The Joe Rogan Experience - JRE MMA Show #11 with John Danaher

Episode Date: January 15, 2018

Joe sits down with Brazilian jiu-jitsu coach John Danaher.

and we're live John Donaher thank you very much sir very nice to see you it's my pleasure Joe thank you for having me here nice to be with a fellow fanny pack proponent as well and now you you have one of the the beautiful higher primate leather bags like that huh Joe Rogan has just given me one of the most beautiful fanny packs that I've ever seen in my life um I I wear a very cheap fanny pack and this this is a thing of beauty I was just telling Joe about uh my student Gordon Ryan was recently given a Gucci fanny pack it's literally the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life. When he wears it around me, I get insanely jealous. But would you buy one of those? It's like an $800 fanny pack. Just on principle, I can't buy an $800 fanny pack.

But I could definitely stab Gordon Ryan in the back with a knife and steal it and blame it on Nicky Ryan. I could do that easily. Blame it on his brother? Absolutely. Great TV series. The fanny pack is making a comeback. make great tv series the fanny pack is making a comeback it's a slow comeback that a lot of people are reluctant to join they're they're scared they they worry about their position in the sexual food chain and with good reason by the way i don't know why i feel like anybody that

won't fuck you because you have a fanny pack you don't want to fuck them they're too much work strong point yeah it's just not worth it. Essentially, it's always a battle over appearance versus function. Yeah. Fanny packs score very, very low on appearance, but very high on function. I feel like that one bucks the trend. I think you're right.

Between this and the Gucci, we've got something going on here. There's a video that I put up the other day of my archery game, this techno hunt thing, which is this big, crazy, elaborate thing. I got more comments on the fact that I was wearing a fanny pack in the video than anything. Were they positive or negative comments? Mostly negative. Yeah.

That's my experience. But that's just the internet. The internet is extremely angry. That's the first thing you learn about the internet. The internet is extremely angry. That's the first thing you learn about the internet. You could literally save a baby's life. 80% of the internet will call you an asshole for doing so.

It doesn't matter what you do. The internet is very angry. Well, what the internet is is it shows what people are like when there's no social cues, when they're not in front of you, they don't have to deal with like looking you in the eye and what weird little hidden demons of jealousy and anger and resentment. And it's a pretty sad story, isn't it? If that's what we're really like, it's not looking good for the human race. I just think it's the kind of people that comment in general. What it shows you is that 99% of what we call human goodness and politeness

really comes out of fear of consequences. There's a lot of that, for sure. Because there's no consequences when you talk online. But I think it's the quality of the people that are making those kind of comments. Like I would say, like, if you look at YouTube comments, like Michael Jordan is not leaving YouTube comments. The people that leave YouTube comments and bitch and complain about things things usually everything's not going so fantastic in their own life yeah but they have this forum now when they feel like you know there's a video

that has three million downloads they also are on that video they are at the they're there in the comment section you go to that they're a part of that unqualified no one asked him to be there. Literally, all you have to do is make an account. No one has to know anything about your education, the way your mind works, what you've done with your life, what mistakes you've made. Doesn't matter. You are old fuck 66, and that's your name. And you can say whatever you want.

And your comments are right there with everything else. Yes. It's fascinating to watch. it's very egalitarian but in a lot of ways it's also it's like boy um i don't know if that's the best way to get your information yeah i think there's a lot of truths of that yeah so john um you are one of the most fascinating characters in the world of jiu-jitsu and the world of martial arts. And for people who are not aware of your background, you started out, correct me if I'm wrong, you started out a philosophy student. That's correct, yes. And you were working as a bouncer.

And you were jacked, right? You were a power lifter at the time? Yes. And you wanted to figure out a way to defend yourself. It wasn't really a question of wanting to figure out. It was a pretty simple desire that I had. When I grew up in New Zealand, martial arts was almost entirely based around striking prowess. You'll back me up on this, Joe.

We're similar age. Joe. We're similar age. When we grew up, it's no exaggeration to say that the study of martial arts in English-speaking countries, North America, Western Europe, et cetera, was absolutely dominated by the striking arts. And if you ask the average person who was the best fighter in the world, they would typically say whoever was the best boxer in the world. So in the 1980s, Mike Tyson wasn't just the best boxer in the world, he was the best fighter in the world, they would typically say whoever was the best boxer in the world. So in the 1980s, Mike Tyson wasn't just the best boxer in the world, he was the best fighter in the world. People always equated prowess in fighting

with the ability to strike. I grew up in that time period. And so I grew up doing, studying kickboxing as a teenager in New Zealand. I came to the United States, and for the first time in a long time, there's no wrestling culture in my country. New Zealand has no wrestling culture. It's one of the few countries where there's no indigenous wrestling culture.

There were, but it was kind of lost in the sands of time. When I grew up, wrestling was something I saw once every four years at the Olympics on TV. And I didn't even associate it with fighting, to be honest with you. I just saw it as this strange sport where two guys tackled each other. And so I came to the United States and I was working as a bouncer. America has much, much more of a wrestling culture in it. In New Zealand, when I grew up, when you fought, you were expected to fight with fists. And if it went to the ground, the two guys stood up and they resumed fighting. You stood up and you fought like a man. That was the idea. And in the United States, when I was bouncing, I was absolutely shocked and impressed by the prowess of judo players and wrestlers

in street fighting, working as a bouncer. I worked alongside them and I was massively impressed. What year was this? This is in the early 1990s. I arrived in the United States in 1991. So I started working late 1991 in New York City. New York was a very, very different city back then. It's almost like two different cities from what it used to be.

It is amazing how much it's changed, right? The transformation is night and day. It's become like a giant TGI Fridays now. That's pretty much what New York City is, yeah. To give you an example, I used to live on West End Avenue on the Upper West Side. When I would come home from working in nightclubs at 5.30 in the morning to go to sleep, working in nightclubs at 5.30 in the morning to go to sleep, there would be large numbers of street-walking prostitutes on my block, my avenue.

If you saw even a single street-walking prostitute in that area today, it would be front-page news at the New York Times. It would be so shocking, so completely out of people's – literally just walk people's minds. Times Square is the best example of that, right? Times Square is an extreme example of that. Because Times Square used to be all seedy peep shows. It was nothing but seedy peep shows.

And now it's like Guy Fieri restaurants. It's all weird television. So the transformation is huge. So that was the New York that I went into. And it was a violent New York. 1991, I believe, was the year with the highest murder rate in recorded history for New York City. So it was a very, very different New York City. It's not what you see today. So I came into this environment and I saw these people were incredibly adept in fighting. They were using grappling technique to do this. This impressed me a lot. Shortly after that time, as I was working, I started to hear talk about this show, this ultimate fighting show.

And there was this Brazilian guy who had beaten everyone. He was wrestling people and strangling them and locking their arms, things like that, things that I'd never heard of. So I'd heard this. And one day I was teaching at Columbia University, and a close friend of mine who was also on the PhD program came into my office. It was office hours. And he said, John, you know, I know you work as a bouncer,

and I know you work at night. And I started doing this martial art. It's called Brazilian jiu-Jitsu. And it's mostly fought on the ground. And I remember you said most of the fights you get into, people get put down on the ground and they wrestle. And I was wondering if you would be interested in doing it. And I was like, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu?

I never associated martial arts with Brazil. For me, martial arts, you know, Japan, Korea, you know. Right. Brazil, like, what do they got, capoeira, you know? Right. Who's this guy? So I'm like, Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Isn't jiu-jitsu like Japanese?

Right. Isn't it like a contradiction of terms, like Brazil jiu-jitsu? So at the time, I was around 230 pounds, and this guy couldn't have been more than 140, and he'd only been training two weeks. So he goes to me, you know, we go on the ground, and we wrestle on the ground. And I was like, okay, let me put you in a headlock, and let's see what you can do. So I shut the door of the office. I cleared out the furniture.

This poor kid on the ground. Now, I had the only thing I knew how to do on the ground in those days was headlock people. And, you know, I was a strong guy. I had a pretty nasty headlock. And so I grabbed my poor little friend and throttled him with basically a Kezuka Tame type headlock. And to my shock and horror, he started slipping around behind me and I started holding harder and harder and about two minutes went by

and I really had no real control over him and he was starting to get around behind me. Now, I didn't know back attacks where I had complete naivety on the ground, but I could feel something bad was happening. Someone getting behind you is never a good thing in a fight and I was getting tired.

My arms were getting tired. I had no control over the guy and finally he slipped out and I had to stand up and run away. I said, are you getting tired. I had no control over the guy, and finally he slipped out, and I had to stand up and run away. I said, are you kidding me? I'm twice your size. You've been training two goddamn weeks, and if this was a real fight,

he would have got away from it, and I'm tired. That's not good. And I was just like, if he did this in two weeks, what could you do with some training? So I was fascinated. I went down,

got completely destroyed on my first day. It was hilarious. Who was there on his first day? Matt Serra was the most, he was a blue guard at the time. So even on that first day, you met people that would become very important in your life later on. And I vowed to the moon and the stars that I would at least become competent in the game. I couldn't live with the idea that I was incompetent at an important element of fighting. I didn't want to be a world champ. I just wanted to be competent. And I believed it would make my bouncing work significantly easier.

That was absolutely true. Within a very, very short period of time, bouncing got massively easier for me. You always hear this cliche, Jiu-Jitsu saved my life. How many people say that all the time? Well, I can think of, without any question, there are four times in my life that Jiu-Jitsu actually did save my life, bouncing. I can say that with complete honesty. did save my life bouncing. I can say that with complete honesty. It's a cliche for most people. For me, it did happen. So it made a massive difference, but I still saw it as something that was interesting and something I just wanted to gain competence in. That fundamentally changed because really at that point, I wanted to finish my PhD and become a professor. That was my original goal when I came to the United States.

But things started to change when the three senior students at the Henzo Gracie Academy, Hikaru Omeda, Matt Serra, and Rodrigo Gracie, all went their separate ways. They had to go out and start their own schools. And Henzo was busy fighting professionally in Japan, so he couldn't be at the academy all the time. And he came to me and he said, John, you're going to have to be a teacher.

Like, there's no one else. And how long had you been training? I believe if I go through the—it was around four years. I believe I was a purple belt when I first started teaching at Henzo's. Don't quote me on that, but I'll have to go back and check. But I believe that's— And why did he come to you? Probably because he felt sorry for me I

don't know um I was there a lot and um I think maybe he saw some enthusiasm but you were obsessed right I mean you were there daily yeah that became much more so when I became a teacher because I I saw that okay I'm I'm filling big shoes here you must remember all three of those names that I just mentioned all three were world champions okay these. These were good, good people. And for that time, they were, they were killers. And here I am a PhD student. Now I've got to fill in these shoes. So I was like, I got to get serious about this. So I made a commitment to, um, to becoming the best possible teacher I could. Now you must remember, I went in as a teacher. That was my first assignment.

And so I decided my primary focus in judici would be upon teaching. And fortunately, I came from an academic background. I had many brilliant, brilliant professors coming through the philosophy programs, both in New Zealand and the United States. Columbia University had a fantastic PhD program. So I was very experienced in the art of teaching, but in an academic context. And I thought, maybe this has given me, fate has given me this angle where I can use an academic approach to teaching in a sports environment.

I can use an academic approach to teaching in a sports environment. And that has really become one of the patterns of my approach to teaching in jiu-jitsu. So this is in the 90s, and you are a purple belt at the time. When did you develop this leg lock system that has become so legendary so for people for the uninitiated that have never Heard of you or understand what we're talking about here for the longest time Jiu-jitsu was Primarily attacks on the arms and the neck that was pretty much it and there were known attacks on the legs

But they were frowned upon. Yes. Something happened. You got to see some of those techniques in MMA. You got to see some heel hooks, occasionally footlocks. There's a few guys, Orlovsky pulled off a footlock in the UFC against Tim Sylvia. There's a few guys that were pulling these off. This is pre-Hus paul harris but you all of a sudden came along with this very effective system that there was rumblings many years ago about this where a lot of people were talking about it

and a lot of people were saying that you know john donahue has this insane leg lock system and then you started developing all these people don't know the top grapplers in the world there's a there's a lot of top grapplers in the world jiu-jitsu is incredibly competitive but you're recognized as being one of the premier coaches of the most promising young people like gordon ryan who you're talking about before who's's an Abu Dhabi champion, Gary Tonin, Nicky Ryan, Eddie Cummings. You have an incredible crew of world-class strangle artists who are also known to be some of the very best leg lockers in the world. So what happened? How did that all take place?

Let's go through. We should talk about the history of the taboo. You've actually asked about six different questions. Yeah, I'm sorry. No, no, no. It's good. We can answer them in turn. So let's go.

The first question, your first question was a historical question. How did it happen? Yeah. First off, there was nothing in my early learnings of jiu-jitsu which suggested leg locks. Nothing. learnings of jiu-jitsu which suggested leg locks, nothing. Henzo would teach, by the way I should say my sensei throughout my entire career has been Henzo Gracie. I never left Henzo, he taught me from white belt to black belt and I never left

his academy. I'm the only one of his students who stayed with him from white belt to black belt and never left. So Henzo would teach leg locks but it was taught in always the same fashion that everyone else did. Here's a move, here's a figure four toe hold, here's a heel hook, here's an Achilles lock. So the moves themselves were known. They were in existence. It wasn't like I invented heel hooks or something like that. That's not the idea.

But they weren't emphasized. invented heel hooks or something like that. That's not the idea. But they weren't emphasized. A very, very talented and influential figure in my life was a guy that I only knew for three days. Now that sounds crazy, right? How can you learn something from someone in three days? Well, actually, the influence he had occurred in three minutes. I'm a big believer in the idea that someone can come into your life for a very short period of time and have a massive influence. I truly believe that. In my case, it was a great American grappler called Dean Lister.

Dean Lister was invited by Matt Serra to come to the Henzo Gracie Academy. I believe, don't quote me on this, but I believe Dean was a brown butt at the time. I'm pretty sure Matt was a brown butt at the time too. And he brought him in for around three days and he trained mostly with Matt Serra in preparation for a grappling tournament, if I remember correctly. Now, Dean was known mostly in those days for his Achilles lock. Later on, he would become a heel hook specialist, but in those days, it was mostly an Achilles lock. And he came to the academy, he rolled with some people, and he was doing Achilles locks and getting some success. It went both ways, I remember.

He couldn't really get his stuff to work on Matt Serra, and Matt Serra could get his stuff to work on him, but he was doing something which was unusual and so i talked with him just briefly after class and i said you know that's interesting what you're doing with these achilles locks because i don't really do that at all it's not something i do and he said one sentence which completely changed my outlook because why would you ignore 50 of the human body one, why would you ignore 50% of the human body? One sentence.

Why would you ignore 50% of the human body? And I looked and I was like, I don't know. Why would you? It makes no sense. And we never talked again. And then he went back to California. He went on to become two-time ADCC champion, mostly with leg longs. But what Dean gave me was not technique, didn't show me a single technique. But he gave me a point of view.

If you give a man a point of view, you can change him. He can work from there. That was the influence. from there. That was the influence. And my sensei, Hensel Gracie, was an extremely liberal-minded professor of jiu-jitsu. He would let us do whatever we wanted. He wasn't one of those guys who said, no, no one in my academy is studying leg locks. He was never like that. He would allow his students to go in any direction they wanted, provided they could prove it was effective. So I started studying leg locks, and that's where I'm going to come to the second question,

which you asked, which is, why did leg locks have such a bad reputation? And you said, it's curious, right? We don't talk about this way about arm locks. I'm going to run through the main criticisms, and you'll be my witness on this, Joe. I'm sure you heard the same criticisms a thousand times. You would always hear people refer to leg locks in the following way.

The first criticism, they were too dangerous. If you allowed people to do leg locks, everyone would be injured in a week and jiu-jitsu would be impossible. So that was the first criticism you would always hear. The second great criticism is they didn't work. You might be able to tap out a white belt with a heel hook, but if you're a world championship level you're never going to tap anybody

they didn't work at high levels by itself those two criticisms seem to go in opposite directions if they're really that dangerous but they don't work how do those two gel? they're either incredibly dangerous to the point where they can't be practiced or they don't work the two arguments contradict each other

then you hear other arguments that they were positionally unsound. That if you were in top position and you went for a leg lock, you would lose position and that was a disaster. That's a criticism with no merit because that same criticism applies to guillotines, armbars, etc. You can be mounted on someone, go for an arm lock and lose position and end up on bottom. But no one criticizes armbars. mounted on someone, go for an arm lock in a loose position, end up on bottom, but no one criticizes arm bars. So as I went through the reasons why people criticized leg locking, none of them really made sense. So I started asking myself, well, often the reasons people give, as opposed to what the real reasons are, are very different. And the more I thought about it, the more i thought about it the more i thought the real reason

people donate leg locks runs much deeper than that let's understand jiu-jitsu for what it is jiu-jitsu is a systems-based approach to fighting okay what is the system of brazilian jiu-jitsu well it can be described in a few different ways. I'm going to give you one rendition, which is pretty simple and will resonate with most of your listeners. Jiu-Jitsu is a system based around four distinct steps. You can add steps, you can subtract steps, but the rendition I'm going to give you now is probably the most widely known. Let's say a friend of yours asks for advice on fighting. He knows you're a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu expert. You're a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

And he's saying to me, Joe Rogan, tell me, I don't know anything. I want to fight someone else using your Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. What are the steps of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu? What is the system that it espouses? You're going to see always that step number one is take your opponent to the ground. Okay? Why? Why do you think the ground is so special?

Why did Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu choose the ground as step number one of its system? Why do you think? Well, it all came out of Judo, right? So Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu took the effective submission techniques of judo and then just refined them. That's the historical reason. But what's the mechanical or physical reason? Because you can control someone on the ground far better, right? Yeah, you can control people.

Lomachenko controls people in the standing position with angle and distance. There's different ways to control people. Yes, in boxing, if you only are boxing. But why the ground? Why did they choose the ground? What's the mechanical reason? What happens when you take a human being to the ground? Well, there's a whole barrier behind them that you can press them against. What about if you're in bottom position? Well, you could use that barrier as leverage. True. But there's something that occurs when someone goes down to the ground. There's something big that you may be missing here. What am I missing?

What's the most explosive event in the Olympic Games? The event that probably requires more transfer of energy and development of kinetic energy than any other. There's a bunch you could name, but one of them for me is always going to be the javelin throw. The javelin throw involves a full-powered sprint, a jump, a massive explosive turning of both hips and shoulders, and a throw. All the quintessential explosive elements of the human body are involved in the javelin throw

probably to a greater degree than any other olympic event and as a result people can throw a javelin 80 90 meters what would happen if you took those same javelin throwers and made them perform the same event on their knees wouldn't be so good they probably couldn't throw up more than 10 meters okay and what's changed the closer they get to the ground the less they can employ explosive force what's the first thing cowboys do when they go to brand a steer take it down yeah they lock up its legs and they put it down the ground nobody tries to brand a standing steer you're going to get killed because it can employ explosive dynamic movement to hurt

you you put them on the ground dynamic explosive movement is massively curtailed it takes away the single riskiest element of fighting which is quick dynamic movement that can generate kinetic energy so step number one of resilience was get it to the ground it's inherently safer less things can go catastrophically wrong on the ground than in the standing position what's step number two secure dominant position? Too vague. There's many ways to control people. There's a definite step. You've just taken the guy down.

What's your first thing in Brazilian jiu-jitsu? Well, the first thing I would try to do is get to a dominant position. What do you mean by that? Be more precise. Okay, pass to side control.

Good, good, good, good. You just answered it right there. Get past his legs. Past his legs. Why? His legs are strong. They carry you around. You can hold

a person in position. They're very good defensively. They're dangerous. They're dangerous. Okay, if I end up inside your legs, if you're a skilled jiu-jitsu player, you can arm lock me, you can leg lock me, you can strangle me. Even if you were an untrained fighter, you could up kick me. Many a man has been knocked out by an up kick. Even an untuted guy

can pull an up kick. Legs are dangerous. So step number two is get past those dangerous legs. What's step number three? Go for submission. No? He must be a tense planet black belt. Sorry, I had to throw that in somewhere, Joe. I'm an asshole. Step number three, Joe, you're failing. Okay, I passed the legs. Well, I'm going to try to control. I'm going to try to either mount or, like I said, side control. You're on the right track. You're going to work your way through a hierarchy of positions.

Yes. You're going to go knee on belly. You're going to go side control. You're going to transition to mount. You're going to transition to rear mount. Depending upon my game. There's a sequence of pins once you get past your opponent's legs, and jiu-jitsu encourages you to go through those various pins. If you look at the sport of jiu-jitsu, the pins score different amounts of points. Neon ballet scores a certain amount.

Mounted position scores more. Rear mount scores more. Why? Ever wondered about that? Why do we score the pins of jiu-jitsu differently? Well, there's more available from rear mount, of course. You can, of course, you can attack the neck. You can also attack the arms. You have a positional advantage where you can't be attacked. You're behind them so it's one of the most superior positions to achieve mm-hmm very good what about

the mount mount when the striking involves phenomenal when you just put your finger on it right there Joe every one of the pins of jiu-jitsu, the value of it is measured by your potential to strike your opponent on the ground. That's why they score more. Neon belly scores more than side control because from distance of neon belly you can strike with more power. It's inherently unstable however, so it scores less than mount which is inherently more stable and offers the same punching platform step number three of jiu-jitsu is to work your way through a hierarchy of pins where the pins are graded in value according to your ability to strike with effect on the ground

so far so far we've got three elements in this system of jiu-jitsu. Step number one, get the fight down to the ground where explosive kinetic energy is less likely to be developed by a dangerous opponent. Step number two, get past his dangerous legs. Step number three, work your way through this hierarchy of pins where the pins are understood in terms of the potential to harm your opponent with strikes on the floor. What's step number four? Step number four is try to secure a position where you can submit them.

You've already got the position. So what's step number four? Attack with a submission. Correct. So we've just described Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu as a four-step system. It's beautiful, it's elegant, and it's deadly effective. Step number one, take the fight to the ground. Take away the danger of explosive kinetic energy.

Step number two, get past his dangerous legs. Step number three, work your way through a hierarchy of pins, each one graded upon your ability to harm your opponent with strikes on the ground and set up. Step number four, submissions. And now the question that needs to be asked, where do leg locks fit into that system? And where do they fit in? They don't.

Well, now they don't. They don't, traditionally. Leg locks fit into the system in only one way. When the system has failed. When the system's not working and you can't take your opponent down. You can't pass his guard. You can't maintain a dominant position. And you can't get the regular submissions to work. Fuck it. Try a leg lock. Leg locks were seen for generations as a signal of failure

when you couldn't get the system to work you had to resort to leg logs it meant you were a bad jiu jitsu player you couldn't impose the fundamental system of jiu-jitsu, and so you chickened out and you went to leg locks. That's why they were despised. That was the real reason why for generations leg locks were dismissed. You don't think it was because so many people were injured by them that they were... No, absolutely not. People get injured...

The worst injuries in jiu-jitsu don't come from submission holds. The worst injuries in jiu-jitsu come from falling body weight, when people jump guard, when people accidentally, poorly perform takedowns. That's where you see catastrophic injuries in jiu-jitsu. That's where you see career-ending injuries. The joint lock submissions, you're out for a week, two weeks,

you know, catastrophic injuries. As I said, go on YouTube and put in guard pull gone wrong. You'll see catastrophic injuries. You'll see career-ending injuries there. You're not going to see from arm bars, heel hooks, etc. You'll see people getting hurt, but it's a contact sport. You expect that. No. There's a very simple, elegant system, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. We just saw one rendition of it, the four-step approach. And you clearly see leg locks don't fit comfortably into that system. What I did is I tried to find an avenue where they could come in. And the results were surprising.

The first thing is our four step rendition of J of Jiu-Jitsu looked at Jiu-Jitsu from top position, where we took our opponent down to the ground and we were on top of them. But my study of Jiu-Jitsu didn't start from top position. It started from bottom position. If you look at my students in competition, you will notice that around 80% of their entries into leg locks come from bottom position or with their opponent behind them. In other words, from what are supposedly inferior positions. So for me, it was never a question of losing position when I went for leg locks, because I was already underneath my opponent. I started underneath. How can I end up on bottom by going for a leg? I'm already on bottom. I started underneath.

How can I end up on bottom by going for a leg? I'm already on bottom. So most of my early work in leg locks was how to get into leg locks from disadvantageous positions, from underneath or when someone is behind me. So I never felt this problem of, okay, I'm going to lose position if I go for leg locks. I could still play a conventional jiu-jitsu game and have a very, very strong leg lock injury. That was the first avenue of leg locks. I could still play a conventional jiu-jitsu game and have a very, very strong leg lock injury. That was the first avenue of leg locking. But things became more interesting when I got further into the leg lock game and I started to realize that as you add leg locks into the game, you change the very nature of the sport. If you look at Jiu Jitsu as it's ordinarily practiced, it's a single direction

game. If someone is in front of me and I'm standing over them, Jiu Jitsu is all about movement from the legs towards the head. I'm supposed to pass their guard, work my way up to chest to chest contact, and get my head next to their head, either in front of them or behind them, either mounted or rear mounted. So jiu-jitsu always goes in one direction. If you ever get stopped or you lose position, you just start the process over again. It's a mono-directional sport.

It always goes from the legs to the head. Once you start adding leg locks into the game, jiu-jitsu becomes a two-directional sport. It always goes from the legs to the head. Once you start adding leg locks into the game, Jiu-Jitsu becomes a two-directional sport where you can go from the head down to the legs. You can go in both directions. So if I'm passing someone's guard and I simply can't do it, I can fall back and go back into the legs. If I'm side control on someone and they start to recompose their guard, I can fall back into the legs. I'm going from their upper body down to the lower body. Traditional jiu-jitsu always goes from the lower body directionally up to the upper body. So you end up head to head with your

opponent. But once you start adding leg locks, jiu-jitsu for the first time becomes a two-directional sport instead of a one-directional sport. And you can play your opponent's reactions between the threat of lower body and upper body in ways that opens up submissions so much more easily than the traditional game. So if I take you back to the moment where Dean Lister says to you, why would you ignore 50% of the human body? You go back and think about this, and what is your next step? Do you just start looking at students and looking at what you're teaching and analyzing positions and

you're still rolling at the time yes correct the first thing that I started to look at is okay who out there is doing a good job of leg-locking and the honest answer was there weren't a lot of people. What you would see is random success with leg locks. You'd see a guy wins a match here, a guy wins a match there. Most of the eminent leg lockers of that generation were actually coming out of Japan. You'd have people like Romina Sato,

who had a decent heel hook for that time. Imanari. Imanari, that was a little bit pre-Imanari. Imanari came slightly after Romina Sato had a decent heel hook for that time. Imanari. Imanari. That was a little bit pre-Imanari. Imanari came slightly after Romina Sato. They fought each other in grappling matches. One was younger than the other. But, you know, they had some success. I believe even Sakuraba finished Newton with a knee bar.

So, you know, the knowledge was there. But there was nothing systematic about it. There weren't people who were coming out and just systematically finishing people with one move. So there wasn't much in terms of people to study. So the first thing I started to ask him is, well, what is the nature of leg locking? is what is the nature of leg locking? It seems to have some problems associated with it. It's not as controlling as the traditional methods of jiu-jitsu.

That was really the key word there, control. Why do people favor things like rear naked strangles so much? Because it's such a controlling position. Rear mount is an incredibly controlling position. Why do people favor things like katagatame the arm triangle because this too is a very inherently controlling position all the most high percentage finishing holds in jiu jitsu all have

control as their dominant feature it's hard for people to work and as a result one person can continue to use the same move with a large degree of success over time against a large degree of success over time against a wide array of opponents. So every question I asked ultimately always came back to control.

And the one thing you would see with regards to the use of leg locks in the late 1990s and early 2000s was a lack of control. So all of my studies immediately went to the notion of control. Now, there are many forms of leg lock, but the ones that interest me the most always come out of what the Japanese call ashigurami. Ashigurami is a generic term. It just means tangled legs.

There are many different forms of ashigurami. Ashigurami is a mechanism by which I can use two of my legs to control my opponent's legs and hips. What I started to do was make a deep study of this notion of Ashigurami. How am I going to use my legs to control the real estate between my opponent's knee and his hips, preferably on both sides? Probably the single biggest cliche that you'll hear about jiu-jitsu is that it's position before submission. At the time, I was primarily interested in the idea of control before submission. Control is a much deeper and wider concept than the basic point structure-based position before submission model of jiu-jitsu. There's many ways to control people that have very little to do with position.

For example, ashi-garami itself scores nothing in jiu-jitsu, but done well, it can control an opponent just as well as rear mount can. So I started to see that there are many forms of control that went outside of the traditional basic positional hierarchy of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Ashi Gurami was one of them. Probably the single greatest key in the development of my leg lock system, again, came from a simple realization that the greatest mistake that people had made in leg lock work prior to the arrival of the squad

was that they made no distinction between the mechanism of breaking and the mechanism of control. Ashi Garami was the mechanism of control. The lock itself, whether it be a heel hook, an Achilles lock, a figure four toe hold, that was the mechanism of breaking. whether it be a heel hook, an Achilles lock, a figure four toe hold, that was the mechanism of breaking. If you watch 99% of the people out there who claim to be experts in leg locking, they don't distinguish between the two. They see, for example, heel hooking as a single skill. There's the lock on the legs, the ashi garami or whatever term they use for it, and the lock itself, they're not distinguished

they're taught as a single skill you can't differentiate the ashi garami and the lock and you'll see people teaching in this manner what i did was to strongly distinguish between the two so that my students could all hold an ashi garami position and switch from one ashi garami to another and hold people for extended periods of time and inhibit movement if i can inhibit movement for long periods of time i can break you at will i can take my time when i come to break you because the control is there the control is prime the break is second for most people it's just throw on the ashi garami and immediately go for the lock they don't even assume the ashi garami and immediately go for the lock. The ashi garami is described as part of the heel hook.

They don't distinguish between the two. Once I made that realization in the early 2000s, that's when the ball started rolling. That's when a significant amount of progress was made. I would say that your question was an interesting one. Okay, you had the insight. Lister gave you the insight. What started you going?

It was making first a critical distinction between control and submission, and in the case of leg-locking, between the mechanism of control, ashigurami, and the mechanism of breaking, which is the lock itself. In my case, the is the lock itself. In my case, the heel hook. A really good example of this is how effective it's been implemented by your students

against real world class Brazilian Jiu Jitsu competitors who don't use these methods. Like a good one is Gordon Ryan versus Cyborg. Cyborg, who is a fucking beast of a man, and just a physical specimen, a real freak, and is known for his tornado guard, is no stranger to leg locks, is no stranger to any of the positions

of nogi or gi jiu jitsu. But when I watched Gordon wrap him up and control him, and before he got the submission, you could see Cyborg look completely befuddled. Yeah. The match was over roughly 30 seconds before the submission was applied. Yeah, he was just trying to figure out a way out of it. There's nowhere to go. Just trying to figure out a way out of it.

There's nowhere to go. It's a terrifying position to be in for a real world-class Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt like Cyborg. When you watch that match, I was like, this is stunning. Because Gordon is, what, 21? Yes. Which is amazing. And Cyborg's in his 30s, right? I think Cyborg has been a black belt many, many years longer gordon has even been doing jiu-jitsu yeah yeah he's one of the best guys in the world and when you you look at

how well gordon dismantled him on the ground using the strategy that you just described it just it's see if we could find that actually see if you can find gordon ryan versus uh his his actual name is i believe you pronounce it a brew how do you do it's ricardo a brew yeah he cut out cyborg a brew yeah there's a lot of cyborgs in the jiu-jitsu world there's a male cyborg in mma there's a female cyborg here we go i think cyborg and pitbull are the two most common. So we're watching it here now, and you see cyborg who is this fucking tank of a man. And Gordon Ryan, who's quite a physical specimen himself, but much younger guy. How long has Gordon been doing jiu-jitsu?

I believe it's between six and a half and seven years total now. That's fucking crazy. And immediately he dives under, gets low, using butterfly guard. And so what he's trying to do, Gordon is trying to do what with Cyborg's legs? The first thing that Gordon Ryan needs to do is establish inside position with his feet. Probably the single biggest starting point for any kind of Ashigurami-based game, if you want to remember anything about this, Joe, remember this. Whenever you go into leg locks, the person whose feet dominate the inside position will always

dominate the Ashigur always dominate the ashi garami game that's the heuristic that i teach all of my students gordon ryan has just established inside position well cyborg just pulled him in which is interesting cyborg literally pulled him in with his feet inside yeah but gordon's feet were positioned in a way where they could only end up in the inside position so that's the first thing he's got to establish inside position with the feet he knows damn well if his feet occupy the inside position, wherever they go, he's going to get to the ashi-garami, and his opponent won't be able to stop. Now, can we freeze it there?

Yeah. Pause. Okay. Actually, can you go back a little bit with overshot, just a little? Okay. Right about here. Okay. Initially, there's a battle going on here for inside foot position. Cyborg is an extremely well-trained and knowledgeable opponent, and he's doing a good job of trying to backstep with his left leg.

He knows that if he keeps both of his feet on the left-hand side of Gordon Ryan's body, he will be able to prevent his opponent getting inside position. So he's doing the right thing. He's doing a good job here. Cyborg's not naive. As you said before, he's a multi-time world champion. He's very, very good. He's not leg-locking someone who doesn't understand what's going on. He knows what Gordon Ryan wants. There's a battle here for inside foot position. Cyborg is doing the right thing. He's going into a back step. He's going to post his right hand on the floor and try and back step out. Let's go just a little further forward into the video. Good. Freeze. Go back just a fraction. Just a little more.

Okay. What does Gordon's right foot have? His right foot, it looks like, it's hard to see here, but it looks like he's got... He's got inside position with one foot. He's got inside position with one foot.

The whole question is what's going to happen with Cyborg's left leg? Now we've got a battle between Gordon Ryan's left leg and Cyborg's left leg. Okay? How the battle goes from here

will come down to one thing. Who wins that battle okay go forward just a little more hook stop right away okay gordon ryan just won the battle essentially at this point the fight is over the only question is how long is it going to take why am i so confident am i am i an asshole am i so confident? Am I an asshole? Am I saying this because I'm an asshole? No, I'm saying this because I know what's happening. I gave you one of the keynotes of the leg-locking game already.

I'll say it again because it's so important. The man whose feet dominate the inside position will always dominate the Ashigurami game. Now, the second, whenever you go to attack someone's leg, 90% of the resistance on the leg you're attacking comes from the other leg. That's so important I'm going to say it to you again. Whenever I go to attack my opponent's right leg, 90% of the resistance is going to come from his left leg. We talked about control. The foundational principle of control in leg locking is a principle I refer to as double

trouble. Double trouble is a simple idea that if I control both of my opponent's legs, he no longer has the opportunity to use his second leg to defend the first. So the amount of trouble that you've put him in is literally doubled in a matter of seconds. Gordon Ryan has a hold of Cyborg's right leg with his left arm, and he has a hold of Cyborg's left leg with his legs. Why was I so confident that the match is over at this point? Because both of Cyborg's legs are now controlled by Gordon Ryan. He has just attained double trouble. Now let's slowly advance the

video. Do you see how Cyborg's legs are in a straight line? He's having a very, very hard time holding his base. There's the stop. Can you go back just a fraction? Right about here. Freeze. Okay. Our whole approach to jiu-jitsu is based around the idea of putting wedges around our opponent's body so that we can inhibit movement. A wedge functions just as a door stopper stops a door from moving in a breeze.

Okay. The only thing better than a wedge is a reinforced wedge. That's where the wedge is locked in place by another part of your body. Gordon Ryan currently has inside position with the right leg. He has control of Cyborg's other leg with his arm, so both legs have some degree of control. But he's about to massively reinforce that control by locking a triangle or a sankaku around his opponent's leg. In order for that to happen, he's going to have to lift his hips slightly off the floor so that he can elevate over Cyborg's left knee.

Watch the video. There's the elevation. There's the lock. Freeze. Freeze. Now he's got Cyborg's two legs in a straight line. That means Cyborg's only mechanism of posting or saving his balance is his left arm. That's all that he's got left. At this point the fight is done. Cyborg's right leg is controlled by Gordon Ryan's left arm. Cyborg's left leg is controlled by a reinforced wedge,

the strength of both Gordon Ryan's legs locked up in a triangle. Cyborg's actually a weight division heavier, I believe, than Gordon, but it doesn't matter. At this point, both hips are controlled. This is a full state of double trouble. Both legs controlled and a breaking mechanism in place. There's an ashi garami on the leg. You can break someone from there. Cyborg knows his only method of not being finished is to keep his hips over Gordon Ryan's hips. So the next battle is, how is Gordon Ryan going to put Cyborg's hips on the ground? What's saving Cyborg is his left hand.

Let's see how the battle goes. The battle just got lost. The hips went down. Why was it so easy? Stop. Why was it so easy? I don't know. Tell me.

Do you see that right knee? Yes. That's what pushed him over. The right knee went into the pocket of Cyborg's left hip. That meant the directionality of force was slightly away from the one base of support that Cyborg had left, which was his left hand. So he got sat on his hips. Now go forward just a little and freeze

what do you see joe and what what do you want me to look at what do i see both legs are wrapped up good be more precise uh well he has incredible control with his right leg um the way he's got his right leg and his left leg triangled. He's got the cyborg's right foot tucked deep under his arm, and he also has the left foot in there as well. So he's completely wrapped up with his legs and his arms. Very good. Okay, let's bring in a few points here. First, if you want to immobilize a human being and prevent them from moving,

one of the best things you can ever do is lock their legs together. You get a dangerous prisoner, what's the first thing you do? Handcuff his feet together and handcuff his hands together. He's no longer dangerous. Here, Cyborg is one of the most dangerous Jujutsu players in the world, but with two of his feet locked together, he's effectively neutralized. Perhaps most importantly, we've got a very interesting distinction here between what we call a primary and a secondary leg. Which leg is the Ashigurami locked up on?

Well, he's got the left leg is what's triangle. You just answered it. That's the Ashigurami leg. We call that the primary leg. The Ashigurami is locked on Cyborg's triangled. You just answered it. That's the Ashigurami leg. We call that the primary leg. The Ashigurami is locked on Cyborg's left leg.

That's the primary leg. The other leg, remember our principle before, 90% of all resistance comes from the

secondary leg. The arm controls the secondary leg and the legs control the primary leg. So the resistance from the secondary leg is pushing off and trying to separate the lock? There's numerous things. He could pommel

the foot. He could put his foot on the floor and turn. He could invert his body. There's a thousand things he could do, but he's not doing any of them if you control that leg. That's the important theme. So Gordon Ryan's upper body, his left arm, controls the secondary leg, and his lower body, the ashi garami, controls the primary leg. As a result, what do you think of Cyborg's ability to move? He's fucked. He's completely nullified. Yeah.

Okay, let's go a little further. Freeze. Freeze. Now, Cyborg is doing all he can do. Movement has been taken away from him. So his only option is to fight the hands. Gordon Ryan understands that he has control of the secondary leg. But he needs to make a transition to the primary leg in order to break Cyborg.

He's going to have to release the secondary leg. Now that's a scary thing. If you release the secondary leg, then your opponent can start defending himself again. So he's got to measure how he releases the secondary leg. So there's a battle for angle here. Cyborg is battling for the hands, but Gordon Ryan hasn't even started the hand fight yet. He's still in a control fight.

His only interest is in holding the position. Go a little further. Freeze. Why did Gordon switch his right hand to the knee? Well, that's the leg that can control. That's the secondary leg. The secondary leg, which can defend. I would imagine he's distracting him.

Why is Gordon Ryan's head leaning to the right-hand side? I don't know. Why? Because that's the side he needs to take Cyborg. If Cyborg turns his head to the other side, when Gordon Ryan releases the secondary leg, there's going to be a problem. There's a battle for angle now that no one sees. Gordon Ryan's head tells the whole story here.

Let's go a little further. Freeze. Gordon Ryan is already beginning the transition to the primary leg. The way he's got it locked up is just so horrific too. Yes. The two of them crossed over each other. Now at some point he's got to uncross the legs to get to the primary leg. Let's go a little further. Cyborg's still engaged in the hand fight. Now Gordon's about to make his transition to the hand fight.

Freeze. freeze. Gordon Ryan's made the critical release of the secondary leg. This is where things start to get interesting. Cyborg has perhaps tragically sat on his right hip, which means he has no ability to use his secondary leg to escape. And because he's holding Gordon Ryan's arm, he has no ability now to invert his body and go into a turning escape. Now, Gordon Ryan just needs to release the right arm. Let's go further. Freeze. Go back just to here.

Okay, Gordon Ryan is about to release the secondary leg. Freeze right there. Now, very slowly take it forward. Watch Gordon Ryan's left elbow. Freeze. Why did he's left elbow. Freeze. Why did he put the elbow there? I don't know. It's a wedge.

It's immobilizing the leg he really wants to attack. He's switched his arm position from controlling the secondary leg, which he hasn't yet fully released. But he's put his elbow in front of the toes of the primary leg to keep that primary leg from extending correct and to be able to transition effortlessly into the lock all he needs now is to release the right arm cyborg knows if he loses the right arm the fight is lost continue Cyborg knows if he loses the right arm, the fight is lost. Continue. Gordon goes back to elbow position.

Freeze, freeze. Go back just to here. Why did Gordon Ryan win the hand fight battle? Freeze. Cyborg is one of the strongest people in Jiu Jitsu. He's got two hands on a guy in a weight division lower than him. Why can't he hold? Why did he lose the arm? Why? Watch Gordon Ryan's right elbow. What did you see? Let me see that again. He's just lifting it up and pulling it away. What is he doing? He changed the angle through the elbow there's a grip over and a grip under if you just pull you'll never release the arm right he changed

the elbow position so that one grip was lost and then a push pull with the elbow and a slip. Once, continue forward now. He's got the left arm set as soon as the hands touch. And Cyborg just taps before he even gets a chance to extend it because he knows the game's lost. He knew the game was lost long before then. That's pretty goddamn impressive. Yes. And you'll see this with almost all of my students. I have seen that with almost all your students, which is so bizarre. Now, how many people are recognizing this system

and trying to mimic it or trying to find out some sort of a counterattack to it? That's an interesting question. I'm told there's actually kind of like an industry of people who try to break what we do down and mimic it. I know there's people putting out numerous instructionals. They watch what the squad does and tries to break it down. That's good. And it's natural. I'd be doing the same thing. If someone else was coming out and wrecking people with a given rule, I'd be studying what they're doing too. So, yeah, there does seem to be an industry of that. The question is how successful are they?

Do you see any other groups of people coming out and just exclusively finishing people with the same moves time and time again for years at a time at all levels of competition? No. You're seeing more Tenth Planet guys do that now. 10th Planet guys have given you all the credit in the world, by the way, that they've started transitioning to a lot more leg lock attacks, leg lock defense, concentrating on that. Yeah. What we find is most people definitely struggle with defending it.

And, you know, this has been around for quite a while now. It's been five years since the squad really started pushing this publicly. And it seems like there's still going to be some... Eventually people will figure things out. It's just the way progress works. Eventually people will figure things out. It's just the way progress works. But I think at this point it's pretty clear that people have changed their minds about leg locks. People, I think, are recognizing that there's something different going on here,

that this is a control-based approach to leg locks rather than a speed and power-based approach to leg locks. And the evidence for its success really comes from the nature of the squad itself if you look at the three founding members of the squad eddie cummings gordon ryan and gary tonin all three have very very different body types all three have very very different personalities and yet all three use a very similar game um two of those three athletes came from nowhere. They had no competition record before they started training with me at the Henzel Gracie Academy. One of them had a competition record. He was, I believe Gary Tonham was a brown belt competitor in the Gi, but he had no leg lock game. He was a guy who was essentially known for scrambling from bottom half guard and using rear naked strangles out of scrambles.

Strangles out of scrambles, my God. That was a tongue twister. So Gary Ton was a particularly interesting case because he came to me as an already developed athlete. He's trained under a very good friend of mine, Tom DeBlas, and completely changed his game. So that showed something very interesting. That showed that someone could already have a developed game and then take on this and change their game. So that was a particularly interesting case.

With the case of Eddie Cummings and Gordon Ryan, they came to me early in their development, so they took it on wholesale, as it were. I think this style and approach, and one of the things that's so fascinating about it is it really requires someone like you to systematically break it down the way you have described it. I've done jujitsu for 20 years, but I never stopped and thought of all the positions in the system, all the steps in the system, take the fight to the ground,

get past the dangerous legs, achieve some sort of a dominant position, go for the submission. I didn't do that. I knew what I was doing. What I find with most jiu-jitsu players is that they know what they're doing on an unconscious level.

My job as a coach is to make it conscious. Now for me, the most interesting thing, when I first started thinking about jiu-jitsu as a system, I did that when I wrote a book for my sensei, Henzo Gracie. He asked me to write a book, and I started thinking deeply about, what is this thing that I study? I spend all day on the manse. What am I doing exactly?

And when you start consciously thinking about, okay, breaking it down into steps, you see Brazilian jiu-jitsu as a step-by-step system. My question was, can I go further than that? If Jiu-Jitsu was a simple, single system, what about if you divided Jiu-Jitsu up into niche areas? And instead of having one overall system,

you had one overall system You had an overall system with many subsystems within it So he had a leg system a back system a front headlock system a Kimura system my approach to Jiu Jitsu is That I had recognized that much of the success of early Brazilian Jiu Jitsu came from its systematic nature nature, the fact that it was a systems-based approach to Jiu-Jitsu. And I took various niche areas and created systems within systems. Then things started to get interesting

when I started integrating the systems so that one subsystem failed, you could transfer to another. That meant that my students could put opponents who had trained much, much longer than they had into a niche area, which my students had so much knowledge of,

so much training in that isolated niche domain, that they could take someone who had trained three, four times longer than themselves and have more knowledge in that one domain than their much more experienced opponent did. And so what you saw with the squad was incredibly speedy progress, where they were getting wins against people who trained two, three times longer than they had. And this idea of what I call integrated subsystems, instead of having jiu-jitsu as just one simple

single system, you keep the overall system of jiu-jitsu, but you have subsystems within it, each one integrated with the other, so that when one system fails, you can pass off to another and go back and forth until you get the win. That was my approach to jiu-jitsu. That's what I want to do. If I can innovate jiu-jitsu in any given direction, that's probably the one I would push the most. one I would push the most. Now, throughout this time, you're dealing with some pretty significant injuries and physical limitations that you've had. Tell me about those, what those were and what, and how those hindered you. Yeah. When I was in my early teens, I was involved in a rugby injury where my knee was massively injured. Over the next six years, I would dislocate my knee. The ligaments appeared to be severely compromised. Every six months or so, I'd get a fresh injury,

which would be severe, and I'd be on crutches. I spent a significant amount of my teenage years on crutches. Around the age of 19, I had one last injury and my knee just seemed to have no power in it. Things like I walked with a limp and you must remember this is in the 1980s in New Zealand and this is pre-MRIs, pre-arthroscopic surgery. The doctors said, well, we can do an operation where we shorten the ligaments so that there's less looseness in there and hopefully your knee will be strong again. An operation was performed and unfortunately the ligaments were cut too short. And as a result, my leg never straightened again. And as a result, my leg never straightened again.

I developed a severe case of arthrofibrosis where my knee actually became deformed and doesn't straighten. Simple actions like walking, kneeling are extremely painful for me and have been my whole life. Just walking around is painful? just walking is painful kneeling is extremely painful and you know it's not easy to do jiu-jitsu where there's a lot of kneeling and yeah also there were other kind of structural problems as I got older because I walk with a limp and one leg significantly bent and one straight I tend to be completely out of balance out of sync with my body so I soon developed considerable hip and back pain. So this was something I carried with me my whole life.

And when I started Jiu-Jitsu at the age of 28, there was a concern. You know, am I going to be able to do this? Well, fortunately, ground grappling as a rule is generally easier on your body than standing martial arts. I don't think, for example, with my leg I could even become moderately effective at Muay Thai or Taekwondo. It was something we had to do at a jump and land. I just couldn't do it. Whereas Jiu-Jitsu, because it's on the ground, you can become pretty good. you can become pretty good um so i battled through that and uh i'm i i developed a satisfactory degree of competence i i got a black belt from hansel gracie and i became one of his

main teachers so how did you train with such a compromised knee you just figure out a way around it you just you know what are you gonna do you never thought well boy I fucked my knee up I don't want to fuck my other knee up too you know I think at that point you you just got to go forward and you got a choice you're gonna sit down and feel sorry for yourself where you're gonna do the best you can with what you've gone and how limited was your game because your knee I mean were you able to standing position was difficult for me. But were you able to do triangles and all sorts of different... I mean, I had, you know, every week or so I would tweak it and I'd be in pain for a day. I developed

a strong need for ibuprofen throughout my life. And other problems started to emerge, especially the lower back. The lower back is a big issue and gave me problems my whole way does it still bother you know less so now I have a machine I have to show you okay that's a called the reverse hyper have you ever heard of it oh yes I believe they were used by a guy called Louie Simmons yeah yes a life changer yeah yeah I can't use one now because I have a hip replacement and when you go up it puts extreme extreme sharing force on a hip replacement. So I can do it with body weight, but I can't do it with a weight. So I'm aware of what they are.

I know many people speak very highly of them. But so, yeah, I had this problem. And things didn't really become critical until my mid to early 40s, when as a result of walking my whole life with a limp, my left hip started to become completely bone on bone. So then the problems doubled because now I had a completely screwed up knee and a hip. But I couldn't get any kind of operations because George St. Pierre was fighting, Chris Weidman was fighting. They both had great goals.

And so I delayed the hip operation as long as I could until George had his first retirement and Chris Weidman became a world champion and then moved further away to Long Island and wasn't training with me so much. Um, at that time I, uh, I started training the squad and, um, uh, my first active competitive grappling student was Eddie Cummings. And, um, uh, I was able to work effectively with him as best I could with my hip problems. Uh, and of course the original leg problem. Um, and, uh, then at some point I got to a point where I literally, if I walked down a New York City block, I would have to stop several times and just stand on the side of the road and wait for my hip to stop hurting so I could walk. And it just became impossible to work with. And I ended up getting a full hip replacement. So that's when they shear off the top of your hip. but they screw a bolt down in there with a new hip.

That's correct. And how does it feel now? It's pain-free, which is a wonderful thing for me. Like any fake hip, it's never going to be as strong as your real hip. There's limitations on what I can do there. The only problem was that shortly after the hip replacement went in, then my knee finally collapsed after 30 years of problems. And so I'm going to have to get a knee replacement on the same leg. So, yeah.

And how do they do that one? Knee replacement's a little bit more tricky because you don't have as much bone mass to work with. And generally the longevity of knee replacements is not as... Because there's much more movement in the knee than there is in the hip. There's a much greater range of motion. There's less bone to affix to. They generally don't have the longevity

of a hip replacement. So I'm 50 years old. So ideally you would want a replacement that outlived you, but I would probably have to get a second knee replacement when I get older to replace the first, which is not ideal, but I'm probably going to have to do it. Well, who knows what kind of crazy technology they'll have down the line. I hope so.

I hope they give me some kind of superhero leg that turns things around for me. Yeah, well, you never know. I mean, it's just the nature of the hip replacement is so brutally invasive. The shearing off the top of the hip and then the rod that's inserted deep into the bone of the hip and then all that jazz. Yeah. It's a lot. There's a lot going on there. So to answer your question, in the early days it was an impediment that I worked around.

But as I got older, I had to do a first operation and now a second. Believe it or not, Joe, I was actually scheduled to get my knee replacement tomorrow. But I didn't do it because Gary Tonin is going to be fighting his first MMA fight in March 26th. Now, is he fighting for 1FC? 1FC. Ah, interesting. So if I got the knee replacement now, I would not be able to help him get ready for his first MMA fight, which I thought would be—that's not fair on my part.

Right. And so I delayed it until after that fight. Why did he decide on 1FC? That's an interesting question. You'd have to ask Gary Turner to be certain. But I think one of his main fears was that if he went through the amateur route and then worked his way towards the UFC, there would be problems because he's already an established name in grappling.

And I think he was concerned that it would be difficult for him to get people to fight amateur um and uh and then eventually make his way to the UFC whereas one FC is a fairly well-known organization and they were pretty open they he did a grappling match for them and they loved it they were like know, are you interested in MMA? And so he could, as it were, go into a fairly high level of MMA right from the start as opposed to do a long, circuitous amateur route and then battle his way into the UFC. I believe, don't quote me on this, but I believe that was the logic behind it. Now, are you able, so when you're demonstrating techniques, are you demonstrating them verbally? After the hip replacement, I could only do it verbally, and I had to trust in my students, Eddie Cummings, Gary Tonin, Gordon Ryan, and others. Brian Glick, no one knows him, but he's one of my great students. I would point with a stick, and they would do the moves for me. Since then, I've gotten a

little better and I like to demonstrate as best I can. There's days when I can barely walk and on those days I'll have the students go through. Sometimes there's certain standing techniques that are a little risky for me to do and I'll have students demonstrate those but um uh I I do what I can on the days that that I teach it is quite fascinating that a guy who has catastrophic injuries of his leg is one who is known for being an innovator and crushing people's legs there there is something kind of uh strange about that, you were joking around about it being revenge. Yeah, this is my revenge against the world. If God took away my leg, I'm taking away everybody else's.

So, yeah, there is something ironic about that. Now, when you're teaching this system and you're showing all the guys in the squad, the Donaher Death Squad, do you have it worked out to the point where it's like you have a curriculum? I never like the word curriculum because that kind of implies that it's all worked out in advance and it's done step by step.

I come in on a given day and I'm there seven days a week. I watch all of my athletes every single day. They don't do anything without me watching them do it. So I know at the end of every day what they need to work on tomorrow because I'm there. Wow. So it's not like a set curriculum where, you know, I know that on April 13, I'm going to do this. It's not like that.

Right. It's like I saw you train yesterday. I saw where you fucked upth I'm going to do this. It's not like that. It's like, I saw you train yesterday. I saw where you fucked up, and I saw where you were good. So tomorrow we're working this. What an amazing resource for those guys to have someone like you standing over them watching them and analyzing their positions and techniques and progress. That's generous of you to say,

but I always feel that my students are more of a resource to me than I am to them. I've been blessed through my entire coaching career to have some truly remarkable students, some of whom are famous and known to you and many others who aren't. And whatever debt they owe to me, I feel I owe at least as much to them. My students literally give me everything. I'm a notoriously difficult person to get along with. I'm demanding. I'm a perfectionist.

I can be downright unpleasant. When my body's in pain, I'm short-tempered. And yet they're like angels. They stick in there and they tough it out and they give so much time, so much effort, so much thought. And as I said, whatever resource I am to them, they give it right back. They're a resource to me. Well, that attitude is why you're such a fantastic coach in the first place. I remember one of the first times I started talking to you was when you were working with George. Now, what's interesting is you had a very interesting approach

and even the way you described things. You would talk about shoot boxing. Describe that because you didn't talk when, like, I remember I think one of our first long conversations was at some weird Denny's or something somewhere. And one of those weird road shows, like, we just sat down. You're absolutely right. That was the first time we met.

We had a long conversation. And you were talking about the principles of shoot boxing. Please explain. One of the strange things about the sport of mixed martial arts, it's so young that there's still so much to be done. Even the way people understand mixed martial arts, to me, is interesting. 99% of people who look at mixed martial arts see mixed martial arts as an eclectic sport. In other words, it's a conglomeration of different martial arts kind of banded together, and

then you've got mixed martial arts. It's a mix of martial arts, and there you have it. You get two guys in a cage, you've got mixed martial arts. I never saw mixed martial arts as an eclectic sport. I see it as a transcendent sport. What I mean by that is there are four distinct skill areas of mixed martial arts. Any one of those skill areas always goes beyond the component martial arts that make it up. In other words, the skill area transcends the various martial arts that make it up. In other words the skill area transcends the

various martial arts that make it up and create something bigger and different from the core components that originally built it. When you look at the sport of mixed martial arts you see there are four dominant skill areas. The first occurs when they first come out and the two athletes have no connection with each other and they're dancing around the cage. This is the so called shoot boxing phase which involves skills drawn from Western boxing, Muay Thai, karate, freestyle wrestling and various other martial arts. Where the two athletes are jockeying for position,

and typically they're trying to determine the direction of the fight. Will it go down, or will it stay up? That's one skill area. The second skill area is the skill area of the clinch, where the two athletes are both still standing, but now they've got a hold on each other. They're no longer moving around at will. standing, but now they've got a hold on each other. They're no longer moving around at will.

This has its key components drawn from Muay Thai, Greco-Roman wrestling, freestyle wrestling, judo, etc. Then there's a third key skill area. The area of fence fighting. Fence boxing. Where the two athletes are in a clinch the area of fence fighting, fence boxing, where the two athletes are in a clinch, but they're locked on the fence, which dramatically changes the skills required for success

than if you're in the open. And then you have a fourth skill area, which is the ground. And of course, that's divided into top and bottom position. So there are four skill areas of mixed martial arts. You could add more or less. For example, you could add in the idea of the geography of the cage. You can add in new areas. But let's stick with that fundamental four for now.

If you show me any one of those skill areas, yes, you can derive skills from those component martial arts, from Muay Thai, from Judo, whatever you choose. But that skill area is going to have other elements that are not part of those original martial arts, that is something different, something unique and something above the various component martial arts that made it up. When you're fighting on the ground,

a lot of what you do is derived from Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and modern mixed martial arts. Most of the athletes come from a Jiu-Jitsu background. When they work ground skills, they work in a kind of a Jiu-Jitsu framework. But many of the things going on down there are a mix of things that are far outside of your daily training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. You can bring in things from Muay Thai. You're throwing Muay Thai elbows on the ground but on the ground the elbows have a very different feel from the standing position. The mechanics behind them are significantly different. You're throwing hooks on the

ground but the mechanics of throwing hooks on the ground are very very different from the mechanics of throwing hooks in the ground are very, very different from the mechanics of throwing hooks in the standing position. So yeah, you're bringing skills in from boxing, but you're adapting them too. So the way to look at the sport of mixed martial arts is not just like, okay, I'm going to rope together some wrestling, some boxing, and see what happens. Rather, you're developing skills in four distinct areas, a minimum of four. And the skills you ultimately develop go beyond and are significantly different from the core components that you started with. And so ultimately the skills of a mixed martial artist at the highest levels transcend the various core martial arts that made the sport up.

You're going further. When you fight in a mixed martial arts fight, in a jiu-jitsu fight, you use it a lot more than just jiu-jitsu and the various other boxing styles, et cetera, et cetera, that you use. In the case of shoot boxing, in George St. Pierre,

everyone always talks about George's wrestling. Now, George is a very good wrestler. He's wrestled a long time with very good people. But 90% of the success of his ability to take people down goes far beyond wrestling. It has to do with the precursors to the shot. What wrestling teaches you to do in mixed martial arts is how to finish a shot. It gives you the body mechanics to finish the shot. What wrestling teaches you to do in mixed martial arts is how to finish a shot.

It gives you the body mechanics to finish the shot. But the setups are completely different from wrestling. I can show you endless examples of good wrestlers who went into mixed martial arts competition with no background in mixed martial arts and couldn't take anybody down. The distance is different. The stance is different. The motion is different. The setups are completely different. The context is different.

You're being punched instead of grappling. his career had a level of skill and technical insight in the art of boxing, kickboxing into takedowns that no one else has even come close to. Much of what he did in that area came from himself. Did he have good wrestling coaches? Absolutely. Did he have good boxing coaches? Absolutely. Great Muay Thai coaches? 100%.

But the skills he was exhibiting went beyond any one of those teachers or even them as a whole. The act of tying together all of those disparate skills came from him, the integration of skills. And so you have someone who had a wrestling background, had a boxing background, had a Muay Thai background, but ultimately what he was doing was something bigger than all of those put together. There's a synergistic effect here where the sum was somehow greater than the components that individually made it up. And that's what I mean when I talk about a transcendent sport. George St. Pierre was largely responsible through individual experimentation, starting in his late teens and going through his entire career in the development of shoot box.

career in the development of shoot box. Now, when you work as a coach for George, you weren't just working as a jujitsu coach. You were working in almost like a mastermind sort of position. I mean, I saw some conversations that you had with him where you discussed various things. And in fact, one of the things you came to me about was you asked me if i knew anyone who was proficient at the spinning back kick and that's how i got to working with george your your your coaching with him was not just simply like the these are the principles of jujitsu this is what I want you to work on, when the fight goes to the ground. You were working on a lot of different aspects. Like you were a guy that sort of put it together.

Now, when you don't have a background in striking and, you know, you're looking at all of these various disciplines and trying to formulate a strategy for a guy who's just such a supreme athlete like George. How did you formulate that? Did you do it based on the individual, based on their physical strengths and limitations and sort of formulate what you think would be the best approach? Did you work it out with him in conjunction? When George comes to train me there's there's a bunch of considerations first of all george lives in montreal i live in new york so time is always an issue well he does go down there it goes down there quite often but um uh but it's not like a squad the squad's there

like seven days a week three times a day george was never like that um uh so in the time available we'll work on uh on what we can. So everything's always done with George. How much time is available and what is the scenario that's coming up? For George, almost always it was an upcoming mixed martial arts fight. So a lot of people often ask me, how come you didn't teach George St. Pierre leg locks? Why wasn't he leg locking everyone in MMA?

Well, that's a good question. First off, leg locking, as you saw from the Gordon Ryan clip, requires, if it's not done well, leg locking is one of those things where if it's done well, it's amazing, but if it's done badly, it's the worst looking thing in the world. It's a disaster. So secondly, George's game, because his takedowns are so strong, is almost always done from top position on the ground. It's rare for George to be in bottom position on the ground. And in a fight situation, if you're already on top of someone and you've got the striking prowess of George St-Pierre, I was happy to coach him more in what we call grapple boxing, the skill of grappling to punching on the ground. It just made more sense for him. He's competent

in leg locking, but he's not like Gary Tonner and Eddie Cummings or Gordon Ryan. Could he finish most black belts? Yeah, absolutely. But why would you stake a fight where literally millions of dollars have been fought? There's a legacy on the line. Why would you take that risk when you could just stay on top and just punch him out like you did with, say, John Fitch, for example? So it didn't really make sense to push that hard on George. Your question, though, was, okay, well, what about these other skills? What about standing position? Well, I'm fascinated not just by jiu-jitsu, but by martial arts in general. And I've always believed all the various sport martial arts in the world

have areas where they are particularly strong. For example, people make fun of Taekwondo. You know, they are. No one does Taekwondo on MMA. You'll back me up on this, Joe. There are some Taekwondo players out there at Olympic level who can kick with a skill level that most people can't even imagine. I've seen people like Herb Perez

kicking demonstrations where you're looking at it and this is one of the most impressive things I've ever seen in my life. And this is a guy who, if he hits you, he's going to take your head off. It's impressive to behold. I was there when Herb Perez was in his prime. I watched him KO quite a few people.

I watched him KO one of the U.S. national champions with an axe kick. Some of the worst KOs I've ever seen in my life came from Taekwondo. They tend to involve jump spinning kicks where there's just huge amounts of kinetic energy being developed. You see the same thing in point fighting karate.

You see some terrible knockouts in point fighting karate. People make fun of these sports. Well, on their own is the issue. That's the issue. That's the issue. On their own, they've got problems. But if you can integrate that into a well-developed, complete skill set, they could be incredibly effective.

And I always saw tremendous potential for Taekwondo's jump spinning back kick. No one does spinning back kicks better than Taekwondo. That's one of their main things, and they do it incredibly well. The setups are fantastic. The application, the mechanics, everything's super impressive. So I always thought that would be a, you know, George had a good spinning back kick,

but I thought that would be a nice addition. You always want to be building new skills into a opponent. You don't want to be that predictable guy where everyone knows what you're doing. And I know you came from a taekwondo background, and so I thought that would be an interesting thing for you to work on with him. Well, it was a funny conversation because that was my specialty. Yes. And so when you brought in, I always wanted to talk to you. I always found you a fascinating guy.

So when you came up to me and you said, do you know anyone? It's almost like a trick question. It was a trick question. And I was saying, and when I- Do you know anyone besides Joe Ritha? When I said, I was like, I was hesitant. I was like, okay, you're not going to believe this, but I- The truth is I knew you had a good jump swing back kick.

I was trying to subtly push you. Did you know? Yeah. How did you know? Word gets around tough guy. Oh, okay. I thought you were just fucking with me. But I felt like when I was telling you, I was like, man,

I don't even want to, I wish I knew someone who did it as well as me. You should have just been like, yeah, I've got the best jump spinning back kick in the fucking world.

Not really. I did jump spinning back kick quite a bit, but I prefer a regular spinning back kick. I want my foot on the ground because I push off that foot. There's a significant amount

of force in that left leg forcing, pushing off that back. Interestingly, you're seeing some guys out there now having good success in MMA. Yes. I remember seeing Michael Page had a beautiful one. He's got everything.

That guy can do everything. He's another guy who came from that point fighting background. You see Raymond Daniels and him and a lot of these guys from that background that are developing. Raymond Daniels worked with George for his last two fights. Very, very impressive guy. Phenomenal. Yeah. And, again, he had just the point fighting skills, and now he's developing real boxing skills.

And he's, you know, you've seen him in Bellator kickboxing. You see the integration of the two. It's incredible. Phenomenal. I mean, he could just do things physically that most kickboxers just really don't know what he's doing yeah he'll he'll jump up and do what's uh called like a touch spinning back kick like he'll jump up and touch you with the front leg i saw that he hit it in a glory fight i believe yes and um yeah beautiful yeah he's phenomenal he's phenomenal. He's phenomenal.

But again, when you see that, it's like those things by themselves, you're just going to get taken to the ground and smashed. And most people, unless you land one of those catastrophic spinning back kicks right away, the odds are you need all those other things as well in order to be particularly effective, which is why George was such a unique case. George can get away with that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. But that was a fun moment. It was interesting. I've always wanted to show somebody this because it's a weird little thing that I know how to do. Going back to your original question, the idea of George in shootbox you'll see that george's entire methodology

and the standing position is built around the concept of a dilemma the dilemma is always between his jab and his takedown people always talk about proactive and reactive takedowns okay this guy's a reactive take this guy's a proactive takedown guy the thing thing about George is he would use his jab proactively, but he would use his takedowns reactively. Now that's interesting because George would literally provoke people into the takedown. I just want to point this out, past tense. You're saying this like you know something I don't know. No, no, no.

Because George just won the middleweight title, relinquished the title, and then the great speculation is will George fight again? Yeah. The truth is that no one knows because it comes down to medical problems. George has a, he's got a problem in his stomach. It's like colitis? Is that what it is? Yeah.

What is that exactly? I'm not going to claim to be a medical expert, but it's one of the most frustrating things that George has had to deal with where there are certain parts

of the human body that is out of your control and the stomach is one of them. Just things happening in your stomach, you can't control it. Things like stress seem to make it worse.

And the truth is that no one really knows at this point. So wherever there's doubt, my instinct is to think, well, do you really want to come back, George? You've done all this. What a great way to cap off a career, too. It was amazing. It was impressive.

And I've got to tell you, when he came back, this is what was really interesting about that fight. George had said, I'm better. I'm a better martial artist than I was before. And he looked better. I mean, he definitely looked like he was a little out of competition. After four years, he should. Yeah, he should.

How many fighters do you know came back after a four-year layoff? Very few. But skill-wise, he looked phenomenal. I mean, his striking looked incredibly smooth. And I think you could see it in Bisping's face pretty early on. Skill-wise, he looked phenomenal. I mean, his striking looked incredibly smooth. And I think you could see it in Bisping's face pretty early on. This guy, this is not a rusty George St. Pierre. This is not a small welterweight who's making his way into middleweight.

He looked huge. He looked phenomenal. His technique, the way he was landing leg kicks and his sharp jab, and then ultimately that left hand that he used to stun Bisping and get him on the ground. I mean, he looked sensational. Yes. You were there the night George went into his first retirement, and you'll recall the whole retirement thing was kind of,

the speech was vague. It wasn't clear. It was confusing. Because in truth, he didn't know if he wanted to retire um the whole thing was actually contrived in the octagon right there in front of you there would be a hard fight uh the training camp hadn't been the best camp the fight for hendrix was uh george was unclear if he wanted to fight at all there was all kinds of controversies involved in the fight and um then when the fight was over it was it was a very close fight um and uh uh he wasn't sure what he wanted to do there was a language miscommunication and ultimately he essentially he walked away from the game and he walked away for four years that's

a long time to be out of a sport that's as young as MMA which is evolving all the time every year, the sport changes and the belts tend to change hands very, very quickly. So when George started talking to me about the idea of, OK, I want to come back, I think I've still got to come back. I want to come back. There's a desire, a passion. My point to him was, first off, are you sure you really want to do this? Like, you know, the last two fight camps was tough. You didn't seem to have the same kind off, are you sure you really want to do this? The last two fight camps, it was tough. You didn't seem to have the same kind of drive as you used to have. Are you sure you want to do this?

Is this like a middle-aged fantasy going through here? And he said, no, no, I feel this. I want to come back. So my question to him was, if you're going to come back, are you just going to do the same thing? Are you just going to come back to welterweight and do what you always did, which is come out and beat the best welterweights and just hold the title? You're just going to be doing the same thing. I thought, if you're going to come back, let's do something significant, something you haven't done before.

And so the way I put it to him was, what are the three most persistent criticisms you always hear about George St-Pierre? Number one, you never fought up a weight class. You never went up. Number two, you fought so tactically sound with such an emphasis on strategy and techniques or what have you,

that matches could become dull. The average fan was like, well, yeah, he's winning easily and it's dominant, but it doesn't do it for him. It's not exciting. There's no drama in the fights. So he had this idea that on the one hand, he was very technically sound, strategically deep,

but the fights weren't as exciting as they ought to be. The idea that he'd never gone up a weight category. And the third most persistent criticism, he didn't finish fights. He was a very skilled fighter. He wasn't finishing fights. So my point to him was, okay, if you're going to come back, let's do it in a way where you address those three things. if you're going to come back, let's do it in a way where you address those three things. George is always concerned about his legacy as a fighter.

And if there were three persistent criticisms of George T.P.'s legacy, it was those three things. You're not finishing fights, you never went up a weight class, and you're too tactical. You're not providing the drama that a fight should. So I said, let's change things. We got, in that four years, previous to that, whenever I was training George, I was training him for a fight.

He was going to fight, he's fighting Nick Diaz, he's fighting Carlos Condor, he's fighting, you know, whoever. And it was always getting him ready for a fight. You're fighting Matt Hughes in two months, let's get ready. Now you're retired,

I'm not going to train you to fight some dude. I'm going to train you in Jiu Jitsu. Freddie Roach is going to train you're tired. I'm not going to train you to fight some dude. I'm going to train you in Jiu-Jitsu. Freddie Roach is going to train you in boxing. In this sense, we had the time now to start working on finishing skills. A significant change occurred where my primary emphasis in training George in that four-year layoff was in submissions now happily that happened at what time the time the squad was coming out so i had a group of some of the best submission peoples in the world for george to work with so his submission started getting better suddenly george st pierre if he got on your back it's a problem he's submitting people in the gym. I could run off some names. I won't do it because it's not the thing to do,

but I could run off some names of people he submitted in the gym that would shock you, like well-known jiu-jitsu people. And for the first time, our primary emphasis wasn't on grapple boxing. It was submission. Freddie Roach was working on the mechanics of punching. George always had good in-out movement. He always had that karate movement, the ability. He always had a strong jab. But now he's teaching him how to sit on a punch. Suddenly George had a left hook. A guy who can integrate left hand between jab and left hook,

that's a dangerous man. Everyone was worried, there's so much overreaction to George's jab that suddenly left hook opportunities were opening up and now he was sitting on that left hook and people were getting hurt. So now for the first time, you've got a guy who's got submissions

and he's hitting with genuine power. As he came back, there was a question of who's going to be the opponent. And the next thing I said is, well, you never went up a weight division. Go up to 85. Now, was any consideration about going up to 85 because of the fact that Bisping was the champion? No. George was trained with Bisping?

No, because that decision was made before Bisping was the champion. Really? Yeah. How far in advance was the decision made? Because Bisping had defended against Henderson. Remember, this is a four-year project. Okay. So during these four years.

Initially, I couldn't make that decision because another student of mine, Chris Weidman, was the 185-pound champion. And Chris and George would never fight each other. But once that was no longer an issue, then it was like, hey, this could work. This could be interesting. So during the entire four years, he was talking about eventually coming back? Not the entire four years, no. Okay.

But he was training the whole time, and I was pushing him. Okay, you're not fighting anymore. Let's do some submission grappling. Right. Okay. He stuck with Freddie Roach. He loves working with Freddie Roach. And so the training was going in different directions.

And who was his Muay Thai coach? Mostly he works with Firas Zahabi and TriStar, but that's more integrated. Firas is a black belt of mine, So he, um, often, uh, does jujitsu with for us where I teach for us and trust that does a good job there. Um, but for us, uh,

ties things together. That's his principal function. And I know he trained with Phil nurse for a while as well. Yeah. Um, then he trained with a lot of guys who came out of, uh, uh,

Thailand itself from Tiger Muay Thai. Um, uh, Yod, that's a shortening of his actual name. They all have very long names, but Yod was one of his trainers. They trained him prior to Condit and Diaz, did a fine job. So there's never been a shortage of coaches in his life, but there are certain things that seem to gel with him more than others. Interestingly, during that four-year period, George had a strong rebirth into karate and worked with a lot of specialized karate people, including Raymond Daniels and others. They came mostly from the European point fighting karate circuit, and he was working with them a lot.

fighting karate circuit and he was working with them a lot. And so somewhere they crossed a certain period of time where you're dealing with a different athlete now. This is a guy who's had four years off and the training had gone in different directions. His finishing skills in both fisticuffs and grappling had gotten considerably better. He was toying grappling had gotten considerably better. He was toying with the idea of going up to 85 and experimenting with diet, et cetera, to get his body weight up. That's never an easy thing to do. And tactically, he was working more on the idea of being an exciting fighter through movement and pushing harder for the finish. And I thought those were three very, very healthy directions to go in. And this would, as it were, if he did come back, this would offer a genuine opportunity to address the three most persistent criticisms of his career.

Initially, there was a lot of resistance from the UFC. I don't think they were fond of the idea at all. They wanted him to go to 170 and do what he had done. from the UFC, I don't think they were fond of the idea at all. They wanted him to go to 170 and do what he had done. But George pushed hard for the fight at 85, and ultimately it happened in a rather strange way. Tyrone Woodley had a fight at 170, which wasn't the most crowd-pleasing fight,

and George St-Pier Pierre was supposed to fight Tyrone Woodley and then the US says you know what fight Brisbane it's on so they we chose the Madison Square Garden that's one of the great fight capitals of the world and that's how it happened so there was consideration in fighting 170 yes and so this was the UFC's idea, but what about your plan? I thought, first of all, I'm not the matchmaker. I'm not the main policymaker. I don't want to say that I was the guy. I was the guy that suggested those ideas.

And George seemed to like the idea. He said, if I'm going to come back, if I'm going to take the risk of a four-year layoff and come back, it's a big risk. I mean, Muhammad Ali came back after three years and had two warm-up fights and still lost his title fight. Yeah, but Muhammad Ali really wasn't working out. Yeah. That was when the Vietnam War thing had happened. Yeah, he was mostly doing tours of college campuses. Yeah, he wasn't really working out.

George was working out the whole time and improving. You could see the difference in Muhammad Ali's body when he came back. But still, there's many other examples. Sugar Ray Leonard came back after layoffs. He had one successful and one very unsuccessful comeback, and he was working hard the whole time. So coming back is a tricky, tricky thing on many levels too, not just physical but also psychological.

So now this colitis thing has thrown a monkey wrench into the gears. Yeah, actually it threw a monkey wrench during the camp. Really? Yeah, I could tell you some stories about that. That camp was, as good as the four years was, the camp itself, I can say it now because it's over,

was a disaster. It was probably the worst camp I've ever been involved in. Really? I was coaching, of course, the squad for ADCC. So ADCC, I believe, was around six weeks before George's fight.

So I was in Finland and communicating with George, and he's like, feeling good, the moment I get back, I'm just going to get on a plane from Finland to Montreal and start the camp. George says, I've got stomach issues. And I was like, what do you mean, stomach issues? What does that even mean? and I was like what do you mean stomach issues what does that even mean now about two weeks into the camp the issues got so bad that George literally could not know this is a six-week fight camp that's a very short camp back in the day we used to do eight to twelve weeks but George

thought a shorter camp would be better he as he getting older he wanted a shorter camp would be better. As he was getting older, he wanted a shorter camp. First two weeks were okay, but I was in the aftermath of the Finland expedition. And when I first went up, George said, I've got to cancel. I can't train. My fight's four weeks away. And George took two weeks off. There was a critical moment on a Friday evening

where I said to Firas Ahabi, this is the second time I've had to say this to Firas Ahabi, the other was the Carlos Condit camp. I said, if George isn't training by Monday, we're going to pull the plug. There's no other way. And we were talking about a four-year layoff. And this camp is lost.

It's dead in the water. So four weeks out, he takes two weeks off. I believe it might have been five. I'll check the dates later. But close. We're talking very close. There was a critical two-week period. And during that two weeks, what is he able to do?

Essentially nothing. Nothing. Just no training. Light drilling, some movement. And it occurred at the worst possible time. It wasn't at the start of the camp. It was in the middle of the camp. So the first two weeks were lost because then we had two weeks of inactivity.

Then there's two weeks left. And I remember the first time I went up, I brought Jake Shields, Gary Turner, and Gordon Ryan with me. We came up and we went through some drills on the ground. And I was happy.s, Gary Turner and Gordon Ryan with me. We came up and we went through some drills on the ground and I was happy. You know George looked okay on the ground. He did fine against the squad guys and we worked on some specialized grappling stuff and then the next day he went to do a shoot box workout. Now I could sit here all day and tell you adventures of George St. Pierre doing shoot box training with people. I've seen him spot everybody. I'm not going to mention names,

but I've seen George St. Pierre take down effortlessly some of the biggest names in mixed martial arts in weight divisions far above his own so many times per round you just lose count. I'm afraid to even tell you the stories because people wouldn't believe me um i'm used to seeing george st pierre shoot boxing bang down right okay um i've seen that since the start of his career i watched george st pierre do a shoot box workout where he couldn't score a takedown. This is a fight two weeks away.

I'm just looking going like, holy heck, what is this? He's getting hit. He's getting frustrated. He's getting tired. And I said to Firas, you know, this is a crisis. This is one of the biggest UFCs of the year. It's Madison Square Garden garden he's the headline the ufc had to pull some big things to get this fight to happen they didn't originally didn't

want it if we pull out now it's going to look like a disaster it's going to let george let the ufc down um and to his everlasting credit george said i'll be be back on Monday and I'll be better. We went up and he dug in deep. What can I tell you? He's a trooper. He trained every day those last two weeks. And as each day went by, there was significant improvement. And I remember there was a distinct moment about five days before the end of the camp.

I saw him do a shoot box workout and he looked like the old George. And I was like, okay, I believe in this kid again. He can do it. Jamie, will you please Google colitis? I don't know enough. I believe you should Google ulcerative colitis. Yeah, I don't know. So it's something to do with stomach ulcers. Yeah, I don't know. So it's something to do with stomach ulcers? I'm not going to claim to be an expert, but yeah. I can tell you what the symptoms were.

It was extreme stomach pain and inability to eat. It screwed up his entire diet. And when did it start? It started early in the camp and got progressively worse. So before the camp, there was no issues? Not none that he mentioned. Ulcerative colitis is usually only in innermost lining of the large intestine, colon, and rectum. Forms range from mild to severe. Having ulcerative colitis puts a patient at increased risk of developing colon cancer.

Symptoms including rectal bleeding, bloody diarrhea, abdominal cramps, and pain. That sounds like a party. Yeah. Can you bring it back? Read the first four. Treatment can help, but this condition cannot be cured. Requires a medical diagnosis, lab tests, or imaging always required. Chronic, can last for years or be lifelong.

It's incredibly frustrating for him to deal with. It says treatments include medications and surgery. Yeah. So it's a problem. But it appeared to back off a little bit in the last two weeks. He came back. This is the kind of person George St. Pierre is. The morning of the fight, Saturday morning, we're in New York City in the hotel room.

Firas Zahabi, Freddie Roach, and myself are at the breakfast table george comes down for breakfast he's weighed in he looks at his breakfast his originally the plan because it was a fight at 185 was to have george come in at a higher body weight but he ended up weighing 191 pounds which is exactly the same as he used to fight at welterweight the same body weight but he ended up weighing 191 pounds which is exactly the same as he used to fight at welterweight the same body weight so that was kind of a disappointment you know um and uh he quietly excused himself and went to the bathroom everyone else went away to do their things and i sat there and i realized he's in the bathroom for an hour he came out I was like George you okay and he looked at me he said I'm fine but I knew he wasn't and then he went out fought

and then afterwards he told me dude I was in so much pain and he was afraid to tell me because he would worry that if I cornered him and I thought he was compromised I wouldn't corner him the way I normally would, that I would doubt him. So he kept it all inside, didn't say a word. And he's a good kid. You know, you can't help but admire a kid like that. Wow.

Well, that's what makes him a champion. It's one of the things. It's less than perfect conditions. He could still rise to the occasion. Less than perfect. It was very far from perfect. Now, you said that during the Johnny Hendricks fight, during the camp for that fight, when he decided to impromptu retire inside the octagon, that there was talk during the camp that he didn't want to fight. Yeah.

What was that about? Really, it centered around two things. One, I can not discuss because it involves the personal life of George St. Pierre. There were some things going on in his personal life that deeply affected him. And he was deeply unhappy with some circumstances in his personal life. And it's not appropriate for me to talk about those. And the second was the whole idea that it had become an obsession with George at that time, which was the use of anabolic steroids in mixed martial arts.

And he was deeply unhappy with what he perceived as the prevalence of the use of anabolic steroids in mixed martial arts as a whole and among his opponents in particular. in mixed martial arts as a whole and among his opponents in particular. And he wanted a testing program to be brought in for that fight. There was talk about it, but nothing came of it. And it became like this psychological obsession during the camp. And between those two issues, there was a lot of unhappiness. He came in, he did his training.

He's a professional athlete. It's not like he missed workouts or anything crazy. There wasn't going out at night or anything foolish. But there was a degree of unhappiness where I'm looking and thinking, how much longer can this go on? Now, there was some talk about the Tyron Woodley fight and then tyron had this bad performance but if george did get healthy and was confident enough in his health that he could get through an actual training camp would he be interested in considering a fight with tyron woodley absolutely

i think tyron woodley is a great champion i know he gets a lot of stick a lot of flack that kid is talented very talented very very good and he doesn't think george wants to fight him he was on the podcast the other day yeah i think uh people say that for reasons so that they can motivate someone to fight there's a political aspect to it i think that both athletes have a deep respect for each other Tyrone Woodley is a very very difficult opponent to beat people criticize his style but people don't understand the difference between regular fighting and championship fighting championship fighting is about winning and losing

and you've got to do what you've got to do to win that's the first consideration it's nice to impress the crowd it's nice to do this or that but ultimately it's about what you've got to do to win. That's the first consideration. It's nice to impress the crowd. It's nice to do this or that. But ultimately, it's about what are you going to do to win? What are you going to do to beat the second best guy in the world? That's a difficult, difficult thing. And it has to be done correctly.

This idea of fighting to entertain. This is a very complex thing. And you talked about it with George addressing that or attempting to address that in his comeback and trying to finish and be more energetic and aggressive. But the reality is that's not always the best way to engage. There's a right way to fight a person with a particular skill set, and especially in the Woodley versus Stephen Wonderboy Thompson fights. I was like, this is the only way to fight that guy. You cannot, I mean, unless you are what he is,

which is a very skillful traditional martial artist that has this very unique ability to bend at the waist like a snake and slide in with techniques and does a lot off the front leg, dangerous stuff off the front leg. Unless you can do that too, you really shouldn't be on the outside striking with him. It's just too weird. That style's too weird.

So he kind of had the lay back. And if you, and I, again, if you look at the results of the fight, the times in the fight

where someone was hurt, it was Tyron Woodley putting the hurt on Wonderboy Thompson. Those are the only times in the fight where it was really exciting. Yeah.

Other than that, it was sort of Wonderboy kind of trying to pick at him from the outside. And it's a very difficult fight to look good at. You know, the whole idea of mixed martial arts fans, there's always three kinds of people that watch mixed martial arts. There's fans of drama, there's fans of violence, and there's fans of drama there's fans of violence and there's fans of strategy and technique guys like us when we watch mma we fall into the technique and strategy crowd that's the guy

to me i can watch woodley fight wonder boy and i'm fascinated yes to me that's just like wow it's a magic yeah i can watch it all day um many of the fans want to see violence that's what they're attracted to. And it's a significant portion. Others like the idea of drama. And athletes, in a sense, have to brand themselves according to one of those three choices. George always branded himself as the technique and strategy guy. Tyrone Woodley's struggling with that now himself.

He's doing the same thing. Cale Sonnen is the quintessential drama fighter. He didn't really have exciting fighting style And he was never really a technique and strategy guy. So he went with drama. So is he done vocally? You'll get it like a violence based fighter someone like who's a map aliaris. That's his appeal, you know, just by Rumble Johnson It's a violence. Okay. He's not into drama. He's not going to talk anything. He's not going to, he's not known. It's like a strategy and technique guy. He's going to come out and do the same thing every fight,

and it's going to be a violent finish. So every fighter has to, as it were, identify what's his area. What's he going to do? What's going to be his appeal and work within that? And, you know, Tyron is learning it's not an easy thing to do. You get criticism from certain aspects of the other two elements of the mixed martial arts audience. That seems like the big fight. It's certainly the big fight for Tyron, but it seems like the big fight for George as well.

Yeah. My only reservation when you say, is this this the big fight is it essentially it's the same fight that George did for a decade it's George against another very very tough welterweight what you did for ten years of his life yeah but Tyron is he's especially dangerous I mean he's more I think he's more dangerous than Hendrix I think he's more dangerous than Hendrix. I think he's more dangerous than any of those guys. I think his ability to put you away with one shot is top of the food chain. But you could say Hendrix was putting people away with one shot for three years, you know?

Yeah, he was. Hendrix is a fascinating case. And we should probably talk about that once the camera stops. He was a fascinating case, and I can understand why he was so successful. But, you know, there's a lot to maintaining that. There's a lot to, it's one thing to get to a position where you are a world-class fighter. It's like, how long can you keep that up for? And one of the most impressive aspects of George's career was the fact that George was able to keep that up for so long. People don't understand this. It's incredibly tough to become a UFC champion, but however tough that is, it's 10 times tougher to stay there.

And on so many different levels, too. It's not just the physical thing. The moment you become champion, you become the most studied fighter in the world. Everyone knows every little weakness. They see every little strength and they can negate it. And psychologically, it's tough, too. Every time the other guy fights, it's the biggest fight of his life.

Whereas every time you fight, it's just another fight. This is your 10th title defense. For you, it's just another fight. This is your tenth title defense. For you, it's just another fight. For the other guy across the ring, this is the biggest moment of his life. He's coming at you with everything he's got. This is his moment of glory. This is literally going to change his life if he becomes a UFC champion. For you, it's just the next fight.

That's the question. It's like, is it possible for a champion to maintain a challenger's intensity through a 10-title fight defense? Or do you just have to accept the fact that you're dealing with a completely different mind space? I think ultimately you have to drop the whole pretense that it's about intensity. Because no, I don't believe anyone can hold the same amount of intensity over 10 years of preparation. You have to start thinking in terms of, I'm going to defend my title with technique and strategy. Because if you go with intensity, you can only hold intensity so long.

It's going to diminish in time. As you get paid more, as you get tired, as you get injured, as years go by, the intensity drops. Now, when you analyze various fighters of today, who stands out to you? There's a lot. There's some very, very impressive people.

The guy who impresses me enormously is Demetrius Johnson. Yeah. I'm extremely impressed by this guy. I think he's the greatest of all time. It's hard to... Greatest of all time is such a tough thing to say it is it's um uh with demetrius the the open question is always going to be what was the level of competition

right but that's not his fault right you can only fight the guys that give you well it's like roy jones jr when roy was in his prime it's the same sort of situation he was so much better than everybody else it's like how good were these guys i mean they were world-class guys but against him they just looked like they didn't belong in there what you typically find is that when you come to assess who's the greatest of all time it's always going to come down to criteria and um each guy has his strong point his claim to fame as far as, you know, I was the best guy of all time. Let's stick with just UFC champions.

Otherwise, the discussion would be too great. If we go into pride and, you know. Right, sure. It's going to get out of control. But Demetrius Johnson's, his claim to fame is the completeness with which he's winning fights.

He's using everything beautifully. He's knocking. He's hitting people. He's clinching people. He's hitting clinch knockouts. You don't see those often in the UFC. He's incredibly good on the ground. A few times he gets in trouble.

He seems to navigate his way out without a problem. There's a completeness in his skill set which is incredibly impressive. He's integrating wrestling and striking in ways that are just deeply, deeply impressive. You'll get someone like Jose Aldo who's right up there in terms of, you know, is he one of the greatest of all time?

A sad thing about UFC is that, UFC fans I should say, is that people have very short memories you a guy loses a couple of fights and suddenly he sucks and it's like dude a killer for 10 years um and uh obviously very very skilled he had that um and he fought you know many tough opponents and uh do you feel like when you see a guy like aldo you're just seeing the miles the miles pile up? Or do you think that Max Holloway is that good?

He's not that old. He's not that old. 32. Yeah. So I'm reluctant to say it's the miles. And also Jose Aldo didn't really take a lot of damage in his career. He's not like a guy that got knocked out five times and, you know, he came back. So in terms of like the damage he took and his age, I don't think it's a question of miles.

Do you think it's a question of the game just passing him by? new levels of the game I That's that's a great question. Well, I feel like max Holloway style was almost like the perfect Yeah, yeah, a lot of it comes out the styles. Yeah, and and you're right Holloway's awkward Distance scene and things very good distance, but also phenomenal endurance. Mm-hmm. Unbelievable mental toughness extreme confidence in himself and He has the ability to break guys just puts a pace on them very Nick Diaz like in that regard You just puts that pace on him and you saw it with Aldo you see Aldo start to wilt Okay, because it all almost started strongly in both

cases yes it starts very strong well that's his thing though he's so explosive and he sprints essentially but you really can't do that i mean his style is highlighted by incredibly explosive fast movement and max is not yeah max's is about avoiding and then accumulation of bombs of techniques keep it on you keep and also his well-roundedness his ability to submit you ability to absorb shots maintain composure when being fired upon all those things incredible strengths of his but particularly uh matched up against ald, his strengths really shined. Yes, yeah. But that's a hallmark of, if you're going to call someone the greatest of all time,

is they have to be able to take on a wide array of opponents and still be successful. Yeah, which is why Demetrius gets my vote. I just feel like when you look at Benavidez, when you look at many different people that he fought, showed him a bunch of different looks, a bunch of different styles. And he was able to overwhelm them all. Wilson Hayes. What's your assessment of his fight against Dominic Cruz, upperweight division? See, I look at that as a learning experience, a different era, a different guy.

He had a full-time job back then. He wasn't the same fighter. What do you think happens if he fights Dominic Cruz a second time? I'm fascinated by that. I want to see him fight TJ Dillashaw. I think that's the big fight because TJ's willing to go down to 125. So instead of fighting Dominic at 135, TJ's like

I can make 125 and TJ feels like he'll be the guy to break the legacy. He'll be far bigger, stronger. He feels like he can match him speed for speed and he thinks he can make 125. And TJ feels like he'll be the guy to break the legacy. He'll be far bigger, stronger. He feels like he can match him speed for speed. And he thinks he can make the weight comfortably. I'm really fascinated by that fight. Because also I think TJ is one of the few guys that's trained by, I think Matt Hume is one of the great unsung heroes of MMA.

I agree with that, yeah. He's a master. Fascinating guy. Fascinating guy. Incredibly intelligent. Deep, deep knowledge of the great unsung heroes of MMA. I agree with that, yeah. He's a master. Fascinating guy. Fascinating guy. Incredibly intelligent, deep, deep knowledge of the sport, both stand-up and on the ground, and integrating those two things together.

He's one of the few guys you can genuinely say has expertise across all areas of mixed martial arts and played a pivotal role in taking someone from being an unknown to a legitimate great world champion. All the time I see people who, people often don't make a distinction between recruiters and coaches.

There's many fight camps out there that are very good at recruiting people that were already good and helping them to manage them, et cetera, and make them slightly better. The world's full of recruiters but there's not many coaches out there. Matt Hume took a kid who no one had heard of and took him from obscurity to arguably one of the best of all time. And he did it in a way where that kid went from being essentially a wrestler

to a genuinely well-rounded mixed martial artist with a complete set of skills. Uh, that's an impressive accomplishment. Yeah. Um, and it's also his, the way he does it, the way he fights, how little damage he takes. Yes. It's his movement is his. His ability to control. Like, a good example is Dodson. He fought John Dodson, who's unbelievably explosive and fast and dangerous, and just overwhelmed him.

If Demetrius Johnson didn't exist, Dodson would have been a very good champion. Oh, yeah. Highly regarded champion. Yeah. People don't realize how good some of these opponents are. You know, they say, oh, was Isis' level of opponent that good? Well, Dodson's a very good opponent. Dodson was, especially a few years ago, he was extremely dangerous.

He seems to be in a bit of a rut now, whether it's a psychological rut or a physical rut. He's not quite the same guy that he used to be. But, you know, it's hard when a guy bests you the way that Mighty Mouse bests you. Because it seems like the level of talent is so far above where you're at that it's like you're left with a dilemma. Like, how do I catch this guy? Is it even possible for me to catch him? Because they had two fights, and the second fight Mighty Mouse won handily. The first fight was closer. The first fight was was more dangerous he got hit a few times but in the second

fight mighty mouse just showed leaps and bounds and it was just a route he just ran him over um the other arguments are anderson anderson is prime is one of the it's a great argument for the greatest of all time you know uh outside outside the UFC, it's Fedor. I think those are really the only arguments for the greatest of all times. And George, George is in there, especially coming back and beating Bisping. That puts him, you know, right back into the mix in terms of argument of one of the greatest of all time. Yeah, I think it was an important step for him because, as I said, there were three persistent criticisms

and he answered all three in one night. So that definitely helps his case. What's your thought on Khabib Nurmagomedov? Extremely impressed. This kid is deeply, deeply impressive. He's come into the academy a couple of times before fights. I've never actually seen him train. After his fight in Madison Square Garden,

he brought himself and a group of his friends, his training partners, came into the academy and trained in my Monday afternoon class. Khabib didn't train. He just sat on the bench because he just fought on Saturday nights. Of course, he's not going to train. But his training partners came in and trained with the squad, and that was a fun afternoon.

They rolled with, I think, mostly Nicky Ryan. And it's hard for them, of course, because it's submission grappling. That's not really what they do. They do more the interface of grappling combined with striking. So they had a hard time with it. But he struck me as a very, very nice person. He's shockingly big for his weight division. Shockingly.

Shocking. Like all the people coming out of the Caucasus regions of Russia, his wrestling is extremely good. They have probably the best wrestling program in the world. That whole area stretching from Ossetia through Dagestan through Chechnya all the way down to Iran, that area is just the hotbed of wrestling in the world. And it shows that all their fighters, they're all strong in wrestling. And then they just add to that the various skills and you've got a tough,

tough group of people. Yeah. I was extremely, I've been, I've been impressed with every single performance he's had in the Octagon. I mean, he's undefeated, which is incredibly rare in and of itself,

but in the 155 pound division, even more impressive. But the way he mauled Barboza was just shocking. Jesus Christ. And you could see the fight was essentially over halfway through round one. Yes, yeah. You could see it in Barboza's face. He was drained.

Yeah, that was an incredibly impressive performance. Obviously, there's still, you can't put him yet in the grace of all time category but he hasn't won a title hasn't even challenged for it yeah yeah but you definitely get the sense that if he had had a title fight by now he probably would have been a champion by now him versus connor jesus christ that's what i want to say him versus connor in russia or him versus tony um tony ferguson and him would be a very interesting fight. What's interesting about those two fights is you have basically polar opposites. Khabib Nurmagomedov is a control-based fighter,

whereas Tony Ferguson is a scramble-based fighter. And just that clash in styles is going to be fascinating. With regards to Conor McGregor and Khabib Nurmagomedov, the feeling one gets is that if they did fight, it would be a complete shutout in one of two directions. It's either like a man beating up a child on the ground, or it's just a flush knockout. A guy unable to cover distance properly and walking into a left hand

and just being catastrophically KO'd and you feel like there's potential for it to go in both directions uh and it's that's a fight I don't think goes the distance it's uh it's one way or the other yeah I agree um I feel like what Connor presents it's interesting in terms of danger is speed and one-shot knockout power with his hands. And Khabib has been hurt coming in. By Michael Johnson. It's really the only adversity he ever suffered inside the octagon. And he dealt with it well. That's a good sign

for Khabib. It's the sliver of hope that every opponent clings to. They watch that one moment where Michael Johnson clipped him. And they're like, look, look, he's human. He can be hurt. It's like the Terminator if it bleeds I could kill I believe that was predator oh yeah what I say Terminator yeah you just fucked up your reference sorry I'm sorry yeah I did

fuck it up but I think that Connor has been overwhelmed on the ground though yes and he's been overwhelmed by Nate Diaz and he's been controlled on the ground by chad mendez one gets the feeling that whatever amount of control they were able to impose on would be nothing compared with what khabib could impose moreover khabib is um it's a much more dangerous form of control yes khabib has a program of hitting people on the ground which is substantially better than either of the two athletes you just mentioned. Um, and the big difference is when Khabib gets you on the ground, you're not getting up. No, you're getting mauled. And it's almost like a spider, like he's injecting venom into you and slowly, but surely like weakening your body. Like you,

you see after the first round, when Barbosa gets up, it's like, okay, he's alive still. But this is a different person now. And going into the second round, Barboza gave an admirable account of himself. He showed himself to be a true warrior. He did try a couple of spinning back kicks. Some of them were relatively close. Barboza's kicking heavy strategy, though, is very different than Conor's. Conor's kicks are

just the opposite. His kicks are just probes. He's sort of poking at you, poking at you, and putting things out in front of you, and he's just trying to, dang! He's just trying to drop that hard left hand on you. He's a fascinating guy to watch. Fascinating guy to watch. I always

undervalued him. When he first came to the UFC, I said, oh, it's hype, it's hype. But the more I studied, the more I saw. He's very, very skilled. He mind fucks people. He mind fucks people in a way that, but I don't think he's mind fucking Khabib. I don't think that works on Khabib.

I don't think that's going to happen. I just think that we're dealing with a totally different kind of human being. Those people from Dagestan are just so hard. It's just a hard part of the world. They're made of hardier stuff. You know what I mean? It's just like they have to deal with way more.

Not that people in Ireland are soft. They're fucking hard people too. I just think that with – I've always said the most important – if you have a pyramid of technique when it comes to mixed martial arts the base of the pyramid the most important thing is the ability to control the grappling ability to take a guy down if you can take a guy down and control him you have a significant advantage you can choose where the fight takes place. And if you're competent in the stand-up, which Khabib is definitely competent in the stand-up, so you are adequate in the stand-up but overwhelming when it gets to the ground, you can present problems with a guy standing up,

which case is problems the guy has to deal with the striking aspects which open up the takedowns. I wholeheartedly agree with you, but I'll go a little further. Whenever someone asks me, what are the programs, what do you look for when you see a guy dominating fights? What makes someone go in the right directions with their training and their fighting itself? I always say there's three things.

If you show me a fighter who can, one, dominate the setups, two, dominate the pace of the fight, and three, how can I phrase this? Dominate the simple direction of the fight. Three things. Dominate the setups, dominate the pace, dominate the direction. You show me a fighter who can do those three things, and I'll show you a fighter who can win 95% of the fights he gets into. Dominate the setups, dominate the pace, dominate the direction. Think about someone like Khabib, or anyone who comes from a strong wrestling or judo,

jiu-jitsu with takedowns-based fighters, they're always going to be able to dominate the direction. They determine whether it goes down to the ground or whether it stays standing. Khabib always dominates the pace of the fight. Once you're on the ground, you're on top. The other guy's just reacting to what you're doing, trying to get back up to his feet, etc., etc. You're dominating pace. If there's one weakness that Khabib has, it is not as strong at dominating the setups

to get to those areas where he can dominate pace, and etc., etc. If he's going to lose a fight, it's going to be in that area. And Conor, more than anything else, is a guy who dominates the setups. You said it before. The kicks are probes. They're not kicks. He's not trying to hurt you with the kicks.

He's probing. He hurts you with this. Yeah. Okay. So Conor's skill is he's a master of dominating setups, especially in the standing position. But Khabib's mastery out of those three critical areas for domination in all forms of fighting is he's incredibly dominant in determining the direction of the fight and the pace of the

fight. That's why he never gets tired in his fights. He's got a very high work rate, but he never gets tired. You never see him just completely shattered, despite the fact he's working hard the whole time. And despite the fact that he significantly weakens himself to make 155 pounds, which apparently he's done far better now. He had a real nutritionist heading into this camp, and it was much easier for him to cut the weight. I'd be fascinated to see him fight at 170. Well, that's a plan. Apparently that was a plan, and Woodley was joking around about it, saying he'll send him nutritionists,

he'll keep his psycho ass down at 155, was his exact quote. But yeah, with regards to your point before, you're saying this core combat skill, the most important one that you as a commentator look for when you look at fighters, can you determine, you put grappling skill as the number one thing, whether it be wrestling, whether it be samba, whether it be jiu-jitsu, whatever.

I would go further and say, yeah, there's three things that I look for. Who dominates the setups? Who dominates the pace? Who dominates the direction? Now, what are your thoughts about strength and conditioning for mixed martial arts fighters? That's a huge question. But the question is, like, what takes precedent? Does skill training take precedent? Like, there's several schools of thought. And one of them would be, one of the more interesting ones is Nick Curzon and Marv Marinovich, That Camp.

They believe that you already know how to fight. And that what the camp really should be about is just radical strength and conditioning to the point where let's uh let's that's a mixed question then um are you talking about a fight camp are you talking about fight training over the year there's a big difference let's let's talk about a fight camp in specific okay okay average fight camp is is around six to eight weeks. And the longest you'll ever hear is like 10 to 12 weeks. That's a very, very long fight camp. How much physiological change can you affect in the body in six to eight weeks?

You could tighten everything up. You can certainly increase your endurance, your threshold, your ability to work. How much could you increase your VO2 max in six weeks? That's a good question. A few percentage points, I believe. I think considerably less than that. Really? Yeah.

Hmm. I don't know. How much could you increase your vertical jump in six weeks? Not much. Not much at all. Not a big believer in the idea that you're going to create big, significant, fight-changing physiological changes in six to eight weeks. It's not really my experience. But I can show someone a single technique which can have a direct impact on a fight.

I can show them that in five minutes. I'm not going to claim to be a medical expert who has a deep understanding of these things. My experience in coaching is that physiological changes take time. And you're not going to get it done in a fight camp. Yes, you can make physiological changes over a year, two years. Absolutely. George went up a weight division. Okay. But it took quite a bit of preparation to do so. It didn't happen in six weeks. What kind of strength training was he doing to do that? I know he's very involved in gymnastics. He likes a lot of that. George, George's primary physical training

outside is gymnastics. He loves it. Um, uh, he also for a time did olympic weightlifting less so now than before but there was a time that was a big part of it um recently he started taking on uh training in water with various fins etc etc to increase resistance and he's quite a fan of that but the truth is george go through goes through cycles and uh you know boredom is a factor here you get bored with a certain kind of physical activity and you want to try something new right and um so he's gone through various cycles i can tell you this george's strength has not significantly changed despite the various changes in physiological training like when he did olympic lifting he wasn't training. Like when he did Olympic lifting, he wasn't massively stronger than when he did regular weightlifting

or when he did swim training. I don't feel like, okay, one made him stronger than the other. There's so many interesting questions in the one you just asked. Okay, do I believe that strength is important? Absolutely. Okay, anyone who says that strength doesn't make a difference in a fight is just straight up ignoring the obvious facts.

There's a reason why men don't fight women, because there's massive strength differences. There's a reason why there's weight categories, because there's big strength differences between heavyweight and lightweight. Strength makes a difference. The proof of that is simple and easy to observe. Why do people take anabolic steroids? Because they know that strength makes a difference. There's a reason why they're illegal, because they do change the outcome of fights. So yes, strength is extremely important.

The question is, how are you going to build it, and are you going to do it in camp? Is your fight camp going to be based around strength that's a risky strategy can you really get that much stronger in six weeks i've always believed that the whole idea of fight camp is to prepare an already well-trained athlete to get around the problem of one individual it's programming one individual to solve the complex problem that another individual presents. It's kind of like preparation for an exam, so to speak. And for me, the whole thing, every fight camp is motivated by two very simple questions.

How are you going to win this fight and how are you not going to lose this fight? The entire structure of the camp is based around that. And almost all of that has to do with tactics and techniques rather than changes in the physical body now when george is in off camp when when he's out of camp is that when he would that's that's a period of skill acquisition you're trying to acquire new skills so that's when he would i know he's notorious for taking trips to Brazil to work in jiu-jitsu. That's when you do your experimentation. You bring in different perspectives, a different person.

This is interesting. This has potential. This doesn't really have much potential. And you start changing things up. Now, do you have that same approach with all the fighters that you've worked with? It depends on the context. Are they mixed martial artists? Do they train with me full-time?

Are they part-timers? It would depend on the context. I can answer with regards to the squad. Yeah, but what I was going to bring up is Weidman. Like Weidman's approach, you know, coming from that elite wrestling background and then developing a lot of significant mixed martial arts skills.

He is in an unusual situation right now, right? Where does he stand in terms of future opponents? Where is he at right now? That's a tough question to answer. Chris, I think, had probably one of the most meteoric rises into world championship level. He literally beat twice in a row. one of the most meteoric rises into world championship level. He literally beat twice in a row the guy that at that time was considered by most people to be the greatest of all time.

His run up to that was incredible. I'm sure you commentated many of those fights. Sure. You saw this kid who... He's an animal. The time frame with which he went from obscurity to world championship level is incredibly and undefeated Yeah, just yeah, it's insane what he was doing So there was this incredible meteoric rise and then there was a

Short period after that where he appeared to be crushing great former champions like the other Mashida Vita Belford He wasn't just beating the music smashing. I was incredibly impressive and but he wasn't just beating them. He was smashing them. He was incredibly impressive. And then I think people were shocked by what appeared to be an unbeaten record and then suddenly three losses in a row. And catastrophic losses. Getting smashed by Luke Rockhold, getting KO'd by a flying knee from Yoel Romero,

and getting dominated by Gegard Mousasi and then all the controversy that led to that stoppage. So it was three in a row on a guy who had never even experienced defeat. Right. And so you go from no defeats to three catastrophic defeats in a row. That throws everything off.

But then he rebounded with Calvin Gaslam and finished one of the toughest guys in the division. You saw what Gason went on to do with yes um bisping and so yeah he's that was that was a great win it was a nice comeback and but the question is where does it go from here yeah um uh and i don't have an answer for you i'm so sorry how often you work with them um not often chris um uh chris came to me as a student he was a student of matt sarah who's um one of my great friends and training partners from the Henzo Gracie Academy. And Matt was having some medical issues.

And he said, John, you know, can you take over this student of mine, Chris Whiteman? This guy's incredibly talented. And I'd heard of Chris because, you know, we're linked schools fairly close by. And people were telling me about this amazing wrestler who's incredibly talented, picks techniques up and I always take these things with a grain of salt because people exaggerate and stuff.

So Chris started coming in and it was all true. This kid, you can show him a technique on Monday and by Tuesday he's doing it better than you are. He has a gift for physical movement that you don't see very often in guys that big he's big agile highly intelligent and and had at that time a level of self-confidence that was deeply impressive I would show Chris a guillotine variation

and then five minutes later he would be using it in the gym and then a month later be using it in an MMA fight. He literally would see opportunities and immediately act upon them. What I worry about with Chris is that in those three losses, I'm not saying this has happened, but what I worry will happen is that fighters who are typically very dominant and were confidence fighters when they experienced defeat, lose confidence. And a big part of Chris's success was that ability to see opportunity and have the confidence to immediately act upon it. So my concern, if I look at Chris's, will that still be there? Will he still have the same confidence, which was such a big part of his rise to the top?

Will it be drastically altered by three losses? And I'm very pleased to say that it didn't appear to be so in the fight with Gastelum he he actually took a heavy hit at the end of the first round in that fight and came back it looked like he had gone through those three losses and come back strong and everything was fine so I'm pretty confident Chris will go on to great success again at 185. Knowing how good Chris is on the ground, how shocked were you about the Luke Rockhold fight? It was a hard one for me to watch. Chris stopped working with me after the second Anderson Silva fight.

We did most of that camp together, and then he stopped working with me, moved further out into Long Island. He opened up a gym with Ray Longo and went back to train with Matt Serra. And those guys were an incredible training camp. They did a fine job getting him through the Machida fights, et cetera, et cetera. I went, I was at that UFC.

It was in Las Vegas. Conor McGregor was the main event and Chris was the co-main event. And the fight had an interesting beginning. Chris was doing well with the takedowns, but Luke Rockhold was doing a great job of controlling Chris's head with fake guillotines to prevent any kind of damage on the ground. Doing a good job of standing back up to the feet,

so there was no really significant damage. then they got into an interesting kickboxing battle where um uh it seemed to go in one direction then switch directions and then chris seemed to be getting the better of it and things look good and then there was just one episode where everything just came unstuck in a second and i remember remember watching, and it was like watching a bad dream, you know? And yeah, it was shocking. Yeah, Chris threw an ill-advised wheel kick. Yeah. Which is slow and telegraphed,

and Rockhold took him to the ground. And what I was most shocked with was, and I've seen it time and time again, I saw it in the David Branch fight, and saw it in the Leo Machida fight, is Rockhold's top game is fucking terrifying. Deeply impressive. Very impressive.

I attribute that not just to his skill, which I think is considerable, but also to training on a regular basis with Daniel Cormier and Cain Velasquez is just his wrestling, his grappling, is severely underrated. Maybe not so now, but his ability to control guys on the ground is just terrifying. Yeah, no, he's done an amazing job.

He's also got very strong submission skills. Yes. People, I don't think, talk about those at all. And he's submitted good people. Submitted Bisping with that one-arm guillotine. And some of his finishes are like highlight reel finishes. Yeah. They're beautiful.

You know, he's got tremendous skills. He's big for the division. He's a... You talk about a guy who dominates the pace and dominates the direction. He's...

No one can hold him down for any period of time. He's great at getting back up to his feet. He wrestles the fence very, very well. Like all the AKA guys. They're all good on the fence.

He's a very, very impressive fighter. I'm impressed with him in a lot of ways, but his ability to control top-level guys. I just thought, my thought was when he got Chris down, like, okay, Chris is a world-class grappler. He's going to be able to get out of this situation. There'll be scrambles. There's a lot happening. But there was none of that. It was just total control and ground and power.

And for a considerable period of time. Yeah, it was rough. It was rough to watch because it was one of those where you could easily make the argument for it being stopped sooner. Yeah, I think so, too. Yeah, it was a rough one. And now Rockhold's going to face Yoel Romero, which is very—he's the freak of all freaks. That's like—that guy was made in a lab. Yeah.

Isn't Yoel Romero fighting David Brunch? No. Did this happen recently? Yes. I'm sorry. I've been— Robert Whitaker got injured. What happened?

The knee again? Most likely, if I had to guess. I don't think they released it, but there's been an injury. Maybe it's a different injury. But— When did this happen? A couple days ago. Wow. I've just flown to California. I haven't been they released it, but there's been an injury. Maybe it's a different injury. When did this happen? A couple days ago. Wow.

I've just flown to California. I haven't been using the internet, so yeah. So, Rock, good for you. It's only two days, Joe. We should all say that. But Rockhold and Yoel now are going to fight for the interim belt. That's a huge development. Yeah, big development.

Wow. Yeah. belt that's a huge development yeah big development wow yeah um that's a i mean yo romero that's um that's that's a different fight my friend yo romero is probably the most uncontrollable man in the universe he is a difficult difficult person to control in any aspect of the fight he's a fighter some parts of what he does make no sense like he's one of the greatest wrestlers of his generation yeah and yet many people take him down yeah and he gets taken down all the time but they can't control him he just springs back up he's not worried about being taken down i think that's part of it yeah because he comes so hard with the upper

body it leaves the lower body open and um and you're right there's no consequence to it. He can just get up whenever he feels like it he He has a greater propensity To change direction at speed than anyone else. I've ever seen in my life People always talk about speed or you know, this guy's fast Well that guy's fast to me the only kind of there's two kinds of speed They don't they don't press me in. One is the speed of decision making. If you can make decisions, good decisions, faster than your opponent, you're going to win a lot of fights. And the other is your ability not to go in straight lines at speed, but to change direction.

Speed of directional change is the most important kind of physical speed in fighting. There's plenty of people that weren't really that fast but they can change direction quickly and that's the kind of speed that counts in fighting so the two kinds of speed that you needed to be a fighter was speed of decision making and speed of directional change and you see lots of fast people are there's a Usain Bolt is fast but he's not fast and directional change it's not his thing but the thing about Yoh Romero is there's a certain twitchiness to his movement where it's so hard to read where he's going where he's going to be in the next half second it's it's just a handful to deal with yeah that that is a very good assessment

of what what's shocking about him yeah his ability to go from zero to sixty. It's just freakish This is him at 40. Yeah What was he like when he was 25? He just doesn't look like a 40 year old man. Just everything is wrong Like yeah, he doesn't look like a normal person like you look at his body his proportions everything looks Like something from a movie yeah Real yeah, and that flying knee that he hit Chris with was like Jesus Christ looks like something from a movie. It doesn't look real. And that flying knee that he hit Chris with was like, Jesus Christ. Yeah.

You could feel it in the audience. It was terrible. It's just the amount of force that he can generate is just stunning. But he's also a guy that's carrying around a tremendous amount of muscle. And I wonder what kind of pace he can keep up. And we saw that in the Whitaker fight. He faded a bit in that fight. Wound up losing that fight. We've seen it in several of his fights.

The Tim Kennedy fight, he faded in that fight and eventually came back to win. But he's got so much to feed. There's so much tissue, you know? Yeah, yeah. No, he's a fascinating character. Fascinating. And again, again boy wouldn't

you have loved to seen him in the ufc at 26 yeah i mean when he was just dominating everyone in the wrestling scene you know he's as good he's as good as they get in wrestling meddled into every single world class competition he ever entered not only that but the best wrestlers in his weight division of that time he beat all of them like Crazy, that's as good as he yeah. Yeah Hard to imagine. Yeah. Yeah All right, John, I think we've covered basically enough where it's we're three hours in here man. Oh my god We've already had this is awesome. It's longer than one of my Instagram posts. Your Instagram posts are amazing, by the way. I'm a huge fan.

You're one of the few. It's not true. A lot of friends share them. They send them to me in text messages occasionally. That's very generous of you. But your breakdowns of technique and strategy and what is actually happening, I think they're critical i think your voice and what you're doing like with the squad and what you're doing for for jujitsu as a whole and the way you're able to articulate that and break these things down it's it's it's really really critical i think it's awesome thank you very significant thank you i'm really glad we finally got a chance to do this it's better

than meeting at denny's yes well denny's meeting was fun too. What is your Twitter for people? Is it just John Donahue on Instagram rather? On Instagram, I believe it's Danaher John. Danaher John. Yeah.

Okay, beautiful. Thank you, brother. Thank you.