck. At the end of that three miles, they will collapse. They'll lay down on their back. Their heart will be pounding. Their chest will be heaving. So they know that's hard. Everybody knows that's hard. Everybody at one point in their life has run until they're exhausted,

whether it's 500 yards or five miles or whatever. From when you were a kid, there's always been a moment where we tested ourselves. So we're familiar with that feeling of not being able to go on. So when they see a guy like you who went through that feeling for six fucking months, or was it five months total? Five months.

Five months, man. Five months is an insane amount of time. It is now upon the... June, July, August, September, October, November. amount of time it is now upon june july august september october november you're into the sixth fucking month when you stop that's insane but but what you just said there like do you think and this is again because i had 12 hours to think every day do you think it is unusual or do you think that we now think it's unusual because society has got real comfortable? And I maintained that stuff that I was doing with Salt Tongue and everything, ancestors, do you not think they would have just thought, you know, that's just Monday?

I don't think anybody ever thought that was just Monday. No, I don't think they would have forced themselves to do that because there's no biological or evolutionary need to do that. It's not like you could swim for 12 hours a day and get across the channel and get to a place where there's better fruit. I don't think our ancestors ever did that. I definitely think they did. What is that type of hunting? There's actually a term for it. Endurance hunting.

Well, they run an animal down. I don't think it's called endurance hunting. I think there's another term for it. But they will literally, like if you take an antelope, they don't have sweat glands. And so they can run far faster than us, but there comes a point in time when they overheat. So if you just stay on them. Persistence hunting? Oh, that was it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I named it right when you pulled it up. Damn. pulled it up damn um persistence hunting is and you see it in these uh a lot of these african men who go on to be phenomenal endurance runners i mean they win marathons left and right in this particular parts of africa that produce incredible runners and they think a lot there was a really there's a cut and run is a fantastic episode of radio lab that details these men from this one certain part in africa i forget where it is but see if you pull that up but this uh this episode detailed the horrific circumcision rituals that these men had to endure where they cut their dick

and uh they like stick a stick through it and then they make them crawl through thorns naked. Right? So I saw that there's a guy back in, I think it's Bruce Parry, so he's an adventurer. He has done everything you can think of, every tribal initiation, and that's the one that he refused to do. Good for him. Keep your dick intact.

Don't let those crazy guys cut your dick. The San are the oldest inhabitants of Southern Africa Where they have lived for almost 20,000 years The term San is commonly used to refer to A diverse group of hunter-gatherers Living in South Africa Who share historical linguistic connections Many now accept the term Bushman or San

Is that That's Bushman hunting Is that from the radio lab thing? Yes That's what they call themselves? BBC article here Which I would imagine. Is that from the Radiolab thing? Yes. That's what they call themselves? ABC article here, which I would imagine. Yeah. Is that the same?

But is that the same with the horrible circumcision ritual? I'll double check. Oh, it's fucking horrible. But they were arguing when they were discussing it, and one of the guys who was on it who had actually been through it, and now I believe lives he lives maybe he lives in america but he was saying he would never have his children go through that but but it made him who he is yeah and the the idea was that not only are these guys physically gifted but they also have unbelievable unbelievable pain tolerance and mental endurance and just mental toughness and this is one of the

reasons why they become so successful is that the ability to push a pace for two plus miles or whatever is their marathon time is not just dependent upon their physical ability but also dependent upon their ability to endure pain like to force themselves past the you know anyone can kind of trot along at a really leisurely pace it's not painful but if you're going hard you know anyone can kind of trot along at a really leisurely pace it's not painful but if you're going hard you know you're really going hard this is the radio lab this is kenya yeah it's the yeah kapogi i think is ah there we go so um before you uh i mean well i've kind of described it but they they describe it even more horrific detail in the podcast. And that almost crosses over to, I mean, again, I'm not advocating what you just, you know, genitalia mutilation.

I'm not advocating that. But there's that idea of adversity training that, like, if you're ever in the gym, it's like, what are you training? And it's just like strength. What are you training? Speed. training that like if you're ever in the gym it's like what you're training and it's just like strength what you're training speed and this is why you know i'm a huge fan of wim hof because so often what he's doing when he's submerged in ice cold it's like well i'm training my capillaries yeah it's like what do you mean you're training your capillaries and it's these we're atrophying these age-old inbuilt mechanisms so again i'm not advocating you know what you're

saying but do you advocate tolerance're saying. But do you... You're advocating tolerance. Yeah, do you... Training tolerance. And do you think that's maybe missing? I mean, again, looking at MMA, like maybe that you see, you know, whether it's, you know, Muay Thai

and they're like kicking trees and stuff. Yeah, granted that's, you know, making denser bones and stuff. But do you think there's that element as well? When you look at... What was it um i forgot what it was now but you just start looking at just putting people in high stress situations just to see how they're going to cope like john fitch he was like notorious for

letting people almost try and submit him and then they'd tie themselves out he was just completely calm and then would sort of i maintain that that's that really depends on who's choking you because josh berkman choked him completely unconscious okay okay yeah yeah you know berkman's got a hell of a guillotine and john fitz shot in on him and berkman caught him in the guillotine just put him to sleep in the first round right i think there's there's guys that can just put you to sleep right okay if you think that you can get away with that shit with like a marcelo garcia you're gonna wake up going what happened really okay yeah okay but most guys won't be able to choke you so to that point you

know and again i'm catching up on 157 days of ufc you know so i was actually out at sea with mcgregor and khabib but on that note do you think he tapped premature do you think he went to sleep mcgregor went to sleep oh that in that fight i thought you meant john fish and josh burke yeah no no i mean it was a neck crank right no he did not tap premature um he did not defend it though okay here's the deal he was done he was beaten down khabib fucked him up khabib smashed him but there was a lot of people that don't train and this was very frustrating to me there was many people that don't train that think that that was something that you shouldn't tap to they're they're out of their fucking mind okay that is what's called a fulcrum choke that's okay okay it's it's not necessarily

a choke but it is it chokes you but it it really feels like your fucking head's gonna pop off right what he's doing is he's wrapping around the face and you don't have to even go under the jaw you can get it on the chin especially if you're as strong as khabib then you clamp your hands together and you're pressing your forearm against his back so you've got this and you get the forearm against his back and you're doing this just leave your us. And your fucking head is just like. And Khabib is so strong. He's been grappling since he was a baby. Right.

All of his muscles are designed to squeeze and crush and smash. And he gets a hold of your neck in that position. And he's got that forearm pressed against your back. See if you can find an image of the actual submission. You can really clearly see what he's got that forearm pressed against your back see if you can find an image of the actual uh submission you could really clearly see what he's doing and then there was a video where dean lister and my friend hans molenkamp described it i was pulling that up and it's been taken off instagram for some reason that video yeah the hans molenkamp dean lister video yeah i don't know why so maybe someone reposted it and that link is gone but yeah huh

um did you check dean lister's that's so weird wonder why anybody would take that down um anyway there's guys who could fuck your face up without even going under the neck a good example here's another good example just pull this up you got it it's not the one from right after the fight but he's still describing it okay oh this is perfect this is perfect so Dean Lister who's a world champion Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt as legit as it gets and this is my friend Hans Molenkamp he's also Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt and see see this is exactly what Khabib did see how his forearm is pressed against the back and the arm is under the chin?

See, the difference is what Dean is doing, he can't even help himself. He's immediately putting his arms, his hands on the arm that's choking him. That's what you're supposed to do. Now, if you look at what Conor did, Conor just waited until he couldn't take it anymore and tapped. Right, right, right. When you see Conor, both of his arms are down he's getting his neck cranked and he doesn't do this right that's what you're supposed to do you're supposed to do two on one and then you drop down like look at this see what he's doing there he's tapping

but see where his left arm is okay yeah that left arm should not there's you you can't you can't do that see that is a perfect example of the fulcrum choke. See how he's doing that? Pressing his forearm against the back, squeezing the head. It's a neck crank. It's a choke. There's a lot of shit going on there. It doesn't have to be under the chin. It could just be on your face, and you're going to get fucked up.

So all those folks out there that were saying that it wasn't a choke need to go have someone apply that to them. wasn't a choke need to go have someone apply that to them and they need to start training jujitsu and stop fucking talking about mma submissions because they they don't that right that you're gonna tap bitch don't say you're not gonna tap you're gonna fucking tap right now not everybody's gonna tap from that because other people unlike connor are gonna be better at defending that they're gonna great like you get a hold of a world-class brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt who's also an mma fighter like um like vinnie magalhaes he's going to grab a hold of that he's going to defend properly he's going to adjust he's going to try to get out of that yeah he might have to tap if someone gets him in it i mean he people tap but he's he's not going to just have one arm posted that's just not the right way to handle it but

i think that's because Conor had eaten bombs. Well, I was about to ask. So that's all technical. So there's that almost as a, I don't know, like a continuum. There's technical, which you've just, you know, brilliant. And again, I should point out, you know, again, I'm a complete layman when it comes to all mixed martial arts, but I find it fascinating, this adversity training aspect. So you were just saying he was eating bombs before that would would that would it have helped you know that if he wasn't do you

know what i mean that where where does it cross over from being it would help if he wasn't as tired so like if that choke was applied during the first few seconds or minutes of the first round i think he probably would have had a good chance to survive. Okay, okay. What's going on? Being put on Dean Lister, it's an Ezekiel choke, and he's not being done well. Oh, but this is not an Ezekiel choke. This is, I mean, it's kind of an Ezekiel, but see where his hand is? You've got to really get underneath.

See his left hand? That left hand's got to go not just there it's got to go under the chin that's not good enough for a guy like dean you okay now it's pretty fucking tight now it's tight and he's got to get further and further and the further that left arm gets into gene's neck the more more there's going to be a possibility of him choking but dean has been fucking choked his whole life which is but i do have to say that josh barnett made him tap and josh barnett is like one of the few guys that's made dean lister tap and i think the first time he tapped in a decade and josh barnett got him in a

scarf hold um and that was in metamorris and josh barnett who is uh he's a catch wrestling specialist yeah go to the very end of it here josh barnett gets a hold of dean's he gets it see in this position right here he's in side control which is just impressive enough that josh is able to do this with a guy like dean lister but then he gets him in what's, he probably has a different name for it, but it's, we used to call it judo side control. It's quite a bit further down on this. You got to keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going all the way to the end. So he gets a hold of his, he's got a head and arm choke. Here it is. Here it is. So he's got his head and his arm trapped together and josh who's an enormously powerful person is really neck cranking him as much as anything and then dean

was forced to tap but this is at the end of a long match and you know it could have been exhaustion might have played a part in it it most certainly was josh's skill and his ability to apply that technique but the point is a guy like dean lister you and his ability to apply that technique. But the point is, a guy like Dean Lister, you're not going to tap that guy easy. But this is, and again, with sort of holding my hands up saying I'm so sort of naive, a huge fan of MMA, but not necessarily any of the technical aspects. But what I love is when you look at someone like, you know, Nick Diaz or Michael Bisping. You know, people don't understand his conditioning, and he will just wear people down. Massive mental toughness, too.

What Bisping has is just insane mental toughness. Bisping basically has one eye. Wow. If you look at his eyes, one of his eyes actually, and I hope he can get surgery on it now because he is retired, he has oil embedded in his eye to protect his retina because it's been torn so many times. It's been torn. He had surgery on it.

He had a repair. Torn again. His right eye is fucked up, man. Right. And one of the reasons why he retired is he started to see some irregularities in his vision in his left eye. So his good eye was fucking up too but i mean michael bisping is a fucking animal i mean he is he's about as tough as it gets and he's not like a spectacularly physically talented guy like a john jones or yoel romero who's

just this unbelievable specimen michael's uh you know a really good athlete unquestionably but it's just tough just fucking tough so to answer your question there's there's this and you could speak to this because what you're talking about the ability to overcome adversity like some people when you were talking about that fatigue is an emotionally driven thing that there's this feeling that you get and you can give into that feeling where you're like, oh, my God, I fucking can't do this anymore. And some people are more susceptible to that than others, and they give into it quickly. I mean, for a person, here's where you can experience this, like whether or not your mindset can affect your endurance. Get on a treadmill or a stationary bike or whatever you want to do for cardio.

And then listen to a really kick-ass song and put on headphones and that song comes on and you just can't fucking, yeah, you can just go. There's something about that. And even if you're tired, even if you're tired and you've put on a good song, you're like, fuck that, we're going to keep going. Nothing has happened. You haven't taken in any kind of a supplement or any kind of a stimulant. You haven't gotten an injection in your body

or you're not sucking on some kind of new gas. Your body's exactly the same. But through the motivation that you're getting from this music, the emotional stimulation, you're just like, fuck that. We're going to keep going. Yeah. And you can keep going. Not only can you keep going, you can go faster.

You can push harder. You can find these reserves. So the idea is that these reserves are always there. You have to be able to achieve the state of mind that you achieve when you hear a really good song. And that's true that I think people don't understand you are the alchemist of your own body that you know in terms of neurotransmitters chemical signals in the brain you can impact those sometimes yeah you need external influences music as you spoke about sometimes you know caffeine but when you start to control them yeah it can be so powerful some people do it naturally i suppose and they've just

got it inbuilt but when you start to train and i think it's only now that we're we're going down that route and looking at that as a you know until previously it was one of those intangibles you know that you you kind of underappreciate it in any sport and now we're going oh okay yeah you know that person over there is you know that mental fortitude or what you're talking about there is maybe their ability to alter their own chemistry biochemical reactions the body and yeah there's something real that happens right yeah like when you hear a song and you get excited like whatever that yeah whatever that that burst is it seems like a real like if that was a pill and you took it you'd be like oh this works absolutely and and the thing is is it's been

around years when you look at like um you know marcus aurelius meditations or stoic philosophy and they're talking about you know dialogue being both external internal so the the conversations that go on inside your own head are just as important as the conversations you have with other people so we've understood this for years but it's only just now that we're trying to kind of apply a little bit of science to it looking at the psychology and this mind-body connection. But the fact is, yeah, some of the greatest ancient Stoics, they were trying to figure out as well. Right. And when you can start to tap into that, well, that can become, and it might be a particular song.

You know, it might be a particular something. You know, if you get into, you go into gym or that you've got a friend that can bring that out of you again you know my um training back home so you know andy bolton who was the the first guy to deadlift a thousand pounds i mean jesus yeah yeah i mean a thousand pounds yeah i mean the the clip when you see it and he he pulls a thousand pounds for it's since been beaten by eddie hall who did a half a ton so what the fuck eddie isn't half a ton a thousand pounds a little bit less so i think a thousand pounds i don't know what's that four i thought a ton was two thousand pounds isn't it so yeah uh eddie what's a thousand pounds in kilos oh you're trying to do kilos yeah yeah so sorry the two so yeah

there was two metrics there so andy bolton which was a little bit 2.2 kilos per pound no 2.2 pounds per kilo yeah and then yeah and when you see him i mean this is what i love when you start looking oh jesus christ so this is eddie that's his that's his half the time how the fuck are his knees staying together right there you look that is if you look at how big his body is and how normal size his knees are that's, look at the bones in his knees. They look so normal. Yeah. I mean, that is... Look at all these fucking people.

I know. It's unbelievable. Pick it up. Pick it up. It's unbelievable. Oh, my God. So when those guys retire, how fucked up are their bodies? Do you know Eddie's...

What's brilliant about Eddie? This is the beast tattooed inside of his arms. Who's going to argue with him? Yeah, bro. Yeah, you're a fucking beast his nose is bleeding yeah oh that's right right his nose started spraying blood while he was without him or another guy though i think you was another video yeah it's the arnold classic i forgot his name he's russian and that shit was wild but i mean eddie again so strength especially

with the deadlift such a simple movement and and you know the deadlift is just strength is your body's ability to generate force you know so it's neuromuscular it's like what your brain is telling your body so that goes back to that strength deficit right that we were talking about you're basically saying to your your body recruit every single muscle fiber possible and work in conjunctions with ligaments and tensors and let's get half a ton off the floor exactly right but when you look and and certainly with andy bolton's a thousand pound lift he had his friend in his face and he's there going come on he's hitting him in the face and they're getting so when we were talking earlier about again strength deficit is is that

sort of deficit between what you can voluntarily contract and involuntary contract that was him obviously voluntarily contracted no one was electric human that particular one but they're there and you do anything that you can before you actually step out onto that platform and now i mean he would have just been you know completely written off after that that sort of adrenal dump afterwards yeah fatigue you know emotionally but and so you have to you have to think about that i've forgotten who said it now it might have been pavel but they said you know uh save fatigue for competition and i know you've spoken about that before yeah um i can't remember who you're speaking pavel's a fascinating guy with his concepts amazing yeah

so so ahead of the curve and i know you were talking to i can't remember who it was now talking about farmer's strength and that ability to stop short every single day so never necessarily going to complete failure um i think it was for us for us a hobby i think it was yeah um talking about continually kind of avoiding that exhaustion phase and solely existing in the adaptation phase yes so you know i mean this goes back to sell you sort of 1936 a hungarian physician who found you know you give uh you know took some lab rats give them a lethal dose of poison they kill over and die but he found by giving them a little bit of poison a little bit more a little bit more that they built up this

intolerance to it and that was the general adaptation syndrome but it was from that that we discovered stress and stimuli is the key to any adaptation. And it wasn't until the strength and conditioning community got onto that. And we started to think, OK, how can we apply stress and stimuli to the body to bring about a desired result? And I think certainly now I think that's kind of overlooked in sport, but certainly the wider fitness industry that, you it's it's it's easy now in very sort of marketing driven to say get fit in you know five easy steps or you know whereas the reality is you know it's get fit in eight months after a lot of stress and stimuli yeah that's but that get fit in five easy steps is really just for it's just a gimmick to get people who don't

actually work out to get involved it is and but and that's why I love what you broadcast. And even with the Sober October and stuff, I mean, I'm a huge fan of Bert, but people, and I know he's so funny, and everyone loves Bert, but he's a beast as well. I mean, to rock up and just do a marathon, and again, going back to power to weight ratio,

what he did was amazing. You're saying he's really fat, right? That's what you're saying? No, I'm not saying he's, I would never say. That's what you're saying i'm not saying i would never say that's what you're saying power to weight that's okay wink wink i got you you're not saying that i get it i get it bro he's a burly guy he's he's a well that's a nice way of saying fat he is a well-built male somebody took a picture of my face on bird's body and i fucking threw up i'm like oh my god but what if i what if i'm like no yeah he likes to drink and he's still he's he is a beast because he despite the fact that he doesn't look like rich

roll he still can keep going and people and i know he was he was very entertaining we did the marathon stuff but i was actually watching that as the sports scientist in me was like that's amazing and no one's talking about that his power to weight ratio and he's still running that marathon and stuff but i was actually watching that as the sports scientist in me was like that's amazing and no one's talking about that his power to weight ratio and he's still running that marathon something and and yeah so for us as funny and as entertaining as it was to watch i honestly was like but that's amazing what's more amazing is ari honestly because ari really didn't work out ari came in second place and he came in second place by only a thousand points which is uh one day i got a thousand points in a day so he place by only a thousand points which is uh one day i got a

thousand points in a day so he was really only a thousand points behind me but it's a crazy day that's like a seven hours of work in a day or at least six and a half hours of work in a day and a lot of it at 80 of your max heart rate but he still he wasn't doing anything before this thing started and he was the first one to figure out that you get the same amount of points for 80% of your max heart rate as you do for 90. I thought you'd get more for 90, so I was just trying to kill myself every day. And then I was only being able to come up with like 230 points and somewhere along those lines because I would max out.

I was doing like 90% of my max heart rate for like 30, 35 minutes. I was like exhausted. And then Ari figured out that 80 points pays just as much. Right. And so he started watching movies while he was on an elliptical machine. And that just turned the whole thing into this sort of steady, not fast marathon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which was really fascinating because I never exercised like that before.

And it changed my endurance radically over a month. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's interesting is it changed my endurance in things that are explosive, like kickboxing. Okay. So having that aerobic base helps with something explosive. How did you find that? It helped a lot. How?

Because I would mix that in. Wow. So I would do, after a while, we were doing so much exercise that I had to do different things or I would get bored. So I would do a circuit of the elliptical machine, and then I would follow the elliptical machine with, or I would run, on some days I'd either run, elliptical machine, kickbox. And on other days, I would do the echo bike, which is an airdyne machine that Rogue makes. And then I would do the rowing machine. And then I would do the VersaClimber.

And then I added in that Air Runner treadmill, which is, what is it called? Air Assault, I think. Air Assault treadmill, yeah, which is a treadmill that you power yourself. Your feet pushing on it and pulling it is what makes it go fast it's not like a treadmill that you keep up with it's actually more difficult than actual running right right 13 more difficult than actual running on the street so i i was going crazy i i couldn't do the same things over and over again so i kept mixing them up and when i would mix them up by the end of the month my kickboxing was i had way more endurance like i could do 10 hard rounds going

three minutes each round and then i would recover in between rounds the one minute in between rounds i'd recover quick like my because i'm wearing a heart rate monitor i'm watching my heart rate dip it was dipping really quickly and then i had all this energy and madness like everything was changing like my my capacity for work changed everything adapted i got a little dehydrated one time and i had pissed it looked like iced tea which is not good so i started panicking and wondering about things like rhabdomyosis and kidney failure but i didn't have anything wrong with that it was just a little bit of dehydration but what's interesting to go back what we were talking about there you've just perfectly described that idea of of giving a

clear cellular signal to the body so polarized training you feel it was you know that 80 20 that you do 80 of your you know your work your training in that aerobic realm where you can keep doing that it's you're not going to over train there you're going to avoid that exhaustion phase you know so sell your indestructible rats you know you're not going to keel over and die from a lethal dose of stress and stimuli right but then over here you know you would that 20 it was powerful it was kickboxing so there you're working technique but you're fresh so you're drilling motor patterns that are completely fresh and not fatigued because you're doing this 80 on an elliptical trainer while watching a movie so you're keeping the two completely separate yes but considering the body in its entirety that when it comes together

you've created a more powerful version of yourself and i think it was interesting what you just said there about um recovery between bouts as well so when you start looking at uh strongman training you know the some of the strongest guys and one of these strongest guys in the world all understood the benefits of cardiorespiratory training you look at again jeff capes um two-time world's strongest man was running fell races and marathons at 25 what's a fell race fell races it's it's, it's quite specific to England. So it's kind of trail running, but we call them fell running

because you're kind of going through bogs and marshes and... Fell trees? Not necessarily fell trees, but just kind of the terrain's a little bit different from a trail run. Right. So he was doing that.

When you look at Bill Kazmaier, again, world's strongest man, a power lifter, but understood the benefits of cardio-respiratory training to improve his recovery between sets. Brian Shaw as well, one of the, you know, the sort of, you know, the newest sort of strong man and former basketball player. You know, so he had that cardiorespiratory endurance, that base, that aerobic base.

And then he built this incredible strength on top of that aerobic foundation. And then he built this incredible strength on top of that aerobic foundation. Goes back again to whether they knew it or not, they were almost creating an athlete like they were creating athletes back in the sort of Soviet Union era when they were taking athletes going, right, you're giving me a kid. And I don't know if he's strong, quick, good at running, running fast or running far. I don't know.

So we're going to build this aerobic neuromuscular base and when they show any sort of genetic potential to be strong quick whatever we're going to hone in on that and that's only when we're going to get specific and you're almost doing that now you know and certainly brian shaw did it again you look you look long through all of the best athletes in the world they've all followed this blueprint but it's only now that we're kind of dissecting that and saying oh okay i'm making it a bit more purposeful who's this gentleman there we go there's brian shaw he said yeah what's wrong with his legs they're all swollen but i mean even now as well i tell you what jamie if it's possible actually i mean brian shaw he uh accidentally you must have seen this clip set the indoor rowing record I think it was for a look at the size of this motherfucker oh my god and he rocks converse all-stars look at that

he set the there's a there's a clip on YouTube man my man's wearing chucks he sets there's a clip on YouTube where he sets the um the rowing record the indoor rowing record and it was just because he yeah there we go he didn't know he was setting it no so what he's basically down there he's rowing and it sounds like someone started an engine and it's there like this here you go let me hear this so this they've just looked he rose with a mouthpiece look the whole thing they have to hold it down in the end because it's coming out of the floor j Jesus Christ, these guys are standing on it. It sounds like just a jet engine, right?

Well, all that power from his legs, man. Exactly. Well, no, and he's better. I mean, that technique as well. I mean, I hope Brian doesn't mind me saying it's not necessarily, you know, Olympic rowing technique, but he doesn't need it because he's just got silly power what is the correct technique so the hundred well there's a catch phase and it's more you're almost treating it more like a deadlift where you're using your larger leg muscles where oh jesus look at him go there you go oh my god this guy's a fucking savage. This is so crazy to watch.

Unbelievable. The amount of force he can generate. He looks like a very tall man too. He's huge. How big is this guy? Six, eight, six, nine. So that helps too, right?

Because the long stroke. Absolutely. It's just pure power. But anyway, so they found out during this session, I believe what happened is they said,

well, you know, a rower shouldn't make that sort of noise he's basically two people put together he's six foot what 400 and what six foot eight 425 that's two big guys strapped together in one body he's almost 200 pounds above the ufc heavyweight limit do you know how insane that is the ufc heavyweight limit is 265. he's almost 200 pounds too heavy to fight in the heavyweight division of the ufc mother basketball basketball background and he still look he didn't know that he was going to set the world record for rowing so the rowing record there you go his one was 12.8 i believe it was 1308. so he's just he's

broke the rowing record. But because he had that neuromuscular background that they said, hey, Brian, you're big and powerful. Just, this is a rowing machine. Right. He went, oh, okay. And it's like, oh, there you go. Congratulations. There's a world record.

Wow. So it's that base that I think so often I've heard you speak about and certainly Eddie as well, talking about break dancers making great. Yes. You know, BJJ. And again, whether you know or not, they had that neuromuscular foundation they understood proprioception where their ligaments tends everything should work right whereas if you had someone with a similar work capacity or someone of the same age everything was the same but they didn't have that neuromuscular efficiency you'd say okay and again this is me so naively again i certainly don't claim to know

anything about bjj but you go okay this is an armbar this is and they kind of go okay let me try and figure this out and you can see them it's like a rubik's cube they're trying to piece it together but you get someone again like brian and you go okay this is bjj or something quite complex that requires you and he i'm not saying well he wouldn't even fight every it's too he's too heavy they'd have to open up the super heavyweight division but he's doing a similar movement to deadlifts which is very common it is and when he's used to that movement it is yeah it is but I suppose where you saw him you know that wasn't actually there was no extension of the back right he was bent over just

ripping there's another one again even to use Brian as an example where he does I believe I can't remember the name of the ward now but he went up um and thor as well another strongman did a uh i think it was a i might have clean and jerk there was a ward that was predominantly clean and jerk and there was this amazing crossfitter technique was beautiful disappearing under the bar bang over his head it was amazing to watch and i think it was thor or brian shaw went in and just instead of a cleaning jerk and Joe Honestly, he just basically upright rose the whole thing and complete and they were like well, that's not Cleaning jerk, but you just set a record

Yeah, so there's that element right to use an example as well with with that. Oh, here we go. Here we go Oh my god example as well with with that oh here we go here we go oh my god that's insane but wait hopefully there's a that is insane okay there's another strong one but there is there's another one of those where you see the crossfitter with this amazing beautiful technique he's doing he's so far from his chest it's crazy that he's doing it like that and what is that 225 pounds is that what that is i don't actually know what that particular weight is. What in the fucking shit? That is so crazy that he could do that. Look at what he's doing.

He's so many reps. Right, right. That is insane. He doesn't have a pause. No, but okay, so that's meant to be a cleaning jerk. I know. So that's what I mean about that neuromuscular efficiency, that he's gone, okay, here's a new sport.

Come get involved. And he's gone, okay, I see sport come get involved and he's gone okay i see the rules of your sport but i'm gonna do it my way and um and does it count well yeah i suppose i mean if that wad is just put the weight above your head um like that guy did it normal that time right there that's a normal one yeah but there's like again um if you put in you know thor uh uh versus crossfit then it will probably come up and you get to see an amazing crisp technique. And then equally, Thor is basically doing what Brian was doing just there. I'll say here you go.

So this is they keep putting on weight until one of them. I believe the conversation here is you keep putting on. Yeah, there you go. CrossFit versus the mountain. It's amazing technique disappears under the bar. You know, incredible. And then I think, you know, Thor will eventually come in and give it a go and basically just um upright rows here we go so you saw that you know disappears under the bar speed of movement

amazing and then thor come come and have a go at this and uh this is what he he produces so there's that neuromuscular efficiency well it's just mad strength it is it is i mean you could do that too if you just had an empty bar you know what i mean like that kind of person the kind of person that can do that when you think about him dead lifting a thousand pounds or any of these guys that can deadlift in insane numbers just the whole machine can generate so much force yeah yeah and that and that's it though it is they're able to do that again because of that foundation their body can generate that force and then you say here's a new movement yes and you can see them look at you know like for that example okay so that's a clean and jerk okay i can't figure that out i think i've found a way you know it also lends credence to the concept that deadlifts is like the mother

of all exercises because it really does work all your muscle groups and if you can get really strong at deadlifts i mean it really does enhance almost any single athletic endeavor you participate in yeah yeah and i think again that's sort of been lost a little bit along the way that that you know getting the joints ligaments muscles everything to work cohesively yeah and when you do that for your training you can pretty much apply to anything so i think that's why i mean again i used to swim ages ages ago way back in the day but i was never going to make sort of elite standard i'm you know five nine on a good day maybe i'm built like a hobbit so everyone else is just great graceful oh yeah yeah so i ended up again almost accidentally going into strength training i played water polo in the end um to a fairly good level so i was

doing that but again i just got beaten up i was 16 playing in the seniors league and you know just big guys with beards just beating me up. You know, it's interesting what you were talking about earlier in terms of mental fortitude and your ability to adapt and your ability to overcome. I wonder if we're ever going to figure out a way to measure that. Like to measure mental endurance or measure mental capacity or mental stimulation. You know, you can measure your VO2 mental stimulation you know you can measure your vo2 max and you know what the body's capable of but i wonder if there's a way like when someone does hear a great song and it kicks in whether it's through fmri or any other type of detection

device where they can figure out a way oh this part of your brain is firing let's concentrate on building up the the activation of that part of that brain of the brain like like a muscle like think of that endurance or think of that motivation as like maybe even a mantra that you can call upon because you call upon it all the time and you can recreate that state. Yeah. I mean, I think on that point, certainly over in Britain at the moment, so basically women for the first time can actually apply and be in the special forces. So at the moment, it's really, really interesting because speaking to certainly the Royal Marines, they were saying, we've got hundreds of years that if you hand us 500 young fit men, we can say they need to be this weight, this tall.

And if you give us them, we've got years and years of experience of putting them through this training system of mental and physical fortitude, everything down in Limestone. It's the training center of the Royal Marines. We go on this endurance course. We go on a 30-mile yont with a backpack, everything. And by the end of 32 weeks, that's what it takes to be a Royal Marine, to get your green beret. After 32 weeks, we can take you from being completely, not sedentary, but unfit to being a Royal Marine.

And that's one thing they pride themselves on. But now what they're saying is obviously, you know, females can now apply to the Special Forces. And what they find so interesting is, and I certainly do as well is what what does that look like for a female raw marine you know what does that look like for a female and again to go back i mean i wrote an article ages ago um run like a girl and i was saying i want to run like a girl you know some of some of my best training partners are female and they their perception to fatigue is unbelievable that's purely anecdotal but also as well when you look at the top tier of ultra marathon runners and swimming as well diana naid first to go from uh florida to

cuba to florida you know incredible like she was getting stung by portuguese manowars and just unbelievable so it's purely and it's but now they're saying you know why is it that that certain female athletes have a greater tolerancy to pain and i think to your point if we can start to quantify that because there are biological differences if you take men you know high testosterone can have an impact on high hemoglobin generate muscle force all of these things but but i think if we could quantify why it is that certain female athletes are dominating the top 10 of ultra marathons and open water swimming what is it that they're doing that would be amazing i think the ability to endure

pain um and this is not my thought honestly i should just say this has been theorized before has to do with their ability to endure the pain of childbirth. Child labor and childbirth, I mean, just the fact that they're forcing a baby out of their vagina. Yeah. I mean, that is insane. I mean, you talk to, you ever seen the machine they do? They've taken these electrodes, they put it on men and recreate the pain of childbirth. Yeah. And watch these men fucking fall apart and like, turn it off no yeah it's it's i

mean obviously i haven't given birth but it's supposed to be unbelievably painful and women are biologically suited to this this is like so i think their ability to endure that pain is just it's probably just there's an evolutionary advantage to having this more, higher capacity. But I also think one of the things that I learned from teaching martial arts is that women, they learn technique better many times than men do. Because one, they listen, and two, they don't try to muscle things. So so women have less of a problem with learning something from a person and this is also true about archery my friend john dudley who's an archery coach says his favorite students are always women because they listen better um they don't have as much

of an ego they don't have to pretend they already know something they don't want to just try it without they follow it to a t better like generally obviously we're speaking in generalities but um they also don't have the uh extra muscle that a man has so men when they're strong will try to just force things and muscle things where women will try to follow what's being described to them what's the proper technique and they do it properly all the time and then they develop this pattern of proper technique i noticed this with taekwondo and i think my friend john said he noticed this with archery i think this this this benefits them in sports because like if you learn jujitsu really the best people to learn from are smaller men or women because they the smaller people they don't

have the physical strength to pull it off on a big guy so what they have to rely on is correct technique but if you learn jujitsu from a big guy man big guy jujitsu is weird because they could just grab your wrist and you can't get go you can't let go and they can get away with things like okay you go wrist control and throw the legs up. Wrist control? Okay. Wrist control on who? Try wrist control on that big motherfucker that was rowing the world record.

You ain't getting shit, man. You're going to go flying through the air. That wrist control ain't going to work. You're going to have to go against his strength. You're going to have to figure out a way to move around it. You're not going to go through it. That big guy, if he was teaching jujitsu, just grab the neck and then you squeeze it's he's he's got the kind of horsepower that a man like you know a normal man can't imagine yeah do you think that's

changing again to bring it back to the usc i suppose because now i mean with what cormier's doing and and you know john jones coming back the end of the light weights are all moving up to heavyweight do you think you know gone are the days of the huge dude who was just a physical phenom and now the smaller technical dudes is that well there's a there's a thought with the 265 pound weight class and the consensus thought seems to be that somewhere around 240 pounds is the magic number that's what they think they think that 240 pounds is the amount of weight that you have where you're strong enough that you can knock out any man but you have more endurance than a man that maybe weighs 265 or heavier and cuts down to 265 okay now

this has not been substantiated the problem is there hasn't been a really super powerful world championship athlete that weighed 265 pounds. There's been Brock Lesnar, but Brock Lesnar's enhanced. You're dealing with a guy who tested positive for steroids. He probably has had things. And then this is a new world. He's also 40 years old now. So it's impossible to tell what he would have been like at 30 if he was clean.

And then you have guys like Francis Ngannou, who's 265 pounds, massive knockout artist, natural 265 pounds, but doesn't have the wrestling base, got exposed in his fight with Stipe Miocic. If he can't knock you out, he's kind of doomed, and he tired out after the first round. So it's hard to say because there's never been a 265-pound version of Cain Velasquez. Okay. Cain Velasquez, in my humble opinion,

when I look at all of the different heavyweights that I've personally seen fight, Cain stands out as the best. The reason why Cain stands out as the best is because he has superhuman endurance. Yeah. And his ability to put a pace on guys, you would see these guys just wilt under the pressure. And I think with Kane, and this is where it gets really interesting, what did him in is probably what also brought him to the top is his mental toughness because his body

started breaking down he started having all these back injuries he needed back surgery multiple back surgery shoulder surgery knee surgery everything was getting fucked up and i think it was getting fucked up because he was working through pain and because he has the ability to tolerate pain that most people don't have right he's just a fucking animal but that's also probably what led to him having this insane endurance is the same kind of mental toughness i'm sure there's some genetic advantages as well because they would talk about how he would take months off and come back in still fuck everybody up because he's just that good but that also could be attributed to the the cardio base that he had from competing for many

many many many years at a high level and and being known for that insane endurance and perception to fatigue going back to what you said if you could quantify that you'd put kane up there with one of those people yes he has that in abundance yes yes and anyone else in the heavyweights then would you say well cormier for sure has has tremendous fatigue, ability to tolerate fatigue, and tremendous endurance, and he breaks people. They call him the king of the grind. But on top of that, what they both have is tremendous wrestling technique. The wrestling technique as well as the endurance, everything plays a factor.

Jon Jones fits into that camp as well. Jon Jones has tremendous wrestling technique as well, striking technique, massive physical skills, but also mental toughness. His mental toughness is unchallengeable. You absolutely have to give it up to him. He's had his arm fucked up by Vitor Belfort, completely hyperextended, refused to tap,

and then wound up tapping Vitor with a Maracan, I believe it was the next round and uh his toe against Chael Sonnen oh his toe was fucked up and he didn't even notice it until I was interviewing him I was interviewing him he looked down he's like oh shit look at my toe and he started going to shock was it as bad as it looked I mean it was turned upside down it was completely turned upside down I mean imagine that I mean if he wound up going into the next round if he didn't stop Chael Sonnen and his toe was that i mean if he wound up going into the next round if he didn't stop chael sunnan and his toe was that fucked up and he wound up losing to chael sunnan

because his toe was bad that's insane um he also went through that fight with alexander gussefson where he wasn't really training very hard for that fight and gussefson won the first couple rounds and then john jones won the last two to take it away and and i watched that battle obviously with all the promotion at the moment and i think it was winkle john jackson when he starts shouting heart heart you know shout out and that was the that was the deciding i mean that spinning elbow that was the deciding factor that you come out and you produce that yeah also in john jones's favor i believe he has two fucking super athlete brothers yeah and they used to apparently beat the shit out of each other all the time and his brothers John Jones' favor, I believe, he has two fucking super athlete brothers.

Yeah. And they used to apparently beat the shit out of each other all the time, and his brothers are bigger than him. Right. I think that is a factor, because I think that there's mental toughness that comes from being around that kind of combat in the household all the time. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a bunch of different, but it's, I don't't know i think you can teach that i don't believe that mental toughness

is something you either have or you don't have i don't believe that i think you can teach it but you gotta want it and you gotta be willing to learn you gotta be able to bring yourself to a state of mind where you're unbreakable i think it's possible i really do and some people just have that that is this i mean and i think they've developed it over a long period of time and once they finally got to whether it's wrestling or jujitsu or mma they already had it and then they accentuated it and and and added on to it and then it got stronger and then they become known for it like that guy is just an animal he's just a mentally strong but i think that mental strength comes from many life experiences and probably probably the guidance of their parents or some other role model in their life that also

showed them incredible endurance and incredible discipline and this this mental fortitude i think you can teach it though yeah Yeah. And I think, you know, I just, I don't, I don't believe that it's something that's just either have, or you don't have, I think you either have it or you don't have it,

but you can get it. That's what I think. And, and, you know, I'm a huge fan of Dan Hardy. We've been chatting since the, the swim.

And I always go back to that arm bar with George St. Pierre. And I was like, everybody would have tapped. Oh yeah. And, and, and I couldn't get my head. and i can't wait to catch up with dan about that and sort of exchange notes on this idea of mental fortitude because how he survived that i mean it was it was horrendous i was cringing watching well dan's a savage i mean he's and he's an intelligent savage. And, you know, he's not like a thug or a brutish guy. He's a very well-read, intelligent, thoughtful guy.

But he's also a guy that knows how to dig deep, you know. And, you know, when he fought Georges St-P. Pierre, that was his big shot. His big shot was against a guy who at the time was in his prime and was the greatest welterweight arguably of all time. I mean, the argument is between him, Matt Hughes, and I believe now Tyron Woodley is in that camp as well. It's like the greatest welterweights ever. But what you get out of Dan Hardy is a guy who's thought things through. I mean, it really comes through in his commentary.

He's a very, very intelligent guy. Would you say he's the same sort of cut from the same cloth as Cormier then? Because I know Brendan spoke about this recently saying he's the most intelligent fighter on the UFC roster at the moment. Cormier? Yeah. In his approach? Yeah. In his approach and how he will break people.

But again, when you watch UFC Embedded and stuff, you can't help but love call me such a nice guy but and this goes back to what i suppose you said about the swim you know when it was like oh you're very smiling stuff but i see that in call me he's the nicest guy but i would never get in the octagon with him he's not fooling anyone no he's a sweetheart until you're locked in a cage and then he's going to fuck you up. The difference between him and Dan Hardy, though, is that he's a world-class wrestler. I mean, he was a two-time Olympic team member and just one of the best wrestlers to ever compete in MMA. And you really see that in a lot of his fights, like the Derek Lewis fight. Derek had no chance, no chance.

Lewis fight Derek had no chance but no chance you know and Derek just knocked out Alexander Volkov who in a lot of people's eyes including mine was one of the dark horses in the heavyweight division but Derek just did not belong in there with Cormier who was the light heavyweight champion he carries a lot of fat on him yeah he's I mean and I think if if he wanted to if Daniel Cormier really dedicated himself he could drop down to 185 pounds. I really believe that. But he's just, you know, why would he?

He's a fucking heavyweight champion. That's the difference between him. And there's many differences between him and Dan. The success ratio is very different. You know, Cormier has been extremely successful. The only guy he's lost to is John Jones, you know,

so, but, but I find that with rest, and this is on a complete tangent here but when you talk about that mind-body connection like so often they're seen as separate you're either an intellect or you're just a physical phenom like it's rare that you see the two but when again ancient greek philosophy you look at plato like plato was an accomplished celebrated wrestler yes i think he said something along the lines of you know you should wrestle to

find the answers to that philosophers seek it was it was something like that he was such an advocate of it and and i think and again this is coming from uh you know sort of my limited background because obviously in britain we don't uh have have wrestling like over over here and stuff but there's something about wrestling it seems or i suppose my question to you is like that it just teaches that like mental fortitude you know yeah physically yeah neuromuscular efficiency and stuff but it seems to just produce this breed of humans that you know did you think is there's something about being face down in a mat somebody's just trying to contort your limbs you know so that to go back to stress and stimuli you know

it's also building up that progressive overlap in your own head yes that and and what you just said there about experiences that that quite often now when i go swimming i'm like it's not the curry of ecken i'm not wearing the jellyfish tentacle on my face you know it's not that bad right and i think what do you think my question is do you think it's the same with wrestling that you're like i've been in a worse position than this i think for sure i think there's the the strength that they have the intellectual strength and when i say intellectual strength there's actually solving puzzles whether people understand it or not you look at wrestling you think it's always brute

force and strength and endurance but they're solving puzzles right they're setting traps they're trying to set up techniques and they're doing this under heavy workload right they're exhausted their hearts pounding and they're resisting a hundred percent with another person who's resisting a hundred percent yeah when you see guys tie up and they're throwing each other around and they're fucking digging their toes into the mat and they're yanking and wrenching that is a tremendous amount of force that they have to keep up for minutes and minutes at a time and i think a lot of that has to do with your ability to maintain intensity and a lot of that has to do with your ability to tolerate being exhausted and tolerate fatigue and to force yourself into a highly aggressive

and efficient mindset and to be able to maintain proper technique under fatigue that's a good point technique and intelligence i believe again with the raw marines we can be uh when training with them i find that it's crazy how you you'll have the cognitive functioning of a five-year-old you know you are complete right right you're in a 30 mile yawn with 50 kg on your backpack and somebody asks you some really complex question and you're just like you know i don't know right and and i think certainly going back to the swim there's times where i said to the team i was like please like when i'm six hours into a swim through the night, I need just really clear instructions.

Just like Ross swim this way, Ross swim that direction. And again, purely anecdotal for the moment, but I love Cowboy Cerrone, and there's times when he's just in his corner, and he's just having a full-on comment. He's so relaxed. And it's just like that. You could see somebody probably fatigued, and they're panicking,

and he's just sitting on the stool. He's got great endurance, too. That helps. That certainly helps. His ability to recover between rounds. Did you see his fight this weekend? I've got to catch up on it with Perry. Sensational.

Really? Sensational. The best he's ever looked. But he was on the bottom when Perry... Yeah, I mean, Perry took him down. But he said to me, he goes, he started to take me down. I was like, shit, I'm going to let him. He said, I'll let him take me down. And then he reversed him immediately and got him in an arm bar and then broke his arm

He snapped his forearm in half. He sent me the x-rays Yeah Think anybody seen this I'm sorry Donald. This is an exclusive If I'm not supposed to send this I gotta send this shit Yeah, we've been going back and forth and you know for him i think it was a matter of rekindling his excitement here it is yeah it was a pretty emotional but oh oh that hurts right can you see that you want me to send it to you here i'll send it to you jamie um also i think with donald when it comes, we were talking about stimulation and motivation.

He has a son now. He has a little baby son, and he brought his son into the octagon with him and is celebrating with his son. He just seemed different to me. He seemed different in his poise, completely in control. The guy he's fighting, Mike Perry, is fucking dangerous. He's fucking dangerous. He hits really hard. He's very aggressive.

And Donald just handled him and and perry took him down i think because he didn't like what was going on stand-up wise he just snapped that shit but that but you mentioned there as well with serrani talking about his and it was such an emotional post that he posted on instagram i loved it and and going back to what you said about finding something that that alters your biochemistry you know and now that he's fighting for something and you know he's got his kid do you think that's that's what we were talking about music before we were talking about getting his mindset maybe you use caffeine like whatever it is but something do you think is now different in

serone because you know it's love yeah yeah the love of his children he has something that i mean he what he said was um i never knew what i was fighting for he said now i have something to fight for i think he was fighting for excitement before for thrills because he's a he's a thrill see he's a wild motherfucker he likes jet skiing and jumping snowmobiles off the side of mountains and he's an animal a week before a fight but yeah he doesn't give a fuck he doesn't but this is a different thing what what he's doing in in this fight in particular i think this is a different thing because he's fighting for his son i mean he's got this family now and it means the world

to him and he looks over at this guy like this guy's trying to take food from his family and he just was an efficient assassin it was just it was beautiful to watch it was like i think the best performance of his career and you know maybe mike perry is not as good as darren till or as jafel dos anjos or some of the other people that he's fought in the past but he's fucking dangerous and he's a legit welterweight, where Donald's not. Donald could fight at 155 pounds. That's one of the things Donald said after the fight. He said, Khabib, he goes, I'm back.

I'm coming for you. So he wants to drop down to 155 and fight Khabib. Do you think he might now? Something's different, do you think? Do you think he could make a title run? Wilson, man, Khabib is the motherfucker of all motherfuckers. Agreed. I mean, I don't know who's going to beat that dude,

but that dude, Molly Watt. Askren? Maybe, but Askren is a different weight class. See, Askren's 70 and Khabib's 55. If Khabib and Askren agreed to a catchweight fight, that is absolutely a possibility. And absolutely a possibility that Askren could best him. Because if someone's going to beat Khabib, it's going to be someone who's a superior wrestler. And Askren is a motherfucker of a wrestler.

But is he better than Khabib? We really don't know, and we will not know until they fight. But I do have to say that Khabib in the training camp at AKA, this is coming straight from Cormier and a bunch of other people that trained with him, say that he trains with Olympic caliber wrestlers and fucks them up that's how good khabib is khabib is he's he's so god damn good on the ground when he gets a hold of guys they look perplexed and i always bring up the edson barboza fight because a moment in the barboza fight in the first round where he that thousand yard stare where khabib had taken him down he was mauling him and he looked over in the distance like how the fuck am i going to get through three

rounds of this shit yeah yeah and that's the thing with barboza i mean terrietta that kick he just yeah exactly yeah so to see that it was just i mean it felt like if i was to do mixed martial arts or jiu-jitsu i know you spoke about about it before. You said if somebody doesn't know what they're doing, like me, it's like drowning. And that's exactly how I would feel, I think. It was just humbling. But it's something that you could learn. See, the thing, what you've done, in my eyes, what you've done is so difficult. I think you could do anything.

I really do i think what you did by forcing yourself to do that shit for six hours a day take a break six hours again to do 12 hours of swimming every day for five fucking months that kind of mental fortitude if someone just taught you i mean obviously you're very physically strong and fit if someone just taught you technique and taught you how to grapple and taught you kickboxing obviously you're very physically strong and fit if someone just taught you technique and taught you how to grapple and taught you kickboxing you would be a motherfucker at it because your mind is so strong like that that you know there's a different mindset to have that same kind of mind strength with the adversity of another human being trying to kill you yeah see that's the thing how well do people deal with other people's

like there's something about a person breathing down your neck that's trying to choke you that's very disconcerting but if you can get past that and i think you could you would be a motherfucker at anything you did and that's actually the thing i mean even at the moment now i i'm used to uh just training for 12 hours a day so right now i i'm still sort of in biphasic sleep so i've only been on land really a week so that's crazy yeah so were you sleeping in a boat this whole time yeah yeah you know six hours on six hours off what is it like to have the ground not move oh just standing boom honestly when i got on i was i mean i was doing media interviews and everything was swaying.

But even that night, my first night, the bed, it sounds so weird, but the bed was just a bit too stable. It was a bit too comfy. I woke up in the middle of the night. I was with my girlfriend and I'm looking for my goggles, thinking the tide's about to change. About to jump back in? Yeah.

She was just like, go back to bed. Honestly, I say it now sort of joking, but there was a real element of just that you'd been conditioned. And all I really cared about, as soon as I woke up, I wanted to know what the tides were doing. Where's it running? When does it start? Have we got good tide or bad tide? Is it spring tides or neat tides?

So spring tides being stronger, neat tides being stronger. And that was my currency. That's all I cared about. And it was really strange that you, to try now and integrate back into society, you know, even just walking, you know, through LA, the cars, everything moves very fast now. You know, and you kind of come back and it's a bit of a shock. It's a real, real shock. You must feel like you're in an alternate universe or something.

Like to go through five months of one reality and then to come out on the other end yeah it does so i almost but but then even it's sort of intrinsically or something my body's used to working hard for 12 hours a day and just getting battered by waves so at the moment you know i'm sort of sitting here and and you know i've been doing media all week and it's been amazing. But there's an element of me just kind of going, I need to use this work capacity. And so I am sort of training at the moment. The first session I did, I was in there for like six hours and I was and they were like, the gym shut in.

And I was just like, oh, OK. You probably can't get tired. That's crazy. There is that element. One of the things that we all talked about after Sober October was that none of us had ever done anything like this before, but we're worried now that we're going to go back to our sedentary ways, and that we're going to lose all this work that we put in. Because at the end of the month, Ari, who had never worked out before, ran 15 miles, rode 5 kilometers, and then got on the bike for a while.

I forget what he did on the bike, but I think he did at least a mile on the bike. And this was a four plus hour workout But he had never done anything before I mean he did Jiu Jitsu I bought him some Jiu Jitsu lessons I bought him a year at 10th Planet Jiu Jitsu Like 10 years ago He went for a while and then he hurt his knee

And stopped going But he was 10 years of nothing. And he's fucking 40-something years old. And he forced himself through mental fortitude. So he's shifted. I mean, we're so, like, the human body, I find, is so lazy. Like, we love homeostasis, our habitual level, what we're used to doing. You know, that status quo.

And then so when you do shift that, it's all relative because you know it can be you know swimming for 12 hours a day and stuff but it's relative and and i think when you do shift that um it is hard and i think you have to be so conscious of that so even now are look for instance my legs at the moment um you know shrunk just my legs. I mean, I essentially skipped leg day for 157 days. But your arms must be jacked. It's kind of it. So we went into the gym the other day and because of ligaments, tendons, but not only just generating force like a bench press. But if you imagine like 40 knots of wind, you know, wind over tide that we're talking.

My shoulders are used to being contorted in ways that they shouldn't be so your shoulders are resisting the wind as it's coming towards me so you're you're pushing with your shoulders yeah and the amount of times i would take a stroke and then a wind i mean there's times when the waves hit me so hard i thought i've just hit a boat you know i hit something and that would be poor. So it was that resistance as well. So on the bench press, it was just kind of like took, you know, 160. You know, I'm not saying it's necessary just as a sort of sports science experiment. I kind of unlifted and then just took 160 kilos just for a ride. And it just kind of felt OK.

What's 160 kilos? So there's 160 kilos in. Sorry, Jamie. But then equally my legs, know in the score i'm barely lifting my own body weight 350 350 350 yeah for you know eight reps so it's it's that that sort of strength and so you had lifted weights in five months and yet you're like upper body but but but please but lower body no you know and and it's not even that though like you know my legs it's it's the it's my feet as well so right now genuinely and a lot of people afterwards like what are you going to do next you know what's the next adventure and i said i've got

to learn to walk again and everyone laughed and i was like no no no like the the arches in my foot have collapsed those ligaments and tendons so it's mean, I think a lot of collapse just from not standing. Yeah. I mean, yeah. You've got to think 12 hours in the water every day. But even when I was on the boat, I was probably eating or sleeping. Whoa. I didn't even think about that.

No. So your load capacity, like your ability to hold your body weight up is diminished. Yeah. I almost entered into this small group of people like astronauts where you've been in a non-weight-bearing environment for so long so i joke and when we watch that video back and i'll say oh just you know trying not to fall over there genuinely i was thinking please don't just fall over with all the characters i'm clapping and another thing that intrigues me is you're a young guy you're

you're not a lot of these endurance guys are old angry people they get older and they develop this ability to just fucking fuck the world and and and push through things how old are you yeah 33 yeah that's very young to do what you did isn't it yeah and i i think you're right actually and that that would be a really sort of good point to make there that i always think when people say i'm too old now to train and stuff i'm like absolutely not when yes granted when you're younger elasticity in your ligaments yeah higher testosterone muscle mass ability to uh you know increase muscle muscles that absolutely but when you're older and to your point there joe when you look at these you know back in england fell running which we're talking about you get these guys who just look

like they live in the mountains you know weathered faces you know their calves are just like this just thick calves and they have that capillary density that like mitochondrial efficiency movement efficiency so their cardiorespiratory endurance has just been built up from years and years and and these sorts of people as well they almost they love the mountains and running so much that they don't care that they're over training or like they need a rest there we go there we go honestly jesus christ when I'm fell running I am getting lapped You know by Fell runner

Josh Naylor There you go Those are all fell runners That's fell runners Those guys Yeah Run into a gay bathhouse That's what it's like

So there All of them Why are they wearing Such short shorts So this is it Put some clothes on boys So you What's up with those shorts

So you get They're the fell running shorts Okay You have to wear those shorts They're not compulsory Seems like it is and you got numbers next to your dick that's weird too i would have brought you a pair if i didn't i wouldn't wear them come on bro those are those are shorts that a girl would wear in a porno movie they're in a legitimate uniform oh okay but actually to this point i mean if you put um if it's possible james there's the um

uh it's called the bob graham so there's a famous uh fell race going back to sort of the bargain there's a famous fell race back in england it's called the bob graham and uh you know legend has it there was a guy bob graham and he sort of said you know i i think i can do 44 peaks in the lake district in under 24 hours and they were no no no that's not possible that's not possible he said yeah so it was like a bet in a pub you know and they were like yeah and sure enough that's what he did and so there's this race now called the bob graham and it's amazing in that it's it's steeped in history and heritage there's a there's a uh a hall in keswick which is a small town it's called moot hall and if you were standing there

joan you're in your running gear with those shorts on but you were running there with your running gear and you had your hand on moot hall and you were looking at your watch like that runners would walk past you and just be like oh he's he's about to do his bob graham you know they'd come over there's that real solidarity that you know like good luck good luck and you know and then you have to do it in 24 hours um and uh billy bland who's the one who who set the record which has only just been beaten by killian jornet who uh uh recently ran up everest as well but i think he um fucking savage yeah so many savages out there so this and what i love about this is um oh there you go is that yeah killian yeah there you go killing

jornet so the guy behind in the blue um set the record look it says there i needed to suffer says killian jornet after breaking the record that has stood for 36 years 36 years wow i needed to suffer but but these guys and it and it goes back to you know too often it's sports science sports nutrition let's look at look at your gait analysis running biomechanics what footwear are you using minimalist shoes and everything whereas with this with fell running it took 36 years for somebody to get close to that record so it's like wow what were they doing so far back granted you need to know the terrain like you could on this descent on this picture for instance you could be running down there struggling down the rocks and you might not know that just you know 50 meters to right, there's a perfect sheep trail that you can run.

And that's kind of the concept of fell running. So it's just a matter of getting up and above and over it no matter what path you take? Yeah, yeah, but certainly efficient if you know something. And so that guy in the front there is pacing him, basically, because it's very easy to get lost on the fells. There's no specific path that you have to take? You just have to get over it? There's certain points's very easy to get lost on there's no specific path that you have to take you just have to get over it there's certain points that you have to get to but then in terms of the terrain and the path no not really so it's just point to point to point to point like how do they mark those points do they have like cones or something i mean this

yeah will be long established that to do the bob graham you need to do that point that point that point and then you come back to moot hall you know within hopefully 24 hours and if you do it then you have your put that back please you have your bob graham these guys look like a guy that would do that whereas you don't right this is my my point about you endurance like how your physique you don't see a guy with your physique doing this kind of stuff do you think that you could do this kind of stuff? Running, I mean, no. And I always say I'm not self-deprecating at all. How much do you weigh?

I think at the moment about 100 kilos, which is a lot. 220? Yeah, so that's about the... 220 pounds? Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, the Bob Graham is something completely different. And that goes back to what we were talking about, about power to weight ratio in a weight-bearing sport.

So with something like running... because you're so heavy yeah even though you have a lot of power yeah do you think it would be possible if you put if you added more power to obviously not now because you're getting off of five months on a boat but if you built your legs and your feet back up do you think you could do this yeah do you think this is possibly but no way near i mean killian johnette what he's he's amazing i mean with killian he um i believe don't come out he's almost sort of semi-nomadic he grew up in the hills semi-nomadic yeah no so for him he would run a marathon to go and get his you know carton of milk in the morning oh jesus you know so when

you are lining up on a start line i mean you know if you're racing against killing you look over and you've got a guy like that yeah you just like you just go like i'm out i'm out right you can't beat that guy but he's but he is built for that that's my like so you but you don't think that guy's built for swimming like if that guy had to do what you did swimming wise he, he would be at a disadvantage. Over a certain difference, going back to the bell curve, that somebody like that, and in my experience, when I've raced or swum with guys who are doing 10 kilometers, they will be quicker than me over 10 kilometers. But then it gets to a point when we're like 30 kilometers in where their biomechanics, just because of muscular endurance endurance that starts to break down

maybe as well and this is so often overlooked actually but you've got to train your digestive system so again this is mainly anecdotal but you know in strength-based sports you know a lot of guys won't think anything about putting away 15 000 calories a day which is what i was doing so are we doing that while you're swimming yeah 15 000 yeah 15 000 calories what was it in like a lot of it you were sitting down once you got inside the boat yeah and what were you eating just it was so intuitive so it was it was kind of strange because the diet was calorie dense so you have to make up for your calorie requirements the day also looking at nutrient dense because you've got to care for your immune system but equally palatability so when my tongue was falling apart, you know, I needed to look at that.

And even seasickness, which we've not really spoke about as well, which is kind of like you need something that hits those four points and does 15,000 calories a day. So for me, that was quite often just like porridge oats, you know, mixed with honey, mixed with almond butter. And then even looking, oh, here we go. Yeah. So this is you eating. What's that it was oh there might be one there somewhere yeah what is that in that bowl beans mostly yeah and this is why it just got to the point where it was like what can you just eat like what is gonna so i was

just eating out the pan just trying to shove it in your face yeah so like what what would you eat like what were the foods this this is probably quite a good one yeah that'll play so yeah there you go like in terms of so essentially as a nutritional sort of in theory the framework you get what was that mask oh so that was to stop the jellyfish oh jesus yeah no no but it doesn't matter like even the mask because the giant jellyfish of scotland and there'll be a picture on there somewhere they're kind of like six feet long so when you're swimming at night and you can't see them the tentacles will they'll just kind of they'll get you and so i got like they go in your mouth and your ear i got i got one in my ear i got like wet willied by a jellyfish it just kind of like got me there so it's like that that yeah they're trying to find and adapt the

same way with the mass but but nutritionally as well. But also looking at as a framework, you're having your protein, which is pretty stable, you know, 1.7 grams per kg of body weight per day. You know, that kind of stays the same. So then for the rest of the 15,000 calories, you basically need to make it up with your two energy yielding macronutrients, so carbs and fats. two energy yielding macronutrients so carbs and fats and so for me it was very carb dependent because when you are swimming through a giant whirlpool you can't say can i have some fats which the body has to go a certain process it's going to take longer no you just need fast acting carbohydrates but then equally um looking at mcts so a median chain triglycerides as well which are a fat so they have the calorie density of a fat but they're treated more like a

carbohydrate rather than long-chain triglycerides so um there was a certain amount of science to it a lot of people would say you know 15 000 calories that mean pizza and everything it was like well you know yes to an extent but then place too much emphasis on that and you're not caring for your immune system as well right to get 15 000 calories i think yeah i always point out that it's using things like mcts which you'll find in coconut oil and certainly again not to get too much on the science but capric and caprylic acid which are converted to atp adenosine triphosphate it's a molecular energy the muscles when you understand how to use mcts like that it can be quite easy to make up 15,000 calories but you try and make up 15,000 calories of vegetables and fruit right

yeah exactly especially you might have like protein and then fruit and it requires a different digestive enzyme and then you're gonna tell me to go and swim through a giant whirlpool and roll on my stomach for 12 hours a day it's just like with seasickness it's's not going to happen. Yeah, you must need a lot of really dense foods. Yeah, and that's the thing that it goes back to, again, this bell curve that I've spoke about, but quite often a lot of endurance athletes that I've trained with who are amazing, they're unbelievable,

they're sub-three-hour marathon runners, they're incredible. They're the guys that will go and run the Bob Graham, but quite often they say, ross can just eat and it's just like yeah that's often overlooked you know that my body you know i didn't have a sick day throughout the whole swim that's crazy was that attribute and i started at 92 kilos um you know when you when you look at the pictures from the start to the finish i just look like just like hairier yeah but just also just bulk because you are asking your body to just swim around great britain so it's not just the fact that you are you don't want to be in a calorie deficit can you imagine how much micro trauma the body's going to go through so you're essentially

just trying to nurse the body saying look i know this is horrible i know it's cold i know i'm asking you to swim for 12 hours a day i know there's going to be jellyfish toxins i mean i've stung like you know 20 times in one night in a single tide you know so it got to the point where i talked about my face sort of changing shape but equally the toxins in your body your heart would start beating faster and you know so there was just this idea that just eat just to to look after the body so when it comes to nutrition and were you taking any supplements were you taking vitamins yeah lots and and that goes to like i said that calorie density but also to make sure that you're making you know the immune system yeah yeah yeah what are you taking everything from super green shakes you know to multivitamins to protein shakes just to make sure

that you were supplementing that calorie density i think it's so often overlooked the higher turnover of like phytochemicals enzymes micronutrients what about fish oil anything yeah omega-3s yeah and that's what just anything that you were thinking well this is even to glutamine to a higher turnover of amino acids so after a for instance after training as well you can have all the protein in the world but if it has a low biological value so um okay i'm going to try and keep it quite short but if you look at you know immediately after a workout you know your body's basically saying look we need protein to repair and regrow protein synthesis um and your muscles are saying please but if you don't have a high

concentration of leucine specifically so branch chain amino acids leucine within that is what will trigger to your motor receptors to basically repair and regrow so quite often you can have all the protein in the world but if it's of a low biological value, if it's not very good quality protein, your body's not going to assimilate it. Right. So it's not about the protein that you eat. It's about the protein you assimilate. Right. So you would take branched chain amino acids post workout? Yeah. Yeah. And specifically, like I said, leucine just to make sure that I was kickstarting that whole recovery process. Because as soon as you got out of the water after six hours, there's always the temptation.

I want to pass out. I want to just go to bed. I want, you know, and it's just like, no, you've got six hours to think before you're back in. Now, what about your protein? What were you getting it mostly from? A lot of whey protein just because of efficiency. And also as well, you've got to in terms of um the boat and stocking food they're like perishable you know food so you know as much as i love my barbecue ribs and everything

like that that wasn't going to happen on this small galley that we had on the boat right so did you get any fresh food eggs anything along those lines we did yeah when we could stop in a harbor you know the team would go out i'd never touch land but they could go and quickly provision from land and bring it back but ultimately yeah it was trying to find a way that was was sustainable as possible but within the parameters that we had you know and that that was what was tricky what about your joints i would imagine repetitive stress of swimming would wreck havoc on your shoulders. Yeah. And that's why this goes back to, I suppose this goes back, and I was trying to ritual about this actually, where once you developed that sort of horsepower program, that work capacity that I was talking about before from when I ran the marathon pulling a car,

it was, this is such a strange story but I then uh again to raise money for the for the teenage cancer trust I um I climbed a rope I think it was a 10 meter rope uh but I repeatedly climbed it until I climbed the height of Everest so it was 8,848 meters and it was that that actually taught me that movement efficiency plays such an important role in terms of endurance. Because you could have the best muscular endurance in the world, cardio, spiritual endurance. But if you can imagine with a rope climb, if you're solely relying on your muscles, your arms, like your bicep tendon is just, you know, and then you can be the fittest guy in the world.

But within that kinetic chain, something's going to give like the weakest part. So you're right from that. I the the work capacity from the marathon then from the rope climb i certainly understood movement efficiency and so sort of transferring those skills over to swimming i knew that you couldn't swim like a conventional swimmer everything that had taught you especially in waves and everything so i ended up developing quite a weird technique that looked really slow and comes in i also i almost looked asleep but you know it was really rolling and that's why i asked you about um swimming and even looking at at bert again to use him as i know he did his triathlon but for everything that is taught about swimming it's probably for someone who looks like you know michael phelps or

you know an amazing phelps or you know an amazing specimen at swimming so you're saying bert's fat is that what you're saying i i'm saying i'm saying that but for the record jamie heard that jamie for the record i've heard it as a repeated yes it's like a hashtag hashtag bird's fan? On record, I think it's a specimen of a male. What? But you're getting it. Well, listen. We have photographic evidence.

Pull up that photo of him with his belly hanging out. This is after he ran a marathon. Is this pre or post Sober October? Because he lost a lot now, though. Yes, he lost 18 pounds during Sober October. He's the only one that lost weight. I gained weight. But there was that video because he was dancing in his bathroom recently, wasn't he?

Look at this photo. Denim pants. Look at that. That's not even the worst one. I love him. Why is Burt Kreisler so fat? That is a fine specimen of a man. That's the one.

That's one. Because he wore those for the weigh-in. Has he got- That's pre-sober October. Yeah, he's got a bunch of those. He's got more than one pair of denim. That's what he wears. I love him.

He's an animal. The fact that he ran a marathon with that body. It's amazing. It's like, yeah, running Le Mans in a Pinto. No, but Nate doesn't get enough credit. I think that's amazing. You're right. Nate doesn't get enough credit. I think that's amazing. You're right. He doesn't get enough credit.

Call him up. But everything that you've done. That's not real. It's not that big. That's Photoshop or something. But it would be the same with you, that if we were looking at your swimming technique, there'd be certain everything that you'd probably learned

probably wouldn't be applicable to you because of how broad you are, how things that you could actually use so i was basically really engaging the lats the traps the larger muscles of the back going back to uh the video with brian shaw when he was just ripping that yeah it was just pure ripping out of the floor and and i knew that i couldn't necessarily do that looking at delts, high catch, high elbows. It's like, what, you're going to do high elbows for 157 days for 12 hours? Right. You know, no. So everything that I'd learned, and certainly, you know, great friends of mine who are, you know,

Liam Tank got a 50-meter world record, a lot of backstroke, you know, Kerry-Ann Payne, double world champion, 10K. These were amazing athletes. I'm not one of them. So you developed a more efficient slower a style that you could continue for five months yeah and you just end up it's like moving meditation it just became like you know the limiting factor was just like i was just getting bored i wasn't actually breathing what were you thinking of this is the thing i mean you had to at any given time any tide

you had to think of something that was going to be more powerful than the thought of stopping or fatigue or seals like getting deeper into your skin and so sometimes it was real easy because you were swimming with dolphins minke whales i swam with a basking shark did they come over to you going what the fuck is this dude doing yeah like one really yeah there's a there was a video of it ages ago with the uh the minky well and the i was swimming 12 hours across the bristol channel so that's kind of england to wales and this this was without doubt for all the hardship that i spoke about i just want to say that there were some amazing moments this one particular moment swimming across the uh the bristol channel and all of a sudden minky well kind of about as big

as this table breaches right next to me i was like whoa like too much rise i i turned to matt the captain i was like matt am i safe like what's going on like should i get out of the war and he said no no no you're absolutely fine and i was like okay because it's a minky whale they're fine they're friendly i was like okay fair enough so i keep swimming and then for the next five miles the minky whale was circling me it was breaching over the top it was coming under me and swimming like that well I turned to my I said like now what's going on and he said I've never seen this he's been sailing like 40 years he says I've never seen this he said but what I think is happening is I think it's a female and I try to fuck you well I said it's not mating season is it he was like no no no no spy spy

because what I think saving you for later no no no it's fine it's fine he goes what i think saving you for later this motherfucker look at him i've seen him for four months in this water i'm gonna fuck him mating season is probably right around the corner she's like if he sticks around i'm getting a move on so i know i was like you know what is like that was a concern of mine yeah that was a good yeah and it was but no matt said no said, no, no, no. I think it's a female. I think that she thinks that you're an injured seal. And so for the next five miles, she basically guided me all the way to the shallower water.

Wow. And as I got there, it was literally the depth of the water. Matt said, yeah, yeah, much shallower water. And we turned, whale breached one more time and then swam off as if to say you know you're safe now wow amazing that's incredible amazing yeah so for all of the hardship and everything that i've described there were moments and sunsets and and and swimming with seals and and it was amazing um whoa oh so that's the basking shark is that what you encountered yeah so that was in the that's the actual one you encountered i don't know if i can't i mean i'll swim behind seems like you could swim in that

i was i was concerned about that one but no so that's a basking shark so they're friendly right the mac can you imagine seeing that like you're swimming through scotland like mountains either side of you and so so to to your point about asking what you think about it's very easy to swim when when you know there's dolphins and everything. But there's times when you are lost in this moving meditation. But then you see something like that and you very quickly got to get your wits about you. Because there were killer whales as well up, you know, coming from sort of Iceland around the top of Scotland. So that was a concern.

Were they interested in you? Thankfully, we didn't see any but they wouldn't attack you right well so this is it so we were speaking with marine biologists at the time saying look like what's what's the situation here and they said well you know what's really interesting they're so intelligent you know killer whales are so so intelligent um and they've never been known this was what they said to me they've never been known. This was what they said to me. They've never been known in the wild to attack a human. And I said, okay, fantastic. And they said, however, if they're going to attack a human,

it's probably going to be you because no one's ever spent that amount of time in the water as well. So I was like, right. They said, all you need to do is... I was like, all right, comforting. So they just said, look, all you need to do is make sure that you don't look like a seal because they might mistake you for a seal. But they might bite you, but then they will go, oh, whoa, they're that intelligent. They'll be like, oh, that doesn't taste like a seal.

So they might, you know. So I was just trying my best not to look like a seal. Well, I think when they've attacked people in the wild, though, or in captivity, it's always been trainers. It's always been anger and frustration. Yeah. You know? And that was my experience with the minke well and everything.

People said, like, how do you swim at night? Because certainly around west of Scotland, it was a depth of 200 meters. So you don't know what's under you. So there was that element. But I think having swum with the minke well around the bristol channel i was very aware that in the hierarchy of the sea i was very low down the pecking order and and and if it's comforting in any strange way i was like look if i was going to be eaten i'll be eaten in the day just as much as i'll be eaten at night right you know it's just

it's just one of those just darkness yeah yeah just like you can't you can't see the hand in front of your face it's wow like the moray fir for instance we were like 40 miles away from land and this kind of cutting across this huge bay across the top of scotland and um you know it was clouded over so there was not you couldn't even see anything because there was no moonlight or no stars and it was uh you in that complete sensory deprivation you can hear everything and it's just if you hear a noise a ripple you're like i really hope that's not a killer whale but then you've then got six hours to contemplate whether it's so it's this and again like i said marcus aurelius meditation stoic philosophy that the conversations you have in your own head are just as powerful as other people.

And I certainly found that all the way around, that you just, there was times when you were just like, what am I doing out here? Like, seriously. And that comes from, I think, you know, this idea of you have to be doing it for the right reasons. And again, to bring it back to mma i suppose it's really fascinated me you know some fighters you know liddell coming out of retirement with ortiz and and certainly you know you know mcgregor's made so much money you know what would get him back out of retirement to come and fight mayweather and and you know again i've been out at sea so i didn't quite understand what was going on there with the his kind of going over towards japan

fighting and it's like what does he? He's got so much money. Oh, Mayweather? Yeah. Mayweather spends money. He spends money like crazy. He was going to fight Tenshin. Tenshin, how do you pronounce his last name correctly? Nasukawa?

No, so I've been out of sea, so I didn't really see what was going on here. Yeah, let me see if you find that on my Instagram. He's out of his fucking mind. Would that have been a bad idea? Terrible. He would have got head kicked into a coma. But you kind of asked, like, what are the reasons?

And I think he spends a shit ton of money. You think? They're trying to get it back on track. He said Floyd had been duped into agreeing to the contest. Look, they will dupe him. By the way, they are very different. If this happens, believe you me, he's going to get kicked in the head. Wow.

They might say, no, no kicky, no kicky. Listen, man, you get in the ring with tension, he's going to try to roundhouse kick you into another fucking dimension. So it was a special bout, so there was going to be no kicking? I don't know if they agreed to the rules wow okay but tension nasuka was i think he's 20 i think he's 20 years old he's a really fantastic talent wow yeah i mean he really is but it but it fascinates me so i'm catching up on all this, like I said. So I've missed all of this for 157 days. Like I said, I even missed the McGregor and Kapi fight.

Go to Striking Breakdowns on Instagram. Lawrence Kenshin, he's done a bunch of breakdowns, as has Brandon Dorman's done a bunch of breakdowns too on Tension. But Lawrence Kenshin has this really fascinating video of him fighting this world muay thai champion and uh he wheel kicks him in the head was more like a jump spinning back kick to the chin but the way he did it it was like a really weird angle and you could see him setting it up he's really creative and he just found like a weird weird opening for this guy and just kicked this guy into oblivion. He's nasty.

And he's really sneaky. The kind of techniques that he lands, he's very clever with his reads and his understanding of distance and what's possible. Do you see it? Striking breakdowns on Instagram? But yeah, it's with this. How much money does he need? Striking breakdowns on Instagram? That might not be the name of it. Huh? But yeah, it's with this. You know, how much money does he need? He can't spend that much.

That's a good question. I think he can. And this is what I love. Again, I'm only just catching up on this. Like I said, I should point out, I have been at sea for 157 days. But with everything that happened... Yeah, striking breakdowns. I just got to it that happened striking breakdowns no no i just got

to it striking breakdowns that's when i typed it man it's not coming up no maybe there's something wrong with uh instagram hmm i don't know i I got it right here. Here, I'll send you the link so we can see. Yeah, here we go. I'll send you this. Copy link. Sorry, folks.

But this is a, I don't know how much they were offering him. You know, so I don't know how much, okay, I just sent it to you. I don't know. I mean, it has to be millions of dollars. That's the only way he'd be willing to do it. But if they offer, I mean, also tension is quite a bit smaller. I think he weighs 130 and Floyd walks around. I mean, he's fought at 154, 150-ish.

And McGregor was at 55. This kid is fucking nasty, man. But he does a lot of wild shit. Like, there's a video here where they see him fight this Muay Thai guy, and he hits him with this crazy... That's when he was a little kid. Like, see how he does shit like that Like sneaky shit Under the arm

Like look at this Zip zip And then He was younger Watch this Look at this Crank This is the one with the world Muay Thai champion

Boom Puts that dude asleep But the way he set it up That's a weird angle For that kick Very tight Yeah Very tight Real close And it wasn't a round It was straight So it was basically like That's a weird angle for that kick. It's very tight. Yeah, very tight.

Real close. And it wasn't a round. It was straight. So it was basically like a jump spinning back kick to the chin. Which is hard to generate force from that. Oh, no. No, no, no, no. But when that close?

Tremendous power. Really? Yeah, no. As long as he can get extension on his legs. It's just he had to jump and tuck and spin. But the fact that he chose that angle it's like he realized that the guy was going to see things that were coming around yeah so instead of coming around he had it come up and and through the middle right which is which made it much

sneakier but that's what we're describing now is another intangible right yeah creativity yeah exactly i mean and what i found it so interesting when you know mcgregor and diaz and i was just i'm a huge fan of edo portal so you know all the movement he was doing but i was just like look and i think it was um i think mcgregor was on i want to say kimmel but i don't think it was he was on a chat show and he was talking about that spinning capoeira crescent kick and he actually did it he performed it and i was like look if he lands that you know the same way with aldo right to be like that is the movement is is it you know you can forget cardio respiratory endurance strength everything that we talked about there the metric saying you know heavyweight you got to be two four five you know whatever the magic no it's just movement he would have reinvented

in the game. Karim is wrong. I think with Diaz, he did try it, didn't he? And it missed, I think, with Nate Diaz. I believe he did. He threw it. I think he threw it. The thing, you know, that technique is a legit technique, obviously.

Wheel kicks most certainly work. But it's not a high percentage technique. There's only been a few wheel kick knockouts in the UFC. The first one was Edson Barboza over Terry Adam. That was number one. There's been a few since then. Vitor Belfort shocked Luke Rockhold with a wheel kick. It's happened before.

But it's just not a high percentage kick, and it's usually a kick that comes out of nowhere. You don't expect it right but that's but but can you tell when someone has it and doesn't it because it's an intangible so if you said um if at the start of the you know barbosa and etten fight you said you know knock out by timing or creativity you'd say like what would you mean you know but if you could foresee that the same way that you could quantify that sort of mental fortitude i think you start opening the door in sports performance into something

that's just this whole other realm that you don't talk about weight as a metric strength cardiorespiratory endurance you can start talking is that hard to see again with tech well yeah with creativity especially in regards to striking technique yeah that's a crazy intangible because you're essentially deciding when to move and what to do. You can throw a jab. You can throw a front kick. You can throw a roundhouse kick. You can throw a wheel kick.

You can throw a turning side kick. You can throw an axe kick if you're crazy. There's a lot of different things you can do. So what do you decide to do and why do you decide to do it? Is it because you have a style? Some people's style is like Connor likes to hop in and out and he throws like a little front leg sidekick. He throws like that for movement. He likes to keep his arms wide. He likes to stand in a sideways stance. Some guys like to hole up like this in a Muay Thai shell and they move forward lifting that front leg up and they move forward and challenge with leg kicks

and striking technique. Some guys just like to wrestle. They'll paw at you and they look to shoot like Ben Askren. He's not looking to stand up and strike with anybody. He's looking to take you to the ground, beat the fuck out of you. That's what he does. So it's all what do you decide to do and why do you decide to do it and when do you decide to do it? When do you engage?

You're throwing some feints. You don't want to be the guy who makes it obvious that you're moving forward because then like Connor clipped Aldo, you get rocked. You know, it's a crazy, crazy sport. But if you enter into that realm and even start applying more sports, again, we talked about that sort of strength deficit as well, that if you get someone, you know, trying to like John Jones, who's going to move up to heavyweight,

is it going to be, will it benefit him when he was strength training, for instance, you know, and I can't remember his deadlift, but it was pretty impressive. Pretty impressive. I think it was 600 pounds.

Big deadlift. Yeah. So when you look at that strength deficit, John Jones, very lean was using neuromuscularly. He was recruiting voluntarily all of those muscle fibers. It was unbelievable. But if he moves up to heavyweight,

would it be, would any more muscle mass be functional? i think when you start a question looking at when should he do that that's another good question because you're beating your body up to do that yeah and is that conducive with high aerobic capacity training like multiple rounds of sparring and bag work and pad work and you And all the lower back muscles that are getting stressed. And does that lead to potential injuries? Is he potentially damaging his discs, his knees? Like there's a lot of things to be considered. And when should you do that?

A lot of people think you should do that when you're nowhere near a camp. Like you win a fight and then you decide to to build up in between camps yeah and i think that's so awful even uh darren till you know who's a huge huge you know well to a huge exactly but he's moving to middleweight now yes yeah he missed weight in his title shot against um tyron woodley and then he got rocked right put away so if you're moving up how do you do it do you do in do it intelligently? Do you yes? but then there are guys who just Like they say training is the realize of the realization of one's genetic potential and when you get someone like, you know, Rumble Johnson

It's just you know, no you and never met before well, no, he made wait. I'm sorry. He made wait against Tyron Woodley, didn't he? Yes He made weight against Tyron Woodley, didn't he? Yes. He made weight against Woodley. He didn't make weight against Donald Cerrone. That's what it was. He came in very heavy against Donald Cerrone. He's a big motherfucker is what he is. He's so big for welterweight. I think he'll be way better off at 185 pounds, but I think many of them will.

I think there's a point of diminishing returns where they're significantly depleting themselves to make that weight. And then when they don't have to do that, they have more energy. We've seen that time and time again. Exactly. But when you – did Rumble Johnson, he fought a welterweight, right? Yes. And he's just – He's so big.

His face got, like, gaunt. And then all of a sudden he moved, unmoved. And then, you know, was it Noguera? I mean – Noguera, yeah. Oh, my God, when he just bounced. He could fight heavyweight. And he did fight heavyweight successfully

In the PFL He broke Andrei Orlovsky's jaw He fucked Andrei Orlovsky up As a heavyweight And that's what always fascinates me Is that God given kind of Power

For all of the training it seems With someone like You know Johnson And he Because he said Am I right in thinking He said he's going to come back

For heavyweight If DC and Jones go up He's thought about it You know I think he's He's in the weed game right now He's making some money Selling weed

Right Which is legal now In a lot of places So he's He's doing that What Jesus Christ Look at the size of him now but he fought

hardy right yes he fought hardy and um he took him down which was interesting he didn't want to stand with dan wow back in the day it was a different thing i mean they kind of made an agreement to stand with each other and then he's like bitch yeah and he took him down and he won by decision but that was a different rumble johnson i think the rumble johnson at 170 he had no fucking energy right he was on death's door he was just always exhausted he would lose fights he just he got choked out by josh koscheck he was just too tired yeah and you and i think weight cutting as well obviously you know there's been certain changes now but even now uh and i love max holloway but uh i think it was UFC Embedded where they flew his favourite cupcakes over from Hawaii

and he was like yeah I love cupcakes I've made weight and then he was just you know nailing cupcakes. Not smart. No and I think there's just that element now that I think as much as MMA has evolved and again this is someone who doesn't understand the technical

aspects but as someone who doesn't understand the technical aspects but as someone who loves uh kind of sports history you know and i've watched it and i'm just like that is amazing but it's still got so far to go again we were talking earlier about you know football or you know soccer as known here back in england and the warming up of the the brandy you know in the in the changing rooms i think even now it's crazy when you have someone so gifted like that, but they are, you know, rehydrating and recarb loading on cupcakes. It's like, yeah, there are better. There's way better ways.

You've cut weight. Your body is basically in fight or flight. You know, you've subjected it to a form of microtrauma. You know, body's kind of sitting there going, whoa, what is going on and um then you're going to get here you go here's loads of cupcakes you made weight yeah yeah terrible so there i find that really interesting that you see some of the guys who you know was it um gleason tabal wasn't it who just like it was so big it was he got in it was like he sent he'd weigh in and then it would be like he sent his older brother in like they were unrecognizable yeah um and and i think it's really interesting that that physiological puppetry if you know how to do it intelligently it can be so powerful but you do it

for the wrong reasons but even if you know how to do it intelligently there's still a demand that places on your organs that's it's there's consequences right and and over time your body resists it and this was the thought behind max holloway's last weight cutting fail is that when he was trying to cut down on short notice to fight khabib norma gamedov he was cutting down only to 155 and he couldn't make it right and they they pulled him out of that and then he started suffering some significant problems when he was getting ready for brian ortega right and they think that when he was ready for getting ready for ortega what was going on was his body was reacting to the fact that he was trying to cut weight again and it was like fuck you we just got through this man right you

know and he was like really messed up because of it and he had to go through a battery of tests before they approved him to fight Again, so his body had like fully fully recover months off and then get back to training and now he's okay again But but I think it's changing. I mean now I mean Frankie Edgar was almost the first he would fight like five pounds He wouldn't even cut weight. He wouldn't cut any weight. Yeah, that was his wake Well, this is what they say frankie although was the 155 pound champion and now competes at 145 pounds really he should be fighting at 135 and 135 is where he could be at his best wow that's what everybody says wow especially people that know like weight cutting and they look at what he walks around at and like look 20 pounds from 55 ain't

shit yeah yeah you know those guys do it all the time especially you get a guy like a george lockhart who really knows how to do it and put that weight back on you you know and how to do it correctly scientifically it's but we're seeing that now across all sports i think this evolution that we're understanding um i was gonna uh carlin aisles is one of my favorites so he was a good american sprinter he was i believe you know top 50 you know he was a he was amazing um but wasn't quite making it you know he's not a usain bolt he's not a justin gatlin so they just said hey carlin here's a here's a rugby ball and again like it'll be on youtube some ways like you know widely regarded as the fastest rugby player they just just handed him, you know, a ball.

And now, this is one of my favourite clips, because he, it was one of his first games or something, and I think it was an Australian commentator,

and he just ran, like, rings around everybody. Like, scored a try, and then the commentator was like, he goes, oh my God,

he goes, I cannot believe this. Can you believe? Here we go, look. Here we go. Here's the ball. Oh my God, look at him go. Good boy. That is insane. Look, look at this. Can you believe? Here we go. Look. Here we go. Here's the ball. Oh, my God. Look at him go.

Good boy. That is insane. Look at this. This is rugby sevens. Look how fast he is. Oh, my God. They're all quitting. They're like, fuck this.

Look at him. Look, the guy chasing gave up. He passed that guy. There's more. This is, I love Connor. He ran past him. Like, the guy was ahead of him. But there's no, I'm not even even gonna sidestep you because i don't

he's like he doesn't even respect their speed look how much faster he is than those guys that's hilarious well that's all in many ways right isn't it like that other guy who broke the world record by rowing he had been doing something else and gotten so much power and energy in his body that he could translate that to to rowing and we're seeing that now but and that was what's amazing there with with carlin lars like i said he scored a he scored a try and then the commentator there was two commentators talking they said i cannot believe he's only been playing you know a number of months and they were like yeah no that's amazing and then the other commentator said no no i can believe it he's just tried to give the referee the ball and he didn't know what to do he'd scored a try and he was walking around and he gave it to the

referee went no no you now kick it you know and it was it was amazing they didn't bother teaching them like just listen man just run but what do i do when i get to the end just get to the end and then we'll talk i'll tell you what to do it'll take about three minutes they do they do and Just fucking run, baby. Woo! But you're seeing it. That's incredible. I think you spoke about this not too long ago,

but I think you might have mentioned LeBron James saying, if someone like that was taught MMA. Oh, my God. Everybody would be dead. What would happen? Yeah. And I think we're seeing that now, that, you know, sports. Now there's more money, you know, in MMA,

and it's evolved to what it is now. It's amazing that if you get you know some unbelievable phenom as a kid you go you go into mma yeah but it's not as popular as basketball and it doesn't pay as much money as lebron james makes because lebron james what does he make like 100 million dollars a year something crazy just from basketball it's like 35 or so 35 million just from basketball like and then sponsors $35 million or so. $35 million just from basketball. And sponsorships. And then sponsorships. Unless you're Conor McGregor or Floyd Mayweather, you're not going to make that much money from fighting.

They can make that much money from fighting, but they're so rare. And then Conor could only make that much money from fighting if he boxed Floyd. Even though the fight with Khabib was the number one MMA pay-per-view of all time, the number two pay-per-view in the history of pay-per-views, just behind Floyd Mayweather versus Manny Pacquiao, right? It got more pay-per-view buys than Floyd Mayweather versus Conor McGregor, I believe. Wow. I believe that's true.

Wow. Look that up. I think it was $2.2 million for Floyd Mayweather versus Conor McGregor, and then $2.4 million for Floyd Mayweather versus Khabib Nurmagomedov. I think it was number two of all time. Wow. Just behind the Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao fight, which is just incredible. So they must have made a shit ton of money from that, but how many times can Conor do that?

Yeah. I don't, you know. I mean, look, the Irish support him. But people thought he had a chance of winning that fight. And then once he gets smashed like that, I don't think they're going to think he has a chance of winning again unless he does something significant. Right. Right. Yeah.

He has to beat somebody. Like, he has to fight like Kevin Lee and fuck him up. You know, if he fought Kevin Lee or Tony Ferguson and fuck him up you know if he fought kevin lee or tony ferguson and fucked him up and then you know said look i had two years off i wasn't ready for khabib but i'm ready now fuck the mayweathers and he says something like that people he's got to have some success though uh floyd connor was 6.7 million floyd manny was 4.4 million and then it would have been right around the next one which had been been Oscar and Floyd, which is 2.4. So, yeah, it's like 2.5, 2.4.

So, it would have been right around number two. So, it was number three then? Number three overall, number one MMA. Number one MMA, but number three overall. Yeah, it could be tied. So, what were the boxing numbers again? What was it? 6.7 for the Floyd Conner, 4.4 for Floyd Manny.

That is so crazy. 6.7 for Floyd Conner. Wow 4.4 for Floyd Manny. That is so crazy. 6.7 for Floyd Conner. Wow, I had my numbers off big time. But with that amount of money, it's so interesting that, you know, with that thrown around, this kind of extrinsic motivation, money, media, fame, versus intrinsic motivation. And in a strange way with the swim you know when we got around johnna groats at the top it was uh everyone was like yeah yeah yeah you just set the land's

end to johnna groats record well done and those cameras and it was amazing and then i was just swimming across the maury firth getting hit by jellyfish in you know six degree waters it was horrible and and i think i think right now as well and khabib fascinates me that you know and i don't know the logistics again you know i've been out at sea so i'm still trying to catch up but he was offered so much money for the rematch but i believe he turned it down khabib no right there was talk of a rematch but the ufc did not offer him a financial sum. That was rumors. They hadn't even talked. They were trying to figure out what to do next.

And in fact, the UFC said that most likely next was Tony Ferguson. Okay. So that's the current, the last time they talked about someone fighting for the title again. But it was a while ago now. Again, it might have been UFC Embedded. And I think it was when Khabib, years ago now, met George St. Pierre. And Khabib said, now met George St. Pierre and, and Khabib, you know, said,

Oh, lovely to meet you. And then just, and then Khabib was smiling and he said, Oh, you know, my dad has always said that he'd love to see me fight, you know,

George St. Pierre. And for me, that was really interesting because Khabib's motivation seems to be intrinsic and, and putting his skills against the best people in the world. You could offer him all the money in the world, but just wants to do something when he talks about his dad his family and it's a different beast and that's what i find really interesting that but but but i'm not saying different as in better worse good or bad because ultimately mayweather's never lost but when you

see someone like mayweather you think is he just an extrinsically motivated when he's saying you know if it doesn't make money it doesn't make sense you kind of look atweather, you think, is he just an extrinsically motivated when he's saying, you know, if it doesn't make money, it doesn't make sense. You kind of look at him going, well, you're extrinsically motivated, arguably. And I don't know, I've never met the guy and stuff, but you're extrinsically motivated, but you've never lost. So which one's more powerful? I don't think he's completely extrinsically motivated. I think that's a lot of it as an act. Do you think yeah he's too good right he's too good there's i mean there there has to be some some deep emotional connection to his work there's got to be some connection to his legacy what he's been able to do the way he's been able to retire undefeated as a professional boxer which is almost unheard of right because

i want to believe that and i hope that's true because because you're almost taught like intrinsic motivation do it for the love you know and sort of you know the sweet science i want to believe that mayweather's there and he's studying you know but maybe he doesn't want you to see that side oh no he's too good right he's too good he's got to have a love of boxing there's no way he's too good the The way he's artistically taking guys apart. You go to the Canelo Alvarez fight. The way he was slipping away from Canelo's big shots and then popping them with the jabs. Like, bitch, not today. Not today.

You ain't good enough for this. And it was intelligent in his approach to that fight, too, because he made Canelo drain himself to get down to 150 pounds. Right, right. fight too because he made canelo drain himself to get down to 150 pounds right that was a different thing because he forced canelo to cut a lot of weight to get down to his weight class but i mean floyd really realistically he's 147 pound fighter i mean he's only fighting in these higher weight classes because the money's there right he's a fucking wizard man he's a wizard but that's what i mean about like that that all starts you know he's playing with everybody's head yes you talk about like psychological warfare you know the art of war and everything like that and he's doing it on a mass scale like we've probably never experienced before well what was

fascinating was connor was doing it to him was screaming in his face with a hard-on by the way at the weigh-ins i don't know how he generated a hard-on but uh you know he must have played with his dick before he got out there or took some viagra or something i really think that might have been part of the psychological motivation just just screaming in his face i'm gonna fucking kill you you little puke you piece of shit and floyd was just like this just dead face staring at him right didn't scream back dead face stayed calm like tomorrow i'm gonna fuck you up and there ain't no goddamn thing in the world it's gonna change there right right well connor was like the first guy that floyd ever

fought that could fuck him up in a real fight though right that was the there was a different element of danger there because there was a greed upon rule set where connor wasn't gonna kick wasn't gonna take him down wasn't gonna strangle him down, wasn't going to strangle him. So because of that, Floyd knew he could win. But he also knew, without a doubt, that if they were just going to fight, fight, if there was no gloves, if they just put the gloves aside and just had a street fight, Conor would fucking kill him. I mean, there's not a question on my mind. There's not a doubt to be had.

Conor would kick him from a distance. He would probe him with front kicks, kick his legs. Floyd would start to limp. Conor would step in, tie him up, elbow him, take him down, smash his face into a bloody pulp, do whatever he wanted to him.

Strangle him, rip his knees apart with leg locks. He'd do whatever he wanted to him if they were going to just fight, fight. And he said wanted to him. Strangle him, rip his knees apart with leg locks. Do whatever he wanted to him. If they were going to just fight, fight. And he said that to him. He's like, if this was a fight, I'd fucking kill you. He just looked right at him and he's saying that to him. Floyd had to just eat it. But it didn't matter because it wasn't a fight.

It was a boxing match and he didn't have a chance. But do you think that worked with Aldo, for instance? Because, and again, this is me kind of just talking on the the mental warfare side and not really understanding the technical aspect but that world tour was fascinating to watch and the whole way around and again um this is me not understanding all that much about mma but being fascinated with the mental aspect that uh and again george saint pierre when he fought nick diaz and and they were saying you know we're gonna he's gonna talk to you he's gonna talk to you he's gonna walk you down right don't be affected and george saint pierre was like of course yeah i won't be and then he was talking

so much that george saint pierre even said it just invoked again actually going back to what we were talking about you know our bodies as much as we like to think about it as black and white they are complex biochemical organisms so when and i'm not saying that you know the ds brothers necessarily think like that but they're like i'm gonna talk to you and i'm gonna mess with your biomechanics you know your the chemical reactions within your body neurotransmitters making you emotions mind fuck you yes they're doing it for sure they're doing they're not stupid when nick's doing that to you he's like what bitch what you gonna do bitch he's fucking with your head man right i remember the first time he did that to robbie lawler robbie was like 20 21 years old and nick was young too and they're both standing to

the they moved into the cage and uh they closed it and nick diaz just started saying stockton motherfucker stop and robbie lawler was like what he's like standing in front of him that's against carlos condit he drops his the best one was against anderson silva he fell to the ground and pretended he was sleeping he put his hands together like he's taking a nap he laid down and i i couldn't stop laughing i was like this motherfucker is so crazy he just like right there dropped down and started relaxing go to the back go back that one's better yeah that when you see him lay down and leaned on his head like i'm just gonna take a nap here like what are you doing

bitch he was doing what anderson silver did to forrest griffin and has done all his career but he's doing this to a guy who's the 187 85 pound rather best ever right right and he's not even 185 pounder yeah he's really a 155 pounder i mean nick diaz when he was a champion in strike force or elite xc elite xc right he was a 155 pound champion but what's what's amazing here is everything that we talk about in terms of intangibles mind body connection nick is imposing his mind body connection connection on Anderson in that he's going to, I'm going to mess with yours. He's fucking with his head for sure. What was he the champion? Why am I not remembering it? Was it Elite XC or Strikeforce that Nick Diaz was the champion of?

It might've been Strikeforce. Why can't I remember? Yeah. But why did I think Elite XC? No, he, I don't even think he fought Elite XC, did he? Oh, okay, now I remember. Because that was because Mayhem Miller and Jake Shields had a brawl in Elite XC. And Nick Diaz was a part of the brawl. They all piled on each other, and that was chaos. But Strike...

That was him, Paul Daly, as well. I mean, the knockout, I mean, knockout, but also just kind of,

like, fell. And so it's, it's so strange that this intangible, this thing that I'm now fascinated with, like, mentally. Yeah,

KG Nunes, Elite XC. So he did fight him in Elite XC. That's right. So he fought in elite XC and then became strike force champion that's why I'm confused wow yeah um that whatever Mayweather did differently to Aldo might have been granted different sports granted but there was something that McGregor was like it's not working the way that when he pinched you know Aldo's neck and

turn around and you know again without understanding the technical element, for me, it was so fascinating watching the two. And like you said, Mayweather stood there completely stoic. Yeah, Aldo was not comfortable with it. And he lost his composure. And he attacked Connor in a way that exposed him. He got exposed to a counter shot. He wasn't patient. He was very emotional. And he just wanted to fuck that exposed him. He got exposed to a counter shot. He wasn't patient.

He was very emotional, and he just wanted to fuck that dude up, and he just got clipped. Right, right. You know? And look, Connor played him perfectly. He played him like a fiddle. Yeah, yeah. Hey, man, I got to wrap this up.

It's already 5 o'clock. We just went for three hours, believe it or not. It's a time warp in here. I'm so sorry. No, don't be sorry. It was awesome. I really appreciate it. And what you did is beyond impressive man

I mean it's fascinating stuff and I feel like we could do a hundred of these kind of conversations though I'm so sorry how often are you in Los Angeles? no this is my first time oh well come back

yeah no come back and visit again man next time you're gonna swim to the moon let me know no this is it honestly like next time we'll get like to the moon let me know no this is it i honestly like next

time we'll get like we'll get burton again for the record he's an amazing physical specimen of a fat guy right no no no no no no no no no seriously we'll go swimming or like okay we'll do something yeah yeah well let's let's definitely do another podcast though this has been amazing either way thank you so much really really appreciate it thank you all right oh tell people with your social media how to get to you oh bless you yeah

so yeah Instagram just Ross Edgley spell please yeah I know it gets difficult R-O-S-S-E-D-G-L-E-Y same on Twitter

and same on Facebook yeah beautiful thank you thank you brother thank you alright folks that's it for today

bye I am so sorry thank you Thank you. All right, folks. That's it for today. Bye. I am so sorry. Thank you. Thank you.