The Joe Rogan Experience - #996 - Dr. Andy Galpin

Episode Date: August 9, 2017

Dr. Andy Galpin is a Professor of Kinesiology at the Center for Sport Performance at California State University, Fullerton. He has a Ph.D. in Human Bioenergetics and is the founder and director of the Biochemistry and Molecular Exercise Laboratory. His new book Unplugged is available now on Amazon.

Yes, and we're live. What's up, man? How are you? Fantastic. Thanks for doing this. Appreciate it. Appreciate you letting me come up. So, why don't you tell people what you do? I am a muscle physiologist, so I'm a PhD in human bioenergetics, and I'm the director for the Center for Sport Performance, which all that basically means I study muscle physiology,

why it grows, shrinks, repairs, dies, and all that crap. Now, when you're dealing with athletes and you're dealing with state-of-the-art performance, how much does that stuff change year to year, like protocols, like what people used to think was the way to go, what's the new way to go? Well, if you take a look or if you examine just the idea of science in general, it's the understanding that we're wrong that's literally what science is if we knew what the answer was we wouldn't look into it like what's the point of doing a study if we know the answer right so by

definition we're always evolving in that sense but it's quite funny how the central tenants are really not that different you take nutrition you take, the vast majority of those things are similar to what they were 20, 30, 80, 100 years ago. So the bulk of it, what matters for the bulk of athletes is fairly standard. Where it differs is the last few percentage points. It's getting us that last 10% gains or being very specific. So you, on a personal level, need this little bit of difference and then you need this tiny bit of difference. But the bulk of it really is not that different. Well, when you watch MMA fighters in particular, you see so many different methods, so many different ways to approach things.

And I never know who's right. It really depends upon who's successful. And then you go, well, that guy obviously has it down. Yeah, that's a major fallacy called the fallacy of authority, or appeal to authority, which is somebody really good did it or somebody who coaches somebody really good, they did it, or a lot of people did it. All three of those are examples of major logical fallacies, right,

to break down on Aristotle's reasoning. That's not what we do. Now, they can help us with some ideas of where to go, but that's a really bad approach. So we have to understand what works for somebody at a very high level is not necessarily going to work for the bulk of people. And particular, if, like, the great example is Schwarzenegger. So when he came out with his book of the Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding, everyone was like, fantastic, I'll go do those workouts. You're not Arnold.

And you should be doing what Arnold did when he was at your stage, not at his stage. Well, also, he's doing a bucket of steroids. Well, that too, right? That's a big factor. Especially back in those days, they didn't come clean about that stuff. No. So guys are like, hey, how come my biceps are ripping off the bone? Right.

Or how come it's not working for me? Yeah. Yeah, so all that is really important to understand. It's not working for me. So all that is really important to understand. With the context of recovery, the nutrition he has, all the other stresses that are eliminated from his life, all of that changes what's going to work or not work for you. Now, there's a bunch of different ways of approaching things. Like I've always been fascinated by the Marv Marinovich method, and now Nick Curzon takes that method as well and their idea is that strength and conditioning is

Especially when a fighters in camp is more important than anything more important even in skill work, right? Cuz you already know how to fight just so Strength and conditioning should take precedent get all that done Too so get your body to the point where you have the most horsepower the biggest gas tank the best tires You know the best handling. And then you already know how to fight. So just approach it that way. Yeah. So the, the guy that actually trained Marv, Michael Yeses is a Fullerton guy. Oh. Scouts Day Fullerton. So he was the scientist. Michael Yeses? Yeah. That's his name? Yeah. Y-E-S-S, Russian name. Oh. He's awesome. He's like 85 now or something. And if you want to get massively entertained by somebody, like he's a good one.

Yeah. Because he's just very opinionated. But nonetheless, yeah, that is, I think, an important one. If you look at Joel Jameson, a friend of mine who trains Demetrius Johnson, like all those guys, they have very different approaches. And I think the massive fallacy, this actually goes back to your original question, is thinking that there is one single answer. That's the problem. Right. goes back to your original question is thinking that there is one single answer that's the problem right whether we're talking training nutrition recovery ice any of these modalities the the major reason we have so much internet fighting between experts and why it makes it so difficult for so many people to figure out like what's the right answer is because searching for a right

answer is the problem to begin with we're having the wrong conversation with all of this crap it's not the right place to go so those are two very different approaches for demetrius they reduce a lot of the strength conditioning they do during camp because they want to get very good with the train with the fighting so all that stuff is gone so joel believes in training as much as we can prior to camp and then in camp it's time to get better at fighting hmm someone like Nick is apparently has the opposite approach yeah I don't think that either one of them is more or less effective than the other it really comes down to the combination of coaches as well as the athlete so some athletes and you could attest to this and I've seen this a bunch of times if they're two days out

three days out a week out some of them get really anxious if they don't get to practice a skill. Like I want to be really sharp with my combinations. I want to be really good with my transitions, et cetera. And if you take that away from them, they get very anxious and they don't like it. And so what you almost have to do is program it based on this combination of physiology and psychology. And that's a bit outside of my realm, but this is what makes coaching so complicated is saying, okay, well, you know what, for you, athlete one, you're going to do the opposite approach. Athlete two, you're going to be doing the other approach because you just don't feel as good. You're not as confident. You're not feeling as smooth. And

more than anything, when they walk down to that cage or particularly two or three days before, they have to feel amazing. You. You have to have that combination. Yeah, it is weird that, like, there is no answer. No. You know, like, there's one, like, Mark Hunt is going to have a completely different set of requirements than, you know, Derek Lewis or Mighty Mouse Johnson or anybody. So, like, everybody's got different needs and everybody's coming to the table with a different set of skills and a different set of problems.

Especially when you look at experience too. So what worked for you in your second fight when you were 20 is maybe not the same approach you have to take when you're 30. I just got back from New York. I was in there the last three days and I was with one of my guys, Dennis Bermudez. And we had this conversation. And when I first started working with him, we had to take a very different approach the week of and especially even, you know, the hour before the fight, because the way that he got ramped up for a fight is very different than some other people that I've worked with. fights, maybe four or five fights ago. And he's like, I'm freaking out because I didn't freak out in the cage this time. I was like, what? And he's like, you know, I'm usually like really freaked out in the cage. And this is what drives my performance. But this time I was really calm

and collected and I saw everything and I'm nervous that I'm not nervous enough. So I had to get him in with my good friend, Lenny Wiersmo, who's a sports psychologist, who works with a lot of combat sport athletes and say, okay, we need to get you in a place of optimal arousal. Because if you're under aroused, that's a problem. But if you're over aroused, that's a problem as well. So we had to change the tactics a little bit between everything from his walk down to the week of before the queuing, the things that we say to him to make sure he's in an optimal state. Every other athlete who worked, like all those approaches are completely different. We can't have the same thing. How do you train a guy to do his walk down?

Oh, there's a lot we can do. Really? Oh, yeah. And I'm not a sports psychologist, so I don't go too much. But do you know what they do? Absolutely. Everything from breathing drills to the cueing, the words you use. So, for example, in the back, if you're a Dennis Bermudez five years ago, Ryan Parsons would have to say like real vile,

horrible shit, like rip his fucking head off. I want you to bring it back in a plate, like murder him, rip him to shreds. That works for some guys for Dennis at that point, at that point, not anymore.

Right now it's a little bit different approach. And Ryan could tell you the details of what he does now, but some guys like you tell some other people that backstage are going to be like, what? Huh? Like, don't,

don't say that. Just like, right. Tell me what to focus on. Remind me of my cues and my timing. And so the guys that are too ramped up, they're very specific breathing drills, for example, we can have them do as they're walking down the cage, as they're in the cage, especially if they're the first one down or the second one down. So if they're first down, sometimes that's a 10-minute delay between when they're standing in the cage and when they actually start throwing. Right. If you're not taking advantage of that time, or if that time

is getting taken advantage of you, that can have a real problem with your energy. And especially if you get a guy who's really savvy, like a Connor or a John Jones, who takes their time coming down and they mess with you, they do different things on the way down, that really influences what's going on with the guy in the cage, especially if they're less experienced or maybe a touch of the underdog or other things like that. So that can all be messed with. Now, a guy like Dennis Bermudez is a good example, right?

You're working with him. He's obviously a world-class fighter, but he always seems to fall just short on these big fights. Mm-hmm. Yeah. This is where it's outside of my expertise. I'm a muscle physiologist, not a psychologist. Right, but with his last performance against Darren Elkins,

who's a really tough guy, very awkward, really just blood and guts type of fighter. But that was a good matchup for him. Very good fight. Good matchup skill-wise. It should, on paper, should have been a good matchup. It should have favored Dennis in a lot of ways. There's no way to beat around that uh i feel like two things are happening in that fight one i feel like darren elkins is getting better for sure and he was very super motivated and

energized by his performance over mursad bechtik which is an amazing comeback that was incredible crazy yeah so but a lot of people felt like he was the favorite, that Dennis was the favorite going into that fight. Yeah, on paper, clearly he was from a lot of vantage points. But it's really difficult, you know, without telling too much of Dennis' story for him. It's quite funny what happens with the game plan sometimes and what happens when they get in there,

even with a seasoned guy like Dennis. And I don't know if a part of that was because it was in new york and dennis's hometown or if that was because of pat who was a good friend fought right before and won a really you know crazy fight in the fight before if you saw that you just don't know what goes in and then you know sometimes like in the middle of a fight you're like the fight's over and you're like i don't even know why we did that like i just we got into this weird rhythm thing and we started doing this and that was i don't know what happened and and that the rhythm can kind of take over the fight and darren fought uh an amazing fight he did exactly what he

needed to do um but it was just the from my perspective as a scientist one i try to stay away from those things it's not my job but it it's fun, and this is what makes it exciting for me. It's why I work with these folks. It's because you can have the perfect camp physically, and sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and so then you go back to the drawing board and you go, well, do we throw everything out? Do we try something different? Do we have an approach? But what was it, though?

Was it psychological? Was it physical? That's the thing to think about. He was physically fantastic. But what was the physical game plan? Like, you planned on, you must have planned on knowing how Darren fights. A super high-paced, in-your-face type of fight. That part's not a problem for Dennis. He doesn't really get tired in the vast majority of his fights.

But he looked a little bit like he was getting tired in this fight. Again, he can say that, but from the feedback and from what we saw, he was like, no. He just maybe had a hard time focusing honestly i didn't i haven't asked him very specifically uh what was going on there i kind of give them a few weeks to kind of get through that stuff before we start going back all right let's watch

the tape let's go through it like right went through so i want to be careful not offending him or or his direct coaches like that um but yeah i mean for my vantage it was like this was not this is not what we were looking for. He should have just been more active, particularly in the second round, which is what really got him. And you saw in the third round, once he kind of got into it, Dennis, in our eyes at least, was pretty dominant that round or was at least clearly ahead.

Yeah. Where one and two were not so good for him. But, yeah, just potentially a focus, potentially a lot of things. He wasn't – nothing physically that happened to him in the fight that he, was he like, Oh, I, we didn't prepare for this. We didn't think this was going to happen. Uh, this is throwing me off. He was just like, I just, I just didn't go in the second round. So it's a weird job you have because you're kind of relying on someone else to pull the trigger. You're relying on someone else to make the moves. And you could train them all you want.

You can get them in incredible shape, but then, you know, ready, go. They're on autopilot. They're doing their own thing. Especially me, because I'm not the guy who's in practice all day, every day with them. Right. Like, I'm not the Nick Curzon.

I'm not seeing them 12 hours a week. Right. I'm out there. I'm just like, like Dennis, I won't even see Hall Camp sometimes because he's in New York and I'm in L.A. And so it's like. So what do you do?

You give him a protocol? Do you give him a schedule? So my role, depending on which fighter I'm with, is completely different. So sometimes it's one phone call at the beginning of camp. Sometimes it's just like, hey, this came up. What do you think we should do? How do we go about this? Sometimes it's a text three times a day every day for the whole camp. Sometimes it's phone calls. Like I try to do,

like, this is not my full-time job. Like my full-time job is to research muscle physiology. I work with MMA fighters and combat sport athletes just because I love it. Really? So it's just almost like a side job, a side hobby. Yeah. Yeah. If you want to think of it that way um because you know i have my full-time living i've got multiple labs to run like this is what i do is publish research right i take biopsies of people i isolate hundreds of tens of thousands of muscle fibers at this point in my life and when i can help if i think i can i will but i try not to i don't work with general public i our lab is different we'll put it way. Most labs that do the type of

muscle research we do are focused on disease prevention or treatment, right? So how do we fight cancer? How do we get people back? I'm one of the few that actually do this on the other end of the spectrum, which is, well, let's study optimization. Like how do we thrive? How do we not just get to 80 years old, but how do we kick ass at 80 years old and be coming from the performance background that I have, my athletic background, it just makes so much sense. I didn't come from martial arts background at all. Like I didn't do anything until much later in life. But I, once I started paying attention to MMA, I was like, there's something energetically, physiologically far different about the demands of this sport. And it's really exciting and it's a really complex problem to solve. So I just started helping out and chipping in. And then once you get help,

a couple of people and they're like, this is fantastic, et cetera, kind of the ball gets rolling. So right now, basically what I do is think of it like concierge service, if you will, like I don't, I'm not like you can't email me for a training program. Like I don't have an online website you can buy stuff from. Right. I'm here. Like if somebody's like, Hey, I know a friend who could really need this or something, maybe. So do you coach people for diet as well? Do you go through everything with them? Yep. Depending on what they need. And how do you like, how do you decide like what a person needs? Like say if, you know, Darren Elkins came to you that he might be very different than John Jones. Like how do you, how do you decide what a person needs? So it's depends on if they're local or not. Uh, blood work is, is the easy one,

but the vast majority of what I do is a lot of conversation. So I spend a lot of time on phone calls and Skype with them saying, basically walk me through, what have you done? Where are you at? How do you think I can help? The number one thing I do then is say, okay, do you have, who else on your team does this? Who's helping you? Let's get on a call with them. Not so that I can tell them what to do, but just let me know what your world is like. And then I'll see if I can add some advice. Maybe we'll try this. I can help you track things. I can tell you with my experience about, I've seen this happen before, or I know someone that's happened before. This is what happened with, the best example was, do you remember last summer at the Rio Olympics when that Helen Maroulis won the gold medal?

The first American ever female to win gold in wrestling? No, I wasn't paying attention. Oh, dude, Joe. Go read the article in Sports Illustrated that she wrote afterwards. She beat, I think Yoshida was her name, but she was a three-time defending gold medalist and a 15-time straight world title. It was just like Rulon Gardner when he beat Karelman, but the female version. So Helen went down there. It was crazy.

She was down 2-1 with like 30 seconds to go in the semifinals, came back and won. She was down a point. She in the finals ends up upsetting her first American to ever win gold. Well, I worked with Helen for about a year on straight nutrition because she had to cut a whole bunch of extra weight for the first time. And the whole wrestling community was like, you'll never get down to 53 kilos. Like, don't do it.

You have to go up. Because what happened was wrestling is this really weird thing where world championships is a different weight classes than the Olympics. So she was a world champion at 55 kilos and either had to go up to 58 kilos for the Olympics, which had a three-time defending gold medalist and a 15-time straight world champion, or go down to 53 kilos to wrestle somebody

who also had that 15-time straight world title. So pounds-wise, it's like three kilos, six pounds, yeah. Roughly. It's not a big deal, but when you're already like scraping to get there. Right. And so she had to make the decision to go up or go down. And what happened was she had a nutritionist, Eric Revelo, who you may know Eric.

He works with Barnett. He's been around Josh, big, huge dude, wrestler. But Eric was her nutritionist, and Eric reached out to me because he's right down where we're at and Helen's down here. And he was basically like, I know what I'm doing, obviously, but let's get as big a team as possible to make the right decisions as possible. So that's how I like to work. So when a new person reaches out to me, I go like, well, who else do you have on board? Don't fire them. I don't want anybody to get fired.

Let's all put our heads together. Because with MMA specifically, they're not making any income. Olympic wrestlers are the same thing. She makes like 15 grand a year or something. Like she's poor. So it's what you have to understand when you're coaching them. Like it's not team Dr. Andy. Like it's team Helen.

And all of us have to be focused on her. And it doesn't matter if anyone knows what I do with her or not or anybody. I don't care if you get the credit, another nutritionist gets the credit. If you want to actually help these professional athletes, you have to let your ego go completely out the door and say, why throw people out? Let's take every information I have about everything you've ever done and come together with solutions. And if somebody else has an idea that you don't like, that's up to you to figure out and give it to the athlete. Okay, so what did you find out with her? Like what was the issue and how did you get her to lose the extra?

So actually, it was like a year of issues. A year? Yeah. I mean, like, every day, every week, every month, something else came up. So it was like, we tackle this problem, and then we had another problem. Iron was a huge one for her. Iron, as in deficiency? Mm-hmm.

And she was basically almost flatlined on her iron. Like anemic. Mm-hmm. And we had to come in and go, okay, well, we're going to add this, but she was also traveling to Mongolia. She was going internationally, so she kept getting sick. Mongolia? Yeah, for tournaments, because she had to qualify the spot.

Damn. And she's cutting, she's hypo. I would imagine wrestling a Mongolian chick is terrifying. When you're a world champion, it's not that terrifying. They're hardcore, though. Yeah. These kids get the shit out of me. So she, we had to put her on, we had to basically play a game of saying, if we give you the

things that keep you from not being sick, that's also the stuff that actually harms iron absorption. Keep you the thing. Like vitamin C, for example. Vitamin C to keep you from getting sick. Right. So that can help you get sick. So you're talking about while she's dehydrating?

Is that what you're saying? Anytime. Anytime. So if you're going to go travel internationally for a long time, you can take a big bowl of vitamin C and it may help you from getting sick, from getting cold. Does that really affect it better than probiotics do? Well, probiotics, we're on that too. But the point was, if you're going to go on like a two week thing to Eastern Europe, I'm

going to give you every advantage possible to not probably get a cold. Right. But wouldn't you do that on a regular basis? Like why would you? Accentuate the diet on a traveling trip and give it some stuff They mean wouldn't you want that boost everywhere so the probiotics are basically a no-brainer all the time But I mean even vitamin C and everything else yeah, but you have to be careful because anytime you go with the vitamin Specifically you're gonna have potential toxicity

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

And so you say the opposite. What does that that mean do you mean zinc doesn't help vitamin c absorption or doesn't help iron absorption iron so zinc actually messes up your iron absorption anytime you have a vitamin or a mineral you have potential either co-absorption or you have uh confliction so you're gonna you're gonna cut things off how does zinc conflict with iron i don't know the chemistry behind it that That's weird. Yeah. You have a lot of that. I mean, you look up basically vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin K, magnesium, vitamin K with bone absorption. So you have to make sure that, like, say if you're eating one at breakfast, you eat another one at lunch. Is that how it works? Well, if you get it from food, you're basically safe.

Right. Like, we don't really, this is stuff we don't worry about at all. Do you supplement, like, during your lunch or during your breakfast? Yeah. This is why the general answer is don't supplement with vitamins and minerals unless you have a very specific reason right like and we did that for the vast majority camp but she was continually getting sick because of a variety of reasons some that i probably you know shouldn't say but so we're like okay fine we addressed that and then it was like okay now you're super anemic so let's get away from that but what we did

basically is get iron back to a decent level as soon as possible and then go off of everything go right back to food how are you feeling and that one she was so low on iron as soon as we got her to decent level like within days it was just like tears of joy of like i feel so much better i'm not lethargic i'm not sleeping all the time but it was continual the hard part with her was getting her down and then you would be shocked what the food was like in rio like what they told oh yeah at the olympics oh my god like they told them you'd have a b c d and we get down there and she called me the first day and she's like they have nothing we've got mcdonald's we've got popcorn and cookies like there's nothing down here wow she's like at the olympics oh horrible

i mean the basketball players probably had something but like she's a wrestler she didn't have anything so they they had better food for the more prominent sports probably probably because they probably brought their own chefs yeah oh okay yeah right so she's down there with the team and then she had to be shipped out of rio to some other city two hours away or an hour away or something and she's like there's no grocery store here i can't even walk to the store to get any anything decent so we had real problems she was um about to do opening ceremonies and we had a plan um you know for food like basically we're going hour by hour how do you feel like where are we at these types of things and she wanted to do opening ceremonies and she

called me she's like i want to do opening ceremonies. And she called me. She's like, I want to do opening ceremonies. We're like, fine, cool, no problem. This is what I want you to eat and whatever it was. And we'll do next. And she's like, I'm right next to Michael Phelps. I'm in the front. Like, I don't want to get out of line. I don't want to go back out and eat because I don't want to lose my spot next to Phelps in the front.

I'm like, okay, fine. Well, she was supposed to eat whatever vegetable and food and fat source we had. I don't remember. But she's like, all they have is cookies and popcorn. She's like, I guess I'll just like starve. And we actually, that was one time we didn't do, we didn't want to do that because she was at a problem where she was so calorically underserved for so long, she, her body would crash quite often. So we had to keep her nutrients really, really, really high, her vitamins and minerals to keep her at a low calorie count,

but her body not freaking out. So she was like, what do I do? Not eat. And we had to actually go to the popcorn because of the good fat in there, the butter that it had, to keep her from not feeling terrible. Jesus Christ. You had to go for popcorn for nutrition at the Olympics? And she was there for like six hours. You were supposed to be there for like an hour and go in.

It was a shit show. That's a mess. Now what about other athletes? I mean, forget about the specific requirements of someone who has to lose a ton of weight. Yeah. Now, when you deal with most athletes, like what kind of like strength and conditioning protocols do you have them on? What kind of recovery protocols? Like are you using cryotherapy or sauna?

Like what kind of stuff are you using? So all that is, again, I think the problem is thinking that there is one answer there. I don't have any athletes that I'm like, this is what we do. Hey, this is our method. This is a, I think a generally a terrible approach. It's a combination of where they're at, who are they with? What have they done? What's their past history? What do they like? Are they not like, what do we really need to get? So I try to identify what's compromising their performance. Let's pick the best solution for that issue. So you show up and you're like, your problem is agility, your footwork. You're just too slow on your feet.

Well, we're going to have a different approach to your training than when someone says you're getting out strength here. Like someone's pushing you around too much. I don't need to rebuild your feet. I don't need to improve your maximal speed because you're already the fastest in the division. Maybe your strength is your issue. So do you do a bunch of tests on them when they come to you? And then you try to like, what kind of test do you do? So we have an entire center for sport performance. We've got six or eight laboratories in it with a whole host of equipment.

So we do that thing where you put the mask on them, make them run? VO2 max. Yeah. Yeah. If we need to. What does that do? So we can actually measure the amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide coming in and out of the body, which allows us to get a number called the VO2 max, which is the maximum amount of oxygen that you bring in and exhale.

So it tells us basically your maximal cardiovascular capacity. And it's pseudo important for MMA. So the average person's like at 40, 45, just to give you some context of that number. Anyone past about 60, if you continue to go up, it's not going to really make you fight any better. So that's one of the things that we did, or we found doing all the research on MMA folks is, if I take you...

There's a point of diminishing returns somewhere around 60. So if you show up and you're a Jake Ellenberger and you're at 52, and I can get you to 58, then that's going to help your performance a lot. But when you show up and you're a Pat Cummins and you're 66 and I get you to 69, that's not going to make you fight any better. That's not your problem. What makes you lose in a fight is other things

that you need to spend that precious training time on. So when you get a guy or a girl and you have them in your studio and you start work, what's the first thing you do with them? So honestly, the first thing would be, well, what did the manager or why did they reach out to me? Because usually when they come to me, it's problem fixing. They don't come to me come to me when like hey i've won seven fights in a row i feel fantastic right usually it's this is going on i'm losing because of this reason that's got to be frustrating though because you'll when someone's losing the problem is like that's a slippery slope it's hard to catch

yourself oh yeah yeah well it's it's the of, like, sometimes they just want another answer, which is not, like, you're just not good enough. Right. Ooh, that's a rough answer. Right? Like, I'm not going to tell them that. I'm not a fight coach. Right. But I'm like, okay, so I'll watch the fights, of course, talk to their team. So I'll give you a specific example. So they come to me and go, hey, like, I don't think we're fast enough on the feet. This is a problem. Okay, well, we've got force plates that are really, really sensitive measurement equipment built into the ground.

And we can have them do a variety of jumping tests, moving tests, lifting tests. Force plates? How does it work? So it's a really expensive scale, basically, built into the ground. How big is it? They're as big as your laptop or as big as the table. Oh, so it's fairly small. Oh, as big as the table oh so it's fairly small well some understand oh as big as the whole table yeah they can be okay not ours but we have one that's maybe

the size of uh i don't know small coffee table yeah and then there's two of them back to back okay so we can do your right foot on one your left foot another one so we can test everything from not only your force which is like if i if I, if I measured your maximum deadlift, I would know how strong your back is and your hamstrings and your glutes, but how do you produce that force is the big key. So, uh, a good example is years ago, we had some fighters come in and one of them was clearly not fast enough, but he wouldn't believe it. So he was strong, but it took him a long time to produce that force. So to give you a number, let's say you could produce 100 newtons of force, right? Just making the number up. And I produced 100 newtons of force.

But if it took you one second to get there, and it took me a half a second to get there, in an MMA fight, I don't have one second. Right. So you don't have 100 newtons of usable force in your sport. No, what's interesting, you just said he didn't believe it. So he didn't think you were slow? No, he thought the problems were other things. What did he think the problems were?

Who knows? Coaching, like, I'm not getting the right things. You know, they had my walkout song wrong. So you told him, you're slow, dude. That was my thing. I'm like, I don't think so. His coaching staff was like we think this is a problem well let's put him on the force plate and let's see not only how much

force you produce because his strength numbers were high squatted a lot he deadlifted a lot but the time it took him to produce that force what's called the rate of force development uh his peak velocity the time it took him to get to that velocity all that when i compared him to the other athletes and nfl players and stuff was just like off the charts bad. So like what exercise do you do to measure that? So now that's a great example. So when we have two individual athletes, they come in, so let's say one is the opposite. So one of them is really, really, really good at producing fast quickly. And the other one takes a long time. So the one that doesn't produce fast or force very quick, we would

put them on a drill where we say, okay, the goal of your training is to maximize how quickly you produce force. I don't care how heavy you get, but this is a reactive strength thing. This is a speed thing. So you're going to do maybe a little bit lighter squats, but you're going to explode. You're going to transition out of the bottom. You're going to bounce. You're going to use momentum. You're going to swing. swing you're gonna generate fast as Possible you're not going to go to maximal strength the other guy we get the opposite We would take the speed advantage away from him or her and so you need to be able to produce more strength Without taking advantage of the speed and it's basically comes down to using the muscle for force or the connective tissue for force

And that's really what we can tease out. Now, how much of speed and athletic performance is genetic and how much of it is what you've been doing and how much can you improve? Yeah, so that's a fact. We actually just completed a really cool study on monosigus twins. So monosigus twins means you're the exact same DNA. So sperm went in, implanted two to implanted one egg, the egg split and you became identical. Right. And so we found two twins that were the exact same DNA. But one of them had been doing like marathons and endurance stuff for 35 years. The other

hadn't done anything in 35 years. So we had this exact question. Wow. That's crazy. Identical DNA, So we had this exact question. That's crazy. Identical DNA, one variable different, which is, well, one major variable. That's a huge variable, though. One is a super endurance athlete, and the other one's a lazy bitch. Something like that. Or maybe he studies a lot. Yeah, something.

I think he was a truck driver or something. Wow, it's so weird. That's unusual, isn't it? Extremely unusual. They usually kind of share similar interests. If not, if their difference is mild. Yeah. I kind of do this and you do a little bit more.

So what are the differences in their body types? So we tested them for everything. Cardiovascular stuff, VO2 max, strength, all these same tests that we do with the MM fighters, muscle biops fiber type how much fast how much slow twitch uh all the ones in between what we found was of course the endurance athlete had higher vo2 max like no brainer you you you run 100 miles a week for 30 years and your brother doesn't do anything you're gonna have a better cardiovascular system blood pressure cholesterol all that crap better than the trained athlete but the strength did not favor the athlete the muscle quality didn't favor the athlete the total amount of muscle didn't favor the athlete the speed didn't favor the athlete really no and want to hear the craziest

part is the fiber type the trained athlete and his quad was 90 slow twitch 10 fast twitch the untrained was 40 slow twitch about 30 fast twitch and then about 30 of some of the hybrids in between does that make sense to you because the guy was just constantly running exactly work now what that's really weird that the muscle quality yep didn't favor the athlete i think what it tells i mean what do you mean by muscle quality when you're saying that so yeah that's a good question you can take an ultrasound and you take an image of the muscle and it looks at like a combination of how much menstrual muscular fat there is with uh how much total muscle master is in the size and a bunch bunch of different things. So you get this rough idea of quality.

How does it not favor a guy who's exercising constantly? Well, you have to be careful. It's only one subject, well, two. So we don't know. But the one implication could be that, yes, endurance running and cycling is great for you. There's a clear health advantage to that. But if that's all you do for 30 years,

that's probably not enough to save the muscle capacity. We know things that are actually going to predict mortality. VO2 max, leg strength is one of the most significant predictors of how long you live. Leg strength? Absolutely. How weird. Well, sort of.

Tom Platt should live forever. Yeah, right? Some of these guys at Squat 900, Strengthened? Absolutely. How weird. Well, sort of. Tom Platt should live forever. Yeah, right? Some of these guys that squat 900, now obviously there's diminishing returns, right? Right, I'm sure. If you squat 400 and I take you to 450, you're not living a day longer. Right. But think about it this way. What's one of the big reasons why you go from living by yourself to an assisted living home?

Can't walk. Can't walk. Yeah. Can't stand up. And the biggest one that they're actually starting to look at now is foot speed. Foot speed? Why? Why?

If you trip and you're about to fall and you can't put your foot out and catch yourself, you have to have the foot speed to get yourself out there, but the strength to stop yourself from falling. That makes sense. So balance and... Yeah, well, it's eccentric strength, the ability to block all those forces into the ground

to catch your whole body mass from falling. Or wouldn't it be also your ability to manipulate your body like yoga? Absolutely. To be able to control yourself in awkward positions. The other thing they see is huge increases in general, just physical activity when you're stronger. So when you're really, really strong and you're 70, you're much more likely to go to an extra yoga class. Oh, I'll go take the dog for an extra walk. I'll go grab the thing. But if I'm super weak and

getting off the toilet is a maximum effort squat, I'm more likely to just keep in my chair. Just stay on the toilet. Yeah. Right. Wow. That's incredible that there wasn't an increase in muscle quality. So that well, that's also one very specific type of exercise, right? Endurance work where this guy was a bodybuilder. Who knows? So that's exactly the point when you the first I think the first question you asked when we started talking was, you know, what's the best type of workout? What are we or what's the new age stuff? right? Well, it goes back to, I think every

one of us would agree, if you want to be as healthy as possible, you need to do a variety of training. Yeah. It can't just be one modality. So if you've only done yoga your whole life, you're probably going to have strength problems or foot speed problems. If you've only run, if you've only lifted weights, if you've only exposed yourself to a few of these stimuli, you're probably in a real problem. Yeah. What we've, what we've done recently actually is expanded that thinking. So my friend Brian McKenzie and I have a book that we just came out a couple of weeks ago on this whole idea called unplugged, where we need to expand past just lifting and running and think about what other physiological exposures do we need that are important for longevity.

How well do we do when we're hungry? How about cold? How about thirsty? Hot? How well do we do? Yeah. Meaning performance-wise. Meaning everything.

So, like, are you manipulating diet to make people perform better when they're cold? Like, what are you doing? Every combination. So if we want to be able to sustain and perform as well as we can throughout life, we probably need to be able to handle a bunch of different challenges. You're talking about longevity now, not like necessarily athletic performance and professional athletes. We would use this under that umbrella, but very, very carefully. So, for example, I would not recommend extensive fasting during the middle of a six-week camp prior to a UFC fight.

Right. Like, this is not at all what we're saying, but this is something maybe we implement outside of camp. Okay, so for example, we have somebody who's very, very carbohydrate dependent, right? And we have a hard time using fat as a fuel source. Okay, well, maybe during that six-week camp before UFC fight, I'm not messing with a tremendous amount. We're not going on a new diet five weeks before a fight.

That's not going to happen. But maybe, oh, you got hurt. You got an extended layoff. Now we start to work on another part of your physiology so that next camp we've got more what's called metabolic flexibility. So we have an ability to switch back and forth between fuel sources. Right. So when you're preparing someone for a very specific event. Exactly.

Like here you're ramping up for September 12th. boom, we have a protocol, let's get ready. But then after the fight's over, then you might be working on very specific balancing exercises or that kind of stuff. you need to be very specific to what you're going to do get on weight get focused get right all these things but now if we because if we over specify for too long we have problems we have this complex these fighting forces called optimization versus adaptation so generally when you're optimizing you're not adapting and vice versa how's that work so for example yeah you brought up ice earlier so we do this stuff a lot we've done a lot of studies um and published in this area so we're just learning some of the physiology behind what's going on with ice and a lot of people ask me this like well are you for ice or pro or against it i don't understand why we have to be in one side of the camp. Well, there's one guy who doesn't believe in ice.

Misha Tate had him on her podcast. He's like the anti-ice guy. He's like saying you shouldn't use ice. But I've looked at some of the PubMed studies and some of the various things. There's a lot of benefits to ice. I don't understand why anybody would be anti-ice. Does that make sense at all to you? No, it totally does. And this is exactly where I'm going.

Anti-ice makes sense to you or no? It can. Can. In what way? Because there is good scientific evidence to show that there are consequences of the ice as well. Like in post-injury or post-workout? So it depends on the workout context. So we'll go two easy examples. So it's not so vague and like theoretical. Post a workout that you try to get we'll go two easy examples. So it's not so vague and like theoretical, uh, post a workout that you try to get bigger and add more muscle mass. You don't want to do

that right afterwards. Bingo. Yeah. And why? Well, because your body has time to recover and the actual inflammation is supposed to be good for you. Exactly. It's not good for you. It is the signal to grow. Right. So people have this really weird thing where they like to personify or huma Phi chemicals and Physiology like it doesn't know it's not good or bad like inflammation isn't great or bad like it just is right It's a chemical like it doesn't give a shit at all. It doesn't know it's not conscious right So if you were to do and hop in a nice path post a lifting session when you're trying to add muscle mass It's gonna fuck up your game probably yeah, but you're supposed to wait like two hours right isn't that the right number the more the

better probably more probably four to six oh okay why not why mess with it i read i read something about two that two hours is good after a hard lift well we don't have any numbers to say optimal yet like it would take a lot of studies to figure out well two is not good but three is better so everything you're hearing is rough we would have to titrate it out we'd have to do a study that says one group gets two hours one group gets three hours and then you'd have to like concentrate like effort like how much exactly effort is this guy putting versus that guy it'll have to be in the same training program we'd have to biopsy them all pre-imposed take blood marks god damn you got a lot of job jobs to do there's a lot of work that's why i'm so busy and there's creativity involved in it too because you have to kind of

like manipulate things and figure stuff out and contemplate and well that's why I'm so busy and there's creativity involved in it too because you have to kind of like manipulate things and figure stuff out and Contemplate and well, that's why I'm the director or the co-director and I am the run my own lab And I've got fantastic postdocs and students that are actually the operators that execute But it seems like everything is constantly evolving and shifting and changing and it's like well, I find myself honestly spending more time Being in the middle of saying like let's stop all the fighting between things and let's spend time saying, well, what was good about this and what was bad about this? Now, when it comes to ice, what about an injury? Like, what if somebody twists their ankle or something like that? Do you believe in icing it right away?

I have to defer. That's not my area. I get it. Okay. But just to finish the example. So post-lifting session, maybe maybe not great but maybe if you wait six hours or do it the next day and when we're talking about icing we're talking about ice baths is that what you're talking about or are you talking about like a cryo chamber we don't

have a tremendous amount of crowd chamber research so i'll have to say well actually i should say this with everything like this is as we know it now right but as i started the show with like if i'm wrong in a year i'm gonna say like say like, actually all that was wrong. Yeah. This is part of it. So what I've read about cryo chambers is the, the big thing is the, um, anti-inflammatory markers in the blood or the reduction of inflammatory markers in the blood, um, improvements in cytokines, cold shock proteins, things along those lines that those would be beneficial. But if but if if you're saying that you got to be careful beneficial okay so beneficial for some things but they're always going to come out of compromise is something else okay so maybe not beneficial for a power lifter but maybe beneficial

for an endurance athlete does that make sense yes but i'm gonna i'm gonna make it worse oh no what so you have physiology which is what i do right and this is what science is we biopsy we took blood we measure one mark But that doesn't take into context anything else in their life, right? So for example If you get a lift in and you're like oh man my elbow always things up on me after I lift and I but I got a Competition in eight weeks or a show in eight weeks This would be like a powerlifting competition or a bodybuilding competition And if you get in the ice that takes that pain away for whatever reason physiologically or an aghlesic or anything

And that allows you to train more Well then we can't say that that was bad for you right or if you were like some of my fighters who they're like they feel More accomplished when they do it they feel like they've done some work, so they feel less anxiety because they got in work Well then now we're playing a game here Yeah, physiology said that. When would people feel more accomplished when they got in the exercise or the ice bath? In this example the ice bath, but it would be true of anything Right, so setting them up for a psychological win. Oh, that's fascinating So you factor that in? You have to like we're dealing with human beings, right? Right, but it might not even be real. Totally, but real is

But real is perceptive right right yeah i guess so for sure i mean confidence is a giant factor absolutely with combat athletes and there's some preliminary evidence that suggests perhaps an ice bath i think specifically post exercise improved mitochondrial biogenesis yeah so now you say like well it's bad or good post exercise well i'm like well what's the goal of the training. So now you say like, well, it's bad or good post-exercise. Well, I'm like, well, what's the goal of the training session? Now, when you say increased mitochondrial biogenesis, is that within a certain time period post-exercise or is that just period? Well, it would be when they took the biopsy or the blood marker. Right. But I'm saying like within an hour after exercise,

within five hours. Yes. Yeah. So this one I believe was immediately post-exercise. Oh, and then increased. So like finish and get it back. Yeah. Huh. Whoa. So now you got a conundrum. But this is physiology.

Right. It's crazy. This is why I get so fucking irritated when people say like, no, this is the thing. And then they pull up flags about like, this is what we do or what we don't do. Because I stand in the middle going like, you're going to be a terrible coach. Because you're going to be in a situation where you're going to need to violate those rules right how That's just complicated. It is. I mean, this is why we're eternally wrong

Do you find that that's the case of diet as well? Like I am a big proponent of Variable diets and I think that there's a lot of biodiversity and beep Well, obviously there is where people are allergic to certain types of type of foods, you know But I just think this one-size-fits-all approach to diet seems the more I study diet the more it seems crazy So I would ask you this. What do you think about if I came to you and said I'm gonna do one workout style the rest of my life Everyone would be like that's that's stupid. Well, if you want to be a yogi, I'd going to do one workout style the rest of my life, everyone would be like, that's stupid. Well, if you want to be a yogi, I'd say that's the way to go. Oh, right.

But most of us would say, oh. Yeah, no. Well, also, I just don't think it's fun. But why do we, so why is that acceptable to do that with nutrition then? Yeah. Why is it I have to be ketogenic and this is what I do the rest of my life? Or I have to be paleo or I have to be anything else? Why?

In fact, when you said variability, I assume you mean having a wide variety of foods in your daily. Yeah, I think also a wide variety of foods in your daily life, but also I think what works for you might not work for Jamie or might not work for me. Yeah. I think that's the bio-variability. But we're going to go inception on that one because you ready? We're going to go another level. Okay.

That is absolutely true. And most people recognize that. But what we don't appreciate is the fact that there's not one diet that works best for you. Right. So there might be one diet that works best for me from powerlifting, but it might be different from running hills. Or it might be the exact same. Oh, what the fuck, bro?

Yes, it is i mean what you're highlighting is a real issue and it's also one of the reasons why there's a lot of what i would call confidence men out there and i don't use that in a good term okay i mean yeah i mean confidence men like con men because there's there's a lot of people out there that still tell you like this is is my diet. This is the way to go. You got to follow my way. And, you know, and they almost always mock other diets, which is, yeah. How helpful is that? Not good. No, it doesn't help anything. It's a big issue in the MMA community. I see a lot of these guys popping up where they're trying to make a name for themselves. It seems super common that someone wants to diminish the other people out there doing different things and like, this is our way and this is the only way, this is the right

way. And that's a straight ego shot. Well, also, I think what they're playing to is that fighters in particular want someone to come along and go, Andy, I got the fucking solution. Okay? You come to me. This is Joe's fucking house of power. We're going to get this shit right.

We know what we're doing. We got a team of experts. Dude, he's got a team. Joe's got a team. Yeah. And then you go, I'm with the team. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I signed up with Joe's team.

And you really start believing, like, okay, this is going to work. Do you think physiology is that precious? It's pretty precious. Not like that. It doesn't care. What do you mean? In terms of like, oh, it has to be lined up perfect and there's one magical combination of everything. Oh, no, I don't think so.

But I think for some people, clearly, like, some diets fit better. Like, I've had a bunch of friends that went plant-based and maybe not even vegan, but the majority of their food is plant-based and they just feel better. Like I've had a bunch of friends that went plant-based and, uh, not maybe not even vegan, but the majority of their food is plant-based and they just feel better. Their body just works better. I would say the vast majority of us would. Yeah. And then I know, but I know a lot of other people that went fat based and they feel better too. I mean like a lot of, a lot of coconut oil, a lot of avocados. That seems to me especially true with people that are in intense exercise. And I don't know why that is, but it seems like a lot of dudes that I know that lift a lot of weights or that are involved in jujitsu or wrestling or anything where there's a lot of

explosion, it seems to me like a lot of fats and fish oils and things along those lines, when they add those to their diets, fish oil in particular seems to have a big effect on grapplers. It seems to help them with joint issues and a lot of pain and maybe inflammation. Yeah, it could. I would say that most people are going to far better on a more traditional carbohydrate diet that are in the more explosive power strength stuff, especially at the volumes that MMA fighters are on. in the more explosive power strength stuff,

especially at the volumes that MMA fighters are on. Because of the amount of output they're doing, like the amount of the glucose requirements of the muscles. Exactly. And you have to be careful because it's the exact same principle. Either you're adapting or you're optimizing. And if you're optimizing all the time, then you're not adapting and vice versa. So if you push yourself to one end of the spectrum, you're going to probably compromise the metabolic ability

to go back to the other side of the spectrum. Spectrum meaning what? Like when you're defining it? In any way, but in this particular case, I mean, so say, for example, you get very good at metabolizing fat as a fuel. That may come with the consequences then of being able to use carbohydrates as a fuel. So if you're in a sport that requires that,

that's potentially problematic. What sport would require you to use carbohydrates versus ketones? Anything that's anaerobic. So almost by definition, so anything that's maximal intensity, difficulty is going to be heavily carbohydrate. Man, I wish I had got you in here with Dom D'Agostino. Oh, you just had him on, right? Yeah. And he's all fat based.. I mean, he's 100% keto, and he believes that ketogenic diets have a host of benefits and that the human body just

functions better on them. Well, so here's a good example. I mean, I don't know Dom, and I wouldn't say anything about him without him being right here. It's not fair. But everything I've seen of him has been fantastic. I'm in very much support of the vast majority of what I've heard him say. But his main lens is being focused on cancer prevention, epilepsy, these things. But if you look at some of the research, and I'm not an oncologist, so I'm going to speak a bit out of turn here. But there are now actually identification of several cancers that thrive on fats rather than carbohydrates. Really? Yeah.

I have not seen this because he was talking about a host of different cancers that thrive on sugars and you stop them dead in their tracks by going on a fat-based diet. And I'm sure he's fully right. I'm sure he's totally right on that. I did read something about a type of brain cancer, though, that does not feed on sugar. Right. Yeah. So, again, it would be like, well, good for cancer?

Well, what kind of cancer? Right. Oh, for probably maybe 80% of them, he's right. Maybe 90%. I don't know what the number is. It could be environmentally caused cancer. Who knows? Right.

But the vast majority of high-intensity exercise is powered by carbohydrate for most of us. Now, why would it be carbohydrate versus ketones? It's more efficient and it's faster. Man, see, I wish I had you in here with him. I think he would disagree with you. Well, there's not really... I mean, I've got to be careful how I say this. When you say it's faster and it works better, like...

Well, you have carbohydrate directly in the muscle cell. That's where it's stored, is muscle glycogen. Okay. And so it is an immediate fuel source. And how does ketones work then? Those are systemic. Those are coming from the entire circulation. So when you use carbohydrate for fuel, you're using the carbohydrate in the muscle that is exercising.

So if you're doing bicep curls, you're burning glycogen from the bicep fiber, not even the muscle, but the individual fiber that's contracting. And how would that be more beneficial than systemic? So it's faster. I'm right there contracting. I don't have to move it throughout my bloodstream. When I use fat as a fuel source, it has to be,

has to be go through lipolysis, which means it's, say it's stored fat in your entire body. So people right now listening to this podcast go, I don't know who the fuck to believe, man.

It's not a belief. You got a dude on Monday who says one thing. You got a dude on Wednesday who says another thing. Yeah. So that's, I guess that's what I would say

my biggest message is. It's not like a right or wrong thing. That's the wrong question entirely is who's right or wrong. Do you have any athletes who are on a fat based diet? Who? Totally. Uh, probably those ones. I shouldn't say that.

There's been specific athletes. No, they're just like, Hey, don't talk about my diet stuff. Really? They say that? Yeah.

Some do. Okay. The vast majority don't get, but Helen did. I heard about Helen. We go through periods of that with her for sure. For a lot of reasons. Oh, really? They say that? Yeah, some do. Okay. The vast majority don't care, but Helen did. I brought up Helen. We go through periods of that with her for sure. For a lot of reasons, it's very successful with her. Periods of that, but not when she's competing?

Even during training. But not when she's competing? Yeah. Not like on competition day, no. Yes. But sometimes the week of. So on competition day, no, because you feel like the glucose-based diets are more efficient in terms of actual

physical performance well most specifically for rehydration purposes too okay so all right because she's dehydrating heavily and if you don't consume carbohydrates in the rehydration process you're gonna have a real problem okay that makes a lot of sense yeah so we don't go there but we'll do it even maybe like five days out or the working of or something um But we have to be careful there. And this is one, again, this is no, I'm not bad-mouthing Dom at all. Okay, no worries. Like nothing. But he's not dealing with somebody who's generally hypocaloric. Right.

So when we're going through an athlete who's six weeks of coming down in calories, and if we start cutting out carbohydrates. We actually did address that. He was saying that when you're talking about ketogenic states in particular, when you're talking about most people during a regular life, 50 grams carbohydrates would keep you in a ketogenic state. But when you're talking about some pro athletes, powerlifters, you're in the hundreds, 100, 250, and you're still ketogenic because your body has much more requirements. So like I told you, he's a smart guy.

I'm generally on board with what he's saying. He's a scientist just like you. But the problem is micronutrient quality. So if an athlete's coming down in calories, and especially if those calories are coming from carbohydrate, and carbohydrates are their main source of carbohydrates are plants. So if we've compromised that and they're really low in calories, then they go down to nutrients and biochemicals and that's a real problem. So we have to be very careful with getting them into keto

if it comes with a compromising of vegetables. Of nutrition, right. What about like cold pressed juices or anything like that? That's exactly what we do. Actually, a lot of the times we did that specifically. In fact, that almost single-handedly saved Rio for her. Oh, interesting. It was a real problem.

She had a real physiological crash. That just sucks to think that at the highest level of amateur competition, they have poor food. Yeah. Well, we had to do, like, especially because she was basically broke, we had to, like, go out with a real struggle to find cold press things we could get to her. Because she was on like 40 ounces a day of that for a while wow and it's you know it's funny we did that and that's i don't know you could do the math but 200 grams of carbs or something and the second we did that her weight just started falling really oh yeah interesting so we added 200 grams of carbs and

boom weight just flew what do we attribute that to a combination of physiological and psychological factors psychological she felt better so it caused her weight to drop yeah she was stressed out she was freaked out the way and that's the cortisol level keeps your weight higher absolutely oh interesting so she was panicked and she was freaked out and she was stressed because she didn't feel good and she's like i'm not losing any weight and once well one part of it was we gave her a system that she believed in okay and so she like oh okay we can do this oh now i also physiologically pump some nutrients into you so i don't know like honestly i don't know what part of it was it could have been all psychological it could have been all physiological i don't know but what we know is it worked right and we gave her a bunch of nutrients and we're like 40 ounces a day or up

to 60 ounces a day of fresh pressed vegetable juice and just like clockwork every day. You know, this is such a complicated subject and it's so nuanced and there's so many different variables that I feel like you have to be a scientist to really truly understand this. I mean, yes and no. this I mean that's a no it's one of the problems with the bro science people the people that do not have the real education in this stuff that are out there to you know coaching athletes and teach them what to do and what not to do it's like yeah you don't really know what you're talking about and that becomes a real problem you have to get care like it's funny because I don't know don't don't like I said but he's example I've never heard him plant a flag and be unmovable movable on an idea and it's funny because those of us that do this for a living yeah rarely do

we do that right it's the other dicks that do it i think you're right it's like everyone else is like what do you mean i get this one on fiber type more than anything in the planet fiber type that's what i do for a living right like i could tell you more about that than vast almost anyone on the planet and then yet i'll still have people who like i read this guy's instagram post bro you're wrong like i've hunted i've biopsied hundreds of people i've isolated tens of thousands of fibers and ran them under lasers and studied them and you're gonna tell me because you read one instagram post or one review from two years look what the well people love doing that though oh it drives me nuts and they love it because of that reason i know they love to call bullshit on you. I don't respond, so it doesn't work. Ah, but it still gets you.

Now they know. Yeah, good luck. Now they know, Andy. they can't because I bombed them with YouTube videos showing them,

walking them through the science and it's like, all right. Yeah, but they don't read that or watch that. They're like, blah,

blah, blah. Dude, you're wrong. I saw an Instagram post. I had somebody on something a few weeks ago, some Instagram or something

was like going through, she was being super respectful, so I didn't mind helping. But I was like, okay, we're done here because I already told you about my three-hour video on this. And you didn't watch it. Right. Fuck off. Bingo.

But you know, the three-hour videos are hard, man. I don't care. And by the way, a three-hour video is a goddamn gift from God. Because if you stop and think about how much schooling you would have to go through to get the information that's in that three-hour video, it would take a decade. It took my career. And you could boil it down to three hours and people are like, man, not interested. But I went to an Instagram page. Exactly. And this guy had some shit that said, you're an asshole.

Well, I did a five-minute video. That's videos why the first one was like a five-minute video And I just kept getting so much like Baba Bye, yep, you didn't do this and I'm like you think really you think I missed that you think I didn't read that one And I was like fuck this like here we go. Here's the whole shibami and there you go Just there's the link. That's it. I'm done and threw it all up there and I still get the They don't change they don't change when you like, oh my God, here we go again. Now, so if someone has like a lot of fast twitch muscle fiber, like let's see, like Mike Tyson in his prime as an example. It's like a ball of fast twitch. Could you turn a guy like Mike Tyson into like an ultra marathon runner?

No. I mean, he could maybe complete one. Right. For sure. But he wouldn't be elite. Okay. So genetically he's elite at fighting. it's just Billy okay so genetically he's elite at fighting he's just an explosive individual but making him like you know

filling up like David Goggins type character no I mean we have so the the easiest way to understand this is plasticity your ability to change your adaptability mm-hmm is far higher than what people understand. And in fact, there's almost a direct link between the increase in technology and the increase in our thoughts of what changed and how much they changed. Oh, so our ability to measure it. Bingo. Okay. So the reason why we didn't think fiber type changed 20 years ago is because we didn't have the technology to actually have the fidelity to measure all the ones that we were missing.

And is there also probably a psychological factor in there as well from the people that are measuring it? It's probably easier to say that it doesn't change than to say that it does. I don't know that. It was just more of like that was the evidence. Yeah, right. So it's confirmation bias. The first 10 studies had not shown it,

so therefore you're not looking for it really hard. Okay. Got it. Move on. Because otherwise you'd be chasing your own tail forever on that. Well, I can tell you right now, like it's hard to post, to get things into, into publication when they completely challenge an entire, entire thought. Can you give me an example? So for example, if, uh, if you were the first one to try to publish a study that fiber types changed as response to exercise training

and 20 years of research suggested otherwise, you'd have a very hard time getting through review they would hammer you for every little thing that like wow did you do this and did you do this and and because you're going to be very skeptical and right that's a good reason yes that that's how it should be that's how it should be right uh extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence right yeah so i have no beef with that. What the problem is, when the other people who aren't scientists and don't pay attention, like if you don't know it like I do, then you need to... You can talk about it. That's fine.

I talk about stuff I'm not an expert about all the time. But you need to be careful. When someone else walks in the room and goes like, well, I do this for a living, then you don't just concede the point, but you need to be a little more open with listening and going, oh, really? Right. Didn't know that. Hmm. Yeah, that's interesting.

Can you think of anything that has changed other than the fiber types that's changed the way people look at things recently because of technology? Yeah, I mean, that's a good example. Hyperplasia is probably the biggest one. And what is that? So when your muscle gets bigger, the diameter of each individual muscle fiber gets larger. So it just thickens, right? Well, hyperplasia is a concept that you actually add more muscle fibers total. So you add cells to the entire muscle.

And for decades, basically, you say that doesn't actually exist in humans. muscle. And for decades, basically, you say that doesn't actually exist in humans. And now as we're improving our fidelity of our measurement techniques, it looks like it happens a lot. We know what happens in other mammals. How it happens in humans, when it does, is going to be very difficult and probably impossible to ever show. But we have more and more evidence because we know the mechanisms now behind the cell growth. So once we see the physiology and the mechanics behind it, and the molecules and the gene expression, and then we say, okay, it lines up with A, B, C, D, and E, we just can't show it with F because of technology. Now we need to really rethink our

position here. And that's probably the biggest one. Now, when you're dealing with athletes, and especially athletes that are trying to make weight like a fighter, and do you ever tell them, like, say, like a Jake Ellenberger who's a pretty thick guy, gets down to 170 pounds, and you got him exercising and doing all these things and you do a body composition of them. Do you ever tell them, like, you got to lose some muscle? Like, do you ever say that? Like, you're 205 pounds, getting down to 170 is really going to kind of fuck you up? We've done that a little bit in the past.

People have come and said, hey, will you test me and tell me if you think I can go down to 55 or 85 or something. My general approach is you're better off staying or going up. It's almost always better if they're that close. To stay at weight class or go up at weight class. I could not agree more. And you've seen the performances of fighters when they do go up. They look so much better.

Jorge Masvidal is a perfect example. Oh, sure, yeah. Fought at 55 forever, fought at 170. He's one of the best in the world now. Yeah. Donald Cerrone, another good example.

There's been a ton of fighters that move up and look so much better because their body, like Calvin gastelum he's another great example yeah he's a he's a diet one though for the most part like he gets that dialed he should be able to make 70 no problem but but god damn he looks good at 85 he looks good everywhere he's a tank he's awesome but when you see a guy like him and you know he

got outpowered by a guy like chris weidman what's the line in the sand you draw where you say okay calvin let's put on some muscle and some strength so that you can deal with the Yoel Romeros of the world, or let's lean you out and get you off the tacos so you can fight guys that you're supposed to be fighting, right? Yeah, man, that's an internally question that, if they really buy into what I say say it's it's a needed conversation but a lot of them won't which is fine like uh so i don't i don't think you have a good answer there

man like it's tough he's a classic example though like there's this almost i mean i gotta be careful i don't know his camp like i've met him a handful of times but we've never been in my lab i don't know like how bad his stuff is or or how like if he's got maybe medical problems that no one knows about or if he has other issues that are going on that make it hard. So that happens from time to time. Could just be ice cream. Could just be ice cream, man. There's a lot of guys that are super talented that just love to eat, you know?

Man, it's crazy. Like a lot of those folks will go to food for their... Comfort. For that and for their control. Like that's what they can control. Yeah. That makes sense, especially in such a crazy world of the world of competition and combat sports. Especially in this sport where like winning and losing is so finite.

And when you get to the top, like nobody, well, rarely people win more than they lose. Right. Like it's just so hard. So hard. And there's so many with, you know, like in NFL and Major League Baseball and soccer, there's a clear pecking order. You beat this person, then you beat this team, then you beat this team, then you get to play for the championship. Or in MMAfl and major league baseball and soccer there's a clear pecking order you beat this person then you beat this team then you beat this team then you get to play for the championship or an mma it's not like that well it's definitely not anymore you know in the ufc it's real weird like especially the 185 pound division like good fucking luck oh you know

everybody's waiting in line to fight michael bisping he's probably gonna fight george st pierre and everybody people like luke rock Rockhold all these other guys like what the fuck when he beat Rockhold that's my single favorite MMA moment in history really I'm not like a obnoxious Bisping fan or anything but that just was a culmination of a dude who put in so much time and he did

everything to make it a business he did everything and then he not only steps in and fights just a killer in Rockhold who i thought has been underrated his whole career like he's insanely good but he'd already got he'd already lost to him convincingly like you know that good sub in the first round yeah and older guys don't come back and beat younger guys than rematches ever right especially on short notice on short notice when he had a whole camp and has every reason to not have confidence,

and like 90% or more fighters would have just been like, no, I'm out. Like, no way. He takes the fight. Like, no one would take that fight because if you lose twice to the champion, you're done. Right. Because you're not going to get third. Just every risk possible, and he just nails it. Like, just unbelievable.

Clips him and knocks him out. Yeah. Amazing. Like, I loved Rockhold, but that was just incredible. It really was crazy, And you could really tell that Rockhold just thought he was going to win that fight no matter what. Right. But this is a done deal. Totally underestimated him.

But he's being so scrappy. Like, he's one of the most mentally tough guys in the sport. Yeah. Because he doesn't have, like, some freakish Yoel Romero athleticism or anything. He's just, it's just hard work. He's not particularly fast. No. He's not, like. He's not particularly fast. He's not super mobile.

He's very skilled. And he's got a lot of physical issues, too. You can't even see out of one eye. He's had a bunch of issues with joints and discs. He doesn't move well anymore. And he's not big for the division or anything. He's still fucking people up. Well, he's pretty big for 185. Well, not like amazing.

He's not like towering over Weidman or Rockhold. No. He's not beating those guys. Weidman or Rockhold. No. He's not beating those guys. Those guys are giant. Yeah, those guys are giant. And he doesn't have some amazing skill set either way. He can fall back on a world championship in wrestling to get through. He just is like pretty good at everything.

Yep. Yeah. And still just finds a way to get him. He's a guy I would love to biopsy and figure out like how much slow twitch and fast twitch does he have. 34 beats per minute wrestling heart rate. Yeah, he's fit. Yeah. He's super fit yeah he's a

big factor it's a big factor and then he could push a tremendous pace and then keep it going like one of my favorite fights of uh michael's was uh when he beat kung lee oh yeah because he's overwhelmed him and just you see kung starting to get tired and bisping just poured it on yeah just gave him a beating and that was sort of uh in a lot of ways, like a shift towards, I mean, he was always a world-class fighter. There was a shift towards like the upper end of the division. It was a big moment for his career, too, because if he lost that, that's probably about night-night for him in terms of.

Yeah, he could say that, but he doesn't give a fuck. He got knocked out by Vitor, comes right back, you know. Got knocked out by Henderson, comes right back. He's one of the guys, I've been around him a bit. He's hilarious, but he's one of the guys where, again, like, he doesn't, you're just not going to shake him like that. No. Not at all.

He's undeniably tough. Yeah. And he's undeniably, like, when he says, like, oh, I'll fight that dude, he legit. Oh, yeah. He's there. Yeah. And you can say, like, oh, he's scared of Romero.

No, he's not. Like, he's not scared of any of these dudes. No. He's trying to cash in when he should. Well, I think the Bisping-GSP fight is a fascinating fight. It's fascinating. First of all, GSP's never fought at 85. He comes back.

He fights for a world title. It makes it compelling. Yeah. I just wonder, and this is unfortunate, but I wonder how many of these young, new fans, I would like to say, like, post-Ronda Rousey fans, how many of them even know who the fuck GSB is? Yeah. I think there's a lot of— My wife definitely does.

Well, she's a fan. Yeah. But I mean, I wonder how many of the new ones, the people coming up, actually know who he is. I mean, it's been a long time. Yeah. A couple years, right? More than that. Yeah. And when did he lose to Johnny Hendricks? I want to say it's been a long time yeah you know a couple years right more than that yeah when did he lose to johnny hendrix i want to say it's three years ago at least at least

yeah well beat johnny hendrix yeah i i i'm not i'm not a big believer in that decision i feel like at most that was a draw i felt like hricks got the most of it. My buddy Troy's brother had 50K on Hendricks on that fight. Did he? Yeah, and afterwards he's like, here we go. Like, we're done. That Hendricks thing was interesting because Hendricks is one of those guys that like, you go like, what happened to that guy? Yeah.

You know, like what? A lot of speculation on that where you can all read between the lines there. Well, that's the problem, right? There's the USADA speculation. There's the motivation speculation. There's a lot of speculation. You also have that thing, too, with guys like that that put in that many years of wrestling and you start competing that hard that young.

Where's that at? There's a time frame that you just run out of. Yeah, people believe there's a nine- that he's grown out of. Yeah, there's a, like, people believe there's a nine-year window as a world-class fighter. I've heard that before. It depends on the sport,

but yeah, that's probably fair. As a fighter. And that, as a fighter, like, when you get to MMA in particular, guys have, like, nine years to compete at a world-class level, and then the wheels just fall off.

Yeah, get in, get your money, get out. Yeah, if you can. If you can. Yeah, that's why at 38, I think Bisping's 38, that GSP fight's the right move. Oh, for 100 reasons. It's the right move anyway.

And what does Bisping typically do well with, like, the fighters? He handles wrestlers decently well. He's a very good defensive wrestler. Yes. His style's gonna be fantastic. He doesn't get tired, which is what GSP relied on a lot. His stamina. His conditioning was great. But that stamina, tired, which is what GSB relied on a lot. His stamina. Conditioning was great.

But that stamina, like, is dependent upon activity. Like, even if you're just physically fit but you haven't fought in a long time, I don't necessarily know if it's applicable. Yeah. Well, it's also going to be different, too, with we'll see what he does weight-wise. Yeah. So what people don't understand about when you watch professional athletes, fighters in particular,

is a lot of what happens in that fatigue is either psychological or it's bad weight cut stuff. So now he doesn't have that, but if he's lugging around extra weight that he's not used to, potentially problematic, depending on how he does it. Now, he's got some smart people in his camp, so he's probably going to be fine. Yeah. But that's a real problem that he may or may not be ready for. Yeah, if he's lugging around extra weight. But he was always real problem that he may or may not be ready for. Yeah. If he's lugging around extra weight, but he was always walking around somewhere around 185, 190. He might just

decide to compete at that weight. That's what I mean. Like if he stays there, he's probably fine. But if someone gets in his head and tries to get him up to 202 or something and then come back down, like he's probably not going to feel normal there. Yeah. Which he's not going to run out of gas because of that. Like having more muscle doesn't make you fatigue more. It's the training that does it. Now, do you have fighters, uh, use cardio machines? Like do you have, do you have them use Versa climbers or treadmills or anything along those lines? I don't feel like those are super important, uh, differences in terms of, we're generally trying to get most of their physical activity from training. Like if you have an extra hour worth of training we could get in the week. You mean by martial arts training?

Right. Really? Yeah. Interesting. So, but having said that, if we want to do a small circuit or something that incorporates one of those things in there,

sure. But I'm never going to prescribe if they're not doing it, like, Hey, let's hop on and let's get an hour on the elliptical. Like that's never going to come out of my mouth. Hmm. Um,

that's not to say I would never use it. I'm not throwing anything out. I'm not pro or con, but that's traditionally not where I'm going to go because it's far easier for us to help them lose weight through food than it is adding on an extra hour. And that adding on of extra hour of activity can be real harmful for them muscularly. Right, but we're not necessarily just talking about losing weight. We're talking about increasing performance.

Do you believe in any of those machines or anything? I believe in or I don't believe in. I would go to it if I needed it. I don't feel like in camp it's a huge need with the exception of maybe like a recovery. So you want to do like, hey, let's go an easy 45 or something on the bike. But as like a 45 hard, with the exception of when you start moving to championship fights, I do think there's good cause for doing maybe once a week of saying like we do this with dirkin all the time like hey he loves to ride mountain bikes so go out on the mountain bike and go ride for when you're saying

dirt you mean pat commons yeah sorry it's okay for people not listening yeah i don't know but he that's because of it is because he loves that that's like his real mental release mountain biking yeah it's a great workout too right yeah it's fantastic it's he gets in the sun he gets away from people he gets to breathe and we're not counting things which can be a problem but if i had another athlete who's like i absolutely hate jogging like it's the worst thing i got knee problems hurts my back i'm never gonna ask them hey go jog an hour what do you do with them like what if you if someone has knee problems you want to get them to do cardio 45 minute uh something like that maybe in the pool uh a lot

of pool work can be really helpful if they have access if they can't um no one has ever not loved the airdyne or aerosol bikes like those are fantastic versaclimbers are great i got no problem with those things what is uh is there a one machine that is like your standby or go-to when it comes to like a cardio machine? Well, those would probably, those are the rower. The VersaClimber, the rower and the Airdyne? Yeah. Aerosault, any of those things, anything that allow them to move that minimizes, um, the amount of technical teaching you have to do. So that's most people people run horribly. This is like a real, real, real problem, especially wrestlers. If you ever watch a wrestler run, it's like you're a,

you're a, you're a knee pain, you're, you're a busted ankle waiting to happen. So I'm not going to throw that on them and then try to teach them a new movement skill. It's just not needed. There's a thousand ways we can get there. If they already run well and they have a running background and we could go there if they want. Some of them do like it. Okay, fine, we can get there. But if they don't run well, I mean technically well, if they're landing in bad positions or their feet are out everywhere

and they don't want to take time to go to a running coach like Brian McKenzie or something, then we're not going to add that. We're not going to add a new skill. I know a lot of Greg Jackson's work, a lot of his camp, they do these hill runs in Albuquerque. Have you seen that stuff? Yeah, going up a hill is a little different, though.

Yeah. Because generally the foot position of the hill is much easier to get to, and it's harder to run bad uphill than it is on flat ground, generally. So it is something you go to, but that's also probably something where you don't have as much teaching and you're at altitude. So that by itself is going to reduce how hard you work, which is going to reduce the stress on your joints and bones and ligaments.

Right. So that helps. So all that can be integrated where you reduce the likelihood of them getting a sore back or knees because you added some 45 minute running on it that didn't really have to happen. Well, hills seem to reduce that anyway because you're really almost like doing squats.

It's almost like doing a lunge or something like that because you're just kind of running and pushing your body up instead of like the pounding. The eccentric pounding is gone. Yeah. This is a very good, one of the most important things we stress during fight camp is you want to minimize the eccentric contractions because that leads to more soreness and if you got really sore legs and you got to go to move with Thai practice and somebody jacks you in the leg like that's a problem and so

you have to be able to get work in without getting extremely sore so hills are a great example aerodyne is like the same thing right it's pushing the whole time it's not landing and impact swimming rowing all these versaclimber. That's why they're so good or one of the reasons. You can do a lot of work. Is aerodyne or a versaclimber, are those things limited in the fact that like the movement is like very specific in terms of doing that versus like maybe like a kettlebell cardio workout? Yep. That's why you need to do a combination.

Okay. So it's a bunch of different stuff. Yep. That's why you need to do a combination. Okay. So it's a bunch of different stuff. Just like we talked with nutrition. It's variability that gets, this is what we're looking for. Especially when the goal is not that modality. So for example, if you're competing in a kettlebell swinging competition, you should be focusing on that. Right. But when you're using that for another modality that doesn't transfer over, then you need to have a wide range of stresses. And how do you know like what to tell

them to do though? Well, so that's the thing is I don't, I don't think that stress is necessary. Like who cares? What do you mean? So the stress of worrying about which one to do is not important. You shouldn't focus on being like, ah, should we pick first a climber today? Or should we, ah, it should be what's the training outcome we're looking for. Right. Oh, we're trying to improve your ability to repeat maximal sustained 15-second intervals with short rest and all at the same time keeping your breathing mechanics. Okay. That's the goal.

Now, what modality do we want to use today to introduce that insult? And so you think the good move would be to introduce a bunch of different things, like one day, yeah, one day do the kettlebell cardio workout. Another day do the aerosol. Is that aerosol bike? Aerosol, aerodyne. Aerosol, aerodyne. Yeah, there's a bunch. Another day do a verse climber.

As a general quick statement, yeah, absolutely. But I would say the smarter approach would be to step back and say well wait a minute what's the goal of that workout what's the goal of today this week this camp this fight that's where you then that guides you to make that exercise choice right so don't like you should never choose the exercise because you love the exercise that's a stupid reason you're getting angry yeah it really irritates me. Now, do you measure resting heart rates, body fat, all that jazz? Not really. No?

No. Some folks do it. It's not super important for me. You don't feel like it's important in terms of, like, finding out whether or not a fighter's overtrained? Oh, that's a little bit different question. So you can use things like HRV to track those things. What's that? Heart rate variability.

So it'll effectively think of it like a heart rate monitor, but it's going to look at how, so your heart doesn't just go beat, beat, beat, right? It has variability. It's beat, beat, beat, beat, beat, beat, beat. Well, that actually has some relationship with your autonomic nervous system. So if it's really variable, you're in a good spot.

If you lose your variability and it becomes beat, beat, beat, beat, beat, you're actually potentially being overtrained. So your nervous system is a little bit shot there. So you can use those, and Joel Jameson, again, has done a ton of this work. And you can look at that to have an idea of whether or not they're overtrained. So you can use that. I don't particularly use those things for a couple of reasons. Number one, I know what's going to happen for the most part over the six weeks, like as camp's going on.

It's based on performance, the coach, the athlete, when I've been around them. We plan it out so that this is the volume this week, this is the volume this week, this is the volume this week, so that we don't get ourselves in those situations. And how do you know how to plan the volume out? Like, say if you've got a guy like, you know, fill in the blank, Chris Weidman comes to you, and he wants to train with you, and he's preparing for a five-round championship fight. How do you know how much work to give him? Like, how do you schedule that?

So I would never have the arrogance to step in and go, okay, this is the volume you're at, Chris. I've never met you. Great to meet you, but here's your volume. Right. Like, that'd be stupid. Would you have him come and do a test workout for you? No. I would have a conversation with as many of his coaches.

And honestly, the first time I work with them for something like volume, I generally would just shut up and watch. And go, okay, like, here's what you're going to tell me you did. So write on a piece of paper what you did for the camp. What's your plan for the camp? What have you done in the past? Then I look and we can assess some volume. And then I can generally tell, okay, this is normal for a person of your caliber, of your age and your experience, or like you're way over what's normal. But I don't know how that lands on you. And then I watch. And as we go along and it's conversations continually and going, this is happening. your other coach told me this you're telling me this is going on blood work came back here don't know if we're in the right spot here and then the second or third

camp around then i can have a feel and i can go back at the previous notes and go well this is 10 higher this you've barred three more times here i think and then oh it always almost always matches up with yeah i'm feeling terrible etc etc right what are your thoughts on like plyometrics box jumps things along those lines yeah box jumps are generally misused so people don't understand especially in in crossfit or in mma or in wrestling people use crossfit for conditioning for the most part which is fine but they don't get the the biggest benefit of it, which is strength, speed, power, training the reactive part of the system, training muscle spindles. So absolutely fine as a modality.

But they don't get that out. How do they not get that? So, for example, someone does a box jump. They're like, okay, box jumps, I want to get better power in my legs. So they'll go and do like, all right, let's spar for five rounds, and then I'll go do 100 box jumps as fast as I can. You're not getting any faster like that. You're just getting more tired.

That will not improve your power at all. It won't? No, because you're not jumping fast. You're actually jumping at a very sub-max speed the whole time, because you're already fatigued. Oh, I see what you're saying. So if you want to use those for power,

now if you're using it for conditioning, fine. No problem. But if you're using it for the sake of improving your foot speed or your power or your strength or your explosiveness. You should be well rested. Yes. Yes. One, two, three reps, take a break, etc. What do you think of like that strong first protocol do you know the pavel tatsulin idea that you know he he feels that

strength is it's along the same sort of lines what you're talking about the strength is essentially a skill oh absolutely you should not be doing things to failure that the best way to do it in his estimation is to do more sets with more more break in between them that is that's like very strength 101 like you'd have a hard time for a true strength person disagreeing with a lot of that it's hard to get stronger when you're tired so going to failure is not as now i've talked to a bunch of people about this that have started doing this recently like within the last year or two, and they've all experienced great results. And that the idea being that you used to go to failure and then you'd be wrecked for like three or four days. Instead of that, like say if you could do 10 reps or something, you do five and then

you take a big rest and then you do five again and you take a big rest. And then you wind up, instead of doing 15 reps, you wind up doing like 30 over the course of an hour and a half, and then you're fine the next day. Well, I mean, you had Louie on, like Louie Simmons, right? Yes. This is classic. What a fucking maniac that guy is.

He was awesome. I love that guy. I always tell my kids, my students to Google him. Yeah. Because you're not going to get bored. Oh, listen to my podcast with him. It's one of the most entertaining things I've ever heard in my life. He's such a character the basic idea

Um, well, we'll have to back up for a quick second depends on the goal right strength if goal pure strength is the goal Failure also has to be defined. So what do you mean by failure now my failing because of fatigue, right? Then he's totally right right in my failing though because they're too heavy Well, you do want to go to that failure for strength. How so, though? So you need to, at some point, pick up something that you can't pick up or really close to can't pick up to get stronger. Really close to it. Like you can do, but you can't do a second one. Right. So put it down.

Or maybe you could do two, but you couldn't do three or something like that. The very textbook answer is anything below five repetitions-ish is going to be good for strength. Yeah. He believes anything more than five is bodybuilding that's what pavel says he that's the that's pretty dead on i mean he's not too wrong there and what like well a reason i brought louis up is is he's classic for saying first reps so if you did three sets of 10 right well you had three first repetitions right so you had three reps that you did after rest. But if you did 10 sets of three, now you had 10 first reps. Oh, interesting.

Right. So now you did the same total repetitions, but 10 of them were done after full rest, which means you're going to have more power and more force. That makes sense. That seems smarter. That's basically it. So you're better off doing 10 threes than three sense. That seems smarter. That's basically it. So you're better off doing 10 threes than three tens. For strength. For strength.

Or power or speed. And then taking a big break in between them is sort of counterintuitive to a lot of people. They feel like, oh, I don't want to be a pussy and then let myself get fully recovered. I want to push while I'm still high. Come on, bro. Come on, bro. We're going to go to failure. One more. One more.

And they'll help you up. Come on. Come on. Come on. bro. Come on, bro. We gotta go to failure. One more, one more. And they'll help you up. Come on, come on, come on. I see that all the time. Meatheads in the gym. And they think that's the way to go. And I'm like, man, I don't know. And they're gonna, well, they're gonna, it's the way to go if they want to get sore, if they want

to maybe improve muscle mass. People love to do that, though. They love to walk around sore. You know what's funny? Checked. This is like the number one reason I got into MMA was that. That question that question like right there people kept coming to me with this and i'm like you don't know basics of speed training or strength training and the mma guys were so wrong and then i that's how i got into this for the most part is people were like oh my god this is changing like everything i'm like well mma training is it's

weird it's very strange because mma training is, it's still in its infancy, right? It really didn't even exist until 1993. And then it didn't even really exist even then until like, I feel like Frank Shamrock was the first real professional MMA fighter. Because he was the first guy to figure out that you have to be an insane cardio. to figure out that you have to be an insane cardio, and he was the first guy to be able to strike and also be able to grapple, be able to fight off of his back and piece it all together. And the cardio was a huge factor. He was like when he beat Tito Ortiz, he was way smaller than Tito, but he beat him because

of cardio. But one of the things that I used to see early on that was so confusing to me because I came from a striking background was how many of these guys were willing to beat the fuck out of each other in the gym. And like that they were just going to war. But not even going to war with like good skills. Like going to war while they were learning. For the sake of war. Yeah.

I mean I'm watching them getting coached and they're beating the shit out of them. Like you guys are professionals like this isn't like this isn't like some idiots at the y like you guys are you're supposed to be pros yeah like you're gonna damage yourself the vast take years off of your career the vast majority of you know me working with athletes is doing these very very basic things like i'm not i'm absolutely not the guru who's like oh i know the the 18 point blood test and we're gonna get these the vast majority of what i do is go oh okay i see the problem here oh we need to do this basic thing right you haven't eaten a vegetable in a week got it like did you get that it's not as much anymore but i used to

really yeah we get a lot of that pro athlete that doesn't eat vegetables. You know what we get? Honestly, it's probably because assholes like you and they watch your show or something. I tell people to eat vegetables all the time. No, but they watch this and they're like, okay, and they'll come at me with a thousand really weird nutrition questions or something or really weird advanced training ones because they went to a seminar or something and I'm like, back the train up. Like you're sparring six times a week.

Ooh. Yeah. We've got a whole nother conversation. Like, oh, we don't do I'm like, back the train up. Like, you're sparring six times a week. We've got a whole other conversation. Like, oh, we don't do that? No, that's not normal. Really? No. Okay. Or you're doing that, or you're running 35 miles a week.

Got it. That's the vast majority of what I do is bring these guys back to life and go, like, let me help you sift through all this internet stuff that's really complicated, and let's take what's actually good and bad and dial in a very usable system. So you think people just get overwhelmed with options from the internet? Absolutely. Because too many people get on exposure, get on shows or platforms, and they try to make sure that they are known as the guy that knows something different. Right, right, right.

It's not very exciting if I come up here and tell you, yeah, Joe, that's pros and cons to everything. Great. Well, that's not fun. But it's good. I mean, I think what you're saying is very important for people to hear. Yeah. They get bogged down in the details way too much of things that really don't matter.

Your body's not that sensitive or insensitive enough where it can't convert something from something to something else. And if it needs it, it will do that for the most part. So there are some real small things at the end, but a lot of what we can do is just get you on a reasonable program that's actually possible for you to implement. And that doesn't drive you so crazy or is so difficult and so confusing for you that you get halfway into it, you abandon it, and then you want to start over. Well, you know, I always think about Dan Gable.

When Dan Gable was young, he pretty much outworked anybody. And he was just an unbelievable savage when it came to his training. And then that manifested itself in the competition. He was just like, the momentum behind him because of his ruthless training was so intense. But now he can't even walk. I mean, his hips are gone. His knees are gone. He's got artificial everything.

You know, he's just fucked up because of it. And some guys are willing to make that sacrifice. Yeah, but is that, here's the question. Is that sacrifice necessary? Like, can you be too tough versus smart in your training? It's impossible to say. Right. Because, like you said, here's where it gets so tricky is physiology versus psychology.

So if that gave him that extra mental confidence that he needed to perform better, well, then it's hard to say that it wasn't necessary. Yeah, like he was always talking about guys on steroids, that he liked competing against guys on steroids because he knew they were mentally weak and they would break. Right. So who the hell knows, right? and it would break right so who the hell knows right like you got you have all this conflicting stuff and you try to do this dance which is why again you need people you need a team to do this stuff and say okay this is what I think so people have a really hard time with physiological truth or scientific truth and implementation so a very easy one sugar right now like I don't know anyone in the world who advocates adding

sugar to your diet it's a good thing like no one's gonna say that right but what you tell somebody a scientific truth versus what the message you spread spread to either your athletes or a bunch of people that can be very very different because because of unintended applications or consequences so for example there's no physiological harm with sugar. It's not bad for you in any way. But, as a message to the general public, that's not the worst thing to say. And so most of the fighting that goes back and forth between any conversation like this is people saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, but the actual effect of it is good. Yeah, but the science is wrong.

And they're not conceding. They're actually talking past each other far more than they're talking to listen. Let me separate that. You don't think that sugar is bad for you? No, it can't be. It can't be. Unless implementation-wise. Process sugar.

No, no, no, no. What are you saying? So now we've- Okay. Sugar in your diet. Nope. Sugar- This is where it gets confusing.

Exactly. Because- You want to break down sugar? Yeah. Well, having sugar in your diet, like eating sugary foods and snacks, having an excess of sugar has dire health consequences. Totally. Correct? Absolutely.

But there's a key word you said there, which was excess. Excess. Excess. Okay. So like meaning a piece of fruit, like a nectarine, not bad for you at all. No. Of course not. It's good for you.

And plus fiber. Absolutely. Yeah. Not bad for you at all. No. Of course not. It's good for you. And plus fiber. Absolutely.

Yeah. But processed sugar, whether it's removed from that fiber and put into a Coca-Cola, that becomes an issue. Yeah. Because of concentration issue. Yeah. Because now you can consume it at a concentration that probably wouldn't happen normally. Right.

And quantities that would never happen normally. Bingo. So now you could have a person in the corner of left who that says like, no, you're an idiot. Look at the science. Sugar is not bad for you for a thousand reasons and they're technically right but when we have conversations to 350 million americans they don't want all that detail in between they want do it do i do it or do i not and so if i have to take a hard line and i go you

know what sugar is bad don't eat it it actually causes a generally good effect on people they go oh okay i didn't know this adding sugar to my stuff is not good don't do it. It actually causes a generally good effect on people. They go, oh, okay, I didn't know this. Adding sugar to my stuff is not good. Don't do it. Right. Which is a net good thing, although technically, individually, it's not true. I see what you're saying. So sugar in and of itself is not bad. Excess sugar and processed sugar and added sugar in mass quantities is bad. And that's what you're dealing with with the average American diet,

whether it's through breads or pastas or actually sugar and soda itself. Right, or sucrose or sucrose or any of those things and added to it. And so when people, like the poor souls go on the internet and they're trying to figure out like, wow, God, are carbs bad for me or not? Right. It's like, well, we're fighting over stuff that's not important and we're missing the message because people want real answers and you're not helping them Give it to them in a way. I don't care if it makes you look right on the internet

We need to come together and say oh, okay. Well, here's good. Here's bad about it. Here the pros and cons, etc Now here's the information for you folks and it doesn't matter whose book it is or who wrote it like that's not the important part Well, even having this conversation though is gonna be really confusing to a lot of people because you're talking about so many different variables And by your being intellectually honest about all this stuff and saying well, it's you know, there's no real good answer Yeah, you know and it's different for one person is for another person some some people might Get over really well on like macadamia nuts and almonds and get their protein from, you know, and other people,

they might actually have an allergy to those things. Yeah, and you know, trust me, try to be my students. I get irritated as shit when I do this to them. But it's probably a good thing. But when a fighter in particular is thinking about their career, they sort of exist in these six week

to eight week lifespans, like their whole life. Unfortunately. Yeah. Or fortunately, when it works out well, that they go through these ruthless training camps and to have any variability, to have any unknown, to have any... So this is... Yeah.

I mean, you bring up a good point. This is not the kind of conversation I would have with a fighter. Right. Not during, not especially 10 weeks out from a fight. Overload their brain with possibility. No. Right. No, no, no.

It is very clear. Like, what do you do? What do you like to do? What do you hate to do? Right. What have you done before? What's worked well, et cetera. Okay.

So I have an analogy called the cook, the baker, and the chef. I'll give you the very quick story of it. You can listen to the whole episode on my podcast if you want. What's the podcast called? The Body of Knowledge. Okay. So I like the- It's on iTunes, all that stuff?

Yeah, yeah, all that stuff, bodyknowledge.com. It's actually, not to talk about that too much, but it's only nine episodes. It's not like an on-running podcast. It's like Radiolab, Dan Carlin, but for physiology, strength and conditioning. So not to that extent, but you get the idea. I hear you. Yeah, okay. So I like to look at people as either, the easy one is either a baker or a cook, right?

So do you know what the difference between baking and cooking is? No. Cool. Most people don't. Baking is chemistry, basically, right? You can't like, oh, I'm a little tablespoon here, maybe a teaspoon, baking soda, baking powder, same thing. That does not work. You can't bake like that.

Right? You will not make anything. You would have a mush of crap in an oven. Baking is chemistry. You do this in this order and this, and then you add this, and you cannot do these in other orders. It's very specific, like roughly. Cooking is like, well, all right, what's left? I'll get some oil, get some hot kind of dices.

Yeah, throw some whatever that you give them mishmash, right? So people generally, I find, work well with nutrition information, either one of two approaches. So if I said, Joe, I'm going to do a nutrition program for you for the next six months, whatever you want. And I said, you can either do this one of two ways. We can work together every morning, weigh every single thing you eat on the scale, text it to me, I'll tell you exactly how many slices of avocado to have,

how many jalapenos, and I'd tell you exact weights and volumes for everything. Or we can maybe text once a day or once a week and we would just go over concepts and ideas. Here's what we're trying to get to, do what you want. Which would you like? Man, I don't know. What should I like? It's not a should it's a personal preference. Okay. So some people would cook just wants ideas, right? Give me the concepts like one or two things to work through. Cool. I don't, I get anxiety with all those rules,

all that information. Like I can't implement it. like it's too complicated, I don't have that much time, et cetera. I call those people cooks. Other people get anxiety, like my wife, Natasha, when I don't give her exact numbers. She's like, well, is it six grams? Is it eight almonds or is it nine almonds? Like, what is it? Right.

So giving people the information in the way that they absorb it is important. So if you talk to a baker, so chemistry, details, weighing, everything out, and I go, all right, here's what I want to do. A little bit of fat, a little bit of protein, some greens. That's not going to work for them. You have to give them a very, very specific system.

Half a cup of this, a tablespoon of that. Even if that system isn't perfect. What about a chef? So a chef is someone who knows the chemistry of baking, but has the years of experience of mixing it in different ways. Now you can go ahead and break those rules, right? Chefs break cooking rules all the time, baking rules. So a chef is like Anderson Silva. Well, a fighting. Yeah. Yeah. But a chef would be maybe where you're at in your nutrition where you go, you know what?

Like, I can do that. I could follow a very specific diet, but I know the concept and I know these rules. Let me experiment here. And you have room to maneuver. The problem is most people want to jump in and be chefs. People want to fight like Anderson Silva their first day and get overwhelmed. I see what you're saying. So get a detailed understanding about how your body functions under very specific protocols and then start fucking around with it.

Or the opposite. Start off with a cook approach to say, let me give you one or two concepts this week. I want you to eat one fresh green every day and I want you to make sure you have protein every time you eat. That's it. It's my only rule. Okay, next week we add a rule maybe. Or we add another concept. And as you get better and you get more confidence and you get more comfortable,

you can go, okay, well, how much protein exactly? Let's just try 100 grams. All right, well, let's try 150. And we've slowly pushed you. But generally being a baker, all those rules, weighing everything, generally that's not sustainable for most people. Hmm. Now, do you coach

them as far as their diet goes do you actually tell them what they should and shouldn't eat depends on if they're a cook or a baker so a cook i do not i tell them basic concepts right so i talk to them how what's going to be helpful for them they go what do you think i should do should i add more carbs or should i here's what i'm feeling so i'll go all right where we at like here's our diet yeah yeah let's add more carbs how should I, here's what I'm feeling. And I'll go, all right, where are we at? Like, here's our diet. Yeah, yeah, let's add more carbs. How should I do it? This or this?

This one. Do you generally tell people to avoid any specific foods or are there any things that interrupt training or get into the way? Outside of the obvious, no. No. I mean, the basics, candy, pizza. Right, right. Not really. Unless we have some very specific history with them that hey remember you

don't react well when this happens but generally i don't you know when you say like protein do you specify fish or chicken or meat if it's a cook uh-huh no no if it's a baker absolutely absolutely and whether it's important that i chose fish or chicken almost doesn't matter as much as telling them. That the fact that they, oh, he's got it dialed for me. Great. I got it. Right.

You have eight ounces of halibut. There it is. Bam. Right. Right. Because you'd be like the vast majority of the ones I work with are already pretty good with their nutrition. And it's really more concepts. Some of them just want the stress relief.

Tell them what to eat. And they want someone to come in. And they're like, do you know anyone that will come in and food prep, meal prep for me? And yeah, okay, we can do that. But some of them just want the stress relief, tell them what to eat. And they want someone to come in and, hey, do you know anyone that will come in and food prep, meal prep for me? And, yeah, okay, we can do that. But some of them like it. Some of it is their de-stress. Some of them like that control. So I try to help them.

Again, it's not about me. I don't care if my system worked. I don't have a system. My system is what do you want to do? How can I help you and your team? What can we do? That's the approach. Right.

Wow. God, that seems so, there's so many variables and it's so complex. Yeah. Which is why I get so irritated. You were teasing me earlier about getting all fired up about it. I can understand. But I appreciate this intellectual honesty about these variables and about how there is not one approach. Because, again, there's so many dickheads out there that are teaching their method in air

quotes. So here we go. Let's take those dickheads, right? If you're a baker landing on one of those systems is going to be fantastic for you. And you're going to five-star review them. You're going to tweet it out.

Everybody's like, this is great because you're a baker. Yeah. And you needed a system. Yeah. And if, if you're a cook though, you're like, well cares and if a scientist could step in and go like well These are all the problems in this and this and this and this and then and everyone's fighting back and forth

You're like, oh fuck do I guess do I eat fat or not? He felt like I'm so confused Well, it's not the right question. I think what? Irritates a lot of people is that some people are finding like this Insecurity that people have and they're exploiting it by telling them exactly what they think is right it's human nature yeah right we want the next solution we want all this stuff we want it all dialed into one it's I call a fallacy of unicorn mm-hmm

like I'm just gonna keep searching because there's there's this one thing and if I fix that one thing everything else a lineup Mmm doesn't work like that. Yeah. No, what about vegetables? Like do you specify the type of vegetables you like do you prefer a dark leafy green vegetable general statement beets or? The more color the more texture the better right and like you said actually earlier It's the variety that matters with these folks as sustainable now Now, having said that, here's what I'll do. Outside of camp, these are the conversations we're having. Like, I want as many different vegetables as you possibly can. Different colors, different countries, different seasons, all this stuff, right? Let's cook them sometimes. Let's

steam them. Let's eat them fresh. Let's eat them raw. There's pros and cons to all this. Mix it up. Exactly. Oh, now you got to fight in four weeks and we're 25 pounds overweight. Sometimes I will take those options away because it's easy then to control numbers. If I say, okay, here's the approach. You're going to have A, B, and C at these three meals every day. Every other day we'll rotate. Then I've just removed a bunch of variables from there and they can just refocus and go, okay, boom. And we can watch the weight. We're down half a pound. We're down half a pound, down a quarter pound. We're great. Let's maybe exchange out kale for spinach this time or

something. But the hard part about extreme variability is lack of control. And so sometimes if you're like, well, I mean, not everything you're telling me, I'm eating a bunch of different stuff and I'm not losing weight. Well, maybe they don't understand. Yeah. But this type of vegetable has a lot more calories than this type of vegetable. So we're getting really high up in your numbers. Or when you eat this, the way you prep it, the way you like it is calorically dense. So I will reduce options for them. So it was funny because if you looked at, you know, one of my nutrition programs for my athlete,

you could look at it and be like, oh, this guy's an idiot. He doesn't have this, this, this guy's an idiot. He doesn't have this, this, this, and this. He's stupid. He doesn't have any of this. And you're like, dummy, you think that three-day plan is what we did the whole year round? First of all, you're arguing with someone who's not even real. Oh, they're real.

You, of all people, know they're real. I know. What about water? Now, I've always wanted to ask somebody this. I hope you know the answer. There's all these ways to treat water, alkaline water. Nonsense. Bullshit, right?

Mostly. Yeah, I would assume so. Yeah. We actually did a study on that. Six weeks alkaline. What does it mean? Like, what the fuck is alkaline water? That's pH, right?

So it's the opposite of acid. Right. Right. Alkaline's the base. But I mean, how do they make the water that way? Like, what are they doing to it? Oh, so generally water comes probably a little bit acidic, especially our tap water. And so I would imagine they just do some sort of combination of salt or desalting.

Pretty easy. Right. Chemistry wise. So they get it a little bit technically. So just adding a little salt to your water. I think somebody actually did a study of a bunch of those alkaline waters and tested them in the store, like bought it from brands, and they were all over the place, I said it anyways. Yeah, I would imagine. They were not even close to alkaline. Because you also have, like, remember, it's going to change when it sits on the shelf.

Right. When it's exposed to sunlight, all that crap. I call it holy water. Yeah, it's kind of silly. I mean, I always feel like, oh, yeah, that's the blessed water. Like, come on, man, it's fucking water. I mean, dude, look, I'm open if studies came out and we kept doing it, we're like, oh, yeah, that's the blessed water. Come on, man. It's fucking water. I mean, dude, look, I'm open if studies came out and we kept doing it. We're like, oh, shit, there's something here.

But there's no studies currently. That's happened before with things. I'd be like, that's nonsense. That's stupid. I mean, a bunch of things. The training mask. The training mask. Yeah.

Absolutely. Is it good? Well, it's not good or bad. Depends on what you use it for. How dare you? Yeah. I need an answer. I'll give you an answer. Okay. So what I like to do is give examples of, of when good, when bad.

Right. Uh, and this is, uh, Brian McKenzie. I keep bringing him up, but he taught me this lesson. This is a great lesson in humility. Uh, so he's a, if you don't know him, he's a, he was really disruptive in the running community and the movement. He's, he came up Kelly Starrett. Like they came up together okay um so i wasn't interested in him people kept getting at me like hey you gotta look at his stuff and i'm like oh he's a crossfit coach out like not you don't like crossfit no i have nothing against that but at the time i was like what does right okay crossfit coach no right again arrogance on my part mistake and second i'm like you're a running coach like i'm doubling uninterested

yeah again this is me highlighting my mistakes so So, but then I actually, you know, funny enough, paid attention to what he was saying. And it turns out there was something there. So it's funny how much you hated someone when you don't actually listen or read their stuff. So, uh, he was promoting the training mask and I'm like, you know, like everyone else, I'm like, doesn't work. Evidence shows doesn't work, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then I listened to how he was actually using it. So he wasn't using it to simulate altitude because that's not really effective, but he was using it to teach people how to use their diaphragm. And that's when I was like, oh, I get it here.

So I'll come back and I'll finish this in. But the quick analogy here would be if I handed you a pen and said, you know, like, does this pen work? Well, it may not work as a dagger, but it worked pretty good as a pen. So the problem with the mask was it's flipped. It didn't work for what it was told you to work for. But it worked because in this case, the act of restricting people's breathing sometime can help them learn to use their diaphragm. People who breathe with their shoulders up and they don help them learn to use their diaphragm people who breathe With their shoulders up and they don't use their stomach and their diaphragm a lot when you put that now it's going for their face

They don't have that option. And so they learn to breathe through their belly and use their diaphragm Interesting and so I just didn't give him the time of day because I'm like training mass doesn't work elevation, etc Etc, etc. Right. right oh that's not how you were using and what's the benefit of breathing through diaphragm with a mask on it's not the mask that's important it's the fact that it would use it's a quick way to identify if you're bringing this so you figure it out it's like a weight belt boss rutin has um some sort of a breathing device and he um he was telling me about some studies that they did with it. That was me.

Was it you? That was mine. Oh, beautiful. My lab. Well, what he was saying is that what makes his better is that it's easy to breathe out. The valve opens so you can exhale really good. Dump your carbon dioxide. Whereas other ones that have just smaller holes are not as good.

So we did that study. Oh, okay. And this is actually, that's what turned me on to Brian initially, because I'm like, when boss came to me with the O2 trainer, I was like, this stuff doesn't work, bro. Turns out it does. But here's a good example. So his device restricts airflow in. Right.

But you can change the setting. So it can be a lot of restriction or a little bit of restriction. Yeah, he has like filters that you put on it. There it is right there. Boss rooting. Right. But you can change the setting. So it can be a lot of restriction or a little bit of restriction. Yeah. He has like filters that you put on it. There it is right there. Boss Rootin. Yeah. The O2 trainer. Exactly. So all those little valves on the left and right hand side, they're thick. They increase airflow or decrease airflow. So what we did is we had people come in four times and they either got the high restriction, low restriction, medium restriction, or no restriction. And what we saw is in every person under one of those, sorry, let me back up. They came in and either they did some breathing drills, like blowing it out, inhaling as hard as they can, blowing it out. And they did that 30 times. And then they did basically a VO2 max test. So they

ran to exhaustion, which took them five to eight minutes kind of thing. So we want to see, like, I was interested in performance. Like, does this actually make me perform better? And so they either got a lot of restriction, a little restriction, medium, or none. Every single person got substantially better, like 20% to 30% better under one of the conditions. But they also got worse under one of the conditions as well. So what that told us was this.

If, for example, you went under the high restriction, so you're like, and you can't get any air in. It actually fatigued your intercostals, which are the muscles between your ribs that open up your ribs that allow airflow in. The diaphragm and those got fatigued. So when you did your performance you got slower because you were already gassed but if you had really strong intercostals the lower so the real open valve wasn't enough resistance to actually cause those muscle to warm up so that didn't help your performance so what we found is my point here basically is the individualization of the approach here is really, really important. So there's something there for all of us, but you're going to have to titrate out.

You might need heavy. You might need light. You might need middle. And one of those situations might actually make it worse for you. So the individual variability is the important point there. How would you figure out which one you needed? Performance test. And what kind of performance test would you use? In this particular, you could do anything. You could

say, I'm going to run a mile and a half and record my time. And put that thing in your mouth as you're running or after? As your warmup. As your warmup. Yeah. So you sit there, you put it in your mouth and you do. So you only use it to do drills. You don't necessarily use it to actually work out. The vast majority of the time, that's what I recommend. You could do it in your workout, but it would be for different reasons. So when you do it, what would you recommend doing? Like say if I got an O2 trainer, I put it in, like what

kind of workouts am I doing with this thing in my mouth? Or breathing exercises? Again, you're going to hate this. Probably some of your fans are getting irritated by now, but it depends on the goal of the workout. God damn it! So if the goal of the workout is to get the best score possible right then you do probably 30 or 40 breaths with the optimal resistance you feel great okay but if the point of the workout is to actually improve the strength of the diaphragm bingo right then you then you put yourself in suboptimal positions it's right back to what i said at the beginning adapting or optimizing so you're talking about the muscles

in between the ribs can you actually strengthen those to the point where i mean that's a huge issue with guys getting injured absolutely you can strengthen those with that o2 training thing with that's one mechanism but you can do it a bunch of different ways we have done uh you've had um you've had wim hof on right so i've been working with wim for a couple years now so doing initial stuff with him and it's very clear like we can mess with a lot of different breathing protocols and get you a lot of immediate and delayed up oh sorry uh brian one more time uh he had his conversation with john jones on wednesday before the fight first time they'd ever met.

Someone put him in contact. Brian put him through some of these breathing protocols. As soon as they hung up the phone, or as soon as they were done, Jon was like, hey, will you fly down here on Saturday? Flew him down that day. Had him in his corner. Walked him all the way down. Was right next to probably you and Dana.

And he's doing all the things. So this is how impactful some of these breathing things are. Our whim was great to get us started. Boss's device was awesome. The training maps were concepts, but now Brian has really evolved and developed and said, actually, there's a bunch of different ways we can do it, and he has protocols. You're going to have to ask him,

but he is the one that can say, do this for this thing, do exactly this way for this thing. You want this adaptation, you want this effect. Wow. And he has it all dialed in. I go to a cryo chamber, a cryotherapy place where you put a surgical mask on, earmuffs, and your whole body's immersed. It's not just below the neck.

Oh, yeah. Have you seen those? And when I use the Wim Hof breathing method, it's almost like somebody made it 50 degrees warmer. Oh, yeah. It's way easier. I just got back from Montauk. I spent three days jumping in an ice bath the whole time out there. But we actually have multiple protocols,

so that's more akin to what some would call the breath of fire. Is this when you were with Dennis? Yeah, we were at an event out there with Laird Hamilton and those folks. So Brian also, Laird and Gabby and Brian, Gabby Reese and Laird Hamilton, started a company called XPT that kind of puts a lot of this lifestyle stuff into practice. And so they put on these live events. They also sent me some of their new superfood stuff that they add to coffee, the creamer stuff.

It's really good. It's amazing. Yeah. It's a little espresso-based powder plus a non-dairy creamer. Super healthy stuff, too. I like it. It's fantastic. Yeah.

So I've been working with that company for a couple of years since they got started. But we go out there and we do these things. And so we can say okay we'll get you through the breath of fire protocol and you'll feel like wow you get hot you get warmed up there's other ways we can do it that'll bring you back down where you're like yeah i'm gonna take a nap there's euphoria ones where you can get like wow i'm feel like i'm on psychedelics right now i'm super high like holotropic breathing bunch of apnea stuff um pranayama stuff all these things can have different um outcomes depending on on what you're looking for so they've brian

has got this system developed now where uh like it's that's what he was john the first one he did um it was like 10 o'clock at night and he's like all right let me relax you to kind of bring you down he's like oh this is amazing but then he's to kind of bring you down. He's like, oh, this is amazing. But then he's like, I actually got to go train right now. He's like, can you get me back up? It's like, all right, let's go back the other way. Let's put him back up. So is there any benefit to using those breathing techniques versus an O2 trainer? Or is it different situations? Exactly.

It's situation-based. There's things I like. So you mentioned what boss says. The opening valve at the end of the O2 trainer allows you to dump out carbon dioxide. Okay. The training mask, for example, wouldn't. Right. Right. So it's not right or wrong. It's just depending on what you're looking to do, because one thing you can train your body to do is how well do you perform when you've generated a bunch of carbon dioxide? Right. So carbon dioxide is what actually makes you feel like you want to breathe. Right. It's not lack of oxygen. Right. Right. So I can put you in a situation where you get a bunch

of carbon dioxide buildup and if I don't let you dump it, then you're going to fatigue a lot faster. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. You could learn to then deal with a lot of fatigue. Deal with it mentally, psychologically. As well as physiologically. Really? There's going to be adaptations. So because of the fact that your body has more carbon dioxide in the system, your body adapts to process that carbon dioxide more efficiently? This would be the assumption, like yet to be scientifically shown. Oh. But this is, you know, where we were, this is the thought process. You can feel this intuitively. You're like, wow. And it's also a way for us to get a lot of training volume in, or sorry, a lot of cardiovascular training in because your heart

rate goes way up without actually doing a lot of physical work. And so for MMA guys, this is what we're looking for sometimes because of physical work in their training camp is so high. We can't add any more volume to them. It's going to beat them up. So now we can get them a cardiovascular workout in that's easy on the joints and ligaments and the bones. So the other approach would be dump all the CO2 or do other things like nasal breathing only. So the whole workout where you're only

allowed to breathe through your nose. When you breathe through your nose, it actually can release nitric oxide, which is a vasodilator. So this is why when you... Only when you breathe through your nose? Not only, but especially when you breathe through your nose. Huh.

Why does your body produce more nitric oxide when you breathe through your nose? I don't know. I don't know. That's weird because you would think that just breathing, like Wim Hof, I was asking him, like breathe through your nose or breathe through your mouth. Just breathe! Just breathe! Yeah, he always says like, any hole, I don't care.

Yeah. But so again Wim's not wrong or anything like that but Wim's style is great but there's many styles is the point I guess. He's great. We've done some science stuff together. How do you feel about saunas? Same thing. Amazing benefits there.

Potential but there's no free passes in physiology. So when you get something, you're probably coming at the compromise as something else. What would the compromise be when you do a sauna? Don't know. Huh. We just don't have enough evidence on this stuff. We know we focused on the heat shock proteins. That's like everyone knows about those by now. Right. the ability to deal with uncomfort and fatigue.

Like, there's a lot of stuff. The difficulty is when you run a scientific study, you get one or two or three variables. You don't get 1,000. Right. So we focus on the one or two that you're like, wow, this is moving something here. But, I mean, just like the example we went over with the cold.

It's like, wow, yeah, it's great for this. Actually, it's terrible. And then people say, no, they want to make blanket statements like heat's good or cold's good or cold's bad. Well, as we study it more, we start to finding out, well, actually, it's good for this and it's good for this and it's bad for that and that and that and that. So we'd have to assume sauna would be the same way. There has to be consequences to it. It just depends on implication.

But there's got to be some sort of benefits in terms of recovery, right? So do you think that someone should do maybe like cryo one day, sauna the next, or they do them in the same day? So for example, a fighter in camp, I generally don't go out of my way to recommend sauna because they already get really hot in training. Your grappling, especially if they're doing gi stuff, they're getting heat shock protein. I don't need to go out of my way. Hot yoga in particular, right? There's a study they're doing right now at Harvard, apparently. Somebody was telling me about it the other day where they're concentrating on hot yoga and the benefits of hot yoga and heat shock proteins.

Yeah, I'm sure they're going to find a lot. Yeah. Like that's pretty, I mean, that ship's sailed a little bit. Like we're confident something, there's a lot of detail to work out, but something's going on there. Probably something similar to sauna. Right. So I generally say for people like you and like me me i don't go out of my way to do too much sauna

work because of the way i train i get really hot and sometimes we'll train specifically with a little bit more clothing sometimes and get kind of like well instead of sitting in a sauna for 45 minutes let me wear a little bit extra clothing during my training session get real hot actually but for the average people i think it's a fantastic modality because they're maybe only working out once a week or less and you give you can get them hot and we can actually work on those health benefits while we're building good quality habits and we can eventually lead them down the path to more exercise emmanuel stewart used to run the crronk gym. He used to crank the temperature up in their gym over a hundred degrees. That was his thing. Like he wanted guys to box like in essentially

like a hot yoga room. Well, there's a couple of things to that. I've done a lot of that in my life and I used to hate it. We used to just fight for the door, like wait for the round to go over. Wrestling. Yeah. Wrestling practice theories have it really hot. We used to do MMA with it all the time. And like the problem was it was scary because the floor is water. Oh, yeah. And you're like, I'm not kicking. You're terrified. That's not good.

It was awful. I hated it. That's real bad for kicking. I skipped those practices a lot, Joe. But, so example, I don't think that's particularly needed. With the exception, one time when Pat Cummins fought in Brazil, it was like 110 outside and it was 80% humidity or something. Which fight was that? it was um Cordero and I failed Fajardo. Yeah, yeah, I remember that fight. It was outdoors. I think no it was indoors

But everything was open. Oh, that's what it was. Yeah, so super super hot now We didn't like train for that or anticipate, but you could see if you knew you were fighting in a venue like that. Yeah. Like what they used to do in Bodog in Costa Rica. Oh, yeah. They would fight on the beach. Oh, my God.

Yeah. Right? Just horrid outside. So you could see like, well, in that situation, maybe it's needed. But you're fighting in Vegas or something indoors, and maybe we don't need it for that. But that doesn't mean you couldn't implement it once or twice. I wouldn't go out of my way to do it, though. Right.

So it wouldn't be a daily thing. No. Because what's going to happen is you're going to compromise performance. Pacing is a real problem. Bisping is a great example of this, too. Dennis was, a bunch of people. If you fight in an environment like that, your pace and the amount of output you can do is going to slow way down in the gym, right? It can be hot. You're going to gas out. And then when you go to fight

in your fight and it's temperature controlled, you're not used to that pace. So if you're used to fighting at the pace that it takes for you to sustain 10 rounds of sparring in the gym at 110 degrees, and then we come in and you and I fight and I'm ready to go with this, you're not ready for that pace. So it's not that you don't physically have the conditioning, but you're just like, oh my, I'm just not, this guy's just, and you don't, you don't feel right. So you have to be careful of training too far outside of what you're actually going to encounter. Which is, you know, some of these guys run into those problems when they do, you know,

I'm going to spar 10 rounds so that I can go five easy. Yeah. Yeah. But your pace for your five is way different than your pace for your 10. Yeah. So you have to be careful your five is way different than your pace for your ten. Hmm, yeah. So you have to be careful there. Wow. A lot of questions, man.

Physiology, dude. That is part of the problem, right? That there are so many variables, there are so many questions, that there is no real definitive protocol to follow. No. There's a bunch of different ones. The pursuit, the way I always say it is, the truth is mostly a lack of perspective.

The way I always say it is, truth is mostly a lack of perspective. So when you think that you are on some unbreakable truth, it's because you haven't looked at it from a big enough perspective. For the most part. Right. Right. And there's some, we'll put it this way. In biological truth, that's almost always true. In physics truth, that's a lot less true. Like, we're gravity's real like we're pretty sure right and we can make sure water's good for

you pretty sure uh now quantum mechanics physics those get kind of weird right but for the most part that is true but science in terms of biological or medical is a lot less true i mean how many times we have to see that where it's like, this is true, this is true for 50 years. Oops, it's not. Is this all fun for you? Do you, I mean, it seems like you're, you're very passionate about it, but I mean, it's, it also seems like, wow, it could be kind of stressful having so many variables and possibilities. And I don't, I don't think stress is even close. It's, I would say 99% fun. Like it's stress for me in terms of, I don't want, I like, it would break

my heart if I gave someone the wrong advice and it ruined their career. Like that would be the stress, stress in terms of being right. Or like saying a bunch of some stuff and being proved, I don't care about that at all. Yeah. That is an issue with a lot of trainers, right? Like were they given bad advice and you see it play out in a fight? I mean, one of the reasons I, I used to do a lot of professional athletes in other sports, work with other ones. I gave that almost up entirely, and I gave up, I've done some actors

and things like that, but I generally stay away from that, even though the money is far, far higher for me in those things. But I did it because, like, these MMA folks, like, I have a real passion for someone who's gonna put all that on the line, and they're gonna risk everything, and they're gonna go out there, and that is MMA folks, like, I have a real passion for someone who's going to put all that on the line. And they're going to risk everything.

And they're going to go out there. And that is more exciting to me. And I'm like, that's a fun, a really fun investment in me. And it's worth me investing my emotion. I mean, when Helen won a gold in Rio, like, I just lost it. Like, emotionally, I was, like, gone for weeks. Like, just exhausted. Because I invested so much into that.

I don't want to do that for somebody so that they can make an extra million right on top of that 30 million like it doesn't motivate me that much so I like working with these folks and so because of that like it breaks my heart if you're like man you gave up everything for this kind of a living and the best outcome for you was that you made 20k instead of 10k and then I lost that for you because I gave you really bad rehydration advice for something. Right. That's a stress for me. Um, but the rest of the stuff, man, like it's fun. It's invigorating for me to continue to be like, well, we, we answered that, but now we don't know this or

this like it's continual progress. And, and by like, I take Karl Popper stance on this one in terms of like, science is not about identifying truth. It's reducing uncertainty. Hmm. That's a good way to put it. That's all it is, right? I wish I could take credit for it. It's a good way to put it.

So we get closer, and we know more. Okay, we know this is not, but we're still. Do you anticipate a day when we do, like, when it comes to biomechanics or physiology? Well, there are some things that I would be confident in saying like, basically we know that this is true now. You need to drink water. Like I would basically say that that's true. We need to have a lot of, like the very standard stuff.

Then those are things I'm comfortable saying this is basically true. And as we go on, we only keep adding to that list. So more things get piled on. Now we know for, I told I had told this story also on, um, my podcast about the history of strength conditioning and how it went from the 1900s to where it is now. And the quick story is there was a guy named, um, Peter Karpovich, who was a scientist and he was extremely, he was the guy who started the idea that lifting weights causes you to lose flexibility and, flexibility and it's bad for your health and

all these things, right? This is 1952, 54, something like that. And he's a scientist, PhD. And he calls in a guy, he gets a guy named Bob Hoffman. He's called in, do you remember Bob Hoffman? You're from the generation, you may remember York Barbell, Muscle and Strength, like the magazine. Okay. You may recognize all this stuff. Muscle and Strength, the magazine. You may recognize all this stuff. But basically, there was a show, and they said, bring in these weightlifters, because back then weightlifting, powerlifting, bodybuilding was all kind of the same thing. They said, bring them in, and let's put on a demonstration.

And so they bring in all these lifters, and they put on this demonstration in front of the whole school and in front of dr karpovich and and uh everyone's like cool they're great they're strong and athletic and everyone knows like the showdown's coming like everyone's there to watch the show but everyone's really there to watch like the just like they're on the internet now it's like let's watch the shit show afterwards right so everyone's done and carpet stands up and he's like it's great you're strong and got a lot of muscle and all that. But, um, let me ask you a question. Can you scratch your back? The guy was like, sure. You know, where at? Like what, where? And he starts scratching, boom, landing everywhere. What do you want to do? What do you want me to do? Drops into a full splits, grabs 50 pound dumbbells, does a

standing backflip. And at this point, Karpovich isovich is like oh like my entire career is that strength training is bad for you it's unhealthy you lose flexibility and these dudes the strongest in the world just showed up not only are they not inflexible but they just did a splits their their bodybuilders remaining world champions so he was at a crossroads right there in his career to say like do i admit in front of the whole world about how wrong my entire research line was? Or do I find some excuse? Well, he does the honorable thing and goes, I'm sorry, I'm wrong, and changes his entire career of research going on to actually studying strength training. And of course, shows it doesn't do any of these things we do. So this is the nature of science is we're mostly wrong until we actually study,

and then we get less and less and less wrong. So that's really where we're at with everything. That's an easy example, but if you told somebody 50 years ago, ah, flexibility or strength training makes you inflexible, they're like, well, I don't know. Look at this study.

Look at this study. Well, that used to be an issue with boxing, right? They used to always say boxers should never strength train until Evander Holyfield came along with Mackie Shillstone and won the title as a heavyweight. I just saw Evander yesterday. Yeah? At the airport.

He looks great. Oh, man. It's crazy. Huge. He was walking out of the bathroom by himself and he had his cell phone up to his ear like, I'm on the phone, but I think his cell phone was dead. But he didn't want anybody to talk to him. That's funny. Which I don't blame him. No, he looked fantastic. I just signed a buddy of mine. Do you know he's

managing fighters now or something No, he looked fantastic. Yeah. I just signed a buddy of mine to his. He's doing, do you know he's like managing fighters now or something? Is he? Yeah. Hopefully not financially. I don't know. And Van is like, buy the biggest house that exists. Yeah, yeah. Remember he had that fucking stupendous mansion in Atlanta?

It was like 150 rooms or something like that. Dude, you put that much money in front of people in a sport like that. Especially when you're balling. When you're balling and other people are balling and you're trying to ball harder, you've got to do what you've got to do. I don't think MMA has ever caught up to that in terms of... Financially? Yeah.

It's getting close with Conor McGregor. Sure. But honestly, his biggest windfall right now is a boxing match, so who knows? Right. The thing about Evander that's weird is that he never got out of shape. He looked fantastic. Yeah, he's still fit. that's weird is that he never got out of shape. He looked fantastic. Yeah, he's still fit. He's got to be 50 plus.

He's one of the rare guys. And I think he had a fight as recently as a year ago. No. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, wow. We'll find out when Evander Holyfield's last fight was. I really want to say he had a fight like a year ago.

Oh, that's terrifying. Yeah, but he's okay. It's weird he's not like um oh what's this dude uh just retired or just got smashed really bad uh hopkins yes bernard that guy's amazing yeah that was a freak incident man that's one of the things about like why don't they have pads around the ring in case guys fall through the ropes like i can't imagine that they didn't they've seen that happen before. Guys are getting fucked up from that before. That's all fight style though too, right?

Yeah, but that was like a fake charity boxing match. What does it say though in terms of when is his last fight? Yeah, but that's not real. I think you're lying, Joe. Just pull up his

record. It's a Wikipedia record. I'm sure there's a Wikipedia on Evander Holyfield. Brian Nielsen. This is 2011. Oh, okay. So six years ago. Yeah, that's pretty recently in consideration. Oh, you know what it was?

I believe he was planning a comeback a few years ago, and he was having a really hard time getting licensed. Oh. I think you know what it was? I believe he was planning a comeback a few years ago, and he was having a really hard time getting licensed. Oh. I think that's what it was. I would still say, if you would have asked me, I would have said 12 years ago. I would have guessed way longer than that. How old is he now?

50. He just lost it. 62. 60? What? No, he's not 62. No, no, no. He was born in 62.

Oh, okay. So 55? Yeah. So he essentially had his last fight when he was like what 48 49 something like that yeah makes sense that's the style he's well i don't know i don't really remember his style that much he didn't take a lot of shots did he take a lot of shots oh hell yeah yeah bruiser yeah i mean he talked mean, he just had a tremendous chin. He's just an unbelievably tough guy and unbelievably fit. That was the thing about Holyfield was that unbelievably fit, unbelievably game. When he beat Mike Tyson in the first fight, I remember it was – you know Kevin James.

Yeah, yeah. Kevin was actually over my house. We were watching it together. Really? We were jumping around screaming like a bunch of schoolgirls. I couldn't believe it. It was insane. Yeah, yeah. Because nobody saw that coming. Yeah. I was actually over my house. We were watching it together. We're jumping around screaming like a bunch of school girls. It was insane. Yeah. Cause nobody saw that coming. You know, I was like, wow. Right. Yeah. That was amazing. Yeah. He had a spectacular career though. Oh, he certainly did. Yeah. Hope he still got it together upstairs. Like that's just a tough one. Yeah, it certainly is. Yeah. That it's gotta be weird. I wonder what, you ever have that conversation with a fighter?

I do. It's not my role, so I don't bring it up at all. But if they ask me on a friendly advice thing, and we'll be very careful with names here, but I generally tell them all to retire, regardless. My approach is, no, the risk is not worth the payout in the UFC. It's just not. Like there is the occasional Connor

but this is the anomaly that proves the rule actually. So my advice to all of them is if it's not a good investment, like it is not worth the risk because even if you get the win bonus and the fight of the night one fight like that is potentially years and how

much income could you make in those 10 years of working probably more than that 100k well in terms of income for sure but for a lot of them it's not really what they're doing it for they're doing it for glory right so i mean that's but i'm taking it from a logical perspective i'm not telling you what to do i'm saying though like me as your friend i would love you to never fight because it's great but having said that you do that so let me as your friend I would love you to never fight because it's great But having said that you do that so let me help you as much as I can to get there but I mean you can kind of tell to like if you're If you just don't if you're not in that x-factor charisma wise and stuff

You're never gonna make that real like life-changing right? We're just talking about money though in terms of damage You didn't do you notice in terms of physical performance when you're seeing an athlete move around? I haven't gotten to that. I haven't gotten anybody like that. But if you had someone come to you and say, Hey, I'm thinking about, you know, when I get out, I'm not exactly sure when, what do you think? Yeah. I mean, I would, I would look at them from the performance side of it. I wouldn't look at brain damage at all. I would say, well, here are your numbers in the room room stacked up to other folks we've had in this room and you're if you're far below their performance wise i would say you might have a performance problem in terms of you might not be talented enough physically to compete like i'm not gonna make a comment about your other

reasons to retire but if yeah if i tested you across the board and you were terrible at everything um then i might be like well physically from physically, from my perspective, I don't know if you have what it takes anymore. Right. Do you see a deterioration in physical skills from like punishment? I don't know if I could really say that. But that's just because I don't, like I don't have enough exposure to enough of those folks to make a qualified comment on that.

Over long periods of time. Yeah. I would need dozens and dozens of guys over years to really fairly what's the longest you've ever worked with a guy uh five six years probably yeah probably six years that's a lot of time it is and it's not like uh like some of them it's not every single i'm not talking to them every day and sometimes it's like once a camp uh generally what my goal is is to teach them how to think as much through the stuff as they can. And so ideally, they don't need me after more than a couple of camps other than a few check-ins. I want to come to the lab, get this tested. I got a hunch about this.

Or we did this type of training for six weeks. We think we are addressing this problem. Can we come to get it tested to see if it actually got better yeah no problem but a lot of the other stuff i do is like i said it's so much usually helping them calm down through all the nonsense that i can give them a settling presence in terms of this is not something you should worry about or right get to hear so um but yeah multiple five six years and we've got data we got biopsy data off them from over the years which has been very very interesting actually that was one of the first reasons i wanted to get into the sport because i'm like i wanted to biopsy data off them from over the years, which has been very, very interesting, actually. That was one of the first reasons I wanted to get into the sport because I'm like, I wanted to biopsy these dudes. Yeah, that's got to be really, as a scientist, got to be really an interesting opportunity.

Yeah. We had one fighter who was pretty crazy because he was a wrestler and a very, very, he wins through attrition. Like, that's his style. He's not like a knockout artist or anything like that. And he was almost 70, 75% fast twitch. Wow. Yeah.

And then we also looked at this other thing. So one of the things that we measure in our lab is called myonuclear domain. So the nucleus is what holds the DNA and it tells the cell to grow, shrink, die,

like repair. Well, like human muscle is really unique. It's one of the only cells in all of biology that is multi-nucleated. So that means it's got not only more than one, but it's got thousands of nuclei per cell. The obvious advantage is that allows us a lot more plasticity. So we can recover and repair and adapt and adjust really, really quickly. Which is why we see people's fiber type change in a matter of weeks. A paper that came out last year showing actually a high-fat, high-sugar diet can change fiber type. We've seen carbon dioxide concentrations alter fiber type, things like this.

So the nucleus is really interesting because the more nuclei you have, the faster you recover. It's also what determines how big a muscle will grow. You've heard of muscle memory? Yeah. So this is what's doing muscle memory. Wow. That makes sense. I always wondered if that was real.

Well, working right now through it, a lot of people are. But the old theory would be a satellite cell would come in, it would turn into a nuclei, and the cell will only grow as big as the amount of nuclei that are around it or that are inside of it. And so what that basically means is there's a certain domain or a certain size that each nucleus will control and it won't exceed that size because it loses control so if if you are all three of us and you know we're all a nuclei and this whole room was one cell if we wanted to expand the wall we would have to bring in another nucleus because you'd be like dude like it's too much area to control so when you go through like about a training a year or something of heavy lifting and we add those those satellite cells that turn Into my own nuclei and we expand the size

Well, we used to think like if we stopped training in this and the room gets smaller We used to think that well like time to kick Jamie out of the room. He's gone But now what looked like happening is he's staying around So then when I go to retrain, I've got more of those nuclei right there and so it's easy It's easier. Sorry got excited hit the mic. It's easier for me to expand my size because the nuclei are there. Oh, that makes sense. Okay. So there's an actual scientific reason for muscle memory. Yeah. Oh, and you can increase the amount of nuclei just by increasing the size of the muscle. And that makes it easier to go back to that if you lose some muscle. Well, right. The,

the mononuclear would allow for the muscles to get bigger. Yeah. So a little bit inverse, but basically the same thing. Dude, this was really fascinating. Anything else to add before we get out of here? The book, man. I got a book out on all this stuff called Unplugged, Evolving from Technology to Upgrade Your Fitness, Performance, and Consciousness.

Is it on Amazon? All that stuff. Is there an audio book available? There is available there is but i'm tell you uh no sorry there's a kindle but i would highly recommend you don't get it uh because the kindle no you mean that's the digital version right why get the hard copy why because the book is really a guide for how to use some of these training technologies uh-huh in your training and how it can ruin your training and how it can help your training. So a part of that is the importance of doing a couple of things, getting back to nature and how that the physiology behind how that helps, as well as this concept of choosing suffering and choosing discomfort and how that's physiologically important for you. So a part of the book is built in a way where the photos, the layout,

the quality of the paper is all part of the reading experience. They don't have that in, like, Kindle with photographs? No, it's not even close. You know, it's all black and white. The texture of the paper is different. What if you have one of those Kindle HDs, the ones that are digital and color? Maybe. Maybe?

Yeah, maybe that'd be good. That's what you're saying, though. But you recommend the hard property. Yeah, I mean, I don't change, I don't really care. But for the experience of it. Yeah, it's still cheap. It's not expensive at all. What's the physiological benefit of getting back to nature?

Oh, we have so much. Yeah? It's pretty incredible in terms of everything from visualization, or sorry, eyesight. Did you listen to that amazing podcast? Eyesight? Yeah. Radiolab did one on the color blue. I didn't hear that one.

What's it called? This is a teaser. I'm not going to tell you the whole story. What's it called? The episode? I don't know the episode name. We'll find it. If you Google the Radiolab episode on the color blue

basically we as humans didn't really recognize the color blue until the Bible what? so we had the cones and the physiology didn't change but we didn't have a word for the color blue until the Bible came along so if you look at anything prior to that

yeah why isn't the sky blue on radio yep exactly so what uh what they basically identified is we didn't have a separate color for or a separate word for the color blue because we didn't differentiate blue shades it wasn't important for the world because blue doesn't happen very frequently in in biology in nature it wasn't until we had textiles and we started printing and making cloth and paper and stuff like that, that we had all these different dyes and shades of blue. So then we developed different shades of blue and different colors.

So because of that, we started perceiving and focusing on different shades of blue. So now the average person that comes in the room would be able to identify all these different blues. Or prior to this, we didn't care about it we didn't focus on it so we all just saw that as one color blue so things like that are important so what are we paying attention to what are we being conscious of what are we perceiving what are we focusing on has a direct influence on our physiology it's very adaptable to those things so how does that make like going to nature so if we think about it from this way, what's happening in the exposure when we're in this artificial environment versus being in the

external environment like nature. So what are we not being exposed to now that we could be exposed to out in nature? The third part of the book is the consciousness aspect, which is we talked to a lot of people. Tim Ferriss wrote a section or did a little interview thing for it. Stephen Kotler did one as well. And they talk about the things like getting into flow state and the stress relief of it and all the other psychological benefits that we have from detaching a little bit from our constant tech exposure. Dopamine is another great example, right?

So if we look at the dopamine rush that we get from the constant exposure, not from the actual tech, but from things like, oh, I want to look at my likes. I want to continue to look at this. That's completely different than when we get out in nature and expose ourselves to physiological elements. Similar to the cold and the hot and thirsty, the hungry. I mean, you've been out in the woods and stuff before. You know what it feels like going a full day without food or being extremely cold for a few days and then getting back. And then you're like the euphoria, like the sensations. Well, you can, but it's really beneficial to have ourself exposed to that.

And it's a problem now, but really the book is about wait 20 years. And it's a problem now, but really the book is about, like, wait 20 years and think about the problem that's going to be in 20 years when this technology thing only gets more advanced and it takes more portion of our life. All right, dude. One more time. What's the name of the book? Unplugged. Evolve from technology to upgrade your fitness, performance, and consciousness. Beautiful.

Thanks, man. I really enjoyed it. It was a great conversation. Really appreciate it. Andy Kalpin Ladies and gentlemen See ya That was great