The Joe Rogan Experience - JRE MMA Show #60 with Forrest Griffin, Clint Wattenberg & Dr. Duncan French

Episode Date: April 2, 2019

Joe is joined by the Vice President of Performance Duncan French, Vice President of Fighter Relations Forrest Griffin, & the Director of Sports Nutrition Clint Wattenberg at the UFC's Performance Institute.

from wild pig or something yeah yeah my buddy from uh australia gave me those in that head it's an asian water buffalo it's an invasive species are we live oh it worked jesus christ ladies and gentlemen the ufc performance institute boys hey what's up duncan forest griffin hey forest griffin good to see you we've already talked over each other so we've already blown it no we've got it we've got it nailed Well I'm really glad you guys are here Because I was blown away When I went to visit You know you hear the performance institute

And you go well what is this going to be like And you go they're like oh my god They thought of everything It's like the ultimate state of the art facility For training For recovery For nutrition It's fucking amazing

I mean I'm so happy We're posting a link to that shit right there. Say it. Dude, I mean, it's amazing. When we went on a tour and checked that place out, I think it was De La Grata was with me? Yeah. Yeah.

We were like, holy shit. Like, can you imagine? You have access to this fucking place? Like, you guys have really created something special. It's very interesting. And I don't know much about other sports, but I know this never really existed in combat sports before. Something like this that's, I mean, you guys have athletes

from all sorts of different walks of life come through there. When I was there, there was many, many top-level fighters that were training out of there. It's really, really interesting. Yeah, cool. Well, we appreciate the kind words, obviously. I mean, ultimately, yeah, the vision of the UFC was to build a performance institute that was truly a world-class high-performance center that had everything that fighters would would need um but

not only are we trying to align ourselves as the leaders in mixed martial arts but certainly leaders uh in human high performance yeah don can tell people what you do there like explain yeah so my role is the vice president of performance um I essentially direct the philosophy of how we're going to interact with the fighters, how we're going to support the fighters, and obviously manage our world-class staff that are working within the performance facility. And Clint, you came from a background in amateur wrestling. Yep. And tell everybody what your job is over there.

Yep. So I'm the director of performance nutrition. And tell everybody what your job is over there. Yep. So I'm the director of performance nutrition. So anything related to feeding of athletes is essentially managed by myself and our ever-expanding team. So it can be as broad as working with athletes for their general training plan, integrating within the other performance services, as well as feeding athletes on the ground, integrating within our kitchen at the Performance Institute, supporting athletes as they prepare for fight week, weight descents, et cetera, and then supporting athletes on fight week and preparing at that, even at the last

moment of fight day, to fuel up and to be really well-fueled for their performance. My background is, like you said, in amateur wrestling. I wrestled and coached at Cornell University, graduated in 03, was on the U on the US national team with a number of actually current fighters right now so Cormier Daniel Cormier and a number of other athletes Chris Weidman and some others and I used to train together and then I went back to school and got on my my credentialing to be a registered dietitian and so that's kind of led me through developing a program at Cornell to the

ufc uh with a you know pretty unique combination of the nutrition the dietetics uh and then obviously the experience in combat sports and weight cutting yeah and in my opinion the most grueling combat sport i mean i think wrestling it's just we talked about on the last podcast it's just it's a crazy way for a kid to learn hard work and to learn real competition and the actual physical struggle of getting through wrestling practice and strength and conditioning drills. Most kids that are coming up in high school and college, they don't really work that hard in any other sport. I mean, it's a crazy sport. I remember in high school walking into the wrestling room, and it's a bunch of gross dudes in a sweaty, hot room. And then it was like basketball was right next to it i walked into the basketball there's like dudes in tank tops and

some like cheerleaders i'm like i know what i'm doing i'm not idiots uh little did i know little did you know yeah i mean it's in my opinion still i think it's the most important skill because you get to dictate where the fight takes place i mean there's no one skill that really overpowers all except for the ability to hold the guy down like the ability to hold someone down and control them on the ground it's so critical and everything else you can learn from that submissions ground and pound but the the the difference in like an elite wrestler like yourself and a person who doesn't have that skill it's it's so hard to bridge that gap it's hard to learn later in life gsp is one of

the few people that's just like i'll just take this up and be amazing because i'm gsp and then i'll become a gymnast who knows i think that's a thing with him though he had such physical abilities we were talking about this almost on the last podcast as well that he used to do that karate blitz you know so he was he was so used to that lunging in stuff that he sort of incorporated that with a blast double and he's so physically strong and such a smart dude and so good at learning things that he just figured out the essential techniques that he needed to master and just got better and better at them. Way back in the day, obviously, UFC 1 was kind of a discipline versus discipline kind of grudge match.

And having been a lifelong wrestler, that's when I started tuning in actually and taking pride in all the wrestlers, taking names and growing within the sport and obviously with the evolution of the sport. It's a different dynamic and obviously each athlete coming from their own discipline is really fun for us to work with as practitioners, having their own kind of sport culture. But wrestling is obviously a core component to what each athlete's doing and when i'm working with athletes and talking through their weekly training plan and you know how to feed and fuel for each of these types of training sessions and hearing them bitch about how hard those wrestling practices are i always get a little bit a little bit of pride there like yes it is hard and imagine doing it for eight months

straight for a college wrestling season and grind that out. But it's definitely been fun for me to watch wrestling as a component of MMA grow and be able to contribute to the sport on a few different levels. Yeah. I mean, I think the way I've always looked at it is pressure makes diamonds. There's no other way. Those hard-nosed dudes, they come out of those environments. If you think about guys with crazy determination and mental fortitude, there's a giant chunk of those you could attribute to wrestlers.

I mean, there's a lot of them in kickboxing and everything else as well, but there just seems to be such a unique sport in terms of hardening your mental toughness. For sure. Not for a trip to Chesapeake. i wouldn't do it fuck that i mean we at the performance institute we always talk about martial art mixed martial arts as the decathlon of combat sports yeah um and i think you know our philosophy is to try and understand all the respective components that makes a world-class mma fighter um i think you know if you're in the ufc you've got some certain x factors um that allow you to be world-class and you know wrestling is a huge component of that um but what we try to do is understand limitations as well because in a

decathlon you're only ever as good as your weakest event right right so if you're a striker if you're a grappler or if you're a wrestler um you know we're trying to support each of those to understand how we can elevate the whole thing now how much input do you put into fighters if any into how they incorporate their skills and like how they combine their skills together do you guys offer like coaching on technique and approaches let me yeah so break down the philosophy we don't do sports specific coaching coaching, so physical therapy, sports nutrition, strength and conditioning, sports science, and then Duncan oversees all those to make sure that they work. All right, so our philosophy, anything that doesn't make you better in the octagon is pretty pointless. So what I do is I'll just go over what your training schedule looks like with you, and then, you know, where do we feed accordingly for this practice? You know what?

And then Roman, our sports scientist, when can you be recovered enough for this practice? And that's, you know, that's the philosophy. So it's not specific. If you think about it, if you guys are fighting and the performance institute is working with both of you, we make you as big, strong, healthy, have the easiest time making weight, go into your fight as fueled as you can. But if I start saying, hey, you know what? He's pretty susceptible to leg kicks.

Then it becomes, you know, now we can't support every athlete. So when you talk to people, it's just like, here's how to get the most out of your practices, right? Here's the way to lay this out, just your training blocks. I don't think a lot of people understand like basic training periodization leading up to a fight and then that's the other problem with the ufc you don't always have eight weeks 10 weeks 12 weeks sometimes you got four weeks and it's like all right well where's your where's your weight where are you at where's your skill where's your

conditioning how can we put those things together in time to get you ready on you know but never specific like instruction on how to deal with a certain fighter that's um it's almost like for for a young fighter to have the access first of all just the access to the the physical facility like the just all the different modalities you guys have and you know the strength and conditioning stuff and the fact that you can – one of the most impressive things was the camera setup around the octagon so that you could film sparring sequences and technique sequences, and the fighter, you can back them up and rewind them and watch it, and you can see how you drop your leg here, see how your chin is up in the air, and all these different little factors.

Well, you think about the philosophy, right? You have to get close to game speed once or twice a week so for 15-25 minutes you're going to get you're going to risk injury you're going to take physical damage that you're not getting paid for make the most out of it right like review it treat it like a fight think about our athletes they fight two to four times a year so that's that's a very limited amount of actual footage they have but if you start recording your sparring sessions and treating them like a fight, like, oh, shit, I did this wrong, I did that wrong, then you're going to end up with more like 80, 90, which is baseball, basketball,

even football, you've got 20-plus games to review. Yeah, and I think it's really important for young fighters also to see themselves doing certain techniques. Like they might not notice. They might think they look better than they do. Like, it's good. My coach is full of shit, man. And then you're like, oh, the film, don't lie.

And you're like, yeah, oh, okay, I see what I'm doing wrong there. It's hard sometimes to mimic without actually seeing yourself. Now, you guys, you've been Forrest Griffin, former UFC champion in the motherfucking world. No one can ever take that from you, sir. How does that feel? It's a beautiful thing to have. Yeah, sure, yeah.

I've moved on. I've moved on. I'm over it. And now I'm VP of Athlete Development at the Performance Institute, so it's much, much more important. But you're still Forrest Griffin. There's a lot of champions.

There's only one VP of Athlete Development. We're still trying to find that job description to figure out what he actually does. I change it daily. Don't worry about it. You've been involved from the beginning of this right yeah yeah uh so it was going on about two weeks in i heard this was happening and i was like oh hey guys i i work for you i'm doing community outreach right now but i've been trying to figure out the best way to train for mixed martial arts for the last 18 years i don't know maybe give me a shot at it so yeah now when you

when you say that that you're trying to figure out the best way is there a best way yes for everybody right and unfortunately it's those bullshit answers everybody's different man everybody's got a different ability to work you know like a uzman might have x amount you know before he physically breaks down because look at him he's a fucking ferrari right he he he needs more high-end work or you know whatever everybody's a little physically different the key is to get some subjective feedback to know hey all right i'm in the red i'm good i'm not you know do you do you guys do it on heart rate heart rate variability like when you determine whether or not someone's recovered enough to... Tell them about Omega Wave.

Yeah, I mean, there's plenty of different ways to do it. At the most basic level, it's just speaking to a guy and getting subjective feedback, right? How you're feeling is one of the best questions that we can ask an athlete. But yeah, I mean, we're blessed and we're privileged with pretty high resource at the UFC Performance Institute, so we have some pretty involved technologies. One of the ones that we use is a system called a mega wave and that gives us real

insight and removes the subjectivity where it can get objective understanding around physiology particularly looking at the dc potential of the brain so really yeah the dc potential of the brain is an assessment of the autonomic nervous system yeah so if you look at if you look at the parasympathetic and sympathetic balance of your body we're talking science now i apologize but no please ultimately that's one of the things that's really impacted there you go jamie pulled something up on the screen here there's john smith see the uh windows of trainability this is fascinating yeah so this omega, is it something you wear? Yeah.

So ultimately, it's a three to five-minute assessment. You wear something that resembles a heart rate strap lying at rest. We also have electrodes on the third eye of your brain, essentially. So we're picking up cardiovascular stress. We're picking up the autonomic nervous system. And we're looking at things like heart rate variability, you've already mentioned but so this isn't for everybody some people love it and they say hey man this is you know again these are just tools right so different tools for different people right yeah for sure it's uh it's a first thing in the morning measurement

too to understand your your recovery how well you're recovered from the day before and those windows of trainability for the next day, for that coming day. I think it all comes back to what Forrest says. Ultimately, what we're trying to do is understand individual responses, right? At the end of the day, everyone's on a pathway of performance mastery to be a world champion.

And people respond to the workloads, the intensities, the volumes in very different ways. If we take a basketball team and put them all through the same workout, you've got 15 different guys that are responding in very different ways to the same workout. So we're privileged in that we work with an individual sport, and that's our mantra is that we're looking at every single athlete as an individual and we're building our programming strategies and our information in an individual way.

So you guys have been doing this now for how many years we're coming up on two years on may 22nd is our second anniversary and do you do you have like a log of all the different cases you worked with so you can kind of review like what methods were more effective than others and you're constantly trying to improve this protocol or yes how do you guys how do you guys write it all out i mean we've obviously been involved with numerous fight camps um but we're also working with fighters that are not in camp um last year we we presented this um journal our first journal which is a an overview a cross-section of all the data that we accrued in our first 12 months and we continue to aggregate that data now one of the privileges that we have at the Institute is we get the opportunity to work with just under 600 fighters on our roster. So we can create real clear cross-sectional

awareness of what different weight classes look like, what the challenges are to a fighter. And then, you know, the fighters can compare and contrast themselves against their immediate peers in their weight class. So that's one of the most powerful benchmarking tools you can create. This Omega Wave technology, can people buy that? Oh, oh yeah it's just a commercial product off the shelf and it looked like it worked off an app like you you put an app on your phone yeah yeah doesn't everything yeah seems like it seems like that's the future but again we use many different types of technologies you know things like force plates can can look at neuromuscular responses and some of our nutrition variables will change across time.

So it's not just one tool that is giving us all the answers. The Windows of Trainability concept is something that really helps us on a day-to-day basis to understand, can you go into a strength or power type session today and really maximize the opportunity to create the adaptations? Another day, it might be an endurance emphasis. So what it allows us to do is just give kind of kudos and credence to the athlete to understand where's the best approach and where are you going to optimize your responses.

Every other sport is easier to train for than MMA. If you think about it, I was a defensive end in high school. Every defensive end needs the same physical abilities. You think about the combine, the NFL combine, for instance. They've figured out over a million years what they want to test for and like the the guys that that you know they they run the same they jump the same and per position right so quarterbacks don't need to necessarily be that fast if they can throw right but for everybody else the numbers are kind of the same for our sport and they've collected i don't

know i don't know how many data points at this point, but it's a lot. So they're anonymized, normalized, so you know what average looks like. So you can give a guy like Anthony Smith, say, hey, look, man, and I bring him up because he's mentioned it before. He's been outspoken about working with the PI. Hey, you know what? Your force power measurements, they're pretty average for 205. You're not a weak guy. You could think about going up a weight class. So it's just objective information so the athletes and hopefully their coaches can make those choices.

Do you think they would benefit from more weight classes? Oh, that's a great question. So I thought 65. I look at the percentages. And then I was talking to actually Dana and Sean. And I was like, well, this guy's going to go to 65. This guy's going to go to 65. Everybody's going to go. So is it going to help?

I mean, there needs to be a percentage difference, but I don't know. I think people would just say, well, shit, now I have to do an extra five pounds. But, again, so from a PI standpoint, that's not really a decision we have to make what we need to do is collect as much data as we can on that for individual fighters trying to figure out which and then also to provide that information to you know third-party commissions there's just so many there's the gaps these days i'm so good it's okay i know what you're doing like when you go from 85 to 205 That's 20 pounds That is an enormous jump

So how do you decide Like when a guy's a tweener Like how do you look at a guy Who maybe weighs 215 And you go Damn dude Those The numbers

Like what's your power What's your speed Like are you a good athlete For that weight class Maybe not What's your arm length How does that You know

How does your arm length And the way you fight Right So you know If you're a Tyson-esque guy You can short arms and you wrestle got like a gray maynard style right that's fine you don't need super long arms but you know if you're not a wrestler you don't have the head movement maybe you do anyway we've actually had a number of athletes i would say over the last year come to us specifically and sometimes it's matchmakers who are saying hey this guy wants to go down come come take a look meet with with the PI staff, see what you guys think.

All those things that Forrest said are really valid. We do have a lot of battery of tests, both in the nutrition space, around body composition, around metabolic function. Oftentimes, bad weight cuts will diminish and depress the metabolic rate the resting metabolic rate as well as as it progresses over time through through training and then like we said some of the energy systems a lot of the strength and power diagnostics how does an athlete compare to the the norms and the standards that are set for that division so first things first thing that i look at is how does how does their body fit into a division? Everybody's body is broken into three components if you think about it in terms of bone, muscle, and fat and if

somebody's fat-free mass it's everything except for their fat is 90 you know is bigger than 99% of the athletes in that weight division it's not going to be a good fit. So a big thing is benchmarking and understanding how somebody's body fits into their division compared to others so that's kind of step one then we look through all these other different metrics to see how they compare and then we have a conversation so my job is never especially working with independent contractors they can use us or they can they cannot and we are a resource to consult and to have conversations with them About what makes sense on a

Scientific level can I ask you how that works is Like if say of someone like Henry Sahudo or someone wants to do his camp At the UFC Performance Institute How would they do schedule it with you guys Tell you I'm going to be here for eight weeks We've set up camp in Vegas we'd like to do it At the at the gym so it happens all the

Time whether it's whether it's a week or eight weeks. That filters into every single member of our team, especially as we're doing more and more on the ground at fight events. But that gets filtered up to Duncan, and then Duncan handles the coordination of that. He could literally be there with, say, if he was going to fight Marlon Marais. They literally could be in the Performance Institute at the same time. For sure.

And that happens. That's crazy. We're a split-level facility. They're never in the same Institute at the same time. For sure. And that happens. That's crazy. We're a split-level facility. They're never in the same zone at the same time, though. So you schedule them differently. The guy wouldn't be doing MMA in the octagon. You schedule him first come, first serve. Do you ever anticipate a problem, like with guys that are supposed to be fighting each other,

like what just happened with Masvidal recently, like where an actual fist fight breaks out? Man, you find most of these guys want to get paid to fight, not pay to fight. Right, but when you see like— When the cameras aren't on, they're not so, eh. That fight, yeah, that's true, right? When the cameras aren't on. The other thing is when you're leading into a fight, my thought was you cannot let that person think they intimidated you.

And if that means you actually have to hit them, maybe it does. But the idea is that I can't let you think that you have a mental advantage right in any other sport so we know i ever want to see that like it's like you gotta stop that but in fighting it's like oh they're just doing extra fighting yeah right right i was like you guys are you guys are getting paid yeah like if it was a basketball player sucker punch is another basketball player in the face at some sort of press conference. Like that? Like Masvidal did?

I mean, you'd be like, what? No way. But in fighting, like, oh, they did extra fighting. But you don't get extra money

or extra credit for it. But you kind of do, let's be honest. People are like, Masvidal, for that performance, was going to get extra money.

He was a stunning knockout of darren till was one of the top guys in the welterweight division the way he KO'd him was crazy so he got it from that and then to tee off on leon edwards after the fight like that it's like another one like that's part of that is very good for him unfortunately like i don't want him to do that i don't want to encourage but if you want to think about, like, a fighter's popularity. Building their brand. Yeah, building their brand.

He's an I don't give a fuck, I'll punch you in the face guy. And like, well, a lot of people are. No, he's a real I don't give a fuck, I'll punch you in your face guy. They're real. They really exist. And he's a world-class fighter. Like, that's sellable. That's unfortunate.

I wish guys wouldn't ever fight at press conferences like cormier and john jones i fucking hated that but tell me that didn't sell more tickets no doubt that sold a shitload more tickets how many times they throw show connor's showing that dolly oh how many times they show that even in the promos i hated when that happened it was a terrible thing that connor did that god damn that's awesome tickets and that's a that's a fine line right that's kind of a funny way over the line yeah people that weren't even involved got cut yeah they got hit with glass i don't mean that i mean using it promoting yes yes yes yes yes do we just try to avoid it and hide it or do we let people know that this is a real thing? They call all people involved,

go, look, this is a business. We're here to get paid. Okay, we're going to run it. We're going to run it every 15 minutes. We're going to show that dolly smash. Oh, and that's Will Harris' company? Is that the gentleman? What is it called?

Anatomy of a Fighter? Yes, that's his YouTube show that I often thought was a UFC show. I didn't even know that he had his own show. There's so many good guys right now that are putting out good content. Will Harris. Will Harris. And he came in here with Kamaru Usman.

Super nice guy. But his footage, that was his footage of that dolly smashing into the window. So the thing you see over and over again, thank Will. I think the embedded guys from the UFC were on the bus as well. So they got the inside. Nice. Congratulations. Will got the outside.

Jesus Christ. So the Performance Institute's awesome. Anyway, sorry about that. Hey, listen, man. This is how this show works. It goes off the rails occasionally. It is a – what you guys have set up, though, is kind of an unprecedented thing in the combat sports world.

There's never anything like this for boxing, where boxers can go and – It's closest to the Olympic model. So we went around benchmarking, yada, yada, 60-plus facilities. And you notice a lot of the people that we hired worked with international and Olympic sports. And that's kind of our athlete model right so olympic athletes they might go to colorado springs for two weeks or for four months or for a week um and do like a skills camp or something for we have the same model you come in three four days and then go home with like a program you know a diet strength conditioning program pt program uh your training load goals etc so you'd

leave with that right and then maybe you know you can't you don't want to move your life to vegas you got family kids back home so you come out three days every other month and they can actually monitor and tell you this is how your training's going it's just again just data on whether it it's working or not working as opposed to my old boxing coach oh you're hitting hard today kid i don't know what you ate but it's good i was like i ate cookies last night should i just eat cookies every day and punch hard i don't know yeah um the scientific approach of getting those little extra percentage points of improvement is really what it's all about and it could really be the difference and it's such a crazy sport because it's so wild and unpredictable and i mean

you could speak to this better than anybody the results may vary right it is a wild goddamn sport i had one of the best camps i ever had was uh keith jardine didn't go so well i was fucking amazing in the gym though i was like i am so good right now i beat everybody up this is amazing but you know it was a 14-week camp. I started falling apart again. A little much. There's no other sport with as many degrees of freedom as mixed martial arts. Right.

In terms of execution? Well, just in terms of stylistic background, weight classes. You don't even know when Dana's going to give you a call to the next fight. Let's look at Usain Bolt, right? There's a reason why Usain Bolt is a 100-meter champion, and he's not the 60-meter champion, all right? Our guys, if you look at Usain Bolt, right? There's a reason why Usain Bolt is a 100-meter champion, and he's not the 60-meter champion, all right? Our guys, if you look at mixed martial arts, that is 6 to 36 seconds of high-intensity work

followed by 2 to 3 times as much low-intensity work repeated throughout a 5-minute round. 77% of fights are won in those high-intensity efforts, right? So that's where the fight is won and lost. But you don't know if that 6 seconds is going to be the first six seconds of the fight or the last six seconds of the fight so usain bolt knows that he's going 100 100 meters all right our guys don't know if they need to be the the best starter or the best finisher so you've got to prepare for everything so all these degrees of freedom these very external variable things that come into mixed

martial arts make it the most complex sport to figure out and build a structure and a development pathway against. It's so interesting, too, that so many different fighters have a completely different approach. Like you've got a low-volume, high-power approach, like maybe a Tyron Woodley. And then you've got a guy like Nick Diaz, who just smothers guys. He just stays on you and keeps punching you and talking shit to you. And he sees you starting to lose your breath, and he keeps coming after you, and he can push a pace because of his long-term cardiovascular condition. And you can't tell him he's doing it wrong because he's not.

Everybody's doing it a different way. Sometimes your physiology is going to determine the way you fight. Like the arm length, John Jones, and the leg and arm length. I can't fight like that because I'm not going to be at the end of everybody's punch just out of reach. I'm going to be getting hit by everybody if I start throwing those teeps. Yeah. And also, it allows him in training to get better. He's always got this advantage.

He's constantly getting better. And he's also the best I've ever seen at utilizing that reach he's very good at keeping his opponent exactly where he needs them and in in his range and then when they close up he's very good at being defensive I mean that's what the best fighters do right they take the fight where they want it to go but it's just so interesting to see that everyone does have a different approach that they make work with their body structure it's quite unique because we've looked at a lot of our physiological assessments and when you take the data and you compare and contrast for example people with grappling and wrestling backgrounds

versus striking backgrounds you you can take something like power and you can differentiate between those two so all right i want to get a competitive advantage as a striker and might need to improve my strength work because the wrestlers are already stronger than me. We can look at the strength characteristics, and our data shows that the guys that come from a wrestling background are far and above stronger than the strikers, which you would expect, right?

But if you look at things like, can you differentiate our top 15 in the world versus the rest of the roster in that weight class, it takes away any comparative um any comparison and at the end of the day ultimately in a complex chaos based sport skill is always going to be the best determinant of performance so we're not saying that the physiological variables aren't important to the sport of mma but it's really hard to tease out where you need to push your strategy and where you need to optimize your training because in a in a homogeneous population of world-class fighters it kind of gets absorbed and it becomes invisible where the

differences are don't worry important point we usually are a little more specific perhaps you just told me what not to do what do i do though well and that's where the individualization personalization for every single athlete comes in we find their strengths and and some of their their gaps where it might be the the lowest point scoring component of their decathlon of mma and if it's a deficiency that maybe hasn't been taken advantage of yet but will that's where we fill those gaps so that they can start to fill those holes and become more complete more comprehensive that might be strength power it might be energy system it may be it could be anything it could be orthopedic I mean we have what we're trying to assess every component

of preparation that can support or limit that athletes performance in the cage in terms of you know how how how all those things work together, it's really vital that if somebody's working on their strength and power, they're not feeding their body in a way that's actually limiting their ability to perform the high-intensity training, right? Because then that limits the adaptation that we're looking for as a response to that training. And that's a really critical point where nutrition fills, it really is a foundation that supports the development of

all the other adaptations that are required to become that complete mixed martial artist. So as the strength and conditioning plan is being laid out, as the physical therapy plan, as the recovery plan, all of those are coming to fruition the nutrition obviously is really near and dear to what i'm doing is really critical at supporting the adaptation so that we're not pulling the butt you know the athlete in two different directions in terms of the adaptation now in terms of when you take fighters and athletes into your performance institute have you guys ever worked with young, junior, amateur mixed martial artists, kids that are coming up?

Do you ever do stuff like that? Show them, give them a peek at what it's like to see the world-class fighters? Well, we don't at the performance institute in Las Vegas because we're very much aligned to supporting our current roster. Right. And it's a facility and a philosophy that's been designed to support our current roster. What we're doing in June of this year, however, is opening up a facility in Shanghai, China, which will have a completely different business model in terms of that will be very much a developmental program

for guys that aren't currently in the UFC. So obviously we're trying to improve the talent standards in China and develop that market and break that new territory. But the mechanism to doing that is going to be very much through talent development in the Performance Institute. So over there, we will have MMA coaches and grappling coaches and striking coaches. We don't have that in Las Vegas because we're currently working

with guys that are already on the roster. Well, it's such a unique sport in the fact that even though it is one thing when you get into the UFC, the paths to get there are so widely different. And you really don't know what the right... Is the Krokop path the right way to do it? Or is the Daniel Cormier path the right way to do it?

No one can say. And different fighters will win on different nights with different styles. It's one of the only sports where your pathway in... You could say that if someone is an elite kickboxer or an elite grappler that going in with that one major advantage in that one skill set could could take you very very far versus an overall game approach that some guys have where they're really good at everything right and the true specialist if you look at the day the true

specialist the gsps of this world still hasn't necessarily risen to the top in the sport of MMA. You still see guys that have a stylistic emphasis and that's their X factor that keeps them at the top of the game. Yeah, and then there's execution, which is creativity and their ability to perform under pressure, their ability to maintain their cool during camp where they never overtrain and they stay in a good space, stay in a good head space, enough girlfriend problems or boyfriend problems, and then they get to the final night of the competition with the most in the tank. And that's an art in and of itself, right? When you first asked about something I've seen that I love, training partners, right? So bring your training partners to the ufcpi and

we've had i don't know six seven eight guys that came in as training partners and are now on the ufc roster so that's that's why i'm not an asshole to anyone that's because you never know it's also you get the chance to see these i mean every guy has to start somewhere every girl has to start somewhere you get a chance to see these people that maybe never get this invitation there, and they see the holy ground. They're like, God damn, I'm at the U.S. Performance Institute. Well, to your point, too, about the facility, world-class facility, the services, we would argue, are even better than the facility. But training partners, coaches, those that are on the contender series,

those that came through for the Ultimate Fighter, they have all been able to use and to access the facility in short periods training partners can come and access the facility eat on campus uh strength train with the ufc athlete use the facility upstairs and and train in the mma space and when they get the chance then when they get the shot then they tap right into services and and it's an opportunity for us to you know essentially influence the community even before we're working with them directly which is which is a really huge component of our philosophy and really what we're looking to accomplish i don't think it'd be massively inspirational for the fighters so the young guys yeah i mean our philosophy is to accelerate the

evolution of the sport of mixed martial arts that that's in our mission statement as you've seen when you walk through the door it's right there on the wall you know yeah and and to do that to we're trying to shift the barometer in terms of not the professionalism of the sport but the expectations of fighters within the sport you look at someone like brown or taga and and listen what we're not trying to do is take the wild out of the stallion right we're not trying to just push science at fighters at the end of the day these guys are world-class fighters for a reason. But you can train and shape the stallion, and it still has the wild at heart, right?

So what we're trying to do is shift the barometer so there's an expectation of what a professional athlete should really expect. Brian Otega has worked out in his garage most of his career. Garage, sorry. It's American, right? But in terms of, you know, what's the expectation that a professional fighter should expect you know the performance institute demonstrates that you know not everyone can have access to it

obviously but that's an aspiration and it's it's where people should understand in the sport of mixed martial arts the standard that as a professional fighter you can expect and it's it's so important i think that you put all these things under one roof like that and create this environment because it seems to be trickling off into other places. The level of training and recovery and everything is so intense and so severe that people are starting to try to mimic certain aspects of that in their own gyms and their own different places. Yeah, but the problem is you can't do things in isolation. All right. If you just say, I'm going to really hammer the recovery piece and forget about the nutrition piece,

it's a large machine, right? There's cogs, and all the cogs need to work together. And that's what we truly feel we can offer and we can deliver is this, not necessarily a multidisciplinary service, but an interdisciplinary service where we have multiple aspects coming together to fill the whole picture of an athlete's portfolio of

needs and that's what we can offer through the performance institute the other thing we want to do is figure out what the best practices are and disseminate them like we don't want to just know a bunch of stuff so we can keep it remember we want every other gym like hey here's what we've learned this is how we do our recovery take a take of it try it see if you're recovering see if you want a laser bed maybe you do maybe you don't this is what we found success in you know so you want to you know what's the point of learning something and then hiding their way and for a young please yeah sorry and everything's about assessment so it's not one recovery modality it's not one nutrition modality it's not one strength and conditioning it's assessing so then we could

build that personalized approach and so here are the modalities here's the so then we could build that personalized approach. And so here are the modalities. Here's the philosophy that we've developed to help optimize athletes' needs around what we're measuring. And we're not winning fights. That's obvious. That comes with the X factors. That comes from the fighters, their passion, and their commitment to their sport. But what we're trying to do, back to your original question, I think, around this 1% is so hard to measure, but what we're able to do is to help them to do it more consistently and to do it longer into their career so that they can optimize,

they can maximize their ability to train, to adapt, to perform, and give themselves the best chance to be successful on fight night. Yeah, and there must be so many fighters that come from a discipline, whether it's judo or something along those lines, and then they start fighting in MMA, so they get a boxing coach, and they have a few guys working with them on leg kicks, but they don't have a nutrition guy, and they don't have a recovery guy. They don't have someone who understands deep tissue massage.

They've got to find that guy. They've got to find someone to organize a diet for them. They've got to figure out how to cut weight healthy, proper. And these things are so difficult for fighters to put especially you don't live in a place that has something like an american top team or some gigantic institution yeah i mean there's fighters uh even top fighters on our roster might potentially hire a nutritionist for a short period of time in the fight camp you know for eight-week period. This should be a 52-week fight camp. We should be considering our development as fighters

and as professional athletes 52 weeks of the year. You trademarked that too, 52-week fight camp. That's what our philosophy is, as Clint has already talked about, in terms of plugging the holes and being able to offer the services that you need as a particular athlete. So there's large gyms out there, American Top Team, AKA.

They've got their own guys. That's great. Jackson, they've got their own people. But there's plenty of people on the roster that have an MMA coach and a grappling coach, and that's it. So the Performance Institute, we feel we can help and support those guys as well. You can bridge the gaps. Right. And we're not trying to displace the programs

where athletes already have resources, but I don't know of another MMA gym globally that has the capacity around assessment that we do. So, yeah, we have some really great practitioners, but Bo Sandoval, our strength coach, and his team cannot write programs for 570 athletes. It's not possible. But what we can do is assess those athletes,

provide that feedback back to their strength coaches, and have conversations about how those coaches can use that data to support the development of that athlete. And that goes across the board for all of our performance services. Well, it's a pretty amazing resource because if you're a young fighter and all you have is access to the people around you, if you're fighting in the ufc you get to have access like instantaneously to this gigantic group of people where it's like it went

for us when you were coming up you mean you were a real pioneer i mean that was that was not available to a guy like you no i mean i tell the story all the time but so i was actually a little bit ahead of my time i had you know i had an actual strength coach that had letters behind his name that went to college to be a strength coach not there was like an ex body builder uh i had uh you know a relatively good nutritionist who at least had a degree in chemical biology uh i had a good physical therapist but i didn't really have like i was my coach you know at the end of the day i was the head of performance performance. So I'd go do jiu-jitsu. Jiu-jitsu coach wants you to go hard, and then you go kickbox. But you're going to go light, but it's kickbox, so you don't. And now the strength coach and nutritionist are on different pages.

So I think just understanding that everything has to work together, which I didn't really understand. Well, what I'm saying is that you kind of had to pave a path because when a guy like you was doing all that stuff with a real legitimate strength and condition coach real legitimate nutritionist how many other people were doing that at your time not that many but i said i got to be around good people like randy couture chuck liddell those were kind of guys i got to hang out with and say well he does this he does that chuck actually wouldn't do that much of this stuff but randy was i know what i'm doing kid all right yes sir yeah he just

existed on pure savagery um when you step back and look at your career like how how amazing is it to be able to step off from there and do something like you're doing now for the ufc performance institute which is very meaningful for young fighters. I mean, you really do get a chance to give back with your experience and your understanding of the right way and the wrong way, the mistakes that you've made. I mean, it's huge. I mean, that's the whole genesis kind of from my involvement in the PI.

Like, look, here's the 10,000 mistakes I made. You're going to make mistakes too, but these are the ones you don't need to make. Again, sports change, man. It's 25 years old. Every other sport's so evolved, been around so long. Our sport changes all the time. I forget who was talking about it, but even the guys fighting 10 years ago

probably couldn't compete with the guys fighting today. What I would say as well is not only for the fighters. Forrest is a huge resource for us. The best piece of technology we have is the door handle that leads from my office to Forrest's office, right? Because ultimately, he's a massive resource for us that are not necessarily coming from an MMA background and are trying to support the MMA community

to bounce ideas off, to essentially beta test things from a thought process perspective. And he's a huge part of the Performance Institute philosophy because we can use and call upon his expertise. So here's another funny thing. When we were putting together the team for the PI, I kind of shied away from people already doing MMA. I wanted combat sports.

Everybody that's done it has done judo boxing on an Olympic level. They've done combat sports, but I wanted like a fresh set of eyes coming from a different, you know, than just, you know, because I know really good MMA strength coaches. I know pretty good MMA, you know, you know good, but get that fresh set of eyes. You know, nutrition actually was a little different because the rest of the world does not understand a weight cut for an MMA fight. It's not like we go to Exos, you go to any high-level facility, and you say, I'm going to lose 8% of my body weight and then compete on Saturday. They're like, no, don't. Just fight in the high-weight class.

I'm like, yeah, that actually isn't going to work out for me. They just won't comprehend it. They're like, no, no, you'll perform better. Like, no. gonna work out for me they just won't comprehend it they're like no no you'll perform better like no so well some fighters do it's that's another thing about having a limited amount of weight classes when you jump up you're doing a drastic change he's crazy man he's like 174 and 175 on fight day yeah fighting guys 190 yeah but with a lot of energy easy yeah what's interesting is at his age i think it's probably no meals yeah i think it's probably a good move though at his age you know i mean he's back from ufc ultimate fighter one dude insane we we knew though like on the show that he was the one that would go forever

we knew in the house that i don't know he's just crazy so much enthusiasm still he's not gonna stop i mean when when he beat mic Gall that way, I was incredibly impressed. When I'm like, this kid might test him. He didn't test him at all. I mean, it was amazing. It was a prime Diego Sanchez performance 15 years into the game. I mean, not even just into – that's just into the UFC. He had amateur fights or professional fights rather before the UFC.

He's been in the UFC for 15 years now. Or at least 14, right? 2004? 2005 was season one. Yeah, we shot it 2004, 2005. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 years. Which is amazing that he's so enthusiastic about it

still. Yeah, they'll give him a vase for his top of his mantelpiece on above his fire or something. Carriage clock or something. Just to recognize his 15 years yeah yeah that's um that's a long time in a combat sport a long time so that's the other thing man that is not the norm that's a deviation right don't think you got it for i made it nine years in the ufc eight years actually and you know i didn't have that many fights i broke down i fell apart yeah it's pretty average you know i was like whoa is me and then when you look at the data it's like oh no i'm

i'm just average 35 that's that's when you start to fall apart when you look back now with what you know now and all the athletes you've worked with at the ufcpi do you think you would have done anything different oh my god i can't even think about it i knew what i think about it oh yeah yeah it's so so dumb like why would you spar eight rounds why would you spar eight rounds there's no eight round fights for us what are you doing oh you're literally just getting slower forced you're already slow i don't i don't know man it's again being a pioneer like you were there wasn't really a whole lot of guys before you that were operating. I had the other pioneers, like the Randys and the Chucks, and that's what they were doing.

So I figured, oh, better be tough. I better do what they do. That's the craziest thing about MMA. They're champions. I'm not going to question them. Boxing had already figured out you shouldn't beat the fuck out of each other every day. They had already kind of figured that out. The other thing they figured out out is uh we would work

with people i would spar with vanderley chuck uh randy in boxing they don't spar with people they're equals past a certain point in camp well think about it you know a lot of they they start like is floyd mayweather sparring with i don't know really good people his level no no definitely not he's he's finding people good boxers and he's tooling them yes yes yeah and i think have you heard of them though they're not famous and rich so they're not the best in the world they're not elite whereas you think about like a gym like our gym like i'll just use randy's because i don't want to talk bad about anybody you're fighting other champions every day right maybe maybe dangerous as fuck yeah maybe drill together sure learn from each

other roll wrestle like control your training especially guys that are in the same weight class as you that may someday fight you that's awkward yeah yeah and there was no guidebook yeah you know you know guys like keith jardine and rashad evans figured it out they're like all right we already had to fight each other we'll train together now so we won't have to do it again. Right. That is a good move if it works out. The level of guys now, it's so extraordinary to see. Like when you see the elite champions of today,

you just have this insane level of fighter. It's really, as a person who's been involved in the sport as long as I have, of fighter it's it's really as a person who's been involved in the sport as long as i have i i still never cease to be amazed at the the level of talent of these guys coming up because some of these guys coming up they just could do everything and they could do everything at such a high level and you're realizing you're seeing the results of kids that started out learning mma when they're like five six years old yeah i mean you know i had a person i have a personal gym and i remember ronda rousey they're like man, man, she's going to change my bottom line. All of a sudden, I got a mat full of young women just training.

Wanted to be a badass. I was like, this is amazing. Thank you, Ronda. Yeah, she for sure changed it. Gina Carano changed it a little bit before her. You know, people had this idea like, oh, you could be pretty and fuck people up. Like, oh, that's a totally different kind of girl. That's like a superhero.

Like a real life superhero. Now she plays it in movies, right? Yeah. But it's just incredible, too, that the sport, when you look at women's MMA, like particularly Amanda Nunes, Chris Cyborg, that fight. I mean, that is as crazy exciting as any fight you will ever see in your fucking life. crazy exciting as any fight you will ever see in your fucking life and amanda nunez bombed on the one of the greatest if not the greatest women's mma fighter of all time and KO'd her in the first round in spectacular fashion like if you're not a fan of mma or women's mma after watching that yeah like that's funny you mentioned that i just think about holly holm like what she made out of

like she's had a million fights like what what is she doing so right like she's just he's she's a you know gsp couture she's just a genetic specimen and i think she might you know she just again she does that 52 week fight camp type deal you know yeah you don't see her ever getting out of shape it's never not happening yeah you know i still think she got a raw deal in the durandamy fight uh she did that's what she did she got she got clocks pretty pretty late two times hard after the buzzer absolutely two times and no no points taken away no nothing and we were shocked we're like that's crazy and then on top of that she dropped her she dropped her with a head kick and she dropped her with a straight left

like in my opinion she did the more damage in that fight, and I was shocked. But that's, I mean. MMA judging. Yeah. It's never going to. That's crazy. We cannot help you with that at the Performance Institute. At the Performance Institute. Well, we got some data.

What I was getting at before when you were talking about little kids, when I was rather talking about kids coming up and amateur fighters, there would probably be something that would be really beneficial of having um some sort of a program like that in america where kids could understand the right way the wrong way to do it so they don't have to repeat these problems and these these mistakes that have already been kind of gone gone over and that's your background in the british olympics yeah i mean if you do it set that up right you got nothing going on is I mean, would that be something that the UFC would ever think about doing in the future? Because if they really wanted to ensure that they had a good pool of high-level talent,

it would certainly add to that. Yeah, I mean, there's no clear performance pathway into the highest level of the UFC for the sport of mixed martial arts. But there's guidelines for training that I think kids might not have the resources. For sure, and resources every gym has a curriculum and what we're trying to do is obviously add to that curriculum from us you know from a training perspective a recovery perspective but ultimately what's what's the best pathway and as you've already contested to people who come into this

sport with so many different backgrounds so are you going to chop that that x access route to to the ufc in in half or are you actually uh going to promote it and find you know many ways to get into the ufc i think you know we can look at things like the olympic games does mma ever ever enter into olympic games and create a pathway who knows and i'm sure the ufc you know are looking into that type of thing in the future and trying to be ambitious but right now it's hard to define what's what's the optimal way and what is the optimal route into the UFC. It is really, that's one of the more interesting things about it, like we were saying before, you could really have any combat sport path, boxer, wrestler, anything could get you in there.

I'm sure it's the same for other disciplines of martial arts, but I have a lot of experience in kind of youth wrestling development. And when MMA came along, it was a little bit of a fear. We're going to lose a lot of athletes to MMA. And we did originally lose a lot of athletes on the Olympic level to MMA. Johnny Hendricks is a great example. Promising young wrestling star went to MMA, became a UFC champ, did not become an Olympian. But what it's really done is it's created this popularity in wrestling in no small part to, I think, some of the feedback that you've provided around wrestling being so vital to the development of mixed martial arts. But there's been a real boon, I believe, in youth wrestling and in, you know, youth and high school wrestling because people realize and recognize

that this is a pathway into, you know, into becoming an elite mixed martial artist. Of all the athletes that are in the UFC, there's a very high level of champions right now that were 2008 Olympians. But if you look at the roster and how many people wrestled in high school, it's staggering. And so just getting this base, not only technique and the grind mentality, but the strength that you, you know, double-legging somebody from when you're five until you're 18, you develop strength that you can't develop when you're 22. And this core strength and the ability to do that is a way to get into it. And I know that other disciplines are likely receiving similar windfalls, but in terms of developing that curriculum for development, and that's that's definitely part of the you know what we're interested in in alleviating some of the the big the big mistakes but there's still

innumerable ways to get into it think about when you're doing jiu-jitsu you had to like struggle to find people to roll with when you started right sure it was like there's like six guys you could roll with now you can go anywhere Like you can be doing a show in any, just look up and go drop in on our local jujitsu club. Yeah, it's packed. It's insane. John Jock's noon class the other day had 60 people in it. Six zero. Like what the fuck?

There was nowhere to move. There's your talent development pathway to the UFC. It's those kids' classes, right? Yep, yeah. It really is interesting too, and it's dependent upon if a kid lives in an area that has a strong jiu-jitsu program or a strong muay thai program oftentimes that's what dictates what path they get into the sport from no doubt yeah good good women's

wrestling program yeah there you go yeah wrestle like a girl i'm on the the advisory board so i'm not only women's mma but women's wrestling as well and there's what's really interesting working on the on the kind of the clinical side of of what we do with the PI is every discipline has its own not only sport culture but physiology that goes with it you know as we talked about the strength dynamics for wrestlers um it are going to be different than the the reactive strength for for our strikers. And then nutrition and just overall lifestyle-type sport cultures is really interesting coming from the different disciplines that you came from. Boxers, they do their road work.

They're doing a lot more fast and morning training. Wrestlers have obviously a weight cut culture that they bring with them and have a little bit more experience there. A lot of the Brazilian jiu-jitsu players, especially from Brazil, have their sport culture so it's so intriguing being able to you know not we work with one sport but with so many subcultures within that sport and uh really really interesting to to get to work with and obviously working with the the female athletes like you alluded to earlier adds a whole another layer in terms of the dynamics that we're working with in terms of the physiology with our athletes. Yeah.

I was just like, the female physiology and the weight cut, that's just a whole, like you really need to go to school for that. Yeah, I would imagine. That's a big difference. Now, you help them organize their weight cuts. I know you work with Kamaru Usman for his cut for his last fight. So with Kamaru, we absolutely worked with him all the way through the fight. Did you guys know he had a broken foot?

He was limping around, but, you know. No, we didn't. And if we did, we wouldn't have mentioned it. But no, I had no idea. How crazy is that guy? Hey, I did know, you know, that's awesome. I was actually happy.

He was in the building for the whole time, and I didn't know that. I was happy. I was like, yes, good. Good job, good job what happens in the walls stays in these walls because if there's this place like the performance institute and it's run by the ufc oh the the ufc that that pays me to fight people i'm worried that that's going to get to them right so of course that was one of the biggest things when we started this like i don't want to Like, I'm the liaison from them to the other side of the half. I don't want to know whose weight is what.

I don't want to know who's got a nagging injury. That's your, you know, some of that is actually HIPAA, you know, information. That's your private stuff, though. Even if it's just how strong or weak you are, if you're having a bad day, I don't want that to ever get out of our walls, right? So that's obviously. You're a conspiracy guy. What does that have to do with conspiracy?

Guys always think the UFC is out to get them. Me too. I always thought like they're going to find out that I got this or that. Well, you know. They won't find out for me. The stress of preparation for a fight. I mean people are always worried, especially if there's a little tweak, something going on, something with the hand, something with the leg, something with the knee.

It gets out. People find out about it. They hear about it. They target it. Yeah. Yeah. That's a thing. It's a thing.

Kamaru and every other athlete we work with comes in with sensitive injuries, and we have a private treatment suite within the Performance Institute, the PT area. So they can come get private treatment suite within the performance Institute, the PT area. Um, so they can come get private treatment. And then in terms of, you know, supporting him for, for his weight cut, that, that starts 10 weeks, 12 weeks for, for Kamara, you know, three, four months in advance. How much are you trying to get them down to before the day of the cut? So every athlete is going to be a little bit different based on what, what their background is, what is comfortable cutting from? Yeah, what their historical weight cutting practices have been, how hard they've been

on the body. So we're assessing somebody like Kamaru for their metabolic rate, where they fit in terms of their body composition into that weight division, their lean tissue versus their fat tissue. Those that have a higher degree of lean tissue are going to have muscle has more water than does fat and bone. So you can push the body a little bit further for those that have a higher lean tissue. And so all of that planning and preparation starts many, many weeks in advance. And having heard Kamaru on your show a couple weeks ago, a lot of what we do with an

athlete that doesn't have a history of missing weight may have a hard time making weight but oftentimes they're making it harder on themselves because they're pulling the body in two different directions like we talked about if they're training in one way and feeding in a different way what they're doing is they're just undermining it and kind of digging a digging a hole that they can't get out of by the end of fight camp and that fight camp gets really long like forrest about. What do you see in terms of the way they fuel themselves that's like the biggest error? Sticking to one style of feeding,

regardless of the training style that they're engaging in. So MMA athletes, they have to do high-intensity training sessions, strength and conditioning. They have to be doing sparring. They have to be doing pads rounds that are crazy hard. And every athlete, each one is going to have a different intensity relative to their body type. And so if somebody is doing pads,

it's a nine or 10 out of 10 in terms of intensity, and they're doing that fasted or they're doing that without carbohydrates available to do that work. They can't, they can't hit those training intensities repeatedly, and then they can't adapt as a response to that training. So they end up just getting slower and more beat up instead of faster and more powerful. So if they're doing high intensity, we need to fuel the body in the specific way that supports that training effort. And then the longer term adaptation to that bout. Additionally, if they're doing lower intensity, we can adjust our fueling strategies based on what that dictates. If it's kind of a base aerobic training session or if they're doing skills and drills, we want to be feeding the body to adapt differently than if they're doing the high intensity sparring, strength and conditioning, or pads, or whatever that might be.

So for every athlete, we're looking at how their body uses substrate energy, the energy that they're using, the substrate between carbs and fat at each of these intensities. And then we also need to base our recommendations on where their body fits into the division. If they're 20% out from their weight division four weeks out, then we're going to have a little bit of a more aggressive strategy nutritionally because weight becomes a primary factor. If they're 10% out, four weeks out, then we're going to have a little bit of a different conversation and prioritization around the fueling strategies. And all of these conversations integrate within our strength and conditioning program so that we're working in concert and tying in the workload into our own system, as well as the training load that they're engaging with,

with their skill-specific training. Now, when you vary the diet that you give them dependent of the workout, what is that based on? Is that based on a hard, accepted science of carbohydrate versus protein versus essential fatty acids? How do you determine that? So we use a philosophy, a system called metabolic efficiency. You could call it metabolic flexibility. I've heard it called as well. And essentially the body will use different substrate at different intensities and at low intensities and at rest, the body, uh, can and likely should be adapted, uh, for our, for our

sports athletes to, to fat at rest., it depends on the sport type. Again, if we're a shot putter or if we're a 100-meter sprinter, then we're going to be much more dependent on carbohydrates and really the creatine phosphate system. We're not even getting into the glycolytic system, and Duncan could talk a lot more about the energy systems, but essentially, we're reliant upon glucose and ATP for energy at those lower intensity bursts. So to hit repeated max or sub-max efforts, we require blood sugar. And without it, we will deplete our initial stores, and then we can no longer hit 90% or 95% of our max. We start hitting 80% and 70% and 60% and diminishing our ability to do these high intensity efforts now do you guys

see anybody come in and try to fight on a ketogenic diet because i know quite a few guys were doing that for a while i know brian carraway did it matt brown yeah that's right he has fought but he he varies and i think he yeah well i talked to him i think he did one pretty pure and then he did you know he did the one where you you know you might take in 60 or 80 carbs, but then you work them off to stay ketogenic. I don't. Some of those guys like Zach Bitter, he's an ultra-marathon runner. He does eat ketogenic most of the time, but then on days of big races, he'll consume a lot of sugars. Yeah.

And again, I'll… Insulin sensitivity, too. Yeah. And again, I'll... Insulin sensitivity, too. So essentially, the more we can regulate blood sugar at rest and low intensities, then we can expand and to support the development of that kind of aerobic oxidative system. And by adapting to use fat as a primary substrate, we're doing a number of things. One, we're balancing blood sugar at rest so that we can really limit the insulin spikes

and essentially adipose development in addition to really driving the body towards the oxidative ana or the oxidative aerobic system and then as we increase and what we do is we assess how the body adapts through the training intensities and we'll repeat that kind of on a monthly basis to see how the athlete changes. And then as they increase in the intensity of a training effort, then we will adjust the ratio of fat to carbohydrates as a fuel substrate. I thought it was going to come up organically,

but it didn't. The trifecta fight prep system, you guys and your team are going to 22 events this year. Indeed. Take it away all right what are you doing so i'm shooting a promo here joe step back so essentially we're assessing and then we're programming based on each athlete's needs so um like for said one of our most valuable

partners at the ufc performance institute is this meal prep company called Trifecta Nutrition. And they essentially have all organic meal line that can be developed a la carte, ordered a la carte. And so with Kamaru, as an example, we worked together for his past two fights. And many athletes, like I said, are not fueling the type of training in a way that leads to their long-term adaptation but can lead to over training earlier in camp and so what what we really want to do is to understand how that physiology works and then program and then provide those athletes with the nutrition whether it's on site at the ufc performance institute at the event as well as what i was getting at like 22 events they go to. So you think about, like, I would literally smuggle oatmeal into Brazil.

Like, you're stealing food. You know, they're like, you get the little thing that says Norganic, the little pass. They can go to those fights and actually feed you throughout the week. Oh, wow. That's where I was going with that. That's incredible. So they would, like, if you had a fight in Stockholm, they would come to stockholm if if it's one of the 22 events oh okay so but if it's one of those 22 events they would go and you could get the ufcpi

to fuel you through the entire event yep so there's a number of levels so i'll get there in just one sec but essentially we'll take them through the fight camp fuel them for adaptation so they show up to the event we know exactly where they are they're, but essentially we'll take them through the fight camp, fuel them for adaptation so they show up to the event. We know exactly where they are, they're fueled, and then we could take them all the way through the fight. So 22 events, most are domestic except for some, the pay-per-views that are international. So of the 22, the only international ones are the pay-per-views, the others are the ESPN events, and those are pretty much exclusively domestic. But what we've done is we've outreached all of the athletes that have crossed paths with us at the Performance Institute.

So it's not roster-wide yet as we're working through a lot of the operational stuff. As an example, we aren't able to get into the kitchen at every hotel. So then we're working to find a community kitchen, trying to find contacts at local universities. So you guys would actually cook them yourself. So Trifecta hired a chef. So Trifecta, they're our partner. They've been amazing in terms of trying to feed our athletes.

We identified this as a real need. We run a marathon with these guys, right? Camaro as an example. We worked together for three months. We get them to a week before the fight, and then it's like pat them on the butt and say good luck. As we know, fueling is impactful all the way through the fight you know in including 30 minutes before and so instead of patting them on the buck and say button saying good luck trifecta hired a chef who i previously worked with he worked with me at

cornell university um for for a year he was an intern with me he worked at exos for two years and then at a two Michelin star restaurant here in LA. Providence is the name of it. He got hired. He's their executive chef and is building out the fight week meals based on me and my team's programming. We work with every single athlete that we've connected with at the PI. It's gotten up to, on average, between 14 and 16 athletes at all the events that we're working. And we provide comprehensive fueling. So all of the food calories that they put in their body from the time they step on foot on Tuesday for fighter checking

all the way through, you know, 30 minutes pre-fight, including all the supplements, NSF third-party tested supplements for supplement safety to make sure they're not getting adulterated products. We're keeping track of everything that they're consuming on the supplement side. We don't sit in the sauna. We're not there to be a weight cut coach. We are the sports dietetics team to support them on a programming and on a science evidence-based level. So we will consult with their teams around what's the safest, what's the most effective way to support an athlete making weight. And then we instantly, once they make weight, we have supplies that was developed, cooked, prepared by our chef that morning and

the night before to support rehydration, electrolytes, to optimize the gut repopulation of gut microbiota, as well as balance the osmolality so that they're not getting gut cramping and issues that happen when you ingest a ton of sodium and glycogen, sorry, and glucose that causes a lot of water to rush into the gut. And then we essentially feed them all the way through, um, like I said, breakfast, lunch, and then pre-fight to support their, their performance on fight night. I'm an outspoken critic of cutting weight. I don't necessarily think it's the best thing for the sport or for the athlete.

I mean, I think one of the benefits that we would get out of having more weight classes available is that fighters could get their body to the weight class where they're optimally at. Has there ever been any discussion? I know you guys have had discussions about PED usage and how to stop adulterated supplements from getting to fighters and and making people test positive but what about some long-term goal of potentially eliminating weight cutting the way they've eliminated peds so as we already talked about i come from college wrestling um tragically in 1997 three college wrestlers died. In Florida, of course. It's always Florida.

Was it? No. Two of them. One was at the University of Michigan, and I'm not exactly sure where the other two were. Let's pretend they were Florida. Let's say Florida. It feels like Florida. Florida's just going to shake their head anyway.

They're not even going to check. They'll accept it. But the NCAA dramatically overhauled their weigh-in rules from the day before to the day of. And there are a lot of similarities in terms of the types of athletes that are wrestling versus the types of athletes that are competing in MMA. But we work in and we work with professional athletes and we work for a professional fight promotion and and the dynamics of a professional fight promoter is completely different than the ncaa and the the level of autonomy with our independent contractors versus the NCAA athletes is different.

And we, as the UFC, the performances too, we have the health and safety of our fighters in mind at all times. And that's priority number one. And I've had to literally call the ambulance on athletes that I've seen not doing well because of health considerations. You personally, how do you feel about it about weight cutting i i would like to um i personally would like to make it safer um there there are uh there are less than ideal um i think safety concerns that you know that we've all heard of and you know a lot of us have seen. And from my perspective, the closer that you can bring it to the fight, the better.

But because of the promotional nature of the UFC, it's limited. And then we have limited ability to effect change with the UFC because the commissions really are the ones that are really making the rules. Like that asshole, but dude, pick your weight class, make the weight or just say, you know, I'm not going to be able to do it. I got to move up. Right. You know, like it was always hard for me to make 205, but you know what? I didn't really want to fight heavyweight and I made it. And towards the end of my career, I walked around like, you know, I used to get pretty big. I was like, hey, I don't want to do that.

I want to be a professional. Be a professional. It comes back to the whole, I hate to keep saying it, but the 52-week fight camp, all right? Like, do you need to get 20% over your fight weight? If you're 20% over your fight weight, that's not your fight weight. You know, just. You're making very good points.

Just, I mean, you can, there are weight classes, all right? your fight weight that's not your fight weight you know just making very good points just just i mean you can there are weight classes all right maybe there needs to be a weight class like every well it is like every 10 10 pounds well every 10 so i think percent's a lot more important than than weight the other thing is maybe in time it'll happen there's 570 athletes is not enough to fill that many weight classes. And then you're a boxing guy. Then you get a weight class. I'm just going to run around and we're going to have fights every three pounds. And then it becomes a little.

I don't know if that's necessarily the move. Then there's like 27 belts. How much value do they have? My point really clearly is that it's an unnecessary risk it's an unnecessary risk to have a guy dehydrate themselves or a girl dehydrates themselves that literally to the point of going to the fucking hospital 24 hours before a cage fight is insane if you could eliminate that why wouldn't you that's the number one thing i think there's no benefit whatsoever to making people dehydrate themselves 24 hours before a cage fight it seems

crazy no nobody's going to disagree with you but but what's the best way to figure it out? The best way to figure it out is to, first of all, you could definitely avoid a lot of struggle and tragedy by figuring it out. I mean, the fights that happened where fighters in several organizations cut weight and died during that process. That's heartbreaking. If we could avoid that. It's already a dangerous sport as it is. We are collecting data at the Performance Institute. We all have some opinions around what works best in terms of reducing the extreme weight cutting,

creating some competitive parity in the cage, I think, is a really critical point so that it de-incentivizes that right that way cutting process if you can't be as big in the cage well then right then there's not as much of a benefit the problem well it is a very complex problem and the regulation in mixed martial arts is such that we're the promoter and we abide by the regulations of every single state athletic commission and so we are we're collecting data so that we can understand the issue better. We're working to come to an understanding to then share with those that are the legislators of the system so that they can help make it safer as well.

Because it's not just a unilateral decision where we tell our employees, this is what you do. We have 570 independent contractors. So each of us has some strong beliefs and opinions in this space. And I value yours, and I really respect the passion you bring to it. This is my passion as well. That's why I came to the UFC is to impact this culture and hopefully on the policy side as well. But it's a very, very complex system that we're working to Infiltrate or to affect

From the inside I truly understand that it's complex But if you could wave a magic wand And not have weight cutting Wouldn't you do it? Nobody's disagreeing with that The UFC can do that One FC is doing it

It can be done You have a program where you make sure that people move up a weight class. You have hydration tests. You make sure that they're never really taxing out. Like some guys, I've seen guys shuffle to the scale because they couldn't walk. We've all seen that. Where guys are literally on death's door 24 hours before a cage fight. That's crazy.

If you could eliminate that. I commend one fc for for trying there's holes in that system just like there's holes in any system you're always going to try and game the system nah they're they're trying to game the system as well well i remember they're peeing on a stick that you or i could go buy in walmart those aren't that easy to beat or that those aren't hard to beat The hydration tests Yeah No they're not You're 100% right I mean But it's more

More It's more protected It's more difficult to do They have a They have a Far different regulatory system Than we have as well Yes

We have 50 independent State regulators We have Every country Down in Brazil We have different regulators It's It's very complex And I think that we Obviously here at the table We have Camacho down in Brazil. We have different regulators. It's very complex, and I think that we, obviously, here at the table and at the performances,

do have that as a primary kind of area of focus. But we're working to affect the systems that can implement change. Yeah, I mean, I'll sum it up. What Clint and his team are doing is let's see the data. Like, let's collect the data. Let's figure out what it looks like you know what what uh don has been doing for the last couple years collecting every fight weight let's see you know let's let's look at the data figure it out from there yeah um it's uh it's just such a it's such an unfortunate aspect of it that i get has been there from

the beginning or at least from the time the weight classes started being instituted but it just seems to me that boy if there's a way to avoid that. UFC 6 they had it right. The giant guys. Wasn't that the one with the giant guys? Oh that was Adam. Like Jerry versus Goliath. Yeah.

We'll go back to that. Yeah. Cage fighting is pretty hard by itself. Yes it is. Yeah. I just We don't call it cage itself. Yes, it is. Yeah. I just. We don't call it cage fighting. We call it octagonal struggling. Struggle. You got to PC that shit up. Yeah.

Well, you say cage fighting. People go, what? You say, oh, mixed martial arts. Oh, you mean like the UFC? I love Ronda Rousey. Yeah. I'm a big fan. Hey, it's about your messaging sometimes, man.

Yeah. I've accepted that. Do you guys have long-term plans for expansion of the treatments and the different things you do? Is this something that you guys are constantly working on and improving? Yeah, I mean, absolutely. The sports science landscape is vast, you know, and we try to keep abreast of all the latest technologies, the advances in theory and philosophy. So, yeah, that's at the heart of everything we do. try to keep abreast of all the latest technologies the advantages in theory and philosophy so yeah that's at the heart of everything we do you know we're trying to um stay at the cutting edge of

sports performance so how does that does do you have to go to conferences and find out what the latest stuff guys are doing and i mean you know i did the math this week actually you know i i always say the church isn't the building the church is the people our staff has got a combined experience in pro and elite sports of 106 years we've got 18 olympic games supported within our staff alone wow okay so our people our our staff are what is so precious to the performance institute and we're very proud of our staff and their respective world leaders in their own individual areas um but yeah of course you have to go and speak to people of course you've got to listen to seminars and collect and gather information they love their conferences i'll tell you that what you've got to be able to do is process it you know there's there's a lot of pseudo science and and bro science out there you know so you you've got you love that word right

yeah it's a real problem yeah so you know the ability to process it is is what makes the difference you know what's what's no no not everybody can be fortunate enough i don't even Yeah, so the ability to process it is what makes the difference. No, no, not everybody can be fortunate enough. I don't even have to be smart. I just went out and found a bunch of smart people. Do they make you take notes when they make you sit on these conferences? I honestly used to really try to upskill myself and everything, and then at some point I was like, nah, just nah.

Hey, Clint, come here. I got a question. Now, in terms of recovery stuff, I know you guys had a hot pool, like a sauna or a jacuzzi, rather. It was right next to a cold plunge. How much of that stuff do you guys do? And what equipment do you guys keep? Yeah, I mean, Rick, again, Bo Sandoval, who's our director of strength and conditioning,

puts it intimately in terms of in the UFC, everyone's training hard. You're not training harder than the guy next to you or in the gym next to you. What is the key is how fast you can recover and train again at the intensity that you need to, day after day after day, and be robust enough to tolerate that. So recovery and regeneration is just as important as the training exposure. In fact, your body obviously changes and adapts during the recovery and regeneration process so yeah listen we've got hot tubs we've got aquatic capabilities we've got cryotherapy we've got compression we've

got you know everything that you would expect in a in a world-class facility what we're starting to do is really try to be a bit more prescriptive around that um as clint's already talked about you know it makes no sense to us to look at a high neuromuscular striking session where you're hitting mitts or hitting bags and use the same recovery strategy as a high metabolic grappling session these are totally different physiology physiology challenges so yeah to be prescriptive and to be a bit more um strategic in our approach um but at the end of the day what is core to recovery it's such a personal thing you know some people don't like getting in the cryotherapy chamber some people can't swim so they're not going to get

in the water and do hot cold plunges it's just it's going to stress them out more so you know it's hey go in here and potentially drown it'll help you recover it's not that deep well it's not that deep but but there's, you know, there's some people just got the fear of water because you can't swim, you know. What do they do about baths? Well, showers. Avoid showers. Shower's too crazy to do.

You'll know them when you smell them, I guess. Do you guys have sauna on premises as well? We do, yeah. Steam, sauna. Do you have guys go from the sauna to the cold plunge? Me, personally. You can't do that? Yeah. It's supposed to be a great benefit of Me, personally. You can't do that? Yeah.

It's supposed to be a great benefit of that, right? For sure. And again, you've had Andy Galpin on. You've had all these, Brian McKenzie, all these people, the breathing experts. I read most of both of their books. There's a lot of information now around recovery, but it's still a massive gray area. What about massage? Do you have that on staff as well?

Absolutely. Our therapists can do that. Do they do like uh like um rolfing that kind of like deep tissue stuff grass and all that how often do you guys recommend that for athletes because the the soviets for a long period of time was really shocking when we found out they were massaging their athletes every day yeah and uh there's there's debate as to whether or not that's good or bad like what are your thoughts on that well i think what heather who's our director of PT,

will tell you is that the fascia and the fighter posture and the way fighters are putting their bodies through particular challenges obviously creates a lot of muscle tone. It creates a lot of tightness in the fascia. And just methods and mechanisms to free that up, to allow the joints and the articulation of the body to work effectively um is huge if if you have greater than a i'm trying to remember the numbers but a a a a 10 to 20 imbalance in the joint within your body you now have a 70 to 90 chance of injuring

that that joint right so just the the difference in terms of symmetry and balance within the body and its influence on injury is massive so why why why not be proactive i mean trying to utilize manual therapies and recovery modalities rather than working in a reactive process and waiting for the injury to happen and again that's that's core of our philosophy is that there's been a big shift in the barometer for some of the fighters that come through the performance institute you know the clinic and the therapy is somewhere where you go and you're injured well you know what we do is we promote it just as much as the strength and conditioning piece so when you're talking about range of motion you including uh flexibility

exercises do you guys incorporate a lot of that stuff as well oh for sure but again it's it's you know the fighters tend to be pretty flexible um so again it's it's on an individual level but most strikers most people can kick you in the head in the ufc they're pretty flexible in individual orthopedic assessment right so aim this is tight that is tight all right we need to loosen you up we're going to put that in your routine right so everything is needs analysis driven right so you know brian ortega don't need to be any more flexible he can throw us put his legs he just needs to maintain his current flexibility right so you it completely

varies and if you got like a stiff wrestler or someone who's like just never really worked yeah and think about the combat posture that internal rotation that combat posture where you're constantly throwing i mean just chronically doing that year after year is going to set you up for some amount of tightness in terms of fascia so again i i don't want to get outside of my scope of expertise but we're very proactive in promoting fighters using modalities proactively rather than reactively so say if a fighter came in and they did a hard grappling workout and after the training what would you recommend and how much time because there's there's some thought that the body should exist in an inflamed state post-workout depends on the face of training so yeah right and also for a

certain amount of time right and then there's more of a benefit of going into cryotherapy after like an hour or so so where the benefits and the so again if you're off camp what are you trying to do? You're trying to break down your body so it can be overloaded and recover better. You know, you're using that super compensation to take it to a new level of adaptation. In camp, when you're sharpening the knife ready for the fight, you want to remove any type of fatigue because you're getting close to the fight. You need to optimize your training and always peak to the performance on fight night. So there's got to be a strategic,

you've got to periodize your recovery as you would periodize your training loads in camp or off camp. But yeah, there's different approaches and different modalities that you've got to utilize. So if you look at grappling and the metabolic demand that goes into the wrestling and the grappling,

that's a lactate kind of response. That's a circulatory issue in terms of those metabolites that are circulating around the body. You've got to remove those. So is that going to be something like a muscle pump type recovery strategy that will help it remove it through the liver and into the lymph system? You mean like one of those compression pads? It might be a compression pad or it might be hot-cold. If you go hot-cold, the vessels will expand in the heart

and they'll contract in the cold. You get a natural kind of muscle pump. And how many times do you ask fighters to do that? When they do a hot-cold thing, do they do it? Is there a sequence? Yeah, I mean, we have a preferred methodology. Right now, it's about three to four minutes, four times in each. Just go back and forth. Go back and call you look at other you know other experts and other professionals in the field they'll say sit in the call bath

for 20 minutes you know so it's it's still not the science not the the data and the information out there to really support some how do you yeah how do you optimize i mean how do you know whether or not it's having that much of a benefit compared to not doing that ask the guy yeah just i'll subject talk to him make a way you know feedback yeah number one subjective do you feel better you know there might be no science around cryotherapy i'm not suggesting not but there might be no no no data and no science on it but if the guy walks out three minutes later and feels like crystal mind and his body is fresh it's kind of worked right yeah well the norepinephrine the the raising of the levels

of it due to extreme cold exposure i think that's been proven i think cytokine developed yeah and the heat shock proteins as well yeah cold shock proteins and heat shock proteins both of them that's all proven stuff In terms of measuring the actual Inflammatory markers in the body But some people don't like it I'm just making the point that if you like that stimulation And you like that sensation and you walk out You can forget the physiology

Because now we're tapping into psychology And that's still part of the recovery process Yes it's beneficial I have no idea I will sidetrack Just in terms of recovery It's beneficial. For sure. What were you going to say? I have no idea. Sure wasn't important. No, I was going to say. I will sidetrack. Just in terms of recovery, nutrition is a core value of the recovery process as well. So as much cryotherapy as you do, if you're not recovering, stimulating muscle, converting from catabolism to anabolism, providing nutrients for substrate regeneration, that's a critical component as well.

So that's critical. What we aren't doing is providing tart cherry juice or high antioxidants immediately post-training as well. Yeah, we'll include that in other periods of the day, in the evening or not immediately around a high-intensity training session for antioxidants. What's the negative aspect of antioxidants post-training? Similar. It limits, it blunts the adaptive response based on the body's recovery process. So if you blunt your immune response to a microtrauma, muscle tears that need to be rebuilt stronger and faster, well, then you limit the adaptation. longer and faster, well, then you limit the adaptation. So, yeah, we want to provide nutrients to support recovery,

but we don't want to eliminate the adaptive response to the training session. That's what's so fascinating about the science of it, that you can get that specific, that you know that if you consume the high levels of antioxidants post-training, it's going to blunt the recovery time. You have to. It's amazing. Curcumin, tart cherry juice,

there's a number of spices that are included in a lot of different things, whether it's cooking or in our supplement protocol that we will include, but we're going to target them away from the high-intensity training. How far away from the high-intensity training? A couple hours. A couple hours. I mean, it comes back to can a fighter, can a coach process all this information? Right. Can they physically be aware of it?

Nope. Where are the cats now? Just give me the diet. just write it down for me so again let let us do some of the grunt work yeah performance institute and we can give you some of that education write it down for me i'll tell you how i feel and then we'll come back we'll talk about it and maybe it changes coaches and gyms don't have to feel like you're trying to poach them and take them away and bring them to a new player that's the beautiful thing about it it's like it's open to everybody who fights for the ufc yeah and the other thing which i would It's open to everybody who fights for the UFC.

Yeah, and the other thing which I would say is this is at no cost to the fighters. It's also their choice. They're independent contractors. They can decide how much they want to engage with us, as much or as little as they want. And again, that's the same with the trifecta program for meal prep. It's the same with our strength and conditioning program. So again, it's all bespoke and customized programming at no cost to the fighters. It's so exciting for me because having seen the fights

and the sport and the level of sport evolve over all these years, it's so exciting to see constant and continuing innovation. And when you guys came along and built this thing and I had a chance to go and visit, I was so excited. I was like, this is just what, man, every sport needs something like this. But the fact that the UFC has this. You should do some testing.

Come by, do some testing. They're going to find I'm old. We knew that. But where are you more old than others? Right now, my left hip, I fell down skiing. You make a great point because what's been one of the really exciting things for us and refreshing also for the UFC Performance Institute is that sports like the NFL, the NBA, the English Premier League, we're having representatives from all of these teams, NHL, coming through and trying to understand what we're doing,

how we're working our sports science into the sport of mixed martial arts, and to try and capture our philosophy and our approach from a facility development perspective through to kind of our educational processes through to the way we're interacting with fighters and again we're trying to shape mixed martial arts we're trying to influence the ufc that's that's our that's our number one mission but the the the global awareness around the performance institute is is really exciting as well now i know you guys you were talking about your place in china are you planning on going anywhere else well. Now, I know you guys, you were talking about your place in China. Are you planning on going anywhere else? Well, right now, you know,

the, the expectation or, or our desire is to influence mixed martial arts globally. We're, we're truly a global sport. So, right now we don't know what that's going to look like, but the ambition is to obviously have performance institutes around the world

that can help the development process. I want to build one in like South Africa. Badass over there. Get the malaria medication ready, oh cipro right cipro i don't know what that stuff is he just wants the red wine right oh it's pretty nice too what is cool about is about us operating and athletes being independent contractors and accessing us however they see fit is we have so many different case studies and utilization uh we'll have people come out for a week at a time, access our team, take that back. We'll have other people come out for part of a camp or a full camp. Others will come.

We had Macy Barber, actually. She talked about it publicly, but she worked with us quite a bit for her last fight. She booked a flight from Nashville to Vegas to reconnect, to get updated nutrition, strength and conditioning, whatever metrics that we could update based on her health status, as well as orthopedic support post-fight. So we were able to get a number of days post-fight

as part of essentially the completion of her fight camp to get her ready for the next phase. So there's a lot of different ways that athletes can utilize based on just whatever their needs are, whatever they perceive their needs needs to be and then whatever influence we're able to uh kind of make over over their preparation and macy barber is a perfect example of someone getting that kind of high level treatment very early in her career she's only 20 years old right no super exciting prospect and for her to have access to 21 like three weeks she's old already over the hill that

that voice is forrest griffin ladies and gentlemen no one else uh when you um when you treat these younger fighters how much um emphasis do you put on giving them um just some just a smart protocol to try to minimize the potential injuries, to get them to understand the relationship between range of motion and injuries, to get them to understand balance. I know you guys have a machine that you actually can measure the muscles in the body and show the left and the right side what's weak and what's strong, right? What is that called again?

I mean, we use force plates in certain particular… There's something you lie down in though, isn't there? Biodex. So we have the DEXA scan, which is essentially a low-dose x-ray that measures the mass of the tissue between bone mass, muscle mass, and fat mass. And so we can get a balance of the musculature and the skeleton bilaterally. When we see a big imbalance on that front, because that is a nutrition-related test,

we will share that with both physical therapy and strength and conditioning. And then physical therapy could break that into more nuance around strength imbalances around joints using the Biodex. And then strength and conditioning will do very similar kind of understanding using the bilateral force plates that Duncan was mentioning. That stupid machine told me I had two pounds less muscle in my left leg than my right.

And it was accurate. Oh, yeah. No, I do. I blew my knee out a couple times, but I just didn't rehab it properly. So when you found out, did you start doing like extra one-legged pistols on the left side? For two weeks, maybe even three. And then I was like, yeah, I got some emails to send.

Then your knee started hurting. And now it just keeps running in circles. Let me ask you this. If you did see a fighter and they did have something like that and they were active, they were still competing, you saw a big – Happens all the time. What do you do? Yeah, I mean, we have a lot of fighters that have imbalances muscularly. That's not a nutrition-related issue.

Obviously, our support is going to be important for the adaptation. Right. and this goes to heather around a orthopedic assessment what what's the imbalance what's the injury risk like duncan was saying in terms of strength imbalances um she and her team heather linden our director of pt would would do that orthopedic screen see what the imbalances are um and break it down and then that would lead to probably programming in her space, and then also to strength and conditioning to build programs around whether it's mobility, range of motion, or just around kind of hypertrophy to make up for some imbalances. So that's where the comprehensive approach comes in. I might assess something

and then kick it over to them. There's many cases where they would assess something, whether the strength coach happened this week, so-and-so is having a bad training session they talk about low energy they talk about not being able to recover or get up for the next training session that's an immediate referral over to my session to my side of the fence so that's where the integrated care becomes really really critical. So how if you had someone that had like a two pound weight difference between their left leg and the right leg how much time would you give them to gain that weight back would it be dependent upon the individual or like you would probably want that

to be a priority before they went into a heavy camp or something like that right you can't resolve that immediately but that would be part of the i mean it comes back to the the return on investment right what's the return on investment to investment and the reduction of an injury risk to try and influence that two pounds? Do you know what I mean? That's a conversation. We're going to have that conversation around how effective or influential

that is going to be on the outcome of the fighter. So, as Clint says, there's fighters that walk around truly imbalanced, but what's the risk and the time and effort it's going to take to make that change? If it's in a fight camp, we're probably going to just leave it as it is. If it's off camp and we've got a little bit more time to try and address it, all right, now we can be a bit more proactive about doing that. But with me, they were like, you're old.

We'll take you out back and shoot you. No, they did. We messed around with some BFR stuff. Yeah. BFR? Blood flow restriction. The occlusion band? The Katsu type

approach but again in in physical therapy and strength and conditioning now that's not revolutionary anymore that that's that's part of just another tool that we add to it it's it's a way to come to augment um or accelerate hypertrophy so if you have someone that's coming back for returning from surgery or an injury and you're looking to get muscle mass back onto the limb without necessarily loading it through free weights or whatever it may be, you can use blood flow restriction methods to try and increase that hypertrophy mechanism. What are your thoughts on electrical muscular stimulation,

those little pads and shocks? Geez, now that is called Heather. Yeah, well, they come by a lot with different machines too. Do you ever use it? I have not, no, that is called Heather. Yeah, well, they come by a lot with different machines, too. Do you ever use it? I have not, no. Well, no, actually, no, that's not true. I was the test dummy. We did it on my shoulder.

I was the test dummy. Did it help you at all? I think with a lot of those things, there's some short-term relief. And again, you influence the nervous system. The long-term changes are potentially not there. Here's what I've got to ask you about. Cupping. Is that legit? Yeah. is it real michael phelps everyone sees this he's amazing everyone sees the pictures of michael phelps at the olympics you can play them fork them if you think about massage that's all decompression what cupping does is the opposite it lifts all

right so again when we're talking about fascia and changing fascia and releasing fascia, if all you ever do is massage and depress the tissue, you're not getting that mechanism of lifting and bringing it up into the cup. So that's kind of the philosophy behind it. And our therapists use it a lot. But again, it's just a tool, and they're going to use the tool for certain situations, and they might leave it for others. Is there any scientific research to back cupping?

Not that I'm aware of, but I might be completely wrong. Do you ever do it? I got cupped this morning. Did it this morning. Show me your leg. Show me your leg. What's going on with your leg, bro? Forrest.

Forrest, what'd you do? So do you know? Is that a compression from a surgery? Six weeks ago. What'd you have done? MCL, PCL, LCL. Jesus, man. Do you know the single leg, when you do the scissor defense to the single leg?

Yes. I don't. Oh, no. Not at all. I just fell right on his leg. It turns out you can't do a thing. You can't not do a thing for six years and just think you can do it. It's not riding a

bike it's a it's a perishable skill as me and clinton now know so how long ago but i have three new ligaments i'm good oh jesus six and a half weeks ago six and a half weeks ago three new ligaments from cadavers is that what it is uh mcl was able to be repaired down on itself pcl cadaver lcl cadaver I'm getting world class Physical therapy World class cupping On a daily basis Cupping today

I got grasped in yesterday Hurt like hell But literally I'm just beta testing everything I was the test subject For Roman For all the exercise tests Now I'm the test subject

For all the PT rehab What about stem cells Or exosomes Or anything along those lines We got our flights to Panama booked. Dr. Neil Reardon on standby. I'm sticking with physical therapy at the moment, but

I honestly don't know that much about the other components. I'm waiting for embryonic stem cells in the U.S. Then I'll do it. They're doing a lot of insane stuff i had stem cells in my achilles i had to have achilles surgery yeah it's fantastic yeah they're doing

some incredible stuff if you're you're really interested you should talk to uh dr roddy mcgee he's also local in vegas i know roddy he was the one that did my achilles surgery yeah he's amazing i went i did a consult with him you sent me you and and DC both sent me. And he said for my shoulder, and he was like, yeah, there's nothing there for it to attach to. I'll take your six grand, but it probably won't work. And I was like, well, I appreciate the candor, Doc. Yeah, he's very honest about the potentials. But your shoulder's been operated on how many times? Three.

Yeah, that's rough. Now, what are the options when something like that happens can they i know they do shoulder replacements but what does that entail yeah i'll probably do that eventually and what does that mean they just put a a different socket and socket yeah what do they do with all the surrounding ligaments i don't know i don't know that's terrifying i think a lot of those are still intact so i don't think the range of motion would improve as long as i go mess around an r PT once or twice a week, it stays functional. So when you say mess around, what kind of stuff are you doing?

Stuff for mobility or stuff for – are you doing clubs? Well, I like where you're actually moving through with them pressing on the muscles, and you're actually lifting the weight. What's that called? Where you're lifting weights or someone's manipulating your muscles? Oh, I forget. I'll think of it in a second.

No worries. Physical therapy. It's called physical therapy. They have you do a lot of band stuff and a lot of shoulder guys get band work. I do, yeah, I do them like as a warm-up every day, yeah. Or every, you know, whenever I work out. Except for today today i just jumped

in cold and like let's see what happens now how much how much time do you spend uh on sort of educating fighters about having to strengthen up all the the surrounding tissue around knees and shoulders and necks and things along those things that are commonly your core your lower back commonly injured tissue resilience is is massive in our sport because again it's end range resilience right it's with with the submission and and the you know the grappling exercise techniques obviously you're taking a tissue and the tolerance of that tissue to its end range so by being able to train that over time in a progressive fashion of course it's going to have an influence. And yeah, part of our programming is going to approach that for sure.

Now, you guys have been in action now for two years. You've had a bunch of different fighters move through and do their camps there. We've had a roster of 570. We've had over 430 of the fighters have already been through in the first 22 months. And we have a retention rate of about 73%. So they're either coming back for repeat visits or they're getting remote programming from ourselves now how much has this changed like over the the two years how much has have your protocols changed your programs have changed a lot yeah i mean yeah a lot we're learning more about the sport the data is showing

us more and you know again just the opportunity to speak to more coaches more athletes again we're servants to the fight community and we're sports scientists therapists clinicians and the end of the day the ip sits with the coaches with ma coaches and people like forest so just being able to understand how we can collect that information from a technical tactical perspective and try and fit it into our philosophy of sports science being complementary to that that's that's evolved all of our processes extensively over the last two years have you guys ever thought about putting any sessions online yeah i mean i oh you shouldn't yeah i always say the performance institute's got three responsibilities the first responsibility is to service athletes to service our fight community either either face-to-face or remotely. The second thing which we're trying to do, something like this, is to aggregate more information and more insights around the sport.

And this is available? Anybody can buy this? No, but you can get it online through – It was sent to every fighter on the roster. Okay. But to the average person, a fan, could they get a hold of it? You can go to our Twitter accounts and things like that and find it on there. There's links out there on social media.

Everybody knows a UFC fighter, right? Just go find one. But the second thing is we need to understand the sport. The sport of mixed martial arts is only 25 years old professionally. So aggregating data is the second thing. And then the third thing off the back of that data is dissemination and education across the global fight community. So we're called the Performance Institute for a reason, not the Performance Gym, because we are truly trying to do project work, do research work, work with partners to try and aggregate that information and our awareness and our understanding so that we can push it out there. So the plan

is obviously moving forward to really ramp up our educational platforms to support the global community. And hopefully we'll have kind of certifications coming online and those types of things as well strength mpt are filming stuff to put online yeah like this is the way this exercise is properly done this is things to look out for for physical therapy and uh strength condition you know you guys have a youtube channel we don't we're working on all this stuff what here's the thing we we don't want to act quickly this isn't we're not like a youtube thing we want to like hey when we release something we stand behind it this is this is tried and true these are practice methods we don't need to rush it also these jerks are all always busy like working with asshole or athletes well i think that would mean what you guys are doing is amazing and it would be even more amazing

if young fighters people coming up yeah get it right you really could influence a lot of folks yeah you're right and then again it's in our ambition it's just we're just two years into this thing our first year was just shit let's just get operational we don't even know what this thing is is. What kind of mandate did the UFC give you? I mean, how much, what did they say? Hey, man, make a fucking

awesome place. Do their best. All right, this is Dana. High five. I'm going back to work. Like, how does that work? How does it get set up? I mean, it was like,

hey, we want insights into the athletes. We want, you know, eventually, its origin was like, hey, can you guys make people stop missing weight and getting injured so much and more importantly when somebody does get injured can we like get them

back quicker can they not work with like a mom and pop car accident chiropractor to get like a professional athlete you know can we get them back so the the the goal right so the mission statement is you know to elongate careers to you, to help athletes make their weight class, stay within the weight class, fight great at their weight class. So, again, specific mandates like the exact KPIs, I forget what they are. They were some. Just off the back of my head, what I would say is that we can legitimately say in the first 19 months of our existence, we've saved 22 fights, either through medical intervention or the work that Clint has done around someone that's behind their weight descent, and we've really expedited that process. That's amazing. We're proud of that number, and it's hard to build KPIs around that, but that's why the Performance Institute was implemented.

KPIs? KPIs, Key Performance Indicators. So we're not a fight team right we work with the whole roster so no we're not judged on wins and losses although some some would you would look on social media and some would think um but we're we're our kpis are around things like how can we support fighters make weight how can we get them to the door of the octagon in a healthy fashion? And again, 22 fights, we can absolutely say, they probably wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for the work of the Performance Institute. So there's, you can put a financial cost potentially against that. And that's kind of the philosophy behind the Performance Institute. All right, gentlemen,

any last words? Clint, you want to say something? I was just going to add that a lot of what we're doing and the athletes that we get to interact with are the cases that require huge interventions. You know, people that are coming off a six fight win streak are not looking for how to fix their metabolism or how to stop missing weight or how to improve their power because it's a deficiency or an orthopedic injury. So we're working with those that are really successful and those that are struggling and everything in between. So we're working with those that are really successful and those that are struggling and everything in between. So it's around those interventions that have led to fights actually happening.

There's a huge amount of, I guess, risk for lack of a better term, that we're taking on as we're really working with the athlete's best interest at heart and doing everything we can to support that athlete to be more consistent and to be able to do it longer into their career so that they can do the best for themselves, for their family, and for, I guess, the UFC. Beautiful. Anything, Duncan, to add to that?

No, I mean, this is a trip. In terms of where we're at with the Performance Institute, our ambition is to really affect and support the global fight community. That's what we're about. And hopefully, moving forward this year, people are going to see the value of what we're trying to do. Well, I think they already see the value. I certainly do.

I'm very excited that you guys are around. I thought it was going to be a waste of money. It's definitely going to be a waste of money, but in a good way. What does that mean, though, right? It costs money. But I think ultimately it's great for the sport for sure thank you and uh it's it's just an amazing resource and i'm glad you're a part of it too man it really means a lot it means a lot to have a guy who's a former champion who's

been there i mean since ultimate fighter season one you know i mean it's crazy your fight i mean everybody says it it's it's a fact your fight i mean i said all the time i said at least once a day that fucking fight made the sport. What? You were in a... He was in a fight once. Okay. That fight made the sport, man.

It really did. That fight was so crazy. People were calling up their friends. Like, when they started doing... Nielsen numbers are all shenanigans, right? You get, like, 100 people. They're checking their... They don't really know who the fuck's watching what.

But they know that something crazy happened during that fight. They have estimates that there was as much as 6 million people changed and started tuning into that fight while it was happening. They don't know what the real numbers are, but it was chaos. And then afterwards, I never saw anything like it. It was like all of a sudden, people wanted to watch the UFC. It was almost instantaneous. The season finale of The Ultimate Fighter went on the air,

and then the door opened, and people started pouring through. It was crazy, man. And that's you. You and Stefan Bonner. You guys are responsible for literally the birth of this explosion that we're all seeing right now, that we're seeing with this ESPN deal, we're seeing with these incredible fights? No, it's cool, and I love that, that I got to kind of be that cornerstone.

But now the PI, the UFC itself, the stars today, it's only building. That was the beginning. There's so much more to come. There's so much more to come, but you're a bad motherfucker, Forrest. You were there. Just don't ever drill jiu-jitsu or wrestling. It'd be worse. You'd fall on people.

But seriously, I'm super happy that you guys exist. It's awesome for me. It's been a treat for me as a fan. Thanks for having us. Dork out with you. Appreciate it. And to learn all the inside stuff. It's very exciting.

So thank you. Much continued success, gentlemen. Please come visit us again. I would love to. Welcome anytime. I would love to. Thank's very exciting. So thank you. Much continued success, gentlemen. Please come visit us again. I would love to. Thank you very much. Alright.