Mark Bell's Power Project - Mark Bell's Power Project EP. 228 Live - Mike Dolce

Episode Date: July 10, 2019

Mike Dolce is one of the world’s top weight management coaches, known for training the best fighters in the world of professional mixed martial arts. He is a trainer, strength and conditioning coach, weight-cut coach, author, nutrition and fitness expert, motivational speaker, and a former mixed martial artist. Dolce is best known for managing the weight cuts of UFC athletes such as Johny Hendricks, Ronda Rousey and Thiago Alves. He was voted as the 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 World MMA Trainer of the Year. ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Find the Podcast on all platforms: ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2 ➢Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4YQE02jPOboQrltVoAD8bp ➢Listen on Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr ➢Listen on Google Play: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project ➢Listen on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/markbellspowerproject  FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow The Power Project Podcast ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MarkBellsPowerProject Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/  Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

We've been podcasting together as a group for probably about two years or so. Okay. Kind of brought him on more recently. And then before that, I think I was going for about another two years. Okay. I think I've been doing it for... Does that sound right, Andrew? Am I talking on my ass?

I can look it up, but you might be making stuff up. I'm not sure. Nice. I just lied to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fair enough, man. Yeah, no, this... Still in airtime.

Just starting out with lies. I just lied to you. Fair enough, man. Yeah, no, this iteration. Starting out with lies. Yeah, I think this iteration, we're over 200 podcasts now, this version. And then the last one, I think we surpassed whatever the hell we did. So, yeah, we'll go with a couple years. Yeah, doing it for a while. Okay. Yeah.

Are we rolling? Yeah, we've been rolling. Oh, my God, the whole time? Yeah, this. Yeah. Are we rolling? Yeah, we've been rolling. Oh, my God. The whole time? Yeah, this whole time. Busted line? Oh, my God. So the whole part about your secrets and all that good stuff?

Everybody must have dropped off. Everybody must have left already. Right. Show's over. Hey, so this guy over here, this giant over here, this freak show, he shows us up. We go down to L.A., and we try to have this nice workout. We're going to train some back. We're going to do some deadlifts and stuff.

We're all getting a little bit carried away, but this guy puts 605 on the bar and rips it up like it's nothing. Takes his shirt off, parades around the gym. He's more jacked than everybody. Then he comes back here to Sacramento, and he gets awarded a purple belt in jiu-jitsu. It's like, dude, what kind of role are you on? What's going on? You're the one who told me to do it. I didn't want to take the shirt off. I didn't want to add the weight on you. I ripped his shirt off.

Yeah, which was kind of in the heat of the moment, but people have seen it in SEMA. They understand. I almost ripped his shirt off when I walked in. See? And then you hear his voice and one thing leads to another, right? There you go. And when in LA, you know. That's right. Why not?

Dude, how does it feel to be a Purple Belt? Good. Does it feel any different? No. I expected it not to feel that much different. Did the coach present it to you in some cool, illustrious way or just gave it to you or how'd it work? Yeah, so I was stressing because when we were in LA, that's when he started about promotions.

I was like, ah, shoot, am I about to miss this? So then I got back, he gave me my belt, gave a little bit of a speech. It was cool.

And, uh, yeah, it feels good. Get that recognition in front of your peers is a big deal. Yeah. It was pretty dope. Um,

but yeah, I just went back to training. Just going to keep training just like I normally do. Have you trained since with the purple? Yeah. The shiny new purple. Yeah. Every day day since actually you know what so i have you getting all snobby now you can't go with the white belts and stuff lose anymore no i do i do i still roll with everybody it's nothing weird but like generally like when i get a new belt i will buy

the next belt and just keep it in a drawer and have it waiting so i had a nice thick purple belt waiting for me already so there you go now you gotta do what buy a brown belt yeah you got a brown belt just wait it's waiting you know it's not ready for me waiting in the wings mike dolce you've thrown down before you've been inside the ring right you've done some mma style stuff a couple how did that start i'd started i was a strength coach so high school college wrestler that was my former life i got hurt in college couldn't on, started powerlifting just as a way to be competitive, right? And keep doing it. Always worked as a strength coach, personal trainer, but always strength minded, right? So we're strength coaches, not a PT. Worked with combat athletes almost exclusively. So started working with them. And this is back in the late 90s early 2000s mma wasn't taken off but our area was dominated by henzo gracie so you know henzo gracie whereabouts this is in uh new jersey okay born and raised in new jersey jersey boy i did did my time out on the west coast um but

i'm back in japan i'm heading i'm heading to jersey at the end of the month oh what are you doing where are you going i'm going to jersey shore baby i live on the shore yeah oh there we go yeah i'm going right to your stomping grounds. I'll give you a list of must-go places. Must-go's and must-avoids. Must-avoids, for sure. For sure. What to wear, though, Mike.

You have a pretty good fashion sense. Yeah, I have to get the right clothes. I'll have to get the chain going, right? The chain, you know, with the GTL. You're going to have to get that going. You're going to shave all body hair. Gym tan laundry going. Yeah, then you're going to stand out. So going. You're going to shave all body hair. Gym tan laundry going. Yeah, then you're going to stand out.

So, you know, I was working with these athletes, combat athletes, and I was offered a job by Randy Couture back in 2004 to be the head strength coach of Team Quest Portland, Oregon. That time was the number one fight team in the world. Randy had the world title in the UFC. Dan Henderson had the world title over in Pride.

Matt Linlin, silver medalist in the Olympics in Greco-Roman wrestling, ranked as the number 185 pounder. I think Randy Couture was one of the first guys I saw really like almost like clean up the sport, I'd say. Like I put that in quotes, you know, not that sport was like super dirty or anything, but it may have been. But he was one that like really treated it like a profession. And he always seemed prepared. He always seemed like he came in ready to go.

And I always admired that about him. And I always kind of recognized that as being a little different than maybe what some of the other guys have. But now if you look at it, they all carry themselves. Well, almost all of them carry themselves like true professionals where they're spending 24-7 on being a better fighter. Yeah, that's a good point. And I think Randy brought a layer of dignity that the sport might not have had. He's a college educated man. He's a veteran and he was a little older than the average fighter. So he wasn't a fighter dude. He was, he was, he was an athlete and he represented this, this different generation of competitive athletes. And the way he dominated

was really through his preparation. He wasn't very fast. He wasn't very strong. He wasn't a great knockout puncher. He'd fight anybody. When he went up against Brock Lesnar, that was wild to watch. Right. Because he was a lot smaller than Brock Lesnar. Right. And he fought everyone and won, beat most of them.

His record is split in many ways. But he fought everyone at a time when the sport was insane. It wasn't nearly the same rule structure that it is now right i mean randy was the 205 pound champion for years and he goes and fights brock lesnar who's cutting to make 265 right you've seen that dude man that guy's a freaking you know it looks like him over here it was unbelievable yeah yeah yeah so um you know being able to go out there and work with those guys you know and there was you know the finances always matter so i didn't have the aspiration to be a pro fighter, but hey, you want 500 bucks to fight this weekend? Can you make weight? Yeah, I'll make weight.

All right. So made weight, got my 500 bucks and, you know, went out there and did it right. There we go. So it started out with you coaching a lot of these guys, and then you ended up getting the ring yourself? Coaching, yeah. I was always a coach. Even when I was fighting, I was always a part-time fighter, and that allowed me to be a better coach because I was able to go through the preparations.

I was able to deal with the nerves. I was able to sit in the back and wait for my name to be called and make that walk. My phone is blown up from friends and family and people I've never even met before asking for tickets. So I've been able to go through that part of it too, that the fighters deal with that a lot of the other coaches, they don't understand. So I think it allowed me to separate myself from a technician standpoint and helping my athletes peak because I understood very intimately what they were going through,

having gone through it over 30 times. There's all these stupid little things that are happening probably starting about two weeks out from the show that other people just aren't aware of. Yeah, your aunt so-and-so wants a ticket, and she wants to bring, you know, right? And it's just like you get caught up in all the side stuff, right? Yeah. Yeah, this is an old fight.

This is kind of towards the end. See if you have that Jim Abril knockout in the IFL. That'll be a fun one to watch if I can even call my own fights. How many fights have you done? I have about 30 and they were all, there's a mix between pro and amateur, but I started fighting in the early 2000s when they

weren't, this is a good one to watch, when they weren't really making a difference. I got paid for every one of the fights I ever did, so consider it to be professional fights. I've had, I think, 27 in total, a couple smokers, a few boxing, jiu-jitsu tournaments, and all that fun stuff. But I made that MMA walk 27 times, I'm almost positive.

Knocked out a couple times and knocked out a few guys also, so I kind of had the best highs and lows. It's really weird how there's these pockets you know throughout the country where mma really started it was a nice shot where mma really started to develop you know it now it's you know now you can go to a lot of different places and train yeah um and there's still there's still a lot of great uh facilities you know throughout the country there's like five or six that are world-renowned, right? But back then, it was like there was only a couple spots, right?

Yeah. And that was Team Quest, North Portland, Oregon. That was the number one gym in the world at that point. Number two, I would say, is Pat Miletic's Miletic Fighting Systems that had Matt Hughes and Jens Pulver, Jeremy Horn, Tim Sylvia. In that era, that's where all the other studs were coming out of. Our gym, Team Quest, at that time, early to mid-2000s, we dominated. That's where Chael Sonnen came from, Chris Lieben, Eddie Herman, Evan Tanner. I'm forgetting tons of guys right now as the list continued on.

Pat Miletic may have been even before that group developed, right? He was earlier, right? Pat Miletic, he was actually one of the original UFC welterweight champions. So he was able to go out there, win the UFC world title, and then went on to just an illustrious career as a coach, developing multiple other world champions under him. So I think Miletic really took the torch from Team Quest, from producing top talent. from Team Quest from producing top talent because as Team Quest, Randy left and went to Vegas, Team Quest started to fizzle. Miletic continued on with their dominance for many years and many of their athletes like Robbie Lawler was a byproduct in the Miletic fighting systems. You know, Robbie's still out there doing extremely well in the UFC, you know, top three, top five,

you know, contender right now. So it was certainly a different era. And then, you know, Jackson Winklejohn's, you know, down there in New Mexico and, you know, the, um, you know, AKA, you know, out in this general area, right. You know, San Jose, right. San Jose, lots of great teams. Um, but you know, I'm fortunate that I came, what we call the pre tough era before the ultimate fighter came out. So I was a part of the sport. I was a coach in the sport. I was an athlete in the sport before the ultimate fighter was ever on the air. So I saw the sport. I think when there was, you know, four UFC pay-per-views per year back in the days that I was a part of it, athletes were making $2,000 to go out there and fight. That was, that was the entry level fee, right? And that was at the highest promotion in the world. So kind of in the early days, nobody was doing it really for the money. It was for the love of the sport. early days nobody was doing it really for the money it was for the love of the sport and uh duane bang ludwig one of my good friends we always talk about man like we miss miss the old days just the simplicity of it where it's not about money it's not about you know instagram followers or anything else it's just about showing up at the gym putting the work in and you know trying to

knock each other out really you know take care of each other but getting there and getting it done the ufc's got a lot more complicated you know, with like Reebok coming in. Yeah. That kind of stifles the athlete a little bit in terms of what they're able to do in terms of sponsorship. I know a lot of athletes aren't super excited about it. And then from a fan's point of view, I've been watching this stuff since the first one.

You know, I've been a huge fan of it from the very beginning. And then now with ESPN+, it's like it's hard to figure out like how do i get it like i have it on my phone but i don't have on my computer and uh even just watching this last fight you know getting the bones jones fight yeah the streaming once the bones jones fight came on was just terrible like it took me like an hour to or maybe even longer to watch to watch that fight because it kept freezing up you know so yeah they made a lot of big decisions, and they've obviously, look, you always want to sell up and you always want to make money.

But they made a lot of decisions that have changed the sport quite a bit. Absolutely, and there's a greater exposure to the sport now, right? Our parents are aware of it, as you could say, where at a time they really weren't. But I don't, me personally, I'm not as enthused as where the sport is gone it reaches a greater audience but it's not as dedicated of an audience i mean even myself now i don't watch 90 of the fights anymore because i don't even know when they're on like you said it's hard to even find them you know i'll stream them later on in the office like on tuesday morning like prelims there's like early prelims and prelims. And you're like, I don't know what's going on and what channel it's on.

Yeah. So it's hard to track down. Now, kind of, I think it's all on ESPN, but which ESPN? Is it on my phone? I can't find it on my TV. You know, it's kind of a pain. So I think where they're going, they're probably about three years behind of where technology needs to be for their vision. That's the way I see. And they're really smart guys, right? And gals, really smart. Everyone behind the scenes, their hearts in the right place for sure. They're very shrewd business people. They know what they're doing. But the collateral damage I think is of the athletes and it's the peripheral businesses around the sport of which I was lucky in my business, the Dolce Diet, we were able to

brand ourself in the pre Reebok era. So we were able to get out there. We were able to gain exposure and there's lots of other businesses that have, you know, very, very big top lines during that period of time that disappeared because Reebok wiped them off the stage. And when that happened, everyone forgot about them. Nobody. and I won't say their names because I want to be disrespectful, but those businesses now are gone as a result of that. Now, is it a bad thing? Well, not if you own the UFC because they cashed a $4 billion paycheck,

but for a lot of the peripheral industries around the sport, it really did a lot of damage, and I think that hurt the sport as a whole because it wiped out a lot of the loyal following, the foundation foundation because we were, and I consider myself a part of that tier. We were the foundation that really helped build and support. I know with what I was, I did, and I currently do. So I bring the UFC money. I bring them a big bag of money when I walk my athlete across the stage and they weigh in successfully on weight and they go out there and they put on a 25 pound war for the fans to sit there and consume. So, you know, entities like, like myself or my team,

that's part of what we do that we feed into it, but it's not, you know, taken into consideration. I don't expect to check of course for doing that. And I was able to build a profitable business that's been able to sustain itself outside of the, um, the, the sphere of the UFC, but a lot of other businesses didn't. And that's, that's too bad. How did your coaching evolve? Like from when you started coaching back in what, like you said, 2002, 2003. Well, I was, you know, I opened my training business in 1993, junior in high school. I was, I was wrestling. I was four, four year varsity caps captain in high school. So four year varsity wrestler, I was wrestling varsity as a freshman year, obviously. And that put me in a leadership position.

And in that, I became very regimented and very focused on the nutrition and the strength training side of it because we didn't have a great team. We didn't have great coaches, very passionate, but they didn't have a high skill set. I knew the only way I was going to make a mark is I had to grind. I had to be in better shape than everyone. I had to outwork everyone. I had to be as strong and fast and reactive as I could. And that's really what kind of identified the team in my training style. So as I was able to take that, I focused on the strength side of it. I mean, I'm an in the gym guy. I love the dirty gym. You know, that's my core. And then I was

coaching all these athletes. The team costed 40 of the greatest athletes on the planet i'm coaching them for free while being paid as the gym janitor because the salary i was supposed to get wasn't there after i moved across the country that's a whole other story but anyway so i'm you know 5 a.m to 9 a.m i'm the gym janitor and i coach 40 of the world's greatest athletes for free in time the athletes start paying me out of their own pockets because they see value the nutrition i always gave them as just as a value add to the strength packages, right? You know, we have 10 block of 10, it's going to be X amount of dollars and I'll do all your nutrition for free. In a short period of time, the nutrition education outpaced my demand as a strength coach because there's a lot of great strength coaches out there, a lot of great strength coaches, which is awesome. Not a lot of good entities that were educating on proper nutrition specifically for weight class

oriented sports. For whatever reason, I go back to just my whole life kind of put me in the position to understand it and be involved from such a young age and all the way through. I was able to take modern nutrition science tempered with the experience of having done it and having run. I said I had 40 Petri dishes that were constantly competing. So I'm constantly testing my hypothesis and coming up with conclusions and retesting on different body types and, you know, training paradigms, constantly pushing forward. That changed it. And that's really where, you know, my brand exploded was on the nutrition side. it and that's really where you know my brand exploded was on the nutrition side the ability to get athletes on weight in shape as healthy as possible weeding eating real food and not

suffering all the way so they can go out there they can compete at world-class levels that was rare at the time because most of the athletes were damn near killing themselves and many of the athletes still are i mean modern era of weight cutting inside mma it's it's no different than it was 100 years ago i mean they're basically putting on burlap bags and and shadow boxing in the barn you know in 100 degree rather weather you know like marciano used to do that's basically what they're still doing but now they do it even worse because you know they're they're putting themselves in in saunas right and just making 180 220 degree saunas which we never do that stuff. So I think that's the biggest differentiation is the strength and condition.

I love to now kind of pass on the strength work to a lot of our athletes and clients, to someone who's hands, like a hands-on practitioner. I don't want to do any of the strength work anymore. It's just my team is going to oversee the nutrition. We'll be a little bit of a bottleneck between your strength coach, your skills coach, maybe your family, your agents, the PR team at the UFC to kind of help ensure that the athlete is properly peaking towards, you know, competition day. So it's been a large evolution

that we see the bigger picture of their business, but also their lifestyle. These athletes, they have families, their kids are in school, they have anniversaries coming up, you know, they got to pay a note on their car, they got to be in Brazil to do a seminar. Well, that matters. That matters. What's their food got to be like? What's their mental state like? You know, what's, what's their health in that moment? Are they rehabbing injuries? What's their fight timelines? How big of a fight is it? What's the sport pulling on them? What do they need to do to get out there and be ready in a month or six months or however that training cycle goes? So there's a lot more into it, a lot more context that most don't really understand and appreciate.

Yeah. As far as like the trend that you've seen with like every athlete, because you said you had 40 Petri dishes running at the same time, right? same time right i'm always curious as to like you know we've had a lot of guests on here that have talked about um potentially some athletes that do high endurance type work working really well off of high fat sure and like andy galpin when he was on here he was like well those type of fighters they typically do much much better with high carbs have you noticed a trend favoring one or the other or um mma is a glycolytic sport yep Yep. You have to have, you have to have carbs. And I point to show me the athlete who doesn't consume at least moderate carbs, regardless of their physiology and competes at the higher levels. You just don't see it simply because that substrate is essential to the type of force

production necessary in that this sport. It has to be there. You cannot operate at that level and compete at that level and keep up with the athletes at that level without that. That's just the way that we are designed. I thought this was a really good quote. Somebody else mentioned it on this podcast before, but they said that you don't see very many athletes up on a podium that aren't eating carbohydrates. Now you might see your recreational person because the person that sits on the couch, it's like, you know, they're going, they're getting after it on Saturday and Sunday and

maybe playing a pickup game of softball or something, right? Maybe it's not in the best interest for that guy to consume carbohydrates all day. And maybe for a fighter, it's, it looks different, right? Yep. Absolutely. And it's, you know, cause the, the weekend warrior, which I love, they don't need that type of fuel. They're not pushing the car that far, that fast, right? The athlete, they need that.

They need that extra tank. You know, the higher level athlete, the average person, if they're just looking about longevity outcomes, if they're just looking about, you know, recomping their body, you know, dropping some body fat, putting on a little muscle tissue. For sure, kind of like a lower carbohydrate diet is likely more effective. I'm sure you've altered the carbohydrate intake here and there for the athlete. Maybe they need to do a weight cut or maybe after a fight just to kind of reset their body composition or something like that. Is that right? That is. And what we say is we eat based upon activity. So I don't conform to hard templates.

What did you just do the last two to four hours? What are you about to do for two to four hours? Let's look at that. And then we look at like a 36 hour kind of, you know, window before and after to make sure we're fulfilling all the micro and phytonutrient needs. But for primary fueling, it's like, all right, what did we just do? Are we recovering from some sort of expenditure or are we pre-fueling for an expenditure? What are we about to do? If we recovering from some sort of expenditure or are we pre-fueling for an expenditure? What are we about to do? If we're mindful and intentional with our fueling during those two periods, nutrition becomes easy. Like, and if I use these term accountability a lot, if people are accountable to what their goals are and what their activity level is, you don't have to follow a diet

program, nor should anyone follow a diet program. It should be mindful eating. You know, I was talking to Chris outside, your brother. He's like, man, if I'm sitting at the computer all day, I'm not eating pasta, right? I'm going to have a few, a slice of an orange, half an avocado made with some sriracha on it. I'm good for another 90 minutes, two hours. That's all the fuel and all the energy I need

to keep on cranking and feel good, sipping on a little coffee. I'm not going to have a deli sandwich with a side of fries if I'm sitting at my desk, right? That makes absolutely no sense. So if I'm mindful of what my activity is, and if I'm accountable to my goals moving forward, nutrition choices become easy.

So I think for individuals like us to educate the population on what real nutrition is, what it should be. It shouldn't be a hard and fast template diet. It shouldn't be a 40-40-20 or whatever the zone was. It shouldn't be like a paleo or a keto or any of those diets. It shouldn't be anything hard and fast. Sure, those are out there and sure, those have short-term outcomes for certain types of people at certain points in their life. But the totality of nutrition is really just being mindful of our activity. What do I need right now? And if we think about

that, and we always pull back to you, the micronutrient and phytonutrient necessity of nutrition that a lot of people don't think about because they're so focused on the macros, the protein, the carb, the fat, and then the calories. Micronutrition is the catalyst for all cellular activity. Humans, we are just a big bag of cells, right? So if we're micronutrient deficient, phytonutrient deficient, well, I don't care what your macro profile is, you're not going to be optimally performing. You're not going to live nearly as long. You're not going to be as happy. You're not going to hit that lean mass, you know, recomp that you're really looking for simply because you don't have enough calcium or iron or magnesium or phosphorus available as the raw materials.

And I use the, you know, we're, we're building a house where I need a certain number of nails on the job site, right? I need a certain number of lumber on the jobs. I need a certain number of copper wire on the job site. If you don't have that, what kind of house are we building here? You know, kind of, you know, same thing with nutrition. I think, you know, a lot of people are just, a lot of people are under eating, you know, I would say like from what I see in the fitness space, it seems like 45% of the people are under eating and it seems like 45% of the people are sabotaging their diet. Maybe not even necessarily just overeating, but kind of ending the day with ice cream or having a burrito in the middle of the day and just kind of ending up with just overconsumption of calories. And they're like not aware of it. And they're exercising and they're trying to have the body that they want.

And they're falling short. Now, there's like this 10%, you know, and maybe it might even be less. falling short. Now there's like this 10%, you know, and maybe it's might even be less, but there's a really small percentage of people that are pretty pumped about their body that have the look that they want. And it's, it's frustrating because the messages are always so confused and people, I think people are trying, some people are trying to get it right. There's a lot of people that are in the gym that aren't happy with their body that are trying to get it right, but they're just having a hard time figuring it out i see so many men and women i see under eating being such a huge problem and being as problematic as overeating absolutely what do you see in the fight game like

are these men and women like oh man i just want to lose a little bit more fat and you're like no that's not we're not really worried about the look in the mirror for right now yeah we can focus on that some other time. And they'll probably inherently look better anyway when they follow what you're saying. They do the training. They get everything all together at the right time. But do you see that being a problem where they're like, man, I'm fatter than I want to be? Yeah.

Now, body composition, we look at it in a few different ways. With our athletes, the elite athletes, when we look at them, we're looking at the power to kg ratio. What is the optimal performance weight given the confines of the sport? So when we're talking about MMA or Mursad Bektik. Mursad Bektik, he's a featherweight in the UFC. He fights at 145 pounds, plus one pound, 146 is what he has to weigh in outside of a world title fight. He walks around about 172. Lean.

That's a big-ass weight cut, right? Wow. Most of his weight, most of his training camp, we kept him right around one 66, one 68, and we fed him all the way through. Now he got leaner all through training camp, also allowing us to start to slowly increase his calories. Why were we doing that based upon activity as we go go through week nine to week seven and then week six to week four, he's training harder and more often, harder and more often. So his training demand is going up. Therefore have to start eating less. What happens if we stop supplying those raw materials? Everything breaks down. Athlete gets hurt. Athlete gets sick. Athlete becomes mentally sabotaged or they become mentally challenged in that they now stop believing in themselves because, man, I got exhausted. Well, you got exhausted because you dropped your carbohydrates by 150 grams a day overnight like that because you thought you were too heavy. So now you got no gas in your tank or protein or fat or whatever that might be. Of course you got tired. You just took an hour's worth of energy out of your body and you expected to be able to

push for that extra hour. No, that's not going to happen. And I had a very similar talk with Mursad during his training camp. How are we going to structure it moving forward? So as we continue on, we are looking at body composition. I want my athletes, my male athletes to compete really between 7% and 10%. That's about the ideal body fat percentage based upon, you know, with respect to weight class. So Merced, he's going to be a lot closer to 7% body fat as a 145 pounder. When we're talking about the 85s or 205ers,

they're going to be closer to that 10%. Heavyweights can get away. I don't want to see a heavyweight personally any more than 12%, which is a lot leaner than most people really think. 12% on a heavyweight looks awesome, right? That looks phenomenal. Most of the heavyweights competing are north of 15%. That's not good. That's not healthy. Let me put a 20-pound backpack on your back

and then go fight Brock Lesnar. Good luck. I'd rather take the backpack off and go out there and do your best. So we do see a lot of athletes, naturally they want to start pulling calories, too many calories way too soon. And then in the off season,

they typically way overeat because they sling shot forward and they haven't developed that habit of this just becoming a normal aspect of their lifestyle. And they're not focused on fueling based upon activity. In the off season, their activity drops. So how do you add a thousand calories to your diet when you've lost 1500 calories worth of expenditure throughout the day? What's going to happen? Well, you're going to go from 7% up to expenditure throughout the day. What's going to happen? Well, you're going to go from 7% up to 14% real quick.

You're going to hit that rebound, and now what happens? There's going to be a metabolic lag. It's going to take time to get the body moving again, digestive enzymes. That's hard on your body. The more often you do it, the easier it is for your body to kind of go back and forth between that, right? Absolutely, especially with women. So you see a lot of women, it takes them for whatever reason. You can get Andy Galpin in here to maybe talk about the biochem of it. For whatever reason, it's more difficult. And this comes really through a lot of the experience for women to swing up and down.

If a female athlete is much better, much more effective if they maintain a relatively static body weight in season, out of season. Guys, we can swing up and down a little bit more and not have nearly the same downside, nearly the same problem. It's kind of easy for us to do so. But even within that, not dramatically so. Off-season, I don't want my athletes much more than 10% over their competition weight. So Merced at 145, I don't want him getting that much bigger typically than the low 160s or so. He's just a 27-year-old specimen, former bodybuilder. I mean, he fills with glycogen so quick. I mean, you'll see him on the scale on Friday, and then you'll see him, you know, step into the octagon on Saturday night. Literally, I mean, he puts on 20

pounds, not because we're doing anything crazy crazy because his body's able to swell so much simply because of the the you know the glycogen and the salt that comes back into a system is that real weight mean you know we we can always make a debate if it will wait or not because now is he super compensated when do we see muscle mass being an issue uh... you know so i've heard joe rogan talk about this on his show before

it talked about about guys like uh..., and they've talked about some of the other guys who get super jacked. I think it was a problem for Vitor Belfort many years ago. He got up to like 240 pounds, and he was just really, really jacked. When do you see muscle mass being a problem, or is it even a problem? Is there a way to like can you still if you're you know 230 or 240 pounds and you're in really good shape you're really lean can you still have the wind to to get through it if you're like a low percentage body fat yeah absolutely it's more difficult because now you have to intelligently train for that type of outcome so when we talked about fueling earlier said you know you have to fuel based upon the confines of your sport. What will you be doing? A lot of guys will go and then gals,

of course, will go in and they'll stop their MMA style training, which is more like gymnastics style training, bodyweight centric training. And they'll do a lot more weight work with a very low cardio output. And then they'll kind of live a rather sedentary life. They'll train once a day. They'll go to the gym three, four times a week. They'll hit mitts a few times, nothing intense. And then within eight weeks, they need to rip their body back into fight shape. There's just not enough time to really do that. And I think they're not feeding their body. They're not fueling their body adequately for that type of performance. They don't. And I think truly, I believe this is one of the biggest problems with Conor McGregor.

Conor McGregor, I think, is one of the greatest athletes of our time, if you look at his resume, what he's been able to accomplish. Nobody will ever say Conor doesn't train hard. The kid trains probably harder than the majority of the UFC athletes of all time. Problem, I believe, with Conor is why he really slows down in that second and third round. He's never made it a full fight with a full gas tank simply because he's being fueled incorrectly he doesn't have the proper substrates available to fuel that type of activity so you know essentially he'll crash diet down to get to the scale he'll make weight he'll look shredded but then he can't

go out there and push for more than 7 to 12 minutes without his whole body shutting down. He simply runs out of fuel, I think. And he's not the biggest guy, right? So you'll see the same issue with a Conor McGregor at 145 or 155, as you might see with an Anthony Rumble Johnson at 205 or 225. It's just a matter of improper fueling for the confines of the sport. You know, when you mentioned like MMA trainings or MMA resistance trainings, like gymnastics training, and then they go their off season,

they lift. Why can't they lift, you know, lift with weights, maybe heavier or whatever while doing MMA style training? Is that just too much stress? Is that too much risk for injury? I think a part of it is because a lot of the athletes and coaches and teams, they don't understand how to properly periodize the training. They don't know where to fit it. Now, I don't like a Monday through Sunday template. I like thinking in more of like, you know, hitting strength work every three to five days. If it's a Sunday, so be it. If it's a Tuesday, so be it. I don't care what the day of the week, most of the time, I don't wear a watch. I don't pay attention to the calendar. Like, I don't know what day it is. Sometimes I don't know what month it is.

I'll tell Siri or like I got appointments or whatever going on. And that's the end of it. Right. Cause I don't care about any of that stuff. And I think that's a big part of the problem is the athletes. They try and do too much. So they get nothing done. And the coaches and the coaches,

it's a committee of experts that typically don't communicate well with each other. They want a hundred percent out of their their athlete every time the athlete walks in. Well, if the wrestling coach runs the athlete through an Iowa-style two-hour session on a Monday morning, and then the MMA coach wants them to spar on Monday night, guess what's going to happen? The athlete's going to get their ass kicked by a JV member, right? And possibly get hurt. And mentally not feel great. And mentally not feel great.

Mentally not feel great. And they're done, like, man, my Monday, how do I get through Tuesday and Wednesday? Then they're on the track maybe Tuesday morning because their strength coach is running them through, you know, repeats at 400 meter repeats. Good luck with that, right? And they got a fight coming up, so now they're not on enough calories because they're trying to lose 20 pounds in the next eight weeks. As a fighter, how bad does that feel?

When you were a fighter, it feels like everything you're doing is wrong. You're probably questioning yourself, your coaches. Everything's just turned on you out of nowhere. I'm going to get my ass kicked. I can't do this. What am I doing? I should have stuck with my finance job. It goes south real quick, right?

And you just hit it on the head. You know, it goes south real quick, right? And that's, you just hit it on the head. One of the biggest parts, I think, about what I do is I manage the psychology of the athlete, making the athlete feel like a fucking world beater. Even when physically and athletically, talent-wise, they might not be. But if they feel like it, if they have that energy and they're running through practice, how do you feel?

I feel great. Can you go more? Yeah. All right. We're going to shut it down. Like, what do you mean we're going to shut it down? I want to keep that intact. I don't want them to get to that point where they collapse like fuck i can't i can't finish this round because that's what sticks out i i say no matter what you do in training camp there's a thousand training sessions you know

hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours when the athlete is sitting alone waiting for their name to be called to make that walk all they think about is the one thing they did wrong, the one time they pulled up in a sprint, the one round that someone not as good got the better of them. That's what they're thinking about. So if we can avoid those situations, highlight their strengths and push them and fill in all the holes and make sure they're ready to go, but a lot of it's building confidence. And, you know, make sure they're ready to go. But a lot of it's building confidence. And we've seen athletes who walk out there who are not the most talented. The guy that knocked out Luke Rockhold.

Come on, look at those guys side by side. Now, Jan, he's an amazing athlete, but he's a journeyman. Luke was a world title holder, right? Side by side, there's no freaking way. Their pedigree, there's no way. Jan believed in himself. Luke, on the other hand, coming off a few bad fights, a few bad instances. That's what sticks in that man. What if that one big shot lands? I love Luke, you know, he's got a, whatever his reputation is. I've always had a great

relationship with him. We've traveled on seminars and things like that together, man, that happens. It happened to me. I got knocked out one time in training, affected me the rest of my career. I caught a knee, boom, knocked me out, put me on my hands, busted my face open for the rest of my career. I caught a knee, boom, knocked me out, put me on my hands, busted my face open. For the rest of my career, I was always hesitant to shoot. So I would keep a fight on the feet where I would win. I was losing on the feet.

I'd rather stand on the feet than take a shot because it was so ingrained in my subconscious, right? It's crazy. We're crazy. Human beings, we're fucking insane. We truly are. But you have to be aware of that. Knowing that we're all insane

let's let's take the time and really address that and train for it what is this right here rock hold fight yeah yeah he looked awesome uh looks wise i mean his physique looked awesome yeah oh yeah he got he got popped with some good shots yes do you think it has more to do with like the fact that he's like he is like a legit model now and he's does so much stuff outside of MMA. It could be, he's a little older. He's been in, you know,

big fights before he's had his, you know, bell rung. And that's a hard thing. I've seen it enough times, you know, an athlete goes down one time, they go down a lot more.

It's that for, it's like Chuck Liddell, you know, rampage knocked him out. And then from then on, man, it was, it was a big deal. Now there's, depending on who you talk to, everyone will have a different reason as to why I'm not here to debate what the reasons are. We just know it's a fact.

You go down one time, you go down a lot. And I think, you know, maybe that's why Dana says, Hey man, Luke shouldn't be coming back anymore because we've seen him go out and they typically get worse. He's, you know, I think hopefully Luke did well. Hopefully he's got some money behind him. I know he's got another career that he can do the modeling and Dayton, you know, Hollywood starlets. I would do that for sure. Instead of getting ready for the octagon, I would, that would, that would be my choice. But man, you just don't know, you know, there's always a time for an athlete to walk away. And I would love for the athlete to walk away one time before it's time,

just knowing so many of the guys. With talking about keeping these athletes on like a high, and then you mentioned earlier, I can't get past the deli sandwich you mentioned earlier, deli sandwich and some fries. Now, ideally, you're probably like, okay, grass-fed beef, and you want A, B, and C, and you want everything all lined up. But every once in a while, do you throw stuff like that at them if you if the athlete can afford it uh in terms of their overall calories and stuff so you know what

dude just go enjoy yourself tonight with your wife have a glass of wine have at it food wise because you need it we still got six more weeks we're good yeah that kind of thing that yeah we do certain things and i have two different rules that we'll call them or principles. Number one of which is we call the earned meal. This is more for the off season. The earned meal is what most people call a cheat meal or cheat day. The earned meal is, and it was created actually for Chael Sonnen, who's a crazy man, right? In his own way, love Chael, one of the greatest guys on the planet, a crazy man in his own right. He loves cheeseburgers. He loves French fries and he loves Coca-Cola out of a glass bottle with real sugar. That's what Chael absolutely loves. Like a little boy in this, this hulking man's body. So we created what was

called the four hour window for Chael a decade or so ago. And it continues on to all of our clients. I say, pick two days a month, not every seven days. It can't be every seven days because then you haven't earned anything. It's an earned meal every 10 days, every 15 days, pick one day. It's your anniversary. It's your kid birthday. It's a super bowl, whatever it is, the fights are on pick that day, make that day your day. And for the 14 days beforehand, you better fucking work and earn that. Now the four hour window is for those four hours. I don't care what you're going to eat. Eat whatever the hell you want to eat.

Don't tell me about it because I'm going to nitpick you. Just don't even tell me, but go and have fun and purge that demon. What happens, and I've been doing this long enough, every time they do that, that first four-hour window is disgusting. And it makes them feel like shit because they've been eating really good for the last two, three weeks. The next time, it's bad, and it makes them feel like shit because they've been eating really good for the last two three weeks the next time it's bad not nearly as bad the next time you know they have one bad thing pretty much stick to like a steak and potatoes type of thing the next time piece of cake a couple pieces of pizza they don't really kill it anymore every report back to you

like i ate a quest bar yeah you're like oh shit all right well you really turned the corner i guess and that's that's that's exactly what it turns out to be and they get pissed they're like man fuck you like i can't eat the stuff that i used to love i'm saying well why they say it makes me feel sick well that's an educational opportunity let's think about that for a second all that poison and that that toxic material that you're dumping in your body is telling you it's, it's bad for you. It makes you feel sick. What makes you feel good? Like this whole list of all these other ingredients, earth grown ingredients, ingredients that you eat all the time that makes you compete at world class levels. You fucking look like a, you know, sexy beast. Why do you want to go and poison yourself and feel like shit again? So there's a

habitual response to those, those earned meals. And the next one, let's say you use a Merced Bektik, we use what we call refeed. Depending on if his weight's starting to drop too much, we refeed and essentially we double his food. Double, instead of like a six ounce burger, we're eating, you know, eight, 10, 12 ounce grass-fed steaks. But we don't throw in bad food. You know, it's like, man, you want French fries?

We're gonna go, we're gonna bake our own fries. Slice up a couple of potatoes, sweet potatoes. Make, it was like one white baked potato, one sweet potato. Bake that, put some raw local honey on the sweet potato. Get your ketchup or whatever, salt, pepper, you know, on the white potato. Make yourself a big ass burger or two, you know, two eight ounce burger or four ounce burgers, whatever. Sprouted grain bread, cut off the crust, lightly toasted toasted you'd pay 30 bucks for that meal in any fucking restaurant in las vegas why do you have to go to in-n-out burger and eat that for what like you can do it

like i'm not going to get too crazy man but let's still have benefit to it you know if we're going to have a refeed well let's have some really good things and let's not like what it's, I like what it's teaching though, too. It's like that food tastes delicious. Like what you just laid out sounds so good. Right. Sounds really good. You would, I would be stoked. And I lived in Vegas for a while, man, $30 for a burger. This better be fucking good. Every time I eat that burger, we have, you know, once, once a week in my house, man, I would gladly give Gordon Ramsey 30 bucks for that burger. No problem know once once a week in my house man i would gladly give gordon ramsay 30 bucks for that burger no problem and i'd send my friends there right why wouldn't you want to do that it's going to cost you you know a fraction of whatever the cost would normally be you'll feel

good the next day when you wake up and you wake up go for a run hit your training it's you don't miss a day you don't have that food hangover like a lot of people do right we've all been there i've been there i used to be 280 poundste my way all the fucking way up. You're not tall enough to be 280 pounds, I don't think. It was disgusting. It was like, you know, just like this odd shape and like square, just like rolling around.

It was nasty, yeah. Looking at the Dolce Diet, from what you're saying, it pretty much sounds like it's a whole food type of diet. So I'm curious, like, what are foods that you have your athletes stay away from? Because you know how you have the flexible dieting crowd and they're like, you can eat whatever you want,

as long as you make it fit these numbers. So exactly how, what are your concepts on this? We say earth grow nutrients. What is an earth grow nutrient? And that's anything that that's organic. Well, organic is all a sham. I'm not talking about the USDA organic logo. I'm talking about the true definition of organic. If I can walk out in my backyard, pull a fish from a stream, dig a potato out of the ground, pull an apple off a tree, that's organic food that hasn't been molested by man's greedy little marketing fingers, right? Let's get there. Let's get as close as we can where we are.

We meet our people like meet you where you are like and we'll walk with you. So if you don't have access to like grass-fed cameron haynes wild caught elk sitting in your freezer well no worries let's just start with just grass-fed beef from your local grocery store costco even let's just start there let's not add all the bullshit to it let's not go to mcdonald's at least let's let's stop that so local organic fresh natural in season earth-grown nutrients has a higher nutrient density per calorie than any other food on the planet therefore i will get much more vital micro and phytonutrition per calorie than eating anything else that means i don't have

to eat the higher total caloric load to get the same amount of nutrient density why would i not want to do that that's why i think our athletes can eat so much food, compete at such high levels, maintain relatively lean body masses, and feel fucking amazing. They don't have to overeat to get the same calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, the same basic phytos.

So once we start pushing them that way, we go back to Hippocrates. It's very easy. Rule number one is do no harm. I don't care if it's your marriage, if it's your finances, or if it's your food. Fucking do no harm is rule number one, right? Let's stop poisoning ourselves. Stop creating all these challenges that then we have to mitigate the downside of it. Let's stop doing that. Let's start eating real food. Step one. And then step two is like, let's eat every two to four hours based upon activity. What did I just do? What am I about to do?

Step three, principle number three, is we eat until we're satisfied, not until we're full. What does that mean? Can I stand up from this meal and just go for a light jog and not feel bad? Not breaking my PRs. Do I feel good? That's, I'm satisfied.

I don't have to go back for seconds because I can eat again in two hours. Why is this? Because now I'm not overloading my digestive system. I'm satisfied. I don't have to go back for seconds because I can eat again in two hours. Why is this? Because now I'm not overloading my digestive system. I'm not creating that bottleneck. I'm now absorbing, utilizing, partitioning those nutrients that I just consumed in a much more efficient manner. That's the most important thing.

Like intermittent fasting. People would go all crazy on intermittent fasting. Man, you, how many calories you taking? 3,500, 4,000 around there yep imagine eating all that in one meal it can be tough it can be tough how much of that food do you actually think your body's able to break down absorb partition and utilize a third of it maybe the rest is going to get past you can't you there's not enough of the digestive system it does not have the ability to break down that much food efficiently and utilize it.

Smaller portions more often is much more effective in simply getting this vital nutrition usable. So I get, well, skipping a breakfast and that whole thing, that's fine. I'm fasting. Okay, great. look at long-term long-term outcomes eating real food in moderation based upon our activity in a manner with which our digestive system can easily handle it and utilize it is much more effective for long-term outcomes whether it's health and longevity or it's the shorter term sports performance and and body composition you look at all the bodybuilders right the leanest motherfuckers on the planet they all eat six times a day or more. If getting leaner was able

to be accomplished in a fasting perspective, they'd all be eating one time a day or two times a day. So, you know, you can get, you can get an Andy Galpin or a Dr. Dominic. I forget his name right now. D'Agostino. D'Agostino. Polar opposites in many ways, very credentialed, equally credentialed polar opposite ideologies. So you get two really smart guys who have a whole batch of studies to pull from. Which one's right? You can argue that back and forth, and that shit pisses me off because it's like, well, who can make the best argument?

Well, that doesn't really help the person watching, the person eating. So you have to really push all that away. What makes the most sense long term eating a regulated diet of real food and wide variety local organic in small enough quantities that we can actually absorb and utilize and continue on and not get bogged down and tired we've all done that you know i'm getting a little long on this point but it's education so you shouldn't follow a template there's no nothing hard and fast other than following these basic principles of eating sensibly of real food. And I think that's the big one you asked. What do I tell the athletes not to do? What's what we don't poison ourself

and we eat real food all day long. Instead of a quest bar, I'm going to have an apple and a handful of cashews. I'm going to feel way better. I guarantee it. My bowel movements will be way better. My energy would be way better. I'll be more yoked for sure. If I'm eating like that more often, not to, you know, bash on Quest. They're a billion dollar company or whatever it is, but that's not helping people be healthy, be fit, be, you know, be lean. Eating real food and wide variety, local, organic, natural, that's the most important thing. Okay. And I find the science to disprove that. It doesn't exist. I'm waiting for one of these guys to call me out. A lot of people, they mentioned my name in the background, never to my face. And they never want to engage in these

basic concepts because they'll just pull studies of some bullshit keto study about a 12 year old epileptic and talk about how, you know, carbohydrates are going to give you cancer. That's not exactly true. You know, the, the, the, the, the fasting people, you know, they're going to talk about how fasting is amazing, amazing thing for getting lean and building muscle tissue. That's not exactly true. You can pull a study that shows one thing, but long-term reality-based outcomes, it certainly doesn't uphold it. Well, there's a reason why bodybuilders landed on what they landed on. And if you look at flexible dieting or some of these other diets that have come along, if it fits your macros and stuff like that people will talk about these diets but then what will they do when they step on a bodybuilding

stage they'll do a bodybuilding diet and i've said many times on this show before even though i choose to not eat a whole lot of carbohydrates i don't you know i'm not out running i'm not trying to do mma mma the the the amount of requirement that you have through doing your grappling and strength training, your conditioning. Hell, yeah, I'd be eating tons of carbs if I was doing that. It just sounds like you would need it just to get from one workout to the next to even just survive. But I've always said is a bodybuilding style diet with extra fat because bodybuilders, they'll plummet their fat way down. And so I don't really agree with that part of it unless you're stepping on stage. A bodybuilding style diet makes the most sense. Eating rice and potatoes and steak and you know, all the stuff you've seen Arnold

Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno and Bill Kazmaier, all those people from years past, you've seen a lot of those people achieve great things strength wisewise, physique-wise, and those things still work. Yeah, world-class outcomes with just doing the basics. I would throw a little bit more of the phytos, more plant-based nutrition into those basic diets to support kind of the cellular activity. But you're dead on. That's what worked. but you're dead on is that's what worked. Without all the BS and all the science and all the debates and all the grandstanding of, you know,

it's just points of differentiation to sweep people in the sales funnel so they can go out there and they can monetize. Yeah, and people talk about the advancement of all the drugs and stuff like that, and they didn't even have a lot. I mean, they had steroids and stuff back then, but they didn't have all the different growth hormones and peptides and all the weird stuff, and those guys were still, I mean, still today, they would, you know, be able to hang with anybody in terms of there's, has never been anybody that looked like Arnold since that

time. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I had a question about the, uh, the, the intermittent fasting thing. Um, what if, you know, in the right context, like someone is just trying to lose weight, um, would maybe, you know, fleshing out some of the calories that they did take in be like a good thing almost? It's not a bad thing.

In that intermittent fasting in many ways, it's just calorie control. If you normally eat, you know, six times a day and you cut one meal, well, now you're eating five times a day. 400 calories per meal, well, you went from 2,400 calories to 2,000 calories. You created a 400-calorie deficit per day times seven days. There you go. I'm going to lose a pound and a half a 400 calorie deficit per day times seven days. There you go. I'm going to lose a pound and a half a week. High five, done. Okay. Or you could just pull, you know, 50, 75 calories from each meal and get the same outcome. That's up to you. If you

want to skip breakfast or if you want to skip dinner, that's fine. But you cannot in totality over a long period of time, get enough vital nutrition eating. When I talk about intermittent fasting, I'm really talking about the four-hour, the six-hour feeding window. Now, Dr. Rhonda Patrick was on Rogan's show a while back, and she defined intermittent fasting as fueling for 12 hours and fasting for 12 hours. Well, that's pretty much being a human because we're asleep for eight hours or so. We typically eat our last meal two, three hours before we go to go to bed you know we wake up and we use the bathroom and when we get our first meal going somewhere within some people say like kind of eat with the sunlight right like yeah for however

long you're up you're gonna eat forever long you're asleep and it's dark you're not gonna eat you're fasting right it's just you know a lot of those in our industry they capitalize on that they conflate it simply so they can sell and And that pisses me off more than anything, because now they're no longer educators. They're just simply salesmen. Now you can sell education. You can sell positive health outcomes and have a very successful business. I think we've been able to do that extremely well without jumping into all these different fad diet, you know, chasms and click funnels and whatnot. Very difficult to do that long-term because you get known as the paleo guy or the keto guy or the carnivore guy or the, or the intermittent fasting or the flexible guy. How many times can someone do that?

Not, you know, I got a bunch of buddies who do, who do that. And I'm like, yeah, fuck man, what are you going to do three years from now? You're going to be something totally different. How much of your base do you think you're going to lose? Now you're going to have to go and reacquire users to replace the ones that you just lost because, you know, that's a whole other conversation maybe. But to answer your question, fasting is great. You know, usually like on our three weeks of shredded program, usually Sunday mornings, we call it a modified fast. We wake up, we super hydrate, we have some coffee, a lot of water, green tea, and we jump into our second meal of the day. Now, our first meal is typically oats and berries and nuts and seeds.

We call it the breakfast bowl. Four to six days per week, it's something more carbohydrate-dense, still high-fat, still high-protein, essentially, that first kind of meal of the day. But then we do pull back one day a week or so. We call it a modified fast. You skip breakfast. So you have that two to four hour extra period where you don't. So maybe you're only eating six to eight hours that one day.

But the totality, and it's, we pull back. And you really want to look long-term. Long-term, we're eating, you know, 85, 90% of the time, we're eating over a 10 to 11 hour period for most of our hardcore, you know, 85, 90% of the time we're eating over a 10 to 11 hour period for most of our hardcore, you know, dieters. It's really, it works out to be about 11 and a so 11 or so hours. If they're eating their breakfast, their lunch, their dinner, their snacks, their post work down a little dessert at night, you know, they're eating five to seven meals per day, but you've seen our athletes,

our athletes are fucking shredded. So if they're eating, and this is kind of where I push back on a lot of the community, our athletes are shredded. They're eating six, seven times per day. You don't have to fast in order to get shredded. Some people do. That's fine. But they can't push like that. Well, maybe that's not their goal.

Then, hey, that's fine. But it's, again, we go back to our principle. It's based upon activity. What is the activity? What is the outcome? What is your goal right now? Long term, though, we go back to our principle. It's based upon activity. What is the activity? What is the outcome? What is your goal right now? Long-term, though, I think our goal is longevity. All of us, whatever we do for the two, the four, the 10 years of whatever we're competing at now,

we all kind of want to be into that 76, 86, 96-plus-year-old person. Hopefully, if we can make it, that's going to come through the totality of our decisions, not the few little training cycles we run through to get a short-term outcome. And that's, I'm a longevity advocate. I think more than anything else, we just found that when you focus on long-term health outcomes, short-term sports performance and body composition becomes very easy and very obvious to make those decisions. I've never made a decision for an athlete to do something unhealthy with a positive outcome. It's always been, what's the best long-term solution for this athlete? That also is the best short-term solution for the athlete. And then, you know,

I point to my resume, of course, over 20 plus years in doing that. And some people can argue that's fine. I have a resume though, that anyone can look online and say hundreds, if not, you know, the hundreds of professional athletes, Olympic athletes, you know, NCAA athletes and champions, and then tens of thousands, millions of regular people who also have followed the system with positive health outcomes. It's not hard though. That's, that's what gets me a little crazy. It's not hard. Yeah. And I mean, you obviously have like so much experience in, uh, you know, like preventing muscle loss and whatnot and the i don't know the exact study but i know it was an aubrey marcus's book where he referenced that you actually

um you will lose less muscle in uh intermittent with intermittent fasting than you would in a caloric deficit um so when it comes to like cutting weight while still maintaining muscle is there any merit to any of that in your opinion you know i mean so essentially i mean they unpack this that if you're following intermittent fasting but you're a caloric surplus that will be better than not fasting and being in a deficit um i don't recall exactly i don't know if the calories were the exact same but that that could be it. That would make sense. I would need to see the study. And one study is never accurate because you really have to pull back.

And that's why like the Galpin and the D'Agostino conversation, man, they're going to have two completely different views, both honest views based upon hard data, polar opposites in many ways. You got to push that out. So what's the real world outcome in this situation? Now, you know, you give, you know, me an athlete and you give you an athlete and you know, you're going to only eat one meal a day. And I get the ability to feed my athlete four to six times per day. I'm pretty much going to guarantee I'm going to beat you in every outcome, especially given me a longer period of giving us, you know, a three weeks,

three months, three year time. That's easy. I think. And as I say this, I think obviously everyone's like, well, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Right. So if we think of it like that, but like I can only be in a deficit and you can only be in a surplus, well, that's not real world. That doesn't make sense. Why would we be able, why would we do that? It's like saying you can only breathe on a Tuesday, not on a Wednesday or Thursday do that it's like saying you can only breathe on a tuesday not on a wednesday or thursday let's see how long you can you know live effectively yeah tuesday is my oxygen you know day so like i can't that's not gonna work for me that's not gonna work for me very much there's also there's so many different scenarios too there's like what's

actually optimal like what's the most like you're after what's the most optimal and your athletes are, most of them are professional athletes and that's the focus. Now, some people might be listening to this and they might have kind of a nine to five and they're trying to get what's most optimal for them. And maybe for some people, maybe they just don't enjoy eating during the day. Maybe it slows them down too much. I found for myself, sometimes that does kind of slow me down. So I'll have these blocks of time where I won't eat. And I've done a bunch of different fasting. I've done 72-hour fast and 20-hour fast and 16 and different things like that. And right now I'm just feeding myself when I'm hungry.

And I'm kind of doing what you're saying, just eating until I'm satisfied, not necessarily stuffed. Whereas before with the fasting, I was kind of stuffing myself because as a former fat guy, I liked that. I kind of liked that feeling. And at the end of the day, it was working well for me. But again, you got to kind of, if you're somebody that is at work all day and you're using all these excuses on why you're not eating properly and you don't want a meal prep and you want to be a little lazy with it, maybe the option of getting in some fasting would be useful because you don't have to think, you don't have to sweat it. You don't have to worry about where are you going to go and you don't have to think of all these things. And so it can be effective towards losing weight.

Is it the most optimal for you kicking the most amount of ass in the gym? That's where the debate can really come in. And maybe if someone eats two times a day and they make up for some of those calories, maybe it makes some sense. But maybe what you're saying is maybe you can't utilize all that because you ate it in a four-hour period. And your body's like, what the fuck did you just do to me? I can't move. I get to sit on this couch another four hours to process this. And I will add that we want to push people to be more active. I don't want people to just sit in the office.

I want people to, you know, park their cars in the last parking spot and walk to the office. I want them to stand up, you know, every 45 minutes and go for a walk around the building. I want them to take a stairs. Every time I stay in a hotel, I get on the top floor so I can walk up and down the stairs just to add that normally into my life. And usually I'm in the lobby before all the idiots who take the elevators anyway. So it doesn't do anything less efficient for my time. But it's getting people to eat all the food. But also now it's like, all right, motherfucker,

now you got the fuel. Well, now let's start to use it. What do you love to do? You playing tennis? You love swimming or biking or holding your girl's hand and walking on the beach? Go fucking do that three to five times a week for 30 minutes plus. Your motivation just went through the roof.

Right. With food and sleep. Yeah, that's it. Right. Your motivation for everything just went through the roof with some food and sleep. You're ready to go. And, you know, when you're just like eating and I was that guy, man, I don't want to do anything. Back when I was, you know, was 280 pounds, you'll appreciate this.

I got a hot wife, right? Nice name, blondie, and all that beautiful things. And you're listening right now, maybe. I'm earning some brownie points right now. But we used to go to the mall. She got to go shopping. I'd circle the parking lot until I get the closest spot to the food court. park in the food court. I'd walk in, sit down, order something. She'd go and shop in the mall, come get my fat ass, pew me out of the chair, back in the car, drive home, sit back on

the couch again. That's not a very motivated lifestyle. I was in, I was strong like for the three hours that I was in the gym, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, right? You know, running, you know, those types of splits justifying my, my, you know, gluttony, you know, just trying to justify that. But now, so part of my passion and speaking the way I do now is I remember the way I felt as that guy. I remember feeling sluggish and like, oh fuck man, that looks like fun, but I am not going to do that. Man. Like I used to keep a second shirt in my car because I would sweat through, I would sweat through my shirt. Right. That's a fat guy move right there yep right that was absolutely you know i was that fucking dude man like oh man like drive i would drive and i would grab my gut it was just

like comfortable i put my fingers and i would just sit there and i'd drive oh my god and then hold my gut like i was that dude i lived that i lived in that fucking skin so i get it so when i speak now it's like get up motherfucker i don't care what you want to do. Get up, move, go for a walk. It's a beautiful world out there. Engage.

You don't have to be an athlete. I'm not a competitive athlete, man, but I fucking push every day. I get up, I push, I sweat. I try and do something.

I had two little babies at home, man. I'm chasing them around. I'm, that's the dude I want to be. So when I say longevity, long-term outcomes, I want to have this same energy at 60 at 80 hopefully past that if science and medical technology continues at

the rate it is and we don't fuck it up now in our 30s to 50s right who knows what we could be doing you know 50 years from now fuck man we could look better than we do right now as these things advance but if you fuck it up during this period of time man good luck good luck getting this when were you 280 back in the early 2000s i think i peaked in 2003 at 280 and then i started to scale it back so from like i was competing you know as uh in powerlifting went from 181 to 198 to 220 to 242 to 275 my powerlifting career right not nearly as storied as your powerlifting career you know but i was i was i hit just about every weight class that's that's one of the the me at the the two probably in the 260s right there kind of old

school right you still look jacked so not bad though i wasn't like i was former wrestler right so all that that muscles there six years of but you're using the food as an excuse back then like i gotta be big so you were throwing down extra cheeseburgers and stuff jm blakely's article oh yeah that was to beat the man you gotta out eat out eat the man i was like yeah that's the way i'll do it and i remember i went through like a six month period that i was never lighter jm blakely uhly, he was a 600-plus pound bencher, and he got up from a table one time. He was eating pizza. He had this, I think he might have had two pizzas,

two large pizzas out, and he started eating one. He told himself he was going to eat both of them, and he ate like half of one of them, and he started getting full, and he got up, and he was so mad at himself, he just started pacing back and forth. He's fuck that i'm treating this like training and i'm gonna eat both of these and and if these aren't gone you know by the end of the night then i'm a failure and i can't have what you know i can't do the things that i want to do so then he started

treating all of his eating like that right that's the article that you're talking about i think which is and and me as an early mid-20s got all fired up to eat pizza but that's the attitude right and then you can take that at if now you take that mindset you put it to be an entrepreneur to to running a business to you know becoming a doctor or whatever it is that's a powerful man and powerful mindset right there right to become morbidly obese if that's the goal and. And I look back now, I was like, fuck man, what if I channel that in that age,

but who knows? I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing. All you youngsters out there. That's where the jam press comes from. Jam Blakely. That's right. The other day, man.

Love it. Yeah. Yeah. That's the old school magazine with all the information came from magazines. Right. Yeah. Back in the day. If you're a,

so if you're eating more frequently, smaller meals, are you like, uh, if I'm eating more frequently smaller meals are you like uh if i'm gonna take in 3500 calories am i gonna like calculate each meal to be you know like so each meal is like a even number or is it just like whatever based upon activity so what are you doing where's your hard training you know i try and do something i try and do like a low intensity and i suggest list low intensity steady state cardiovascular activity first thing in the morning, hopefully while fasted. And by fasted, I mean in the absence of insulin.

Get the body really moving. Human beings, we are designed to walk. We're not good at many things. We're really good at traveling relatively far distances at relatively slow paces, right? And that's why I suggest a low intensity because we're designed to do it and you can recover from it very easily. Exactly. And we're going to, you know, you're going to burn. And it also does us no harm.

It does us no harm. I'm following. I'm paying attention. Does us no harm. What it does psychologically, emotionally, spiritually also, when I get done my 45, 60 minutes of walking, I know exactly what I'm going to crush that day. All my business. What does that look like for you? Do you get on a bike or you go outside or what do you do? I live on the beach which is beautiful so i almost every day it's outside on the beach i have a pre-core we just picked up a pre-core too so

that's downstairs i've been doing that a little bit more maybe here and there in the winter it's fucking freezing freezing in fucking jersey i was doing it in the winter in jersey too getting outside because we just moved back from vegas so i was happy for the rain and happy for the snow um but getting out and going for that walk and breathing and trying not to do the iPod and all that stuff. iPod, iPhone, it's like old school, right? Whatever it is, try not to like get the, sometimes I do, you know, whatever. Sometimes I'll throw that stuff in.

They still make iPods. I saw a lady in my gym, which it was like the little one that was clipped to her little top. Yeah, I was like, look at you. I feel like we need to get back to some of that though, because then it doesn't have all the other stuff connected to it. It's what a lot of people do for that reason. The distractions. Yeah. Right. Get your playlist going, but you get up, you move,

you burn that, you know, three, four, five, 600 calories right out of the gate. Um, lists a low intensity, steady state cardiovascular activity in the absence of insulin has a more efficient leaning towards burning that gender specific stubborn body fat right so we know that to be fact why not use that and people scream adultery it's more effective because of epoch shut the fuck up motherfucker because we can do that shit later on in the day too don't think for a second i'm not going to tell you to not train hard or in intervals that's a part of it because most people train like that they get on their pre-core and they fucking run or they lift weights and they go real fast or they

do their mma or whatever it is they play tennis that's all a version of interval training these motherfuckers won't walk for 15 minutes non-stop nobody does that anymore right it's so old school it's forgotten but that's what we were designed to fucking do as humans i'm just trying to get people back to doing try to get a decent pace or you're just strolling? Strolling. I want to keep my heart rate below 110 beats per minute. So like not people think like fat burning zones in 130, 135. No, you're really tapping in the glycogen at that point.

I want to keep it even lower. 90 to 110 is kind of the optimal zone that we think strictly aerobic pace. Doing anything else at that time? You're working on like nasal breathing or are you just walking? Mindful breathing. Just breathe. Diaphragm breathing.

I'm focused on that a lot and educating that a lot. Breathing into your waistband. I thought you were going to hold onto your gut again. Well, I am right now. But that deep breathing, through the nose, out the mouth, whatever's natural,

kind of has that emotional. I'm not one of those hippie type dudes, but a lot of people, they lose track with who they are. They, because they're so inundated by, by technology and by advertising and by, you know, just stress and Facebook and everything else. They don't see the fucking birds flying in the sky. They don't notice a bumblebee in the blade of grass. Like we used to as kids, they don't know any of that shit anymore. So it's getting people back to that, recentering themselves. There's a very powerful ability to control yourself at that time of day before the day gets crazy.

And then the amount of effectiveness that you have as you move forward. Now, something that stuck out years ago, I read a quote from Richard Branson when I was building my own business. And he was asked by Money magazine or anchor, whoever, what's the most, if you have one aspect of your life, what's the most important aspect of your life, of your business, of your new hire technology that made you so successful? He thought about it, thought about it, thought about it. He said, the fact that I wake up an hour earlier than I have to, and I perform, um, rigorous exercise. And he said, no, no, no. Like the invention of the jet turbine

or whatever the person said. He's like, no, like that one hour of exercise every morning allows me to be four hours more productive in my business day. That four hours allows me to exponentially improve my business, my life and everything else. Just that one fact. I have all my best ideas first thing in the morning.

I know exactly, kind of like what I'm saying, I know exactly what I'm going to do, exactly how I'm going to handle things. I get ideas that I never would have gotten once the day gets going, and I'm now distracted by so many other things. Powerful quote. Now, taking that and then adding that

to the scientific low-intensity, steady-state cardiovascular activity in the absence of insulin, man, that's a powerful punch. That just sets the tone for the day. We're super hydrated. Then we come home, we get good quality nutrition going, the day's planned and we start, you know, creeping forward through our day eating based upon our activity. What are we going to do? You know, I like to train between 11 and three. I mean, that's my optimal time. As most people, central nervous system is responding.

Now we're hydrated. When you train hard first thing in the morning, you're in in a dehydrated state it takes a couple hours to kind of mediate that so that 11 to 3 window seems to work really well for those people who have the ability to do so of course i get the five six o'clock at night um and from there you can hit bigger numbers you can hit prs so now you're pushing your training further and that's where the high intensity training goes so you're still getting the benefits of epoch or, you know, excess post exercise, oxygen consumption, consumption for, you know, those, those listening, you still get those benefits, but you're not negating, you're not missing out on the very powerful aerobic activity that most people don't have access to, or they, they choose not to because they're quote too busy while they watch three hours of TV per day. Yeah. How about the, um, cause I wanted to

actually get back to this real quick. You mentioned, and Mark's mentioned this before. He, he's said multiple times, like a lot of individuals are eating like a lot of processed food that has a lack of nutrients. And because of that lack of nutrients, they end up overeating that you talked a lot about micronutrients and phytonutrients. Do you ever like, do you have your athletes get all of that from food or do you have them take any type of supplements for any of this stuff too? All of it from food. Everything from food. Everything from food. Perfect.

Everything from food. Because most of the supplements, they're killed in the gut anyway. So whatever you take on the bottle, likely you're not getting, I mean, any of it, maybe some of it. Food, you're getting the majority of it. And I'll say, sure, you can take supplements once you're eating all the meals you're supposed to for six months. Like, let's start there. Mr. Scoop your bottle of greens or whatever the heck it is. We get people all the meals you're supposed to for six months, like, let's start there. Mr. You know, scoop your bottle of greens or whatever the heck it is. We have people all the time.

I'm just too busy to eat a salad. I just take the scoop and I'm good to go. You fucking look like a train wreck. Like, you look like shit. You can barely fucking stand up. Your week is piss. You have no endurance. Like, your doctor is telling you you're about to die and you're trying to sell me on how you can scoop whatever the powder is, the potion is.

It's bullshit. Let's get back to real food. So real food is always first and foremost. Now, if because of geographic location or you have some sort of medical condition and absorption issue, then maybe a supplemental form is necessary. Vitamin D3. Vitamin D3, most people should probably take a vitamin D3 supplement. I do. I take 10,000 IUs per day

split into a 5,000 IU dose with breakfast and with dinner. I lived in Las Vegas. I never had my fucking shirt on. I still had low levels of vitamin D. I had to take a supplement. I was like,

people, they think that you go out in the sun that your body's going to produce vitamin D. It can, but not enough to be optimal. But that only came because I get my blood work done every six weeks or so. You know, people they think that you go out in the sun that your body's going to produce vitamin d it can but not enough to be optimal but that only came because i get my blood work done every six weeks or so you know so i'm managing the data i'm analyzing the data i couldn't i could not bump

it up through whole food sources then the supplement this actually came from stan efforting podcast that he did in my office we're talking about that he had a similar issue with vitamin d i was like son of a bitch so you know i went and everything kind of so now i always you know carry like a midline normal range of vitamin d and i take a jarrow supplement but outside of that man maybe some maybe b vitamins like a methylated b um dhea pregnenolone if you're you know a guy or gal of a certain age you can kind of start to consider that as hormones start to decline um a ubiquinol or a coq10 that's something to consider down the road but that's more like anti-aging remedy more so than anything else okay yeah most of it's from food and i like what you're saying and some people like they might have like a a bad reaction to like

dairy food yeah and so therefore like supplementing vitamin d D and a K vitamin or something might be a wise choice. Absolutely. But, you know, a lot of this stuff is not going to be available to you. Like even even in the supplement form, a lot of it's dead. You know, a lot of it doesn't have the cofactors that say like an apple or an orange, like an apple and orange has potassium. It has fiber. It has. And once we take that and once we blend it we turned

it into something totally different it's not like it loses all those components but it loses some of them and the more that something gets broken down you're going to get a dried up thing that's in a bottle that's been sitting around for like how long ago was it manufactured where did it come from and was it been sitting on the shelf probably for two years before you purchased it before it ended up in your stomach yeah what's the likelihood of it doing really anything absolutely probably not a whole lot right absolutely and most are underdosed anyway right like they're under they just enough to put on the label this is how the supplement world works just enough to put on the label so like wow it has vitamin a vitamin d it's got you know penny or like you know the budget dust you know

essentially of each so it doesn't matter anyway even if it was absorbed it wouldn't be effective um when you talked about you know blending your foods what we try and get people to do is we eat our foods we prepare them in a wide variety so i i want to like i'll blend my produce and i'll saute it i'll bake it i'll eat it raw I'll bake it. I'll eat it raw. Because every time you change it, you change it. You change the way the body can now break it down and absorb it like a spinach leaf. That's body armor around that spinach. If I can blend that up, it has a completely different nutrient profile from an absorption perspective.

Or, you know, when I bake an apple maybe or just however i change up my food we try and change it completely so what we say is like we'll give an athlete you know a list of ingredients say with these ingredients here's seven different ways to make this same batch of ingredients each day it's it's a different way to prepare it it breaks the monotony right so it's not just chicken and rice every fucking day gonna you know go crazy it's a different way it's not just chicken and rice every fucking day. I'm going to, you know, go crazy. It's a different way. It's a different delivery system to get a different nutrient profile because we're looking at variety. You know, I said earlier in the show is we really want to pull back like that 36 hours before, 36 hours after. That kind of becomes the totality of your nutrition. It's not what I'm, what am I eating right now?

What have I eaten the last like one, two, three days before? What should I eat before training? Well, really, what did you eat two, three days ago? That's really what fucking matters. It's not the meal right before training. That doesn't matter at all. What have I eaten for the last two or three days before training? That's a great message.

That's something I've shared with people for a long time was people talk about pre-workout. They're going to have this thing before they go and work out. And I understand. I get it. Sometimes people are fatigued and sometimes they want a little jump. But I'm like, if you're really into this stuff and you really want to go to the next level, your pre-workout should start when your last workout ended.

You should be thinking about that. You should be hungry for it. And especially if you didn't do that well last time. Maybe you're working on your incline bench or you're working on your deadlifts or whatever it is. When that session is over with, you should be thinking, you know what, next Tuesday when I come in here and deadlift, it's going to work out differently for me. And that's when your pre-workout should start. That's when the dialogue for it should start. And you start to think about, oh yeah, you know, and SEMA told me to do these bent over rows and

this guy told me to do this. I should start mixing some of that stuff in. I bet it would really help. And I'm going to make a commitment to it. And that's where you start getting yourself all fired up. Then it comes back around and you're not like, oh man, time to try to deadlift today. Because you know that you suck at it, right? You won't be all down the dumps. You'll be fired up and you'll be excited about it

because now you have some things to work on. You have some things to work on perfecting. But I agree 100%. A lot of this stuff, a lot of the food that you're taking in, it's not really about, I mean, what you eat two hours before your training session is probably still just sit kicking around in your stomach. It's going to make you feel a little bit better, right? More than anything else, but it might be mental. Yeah. It's not going to power you through a 600 plus pound, uh, deadlift session in front of my O'Hearn for sure. That's right. You know, I see, I feel like there's a big difference between diet and between nutrition. When you hear the word diet, what's something that comes to mind when you hear the word

diet? Um, diet has a negative association from the general public because most have followed a diet protocol that was ineffective. And because of that diet has, you know, that, that, that negative feel. So the one thing that's good and bad is, is the Dolce diet. It's, it just sounds really cool. So that's why the Dolce diet, it's not a diet, it's a lifestyle. That's kind of like the, the subheading. Um, but it shouldn't be a diet. It's, it's a, it truly is a lifestyle and it's a series of habits. And you know, ours is just a series of principles. There's no macro breakdown.

There's no real caloric breakdown when we talk to people, even with our athletes, there's no, I don't send them a list of calories every day to stay within. It's a matter of, of vital nutrition that we have to make sure that we're consuming in large, consistent quantities so their cells can replicate and repair and prepare. Like you said, you know, with the training, you just walked out of the gym. Well, now what do I have to do to get ready for the next one? You get all those raw materials available and that's not coming from a protein, carb, fat, calorie breakdown per se, not starting there. We end up there when we focus on the minutia, the micros and the phytos, and we kind of back our way into what the total calories should be. So nutrition is,

it's that lifestyle component that identifies people as much as their personal style. You know, I can tell a lot about a person, the way they eat, you know, it's like the way they treat a waiter, the way they treat their family. Tell a lot about somebody just by their habits, you know, what their interaction is with the world around them. People who just like eat the crappy food constantly all day, it's not a very powerful person. They might have areas of success in their life, but I guarantee they have a lot of areas of failure also and a lot of areas of kind of self-loathing and some other negative internal issues, you know, and we do a lot of work, you know, a team of registered dietitians and talk to a lot of people, you know, we talk to thousands of people per year and most of people's issues has nothing to do with the food.

It's all inside. It's all an emotional issue. I say that, you know, they didn't get a hug when they needed one or they did get a hug when they didn't deserve one. That's people's biggest fucking problem. And it really does come through with food because food is the way people control their emotions. Food has a cultural association because mom used to make this when I was a good boy or a bad boy or whatever it is. And that kind of sticks in into their mind. So we want to get rid of the concept of diet and just allow people to, again, start breaking things down into more mindful and intentional consumption of fueling themselves. What am I, again, getting ready to do? What did I just do?

What should I be eating right now to repair myself, to replenish what I just exerted or spent? What am I going to be doing over the next two to four hours? If people would simply think like that, food options become very easy. I don't know where McDonald's fits into that equation, right? Where does it fit? Where does, you know, candy bars and things like that, where do they fit into those equations? There's, you know, sodas and things. If people are truly mindful, it's not going to fit, but people don't want to be mindful because they want to, you know, offset it and not be accountable. I, you know, it's my

boss's fault. My spouse's fault. It's, you know, Trump's fault or whoever else's fault. It's not their fault, but everything is our fault. All my successes, all my failures are completely my fault. I have to be accountable. I have to own that. Once I own that now I'm, I'm very powerful in that I can now start to dictate my outcomes moving forward. Nothing more is more true than that with nutrition. And then, you know, I use this quote quite a bit. If we control control what we eat we can control all other aspects of our life by simply controlling by not getting the chocolate cake at midnight when nobody's home and nobody's looking by having that strength of character to not do that i can then use that same strength and i can do anything i want in my life in my world i can i can start to dictate the terms of my life once people can

really start to do that it's like disheart, but yet exciting that so many people haven't experienced what you're talking about. You know, there's, it's, it's exciting because, oh shit, like this is kind of cool because we can reach a lot of new people, but it's disheartening in the, in the sense that there's so many people just don't understand what it feels like to have the pieces of the puzzle together nutritionally to really feel like nutritionally charged to feel really good every day to not even feel really good but to feel amazing yeah to go fuck i feel amazing this is different than saying i feel i feel how you doing i'm doing pretty good it feels way different when somebody almost before they are done asking

you the question how you doing you're saying amazing you're like shouting like i'm doing amazing yeah like you almost come across the table at them because you're feeling so good. You're charged up. But a lot of people don't ever get to experience that. And I think it's because they keep thinking of diet. You know, you'll hear some people say that diet has the word die in it, you know, for a reason. And they're always thinking about being less, becoming less, becoming smaller, becoming skinnier. And they think that they have to take away all this stuff from their nutrition. But it sounds like a lot of what you're doing is addition first. Let's give you all these foods. And yes, there might be a time where we're going

to have to subtract because you're going to have to figure out a way to eat less ultimately. But it won't feel like you're eating less because you'll have all the nutrients that you need. Yeah. When we start with a private client, the first four weeks we call the health and habit phase where we typically dramatically increase our calories all through whole food. And people freak out because they double, sometimes even triple their total caloric intake and they lose weight. Are you talking about like athletes or everybody? Everybody. Okay. And it's even better with regular people because athletes –

Why am I eating so much? What are you doing to me? I can't... And we'll get the macro counters the worst because the macro counters are like, well, I can't eat this. What is my calories? And this is 56 grams of protein, but my prep coach had me on 48 grams of protein and then that's going to...

Isn't that going to make me fat? Just follow the program, please. We try and give as much education as we can and you know that the my fitness pals and all those you know aggregate you know kind of you know calorie data is so destructive i think to most people because when they get meal plans they plug it into their my fitness pal which is crowdsourced right it's like a wikipedia page there's no it's not accurate it's kind of a general estimate. People freak out over that. But what we try and do is in that health and habit phase, we start to teach them

to develop a healthy relationship with food. Guys or girls, kids, old people, doesn't matter. To start to have that relationship with food where they actually go to the grocery store and they actually pick out the pepper that they're going to eat tonight or that they're going to make for their family tonight. And they start to become more selective with their food. And they create that relationship instead of going to the cafe and having, you know, the waiter come and bring it and going to, you know, the fast food stop and having the bag come out the window. They're completely disconnected. So we try and reconnect people with food.

We try and force them in a way to go to the – take 30 minutes out of their week, go to the grocery store, you know, and then hopefully they have, you know, 30 minutes in the middle of their week on the way home or whatever to kind of do a pickup of mostly produce, right? You get all your bulk items on a, on a Sunday or so Saturday, Sunday, you get your little pickup of, uh, you know, produce or whatever in the middle of the week, if you can Instacart and Amazon prime and all that shit makes it so much easier now, right? I think my wife's got in the grocery store in like, you know, eight months now. But my house is always stocked, more stocked actually than it probably should be most of the time. But we do that. So now people, they understand what food is. They understand how good real food makes them feel. And then with that, we've developed a baseline. And that's

kind of the big thing. Because like people, they'll go to Subway today, they'll go to Jimmy John's tomorrow, they'll go to Chipotle the next day. What's their baseline? Well, they had lunch, but their lunch is 600 calories, 1200 calories, 1800 calories. It's constant, this up and down thing. Who knows what it is? What's the ingredients? Garbage for the most part, right? So at least we have now, we fixed the variables, right? This is all scientific. We try and make it seem very unscientific, but it's all very scientific. We're trying to control the variables. You know, a grocery list that they follow. They have basic meals plan that they follow.

We say eat basically the same things at the same times every day. It doesn't have to be a piece of chicken. It can be a piece of salmon. It can be a piece of steak and be a couple eggs. It can be a thing of beans because it's about the same thing at each time throughout the day. We're eliminating variables, we're creating consistency and then after two weeks or four weeks,

we look and we're like, holy shit, Mark, you're down four pounds. You just hit a PR in the gym. Now you're out there, you're walking. Energy's good. Where do we want to go from here? Do you want to keep getting leaner? Do you want to really push the barbells even more?

Then we can add another layer to it. Maybe now we start to play with the carb and the protein ratio. Maybe the carbs and proteins don't change for the day. It's just the timing. Maybe we put more first thing in the morning and more post-workout with the carbs. Those are the heavy loads. Instead of kind of spreading them 40, 50 grams throughout the day times six, we put them, you know, 81, 20 first thing in the morning, 81, 20 right after the workout. So now they have these big periods of lower insulin loads throughout the day, depending on body composition and what your goals are. That becomes really easy for people to develop a nutrition lifestyle instead of a diet. Cause they're not on a diet. They're not following a piece of paper. They're just like, Oh yeah, you know, I have my, my oats and my berries and whatnot

in the morning. I get my rice and whatever after my workout dinner is usually like salmon and some asparagus or, you know, whatever the hell it might be. They're good to go. You have, you know, quinoa and salad once or twice a week kind of mixed in. That's more of what we're trying to accomplish with people. And it's a hell of a lot easier. It's a lot less expensive for most people. You know, we say the average person waits 12 minutes online at a fast food restaurant times five days a week. And that's, I mean, that's kind of a short little trip times five days a week. You just go to the grocery store for 30 minutes. You're done. You have everything you need. We get our food cooked in our house. You know, we do like one big cook, like on a Sunday,

we get all some bulk stuff done and we do like little pickup meals throughout the week. It's super easy. You know, I'm, I'm, I'm super busy guy, two kids run businesses, married, all that fun stuff. I don't know people that are, aren't that are more busy than I am. If I can get it done as a normal dude, why can't everyone get it done? Yeah. That's how we push back. So in terms of the habits that you're talking about, like obviously you're teaching them really, really good habits, but then how do you help people get rid of like, you know, emotional habits? So I'm feeling bad. That's my cue. Uh, I grab a cookie. That's my routine. And then I feel better. That's my, like, how do you, how do you get to that with

people? Motivational interviewing is a part of what we do. So, all right, well, why are you feeling bad? Well, you know, my job's not going well. I really don't like the way I live or like I get this muffin top I'm always aware of. Like, all right, well, how long you been feeling like that? Well, for this amount of time, whatever. When did it start? Why did it start? How did it start? What was your life like when it started?

And they can kind of go back and identify, well, yeah, it was probably their fault. They probably dump a lot on you in that interview, huh? Bro, it's crazy. It's crazy. And it's great. It's cathartic for them. It's invasive for the coach, right? To kind of go through, but we meet them where we are, where they are, and we walk the journey with them. And sometimes it's not

accomplished in one session. Sometimes people don't accomplish it with none of us in a lifetime. We're always working on our baggage, right? We're always trying to get better, but that's the journey. So if we can start that journey with them, cause they're just sitting on the side of the road or they're going backwards or going the wrong way. If we can get them walking forward, they have to become self-aware. They have to own it, become accountable. And now let's start to walk forward. You love cookies. What kind of cookies?

Chocolate chip cookies. Man, I love chocolate chip cookies too. I have an amazing recipe. Sprouted grain bread toasted with some like chocolate hazelnut spread on it, sliced up banana. You cut off the crust. You cut it in the fours. It becomes this delicious, delectable pastry. You want to try that?

Yeah, I'll try that. Why don't you do that next time? And then if you still want a cookie, eat the cookie. Fine. So we give them little healthier steps, little coping mechanisms to go through. I don't know anyone who actually ate the cookie afterwards because that's pretty damn delicious. And it's not nearly as bad as it would have been. But now they're intentionally seeing what that flag is. They're stopping themselves,

and they're altering their behavior into a different direction. We can then take that, like, all right, now that kind of the spread of green bread and toast, now what we're going to do is let's have an apple and some almond butter. You ever wanted a snack? You want to eat something bad? Just eat an apple. Tell me if you want to have the candy bar after eating an apple. Most people are like, oh, good. Just eat the apple first, then eat the candy bar if you want to afterwards. Whatever, fine.

Most people will never have the candy bar afterwards. It's kind of the same mentality where you're giving them a treat. You're giving them something to kind of, you know, focus on to sidestep that emotional issue. And I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist, right? I'm just a dude who's got a lot of experience in working and walking the journey with people. So we give them these little coping mechanisms to start pushing them farther away from those negative habits that do no harm, pushing them away from the cookies and pushing them into a healthier direction where now there's options. And then hopefully we've built up a database of three or five or 10 different recipes that they love. I mean,

like, uh, we make these, you know, pancakes like quinoa based pancakes cooked in coconut oil comes out like a, like a Zeppole or like a funnel cake. It's so good. You put like a little of like a chocolate nut spread on their chocolate hazelnut spread. Isn't awesome like that. And like a cup of coffee, like a dark you know black coffee man it's crazy you don't have to eat a lot to feel good to get that little dopamine hit and then go about your day you feel a little weepy or whatever you'd have that feel fine plan it on a sunday right you get your little hit and move on that works really well but it's like listening to people seeing what their issue is but then having them state what their issue is

if they don't because i can see it, right? You can probably talk to me for 10 minutes and realize how fucked up I am in my life. And you're like, Dolce, you really need to start focus on this, that, and the other thing. I was like, yeah, I probably do, but fuck you because you're telling me

I need to see it for myself. But if you're like, man, you know, you ever notice like you kind of curse a lot? You know, you ever do that in front of kids? Oh shit, I probably do. Maybe I you ever do that in front of kids oh shit i probably do maybe i shouldn't do that shit anymore right so it's like you're kind of spinning the conversation so now i can see myself that's a part of of what we try and accomplish when we do deal with people like that how important is it for you to stay in shape it's you know i wouldn't know what else to

do and i say that because like i've had a love-hate relationship with being in shape. And because I never, when the UFC tapped me to be the face of UFC fit and to create that. It's like a P90X thing that the UFC created. And I was honored. Lorenzo Fertitta, Frank Fertitta, Dana White said, you're the guy to do that. And I did the whole thing. You're like, huh? Me?

Me. Sure. And like, well, we needed, they wanted credibility. And I was the guy. Because they so i did the whole thing you're like huh me me sure and like well we needed they wanted credibility and i was the guy because they behind the scenes they know what i do they pick me because lorenzo by the way is jacked right jacked he's fucking jacked i saw him at a 49ers game on the sidelines and i was like i think that's a uf the ufc owner and i'm like nah it's probably not him he's's too jacked. And I kept looking. I was like, that's him. He is that jacked. That man walks the walk, right? So it was when I was selected and I had the meetings by that group of built something that's amazing, who are also intimately involved in the sport of professional athletics, right?

But they know the body of my work because they've seen me since day one working behind the scenes with their athletes, bringing them to the stage. So they see what I've done and some things that I'll never talk about behind the scenes. They know what I've been able to do. There you go. What I've been able to do where nobody else has been able to do the things that I'll never talk about behind the scenes. They know what I've been able to do. There you go. What I've been able to do where nobody else has been able to do, the things that we've been able to accomplish. So I didn't want to be that dude.

I'm not that, this is cutting a promo, but I'm like, I'm not that like fitness dude. I didn't want to be a Tony Horton. I didn't want to like be back when I had hair. I didn't want to be like a dye my hair and that kind of dude. It wasn't me, but they wanted what was real. And I was like, all right, I'll do that. And I got myself all the way down, like 5% body fat. I had to maintain it because we had a media tour and all this stuff. And man, I was over it. Like I like I'm a meathead, right? I want to be like big and

bulky. And like, I want to be walking around at like 12 body fat that's important to understand that that's important to know that and that's how i identify myself so for me to have to be like super lean and like walking around like the 180s instead of like you know 210 or so doesn't feel like me i don't feel like myself when i'm down at that weight which is why i tell people like i don't care you don't have to be lean and shredded you know to feel good about yourself or to be successful you just have to determine like what makes you happy everyone kind of judges it off of like a six-pack right they do and you know i noticed like with like instagram and social media which is very important for our businesses all the like you got all these

like super shredded idiots out there with crappy content, hundreds of thousands of followers. And I'm like, man, these idiots are crushing it, but totally putting bad information out there to the community simply because they got great lighting and they got awesome, you know, tiny little waist and, you know, veins running through their abs. So now I'm in the phase where this year I was like, you know what? I'm going to start getting in a fucking really kick ass shape right now, but not losing my athleticism. So like I still wrestle, I still box, I still throw weights around. Like I still run, I still hike, I still do like intervals in the sand. I still do all that stuff, but I become more focused on getting leaner for a short period of time. Maybe it's three months, maybe it's six months, maybe it's three years. I don't know. But right now I'm

kind of motivated to start getting leaner for a little bit as a challenge to myself as a 43-year-old man. Why not? Let's see how fucking lean I could get for a little while and maintain it and be healthy and not compromise like my definition of who I am or what makes me happy. Because as soon as it doesn't make me happy, I'm out. I'm loving doing it right now as I continue to kind of scrape down and get leaner. right now as I continue to kind of scrape down and get leaner. But like fitness itself, I can't remember a time in my life since I was eight years old where I started like the old school weight, you know, weight bench in the basement type deal, right? That I didn't exercise, that I wasn't going for runs and, you know, lifting weights and just doing the other thing. But now I see it because

then it was like, you know, get girls or like be a good athlete or get in the college and, you know, whatever, you know, have an identity. Now it's like, man, I want to live long and be happy and travel the world and like see my kids get married. It's a different reason. So when I'm training now, it's like I want to be doing this forever. So I kind of I don't have the same narcissistic approach to fitness anymore. There's much more of a, uh, a selflessness to it. Like I want to be fit now so I can do more things for people than to just like what rewards it'll, it'll start to bring to me. Do you still do powerlifting at all? No, I haven't. No,

my shoulders are jacked, you know, um, not, not jacked in tan, but jacked up, you know, so I get this guy a slingshot that actually would be a good idea um you know bench i was never a good bench press i got really long arms bad shoulder i actually did really well with the reverse grip back from the anthony clark era man so like a single poly reverse grip i benched over 500 pounds being a shitty bencher truly it just worked out really well i think you've got really strong front delts strong triceps i was able to kind of you know get a good kind of scary the reverse grip but terrifying have you ever messed with it before uh not much yeah it's kind of weird it's a weird feel when you get it right it's not bad but it feels like it's going to fall out of your hands

yeah you have to have really good spotters right um so no like i i still like I do love to deadlift. That's kind of my barometer. I said, if I ever walk in the gym, I can't deadlift 500 pounds. I'm fucking done. Like it is. Roll you out of there. Just roll me out in my in my mind. I like I like the ability to be able to deadlift triple body weight.

That's kind of like an ego thing to a degree. And usually I have to three or six week like little training camp to get myself back relative to what my body weight is um i haven't barbell back squatted in years now because i got a hip issue um you know i'm trying not to go the eddie cone route and uh so i'm seeing what i can do mobility wise to offset and that comes from years and 20 plus years ago walking out 1100 pounds at the old pro fitness gym in north jersey um my buddy john we were you know meatheads you know just want to squat 800 pounds so we're doing walkouts and setup and we had chains because the bars on hold at 9 45 on each side had chains hanging i stepped out right side when i stepped out left side my hip rolled oh shit reclaimed position secured it

walked it back but i remember i was like early 20s. I was like, oh, that's going to catch up to me in 20 years. I thought that back then. Fucking lo and behold, like 41 came on. And I was just like, goddamn. Like my hips like clicking. My hip flexors are super tight. I got like a millimeter or two of cartilage to play with. So no, to answer your question, no.

But I still like Pendlay Rose. I still like to move heavy weight relative to my body weight. So I still get in there, you know, and move weight. But now it's more controlled and I do a lot more body weight. You do like dumbbell presses and stuff like that instead of flat bench? Yeah, so I'll do. Incline dumbbell, stuff like that. Like a low incline, like a 30 degree incline.

Because when I go too high, like my front delts take over you know kind of relatively like just the way my insertions are never had a big chest could never ever feel it until like the last two years or so when i changed the incline a little bit i lowered the weight it's weird how long it takes to like learn how to feel so you know like we'll tell somebody i'll use your lats and they're like huh yeah what does that mean we're like well know. Like, yeah, the thing under your armpit. Use that to bench press. They're like, to bench press? It gets confusing quick because you're like, I don't even, a lot of people don't ever really even practice flexing anything other than like maybe their biceps.

Sure. And so like people have no practice with how it feels. One thing I learned in bodybuilding that was kind of cool was like, you know, you got to flex like your left hamstring and your calves at the same time while you're trying to flex your chest or your stomach. And it was, it was interesting. I mean, it was, I thought to myself, how dumb is it that we all learn how to lift, but we don't learn how to flex. I mean, you know, bodybuilding aside, like you don't really necessarily need a posing routine, but everyone should know how to flex each muscle. It's like, why didn't we learn this kind of as we went when we were young? It would make a lot more sense because now, you know,

you could see a well-trained bodybuilder on stage. They can like, boom, they could pop out the right lat and they can throw up a double bicep with the left arm. It's like people have no idea how advanced that is. It's really hard to do. Really hard to do. Lord, no, I've tried in my bathroom so many times. I still can't do it.

I still can't. How much of a trip was that doing a bodybuilding competition for you? It was different, man. It was way different. The actual show itself was great, but the show itself was really weird. The whole thing was just strange. The atmosphere was way different than what I'm used to in powerlifting. In powerlifting, it's like everyone's kind of a dickhead until everyone gets their squats done.

Sure. And then everything's calm and everyone's joking around and everybody's cool. But the bodybuilding show, it's like I was having a good time, but it didn't seem like anybody else was. So stressed out. They seem, yeah, like really, really stressed out. And there's like donuts in the back and stuff. And there's some people that can eat them because their show's over. And there's other people that can't. And like, I don't know. Yeah, people were just, I was donuts in the back and stuff. And there's some people that can, that can eat them cause their show's over and there's other people that can't. And like,

I don't know. Yeah. People were just, I was trying to crack jokes and stuff and no one was having it. What a trip, man. I was the only one enjoying it, I think. But I also didn't like get into this, like really crazy. I had a good coach for that. So I didn't, I didn't go into a real crazy caloric deficit or anything. I mean, he, he had the, the knowledge to say, look, you need the nutrients to be able to train hard, you know, and I'm thankful for that because otherwise if I,

if it was left to me, I would have been like, I'm just going to not going to eat. Yeah. And I'm going to get on stage and see what happens. And it wouldn't have worked out very well, which is what you were saying before is people go so deep in what deficit thinking they're doing what they have to do.

And you can't train and training is a huge aspect of it. It's everything. It's undersold. Yep. People aren't talking enough about, you know, being able to put that effort in the gym. Yeah, that's true. I heard you talking with Chris Bell earlier. Yeah, yeah.

Saying something about doing something to white rice to make it have like the nutritional value of like a sweet potato. Sure. How do you work this magic? Well, he was talking about the glycemic index, and most people say, well, white rice is bad because it ranks high on the glycemic index. That's why we should be eating brown rice. That's better. No, brown rice is shit. It's very difficult to absorb. Why do we eat rice? We're eating rice simply so we can get the glycogen, right? There's not much nutrition, not many micros or phytos in rice. So really, we're just trying to store that glycogen for expression later in some sort

of activity. Why wouldn't we eat the most efficient and most delicious form of rice, which would be white rice? But the concern is what that high glycemic food will have on our insulin response. But people don't understand or they don't accept that the white rice is also paired with typically a protein and a fat, which completely changes the glycemic rating of that meal. So it's the totality of what you consume. It's not the individual ingredient. So white rice, I mean, we go to that all the time. That's a big part of it because you're having grass-fed steak with it or wild-caught salmon with it or asparagus even, let's say.

It changes it. The more protein or the more fat that goes in with the carb, that meal becomes the experience itself. So there's no hocus-pocus. I think it's just a greater understanding and taking some of the bias away from certain foods. But that's really pop culture and Yahoo News and kind of like the big headlines push that information down. Rice is bad because it's ranked so highly and, you know, honey is bad. But then they're pushing diet sodas onto people because there's zero sugar. Well, I guarantee you, if I'm eating raw local honey, a few teaspoons per day,

and twin dulce's over there drinking a few diet sodas per day, I will by and large be extremely healthy compared to them, specifically when we extrapolate that type of mentality and the lifestyle choices that come with it for my type of person

and the other type of person. So kind of this similar concept when it comes to rice and the glycemic index. I never pay attention to that. It's the totality of the foods that you're eating. And when we eat, we really try and eat a wide variety of foods in a single meal. We're not really eating just, you know, one ingredient. And I know some systems do that, you know, just one ingredient at a time.

You don't want to have a competitive digestive environment where certain foods and a lot of foods they work really well together they're better digested together you use the term cofactors they're more cofactors that are combined for a better experience a more efficient experience or just to help you get through it you know like uh eating just a chicken breast is kind of hard yeah if you have some vegetables with it or some rice with it or even a sweet potato or something it makes it way easier to eat the whole thing absolutely a little sriracha a little you know squeeze the ketchup on the side or whatever it might be right you know just having a little bit of that that certainly goes a long way but even then we're going to push towards the healthy natural kind of more of the homemade you know ingredients we're not just going to get heinz ketchup and squeeze it on there

you know because that's high fructose corn syrup and a lot of the other shit. So we're going to look for that really like a Annie's or whatever, you know, kind of the whole food version of that, you know, little teaspoon, tablespoon goes a hell of a long way. Some people use like a half a cup of ketchup and it's all high fructose corn syrup, right? So yeah, you can have ketchup. You're like, oh, I can have ketchup. Like not the way you do it. Not like that.

Not like that. You know, you can do it a different way and still enjoy it, you know, even more so, I think. So you're saying, you know, you're going to eat six meals a day. Sounds like you're a huge proponent of fruit and vegetables. There's going to be some sort of protein source in there, which I imagine would come from meat and eggs and things of that nature, right? Yeah. of that nature, right? Yeah. And so, you know, if you're eating six times a day and you're trying to get your fruit and vegetables in probably minimum of three times a day each, right? Yeah. You're suggesting walking a couple of times a day for 10, 15 minutes at a clip.

There's a lot on someone's plate right there, too. And now, you know, what I think is great about that, it's like, what do you have room for now? It's like, you don't have room for any bullshit. You're already eating very healthy. When it comes to the carbohydrate sources other than fruit, you know, what are some suggestions? I know you mentioned rice and potatoes a little bit.

Is that kind of the majority of it? We do a lot of like oats or oat bran, you know, quinoa flakes maybe. What about the gluten? What about the gluten? Like, do you have cel um but we do a lot of like oats or oat bran you know quinoa flakes maybe what about the gluten what about the gluten like you have celiac disease most less than a third of the population right are you you know gluten insensitive maybe but i guarantee you're more insensitive or less tolerant to high fructose corn syrup and sucralose and aspartame and, you know, red number seven or whatever else. I guarantee you, your physiology has a major objection to that shit than it does to something that's much more natural. And people aren't even aware that that's in their food. No.

And it's funny because most people, they're like, I can't eat bread. I'm gluten intolerant. Why? Because I eat Wonder Bread. Like, you ever read the ingredients on bread? There's like 17 different ingredients on there none of which are fucking bread you know quote bread maybe that's the problem it's not the wheat that you and your ancestors have been eating your whole fucking life maybe but probably three percent of the population not worthy for us to even really

entertain with when we're talking you know mess you So with fruit and things like that, or the carbohydrates, oats, oat bran is excellent. And that's gluten-free. Get the gluten-free, whatever. Bob's Red Mill makes a really great one. We use quinoa is awesome. Amaranth is awesome.

Beans and lentils are great. We eat tons of those. What else? I mean, like sprouted grain bread from time to time. Is there like a specific protein requirement trying to get a gram per pound of body weight or anything like that? Roughly. Yeah. And it depends upon activity, you know, where you in the gym, you know, slanging and banging like you are, you're probably going to be 1.5 or more, right? Or you kind of, you know, sitting at the cubicle and you're getting some,

you know, bike rides on the weekend and, you know, an active PTA mom, you're probably down to like that, that 0.8 per, you know, pound or per gram of, of body weight. So it's, there's that, that flux, you know, anywhere between like, let's say the 0.8 and like a 1.5 for the average healthy adult. And then we have, I call those a phases where, man, I'm going through a fucking serious deadlift cycle here. You might be at 2.0 or more, depending on that really heavy phase, because you're fucking destroying your body. You know, you're crushing it.

You know, whatever else you might be doing, you're hitting some step mill because you're getting ready for a bodybuilding competition. Your protein probably has to be even higher for that. But that's for a phase that's not kind of long-term. So right around that gram, I think, makes the most sense for most people. But we always start a little lower, which gives us room to scale going forward.

We'll start at like a 0.8 and we'll kind of scale going forward relative, you know, 0.8 relative. And we have the ability to grow. Fats and carbohydrates is really activity-based more than anything else. What's your day-to-day look like? You know, you never really you know push hard you never really breathe heavy you're probably going to not be eating a lot of carbohydrates per day it's definitely going to be on the lower end but you're going to eat enough carbohydrates in our system to maximize the phytonutrition that comes from these plant-based

sources from you know i was pushing a lot of the uh you know the the keto heads as i call them where when keto first came out like two or so years ago when it was like really big and it was everywhere you know 20 grams of carbohydrates i'm not gonna keep and they were all talking about the 20 grams of carbohydrates and i said well excuse me uh that means i can't have a cup of blueberries per day that's gonna give me cancer where all this data because it was you know cancer was getting fed all this data on how good blueberries are for you but i can't have 20 grams of blueberries in a day simply because of some rigid macronutrient template that and this everybody was talking about this a while back i can't have a cup of blue i can't have one apple not well i can't have one apple per day can't keep my doctor away you can't have that simply

because this this 20 gram thing so i i push a lot you know that way just to get the general public to see like oh fuck maybe i can't have an apple and even a couple blue areas though that's like you know 40 plus grams of carbs per day i might not be in ketosis but that's okay too because most of the people following you know those type of diets they they're not compliant enough to get there anyway right so we just need to normalize our eating program when i don't want to get you know too far you know into the weeds on that one we're just trying to get normalized eating program but we eat enough fruit to maximize the beautiful benefits that come with fruits you know with plant-based sources, you know, and I'm not a vegan. I'm an omnivore,

you know, like going too far vegan is not correct for most people. Just like going, in my opinion, I had a good conversation with Chris about the whole carnivore side, going too far that way for most people long-term is not the proper solution. Is it a way to kind of get away from one style of eating? Because now I'm in this box for a little while and I'm normalizing my eating pattern. I'm learning more about myself and then I can keep transitioning. That makes a lot more sense.

I see people go plant-based that way and they go kind of carnivore that way. But they all typically come, in my mind, they come and meet back up with this more modified, eating every two to four hours, wide variety of earth-grown nutrients, which is kind of why our principles have stuck for so long. And I'm not like, it's not my principle.

It's not my way. What we just did, my team and I, is we looked at what's best practices. What's best practices amongst the species for the vast majority of our recorded history? And then, you know, moving forward with longevity outcomes. Well, it's eating this wide variety of earth-grown nutrients, local, organic. I mean, you think think about it that's all most people could get up until like 100 200 or so years

ago it had to be local had to pretty much be organic for the most part yeah there was some processing and man did kind of start to manipulate soils and things like that right you know for a period of time but not you know this the shit that they're selling on Amazon right now. It certainly wasn't that. That's over the last 10 years or so. So, you know, I talk like I do once again just to create the awareness so the average person listening, they can start to think for themselves. Hmm, maybe I can eat some blueberries in my day. And I should be eating some wild-caught meat.

You know, I should have a little bit of that. And you know what? I have been sitting at my desk a lot. Maybe I should go out and go for a walk too, you know. It would be nice to go to my local gym, you know, I should have a little bit of that. And you know what I am? I'm having been sitting in my, my desk a lot. Maybe I should go out and go for a walk too. You know, it would be nice to go to my local gym, you know, come to super training gym and, and maybe I, you know, I've never lifted weights before, but maybe I should, should lift weights once or twice a week. Maybe I should really start to experience this life as a human and see what my body

is potentially capable of and start pushing, you know, putting their self out there. So that's, that's. Those things are all a hundred percent reasonable to entertain. That's it. What about dairy? Does dairy fit into? Rarely. What we say is, you know, we kind of allow a few ounces of white cheese a few times per

week. Not so much for the nutrient quality, but just more for the ease of the lifestyle. You know, a couple slices of a fresh mozzarella goes a long way in my house. A little bit of like a feta or a blue cheese on a salad just completely changes the experience. You know, like some sliced white cheddar, maybe, you know, onto one of these grass-fed burgers we make.

Man, that's awesome. But we're talking, you know, one or two ounces, one or two days a week. So big picture, I mean, we're not drinking milk. I mean, I or two days a week so big picture i mean we're not drinking milk i mean i grew up drinking gallon like gallon gallon of milk a day right it's a gram of protein per ounce right crushing that as as a kid man my skin was so thick right you know just so soggy and watery and like so fat and flatulent and just like you know that that whole thing and i handle dairy pretty well compared to the average person. Um, so not a lot of dairy, just a little bit of, you know,

white cheeses, you know, here and there. Um, ice cream is like, man, that's good here and there, here and there, but that's going to, that's going to Jack most people up. And it really does. You talk to me after that, like, Oh, I wish I didn't need that. Yeah. Earned a meal. Right. You know know i want to ask you about this because when you said it it kind of made a surprise and it's backtracking a little bit but i gotta know um i forgot the guy you said he he trains at 166 you wake him to 146 and he trains again he competes the next day at, what, 166 again? Yeah. How does an athlete do that and maintain such good performance? Because obviously he does, and you've done it multiple times.

Sure. I know you can't let go of all your secrets in terms of how you do that, but how do you get them to perform so well after dropping that? Yeah, no, good question. A big part of what we do, and I think where we've been successful, a lot of it's the electrolyte manipulation. He's, about three weeks ago, that's about as lean as we want him to be.

I mean, he's already shredded. He's got veins running through his abdomen. I don't want him to get any leaner because that's gonna have a negative impact on his performance. I don't want him to lose any muscle tissue because that's gonna have a negative impact on his performance.

So where does this 20 pounds or so, roughly 20 pounds come from? And know that this is a 20 pounds that is a hydrated 20 pounds or so roughly 20 pounds come from and know that this is a 20 pounds that is a hydrated 20 pounds and this is 20 pounds that has food matter constantly flowing through the body so at any given point there is food matter inside of our body that mursad back to get this young man um and he's fighting saturday he's the the co-main event so it's him then uriah then then the the main. So he's third from the top. Big fight versus Josh Emmett, local guy. Winner of this fight is right back,

knocking on the top five. So he's right now three fights away from the title shot, two fights away if somebody gets hurt. And he was right there, but he had a foot injury a while back. So he was already at the top five. And then people passed him over the last year with the injury. But anyway, so what we do is we start to manipulate the sodium-potassium ratio, which is a big one. He's still eating carbohydrates every single day. He'll eat carbs every single day all the way up in the weigh-ins. And a lot of times, a lot of these coaches, they cut the athlete's carbs out,

they take their sodium down to zero, they put them on distilled water, they start to water load, or they do like a reverse pyramid of water loading, which is the wrong way to go. They'll go like three gallons, two gallons, one gallon. The athlete's completely dehydrated by Wednesday. or they do like a reverse pyramid of water loading, which is the wrong way to go. They'll go like three gallons, two gallons, one gallon. The athlete's completely dehydrated by Wednesday. Then they got to try and get them to a scale on Friday.

No wonder why these athletes miss weight and damn near die and get hospitalized, right? They're killing the athletes, literally killing the athletes before the most important competition in their life. What we try and do is feed the athlete, keep the athlete healthy. We never sodium deplete. We never go down to zero sodium.

We play with the ratio of sodium to potassium because that's where the magic is. And then some people will understand this and some people it's going to go right over their head and that's absolutely fine. But those who understand this, they know it's the relationship of sodium potassium that matters. It's not high sodium and low sodium with come with regards to, um, holding water or releasing water. It's the relationship of sodium potassium. Now, this can get a little dangerous if you play with too much potassium, which we don't really go with the potassium,

but we play with sodium potassium. And I won't get into the weeds on that one because those listening might try in their own little way to do it without proper supervision. And that could not be a good thing. That allows the body to naturally release water. We play with the carbohydrates,

but we never drop the carbohydrates down below a hundred grams per day. I mean, massage probably not going to blow, go below 150 grams of carbs per day, the entire week where, you know, you get other systems out there and they're trying to go, you know, full zero carb all fight week. Well, the athlete still has media to do. They have open workouts to do. They got tons and tons of press conference and they got to walk the hallways and see their opponent and their opponent's team and the adrenaline dump that comes with that. There's all these things that the athlete goes through that they don't take into consideration that we do. So we use the term, we feed the athlete all the way to the scale. And what you were saying, there's a lot of work to be done during fight week. We have to have the

proper fuel available for the athlete to perform all the jobs necessary just to get to the scale to then go and fight so what we do is we'll have him on weight friday the night before without really cutting we'll never use a sauna i haven't used saunas for easily over a decade now we don't do plastics or anything like that we do what we call soft cuts which is in the bathtub very light very gentle never so hot the athlete ever wants to come out. You got these idiots putting athletes in 107, 109 degree bathtubs, which is scalding, burning. The athletes are crying in there, feeling like they're dying, praying to God that they're not going to die. We don't do that crazy shit. It's so, it's so stupid. I mean, I feel bad for the athletes

who follow those protocols. We don't do that. So we'll get the athlete on weight the night before and then we'll feed him and we'll keep feeding him. So the athlete, I mean, I've been in the last three or four fights now with Merced. So we typically have four ounces of salmon the night before weigh-ins. We have half a cup of white rice, a bunch of asparagus and pepper, some onions. This is the night before he steps on the scale. So we'll get them down to weight the night before. We'll put two pounds of food and fluid back into him he'll lose that overnight while he sleeps usually wake up has a bowel movement he has

for the last three four fights not to put you know too much information out there but you wake up you have a bowel movement before you go and weigh in come on i know athletes that that you know not on our system who don't have a bowel movement by the time they weigh in by the time they fight their bodies just not back up and run in again and that's. You probably know athletes who've gone through similar bad weight cuts. They don't have a bad bowel movement until like Monday, Tuesday of the next week. Some have to go to the hospital because their body's not working yet. That's what we do without getting down into the specific. That's the general overview.

But we keep it calm. Like, Merced, you know, I take all the stress away. All the UFC, PR, the media, man, what do you need? Just tell me. And then, you know i take all the stress away all the the ufc pr the media man what do you need just tell me and then you know it's done don't don't bother the athlete we got this like let's go we're gonna go see a movie we're gonna go hang out if you know any cool places to like just chill out in sacramento we're gonna go sip coffee we try and keep fight week like super chill and relax like that while making sure he has everything you know he needs because the stress is already there he's gonna get a fucking cage fight on saturday night we don't have to starve him we don't have to dehydrate him we don't have to overwork him

like kids already done all the work we just got to keep it really easy all the way through wow and to rehydrate um this is not an onslaught of food, right? No, it's slow and steady. So we always start with water and natural electrolytes. We don't use any of the carbohydrate drinks. We don't use any of the Gatorades and the Pedialytes and all that other crap. In my mind, it's all crap. And it hurts people's feelings. You know, I guess it does, but it's not effective.

It's what our system we believe is the most effective, which is why we do it. It's not because it's my system, just what works best because what has the best outcomes. It's what our system we believe is the most effective, which is why we do it. And it's not because it's my system, just what works best. Cause what has the best outcomes? That's what we have to do. If shit, if PLA work great, how easy would that be here? Drink this purple shit, drink a gallon. And that PD light is meant to be drink, um, consumed by babies in teaspoons, right?

Look at the directions. It's fucking teaspoon. You see athletes drinking that. And then 15, 20 minutes later, they're in the bathroom,itting their brains out they got diarrhea they're vomiting they don't have an appetite they can't eat their food we start with purified water some natural electrolytes whether it be sea salt um fresh squeezed lime juice raw local honey fresh fruit we start to get in there we just start to get really simple foods that the athlete's been eating for the last three weeks six weeks the whole training camp and we slowly trickle it back into their system it's not like they have to compete two

hours later they compete 36 hours later so the whole like you know four hour window of like um you know these these high as malika um the carbohydrates i forget the i'm trying to think of what the brand names are and cyclic dextrins and all that shit. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. It's all based. I mean, that maybe, maybe, maybe if it's like a two to four hour competition window, then maybe there's a shorter term benefit from an absorption perspective, but not in our athletes.

It's going to cause a digestive discomfort because it's something so foreign from what they're used to, right? Because they don't consume it at all. You got to really consume that all during your training camp to see how you react to it. Ours don't do that. And any net benefit you might have is so minimal, it's not worth the risk, but on a third, 24 or 36 hour window, it makes no sense at all. It's just this, this hocus pocus. Um, are there any faster things in there such as like maybe like a rice cake or, uh, whey protein or

coconut water or anything like that yeah so you know coconut water is usually about two hours later we stage it you know i basically have the coconut water's loaded with potassium absolutely tons of it and that's like after two hours then the athlete can start we start to open up their menu the first two hours is very rigid with regard to the rehydration schedule. Every 15 minutes, our athletes are consuming a electrolyte solution. Basically, it's purified weather with a little bit of salt, a little bit of lime juice, and a little bit of raw honey. Usually, we make them in a big old gallon, and we just let it sit, and now it's ready to go. And every 15 minutes, they have, based upon how much weight they cut, based upon their body mass, and based upon our relationship

with them, how much they normally sweat during practice, like all the data that we've aggregated over the last fight camp or multiple fight camps. We have all that so we can determine what's best for Merced or for, you know, whichever other athlete. So every 15 minutes they're consuming, not so much that they're bloated enough that they're absorbing and they want more for two hours, two hours. You can get a lot of water in if every 15 minutes the athletes a little bit a little bit they want it they want it and then we're starting to you know right about you know 30 minutes we start to trickle in some um fruit whether it be like a watermelon or grapes or certain berries something that has a high water content high fiber content and a good amount of

sugar in there because we want to start getting the digestive system working. We want to start to perk up their brain a little bit and get them starting to feel better because a lot of this is how the athlete feels, right? Their mental side. Some individuals, you know, they want like baby food. Okay, really depends. I'd rather like make my own, like make a puree, which is what we'll do.

Applesauce is fine. We can certainly do that. What else do we do? Like rice cakes. We get rice cake with some raw honey, maybe some sliced banana. That's great. We do that for sure. Usually within that 60-minute window, within the first 60,

they're having little foods like that. Maybe it is a little bit of like banana, like super ripe banana. They can start to nibble on some of that. And slowly we're walking them back to what they normally eat. Anyway, we say, you know, we pull out of weigh-ins the same way that we've pulled in. There's nothing new, nothing that they haven't eaten in the last three weeks. Are they going to eat after they get off the scale really or until they compete? We're just going to slowly putting more of the normal food right back into them like

their breakfast bowl, which is usually like, like oats and berries and some nuts and seeds. They'll have that right around that, in that two hour or so, a little more bulk, but smaller portions. We usually feed them out of coffee cups. They can eat out of a coffee cup, whatever the meal might be, and then they have to wait 15 minutes. If they're hungry again, then they can have another coffee cup-sized meal. If you give them a big plate, what are they going to do? They're going to eat the whole plate. Now what happens? They're not hungry for four hours. So a lot of this is, is, you know, we kind of stage and we scale this all the way through. It's like every 15 minutes, there's something to be done. The first two hours, the first four hours, the first six hours, really like that six hour phase,

the athlete is, is already filled back up. They're ready to go. Um, our athletes are usually having full bowel movements within the first four hours. They're urinating within the first hour, which is super rare for weight cut oriented athletes. And they're just ready to go. So it's slow and steady, but it's not a hard template for everyone to follow. It's based upon the individual with the basic principles intact. And most people, they make the mistake of they just follow a piece of paper that a hundred other athletes get. Well, that's not unique to the individual. It's just like a jab, man. There's a hundred different ways to throw a jab. There's a thousand different ways to throw a jab. So if I try and tell you to throw a jab the same way Tommy Hearns throws a jab, that's not going to work too well. Or, you know, the same way maybe a Mike Tyson throws it,

that's not going to work too well for you. So how is this protocol going to work for you? It's very similar in the staging aspect. How do you get these guys to decompress and how do you get them to sleep? Decompressing is trying to find things that they enjoy and not talking about the fight and having that really cool environment around them. So like with Merced, he's got a great crew around him. He's such a mature athlete for being so young, 27, 28 years old. And he's been like this his whole career. He knows good people and he only keeps good people

around him, regardless of skill set, good people, good energy. And that's, he's big on when he's had bad energy around him. He hasn't performed as well. He's only had one loss in 20 plus fights or so, bad energy around him he hasn't performed as well he's only had one loss in in 20 plus fights or so but still he does a very good job so we try and cultivate this environment you know and i i certainly try and strive to cultivate this positive environment where man like we look forward to fight because we all get to hang out we get to pal around it's like a good time good energy and oh yeah we get to fight too we get to kick someone's ass and fucking make the shit a little money oh man that's even cool you know it's like that's the type of attitude but it's serious business man everyone's going to the hospital you win you go to the hospital right it's serious serious fucking business but we know that so you try

and minimize that and focus on the other things man you talk about family or you talk about like you know farasa hobby is is mercedes uh head mma coach so we just sit around we sip coffee and for like four hours we're just talking about like philosophy and like history and just like whatever bullshit like you know fighting with your wife over what tv show you're gonna want like whatever mundane in a way type of topics that goes a long way it's very little about the fight it's all the work is done the kid's whole career has been about the fights in the last two months of his life has been about the fights getting away from that as much this is yeah it's beautiful body shot knockout very rare right to the fucking solar plexus crazy yeah oh right that's 145 pounds there he's probably like

168 um but it's like and it's knowing your athlete as you know I mean you're the people's coach you have to know your athlete what is your athlete what do they dig man that's what you get into you know keep it low keep it

happy keep them positive for sure without blowing smoke up their ass because people see through that. Got any other tips on sleep just in general? What are some things you do with these guys when it's not fight week? Yeah, well, for sleep, a few things that we do, fight week or not fight week, we try and wake up a little earlier than normal, which allows you to naturally go to sleep earlier. You know, that's, I say go to bed an hour early, but wake up 30 minutes before you have to. You get 30 hour, 30 minutes of net sleep time, additional sleep time simply by waking up earlier in many ways. Another thing is to shut off that, you know, the, the self-talk. And one thing that I found to be super successful, whether it's our athletes or I work with other, you know, executives and higher VIP clientele, they have the whole

world's problems on their mind and say, well, what's, what's your, what's your favorite movie? You, what's your favorite movie, favorite TV show you've seen a million times? Braveheart. Braveheart. So you take Braveheart, you put it on your iPhone, you put it on your iPad. If your wife lets you put it next to your bed, face down just loud enough so you can barely hear the music and barely hear the dialogue shut your eyes and picture the scene picture picture the face paint picture the kilt he's wearing picture what he's going to say picture who walks into the room and what he's wearing as you're laying there trying to fall asleep just picturing that scene to me it's it's Seinfeld I've watched you know every season of Seinfeld a million times so that's what

I picture I can barely hear it so I have to strain to hear it and as I'm going through the scene I'm out it shuts off that self-talk and that's been a huge huge huge benefit for really anyone I've ever talked to who's tried they're like holy fuck like for me like I won't change the episode until I've actually watched the whole episode I'll go months on the first episode of the first season and it becomes like a sedative after a while, because now I'm training my body. Like when Seinfeld's on, like, it'll come on at home, like on TV and like 10 minutes in the episode, like I'm past now at six o'clock at night. Um, it's just shutting off that self-talk because you're exhausted. I mean, we're exhausted. We work hard. Our life is busy. You're tired. You just got to shut your brain off

a little bit. That's been a big one, you know, light overhead light. We shut those off. Like, you know, in our house, we tell our athletes and clients to overhead lights, kind of lower lighting candles if you can. As the sun goes down, so should the lighting in your home should come down a little bit too. We try and start to push, you know, a lot of the technology away. Put on your, you know, like the orange warm hue, like set up all that, you know, basic stuff. You know, stimulants, you want to try and keep those before 4 PM. Um, you know, if you're going to bed around, you know, nine, 10 o'clock, you want to give yourself a good, you know, four hours plus six hours, even better, you know, get it, get the, get away from the stims. This question might sound weird, but is there a certain trend? Cause you worked with like Ronda Rousey, this guy, what's his name again? Mursad. Mursad.

Bechtik. Bechtik. Mursad Bechtik. Two years from now, everyone will know that name. Oh yeah. I'm going to make sure not to forget now. But is there a certain trend you see, and this may sound a little odd, just like with the way they work athletically or with the way they go about doing what they do to maintain that high level activity? Is there something that you just see consistently? Yeah. What's funny is, you know, what makes these athletes so great is also, I don't want to say a flaw, but it's debilitating in other aspects of their life. And I think any great person, any great achiever, right? What makes them so special? There's a downside.

You can't get all the gifts without being punished in some way. Not to say that they're bad people or anything like that. That's not the case. Not to say that they're bad people or anything like that. That's not the case. But like Ronda's intensity, the way she prepared for her fights. If she had to be in the pool at 5 a.m., there's not a day that she wasn't in the pool at 4.49 or 4.59. Not a day. Not one time.

Same thing with Merced. He's so obsessive about his training. Same thing with George St. Pierre. I use George as an example because in many ways, this is what pushed George out of the sport. He couldn't take the pressure anymore that he was putting on himself. He was so obsessive about his preparation. It was ruining his life. The highest level athletes, those that stay at the top for the longest are typically the ones that I've seen that have this, this trait, this characteristic that starts to erode other aspects of your life. Just your ability to be

happy. Sometimes you go out there, you win a world title. George is in the back damn near in tears because he didn't finish the arm bar in the fourth round. He had to settle for a unanimous 50 45 decision, all three jobs, you know, and walk away with $10 million and, you know, his world title intact. And he's pissed at himself for that. And, you know, not destroyed his day, but was thinking about that every single day thereafter. He's spoken about that, you know? So I think that's one of the things that these high level, not just the athletes, but these

high level achievers, whether it's, you know, business or whatever else, what drives people so much usually creates some sort of void somewhere else you know i have another athlete i probably shouldn't say his name um great great guy won the world title and never cared about the fight never like it never got under skin so he was able to just be so loose and go out there and ran through guys who were way better than he was on paper, way better than he was and just ran through these athletes. Was he still like a super hard worker though,

even though outside or was he just like, eh, he just, he just, just not as a fucking whip. This dude's ass really come back and do my, do the other thing. But as a result of that, most of his other other life he really didn't care about taxes yeah yeah i left my shotgun on

the top of my truck and got on the highway and it's not there anymore yeah cops will find it that left i mean it was like every every fight you knew he wasn't going to have his wallet or his glasses or his phone because he put them in the front seat in the plane. Seat in front of him, he put it in that dirty little pouch, like the puke pouch. He put it in there and be like, man, like, again? Now we got to try and check you into the hotel? Like, it was that, you know? So, like, we're pointing at the poster like, no, that's him. Like, yeah, but it's ID.

ID. So, it was like, you know, it's crazy. at the poster like no that's him like yeah but it's id id so it was like you know it's crazy you know it's crazy now me like you know i'm you know i know where my wallet is and all that stuff and when i had fights i'd be like oh fuck like that dude's pretty big dude right you know he's training as hard as i train like you know all that so i was kind of like oh he's in the middle kind of a realist in in many ways right just to like temper myself kind of a realist where these athletes they were like here and here where i was always able to kind of maintain the midline which i think allowed me to have a very nice and balanced life i'm super happy guy and my taxes are always paid and you know i never won a world title though you know so it is what it is i wonder if the do you like because you know a lot of these fighters

um what you described in terms of the middle way, if I were to look at John Jones, I would think that he's like that kind of middle kind of fighter. Like he trains a lot, but I don't know. Do you know if he's super obsessive or, um, you know, I, I know John a little bit, you know, we're not text buddies, but we've had, you know, we've, you know, an, an, a friendly relationship at being in the same industry. Right.

Um, John, in my opinion is the, it being in the same industry, right? John, in my opinion, is the most talented athlete in the history of the sport. So I don't know. And he trains his ass off. I don't know if he shows up on time. I don't know if he cuts out early. I would assume he does show up on time. I would assume he does get all the practice in. He worked with a great team that, you know, and I know some of his coaches, they don't put up with bullshit. get all the practice in. He worked with a great team that, you know, and I know some of his coaches,

they don't put up with bullshit. He's a super talent. And I think what makes, and, but again, what makes John so special in the octagon might be what's responsible for a lot of his mishaps in life where he's a risk taker. Also, if you see his best fights,

he's throwing shit we've never seen before. Dominating athletes. Well, he's taking risks in there he takes some risks in his personal life too previously maybe he's grown up since then i don't know but not knowing him as well as i know my own athletes i could see well maybe that's a little bit he has that streak in him that fuck it let it all hang out there push the adrenaline just a little bit like a cowboy serrani you could say that man he almost killed himself scuba diving

and he's driving jet skis off mountains and jumping out of planes and this crazy shit. But he goes out there, and he takes a fight on two days' notice up a weight class, and he's one of the winningest athletes in the history of the sport. So what makes these athletes so special kind of fucks up other aspects of their life.

They say with Jones that he's just insanely confident. Okay. He's usually pretty loose. He's usually pretty carefree. He does work hard, but he has a level of confidence that they haven't seen in anybody else. It's probably because he is fucking talented. It's insane.

His two brothers are in the NFL they say he's the worst athlete out of the three the worst athlete out of the three and his greatest UFC fighter of all time his mom man bottle one of his brothers is like I forget which one

but he's still in the NFL and he's like 12 million dollars a year or something like that it's not like he's just in the NFL he's's still in the NFL and he's like $12 million a year or something like that. I mean, it's not like he's just in the NFL. He's a superstar in the NFL. He's a superstar in the NFL. It's crazy, man. You know, the athletes, the athlete that have genes like that and the work ethic to bring out their potential,

that's an amazing thing. I mean, I remember when they asked him about, you know, where he learned some of his striking and stuff and he was knocking people out left and right and he's like, I learned it from YouTube. And people are just looking at him like, what the fuck? Yeah, what does that mean? What do you mean you learned it from YouTube? So he just has that awareness where he can see something. He can see it and mimic it.

And just go in there. And who would even have the confidence to do that? Like, no, I'm going against one of the best guys in the world. I'm not going to be able to try that bullshit on him yeah but he knew he could do it yeah i remember i was there when he beat mauricio hua for the title that was in i think it was in new jersey as i if i think back i was just standing there i just happened to be standing in the like where the tunnel comes out and then the octagon's right there and it's before they were like super like security and you know this is going back a little bit so i was just able to stand right there and watch him because

who's fucking stud right we grow up watching him kill people in pride and joan is making it look like it was a sparring match with a kid and i remember just being like and it might be why i think he's the greatest of all time because i remember seeing him in that moment as like the first real impression of him you know having seen his fights on tv this dude is fucking special you should be terrified of who at that time in his career john just glided through him and made it look so fucking easy and like you say if he just has this this insane confidence. You must, you have to.

Yeah, and I think like his collegiate background, I think is just a junior college wrestler, right? Yeah. So you wouldn't really, and then grappling wise, I mean, he's taken down Daniel Cormier, you know? And like Daniel Cormier may be one of the greatest wrestlers in the history of mma right absolutely he got john who was doing it for two years at a jc it just doesn't make any he's just you know

he's got that much confidence in himself yeah man he's it's it's a special guy and i know you know people bust his chops about the the peds and whatnot and i understand that right you know he got busted for whatever was in his system and it's not making excuses for him and i don't work with john so i got nothing to do with it but john john john jones walks into a room any other man on the fucking planet john walks back out that's why i say he's the goat i don't care who it is look at what he's done to all these dudes and half the guys he fought were on pEDs anyway, all busted. So it's like that washes it away a little bit. How prominent are PEDs, do you think, in UFC? I read, I forget who said it, and it was a great, kind of a striking statement

that you know PEDs are so prevalent in MMA because athletes know USADA is testing them and they're all still failing, right? So you know USADA is there. USADA is going to catch almost everybody and look how many athletes still get busted, right? So what was it five years ago before USADA came in? Probably the majority, right?

What is it right now? I wouldn't say the majority anymore but it's a fucking shitload because athletes are i mean it's like every month right almost like almost you know not weekly but a few years ago it was all the fucking time and it's like all the sarms now which is kind of the weird thing and i just think that's probably bad coaching and athletes listening to a coach they read an article on T Nation or something or whatever it might be off the online

I was going to say they watch the series but for whatever reason band is band and the water list is there for a reason this is how stupid athletes and coaches are the the water list is there for a reason this is how stupid athletes

and coaches are the fucking water list is right there man just read the fucking list and i did a podcast with john romano who i couldn't even release because he was so like you would have gotten i would have gotten sued by every across it would assume that you see everyone would have sued me but he was so honest which is the one thing he's like listen there's 200 known performance enhancing drugs out there or that you saw the test for 200 a lot of tests for 200 a list of 200 so he said there's 300 peds out there you just have to know the other 100 and that blew my mind because i never heard i never even thought that blew my mind i was like son of a bitch all right that that makes sense he never named names but he kind of you know inferred certain

people and i was like my lawyer was like dude you can't you can't especially at that i was like three years ago i wish i could um so kind of like putting that out there that that's one way to do it and you look like tj you know right you're very famous he manned up and he's fucking taking epo and all sorts of rumors about it but you know that there's so much money that's the best thing an athlete can do is when they get painted in a weird corner, they may as well just put their hands up and say, you know what? Yeah.

You're right. This is what I did. I think Chael was the master of that. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's the best route. I mean, because everyone's just like, I thought I was taking flaxseed oil. You're like, come on, dude.

Come on. Yeah. Flaxseed oil. And it's like you point to the water list and all these athletes that get busted for these tainted supplements. You know that. We all know that's bullshit, right? Right. You walk in any supplement store and you know the kid behind the counter is going to be like, yo, this is the one.

Remember like the old, was it the Russian bear back in the day? Remember like that stuff. Like we all know as a high school kid, you know, you knew what that was. Um, that stuff still exists to this day, but the athletes, they, they kind of, they, they jump in and they take that. And I think it's, it's just bad counseling, bad coaching. They listen to the wrong person, whether it is the bro at the, the GN, not the, the GNC cause they don't do that, but the the other supplement shop the gray market supplement shop or certain coach or whoever else in their inner circle that lets them believe that it's a safe supplement and i think that's how a lot of them are getting in trouble instead of just

avoiding it all just fucking stay away from it and you're good you know so like merced the only thing he'll take is vitamin c and dandelion root that's it. No extra anything all the way across because... Not worth it. It's not worth it, man, for the amount of money these guys make and the suspension. Now, you look at TJ. He made, what, $2 million for that fight? Got two-year suspension?

Right. $1 million a year. Is it worth it? How do you say it's not worth it? Kid just made $1 million a year on suspension. So what's the incentive? And I made a million dollars a year on suspension. Right. You know, so what's the incentive? And I think that goes back to the original question.

How many athletes take it? Well, fuck. A million dollars a year. You know, you do the math. It's hard to tell an athlete not to. Or why wouldn't an athlete? Why wouldn't a human? You know, why would an attorney not be, you know,

snorting or popping a,, uh, what's that? That fucking drug Adderall, Adderall or whatever else. Well, they still see you, uh, beating somebody else too. So it's like to get caught after the fact.

Yeah. You still won. Like the thing with Cormier and Jones, like, you know, Jones still won twice. So I don't think people are like, they're not questioning who the better fighter is. Right. They're not like,, so I don't think people are like, they're not questioning who the better fighter is, right?

They're not like, well, I don't know. I don't think people really think that. I mean, people know that they are performance enhancing and they can make a difference, but I don't think that people think that under normal circumstances, Jon Jones is a notch below Daniel Cormier as a fighter, right? I agree. I think they already know that he's a notch above

regardless of what he takes or how he does it absolutely and i think yeah because i'd say daniel has beat probably the majority of the guys he fought were probably slaughtered everybody and then he comes in the you know yeah skinny little john right and john i think smoked him twice yeah competitive the first time and not so much the second time the guy that he just fought uh that jones just fought um yeah jones is like he's i'm like man he's kicking at a guy who's all bones yeah of course he's gonna hurt himself kicking him you know yeah but what that was a good fight man that guy that guy did i mean he was hanging in there and he he nailed him with some good shots and i think jones legitimately couldn't take him out because he got banged up himself.

Yeah. You never know what is happening in there. You know, what happened to the athlete, what happened backstage. Like I said, this guy tore everything in his leg. He tore and fractured and did all kinds of stuff to his leg. It's crazy. Could you imagine having like a torn up knee and having Jon Jones standing in front of you for 15 more minutes? That's why I'm wondering.

Do you potentially think that Jon Jones was kind of having mercy on him? Because like he was just playing the points. You know what I mean? Win each round by points and let this guy get out. What do you think? You don't know because it could have been. And a lot of times first contact causes an injury. Maybe the first because

john got carried out of the cage himself i didn't i didn't follow up to hear what happened did he break something or what just welt on his like leg he kept getting kicked in the front knee okay and so who knows oh geez um what's going on in an athlete's mind and sometimes you know sometimes you walk in here man and 500 pounds feels like a thousand. You smoke it, right? Same thing in there sometimes. You just don't know. So it'd be hard to analyze.

I think there's a bunch of different ways. But that's, I think, a rarity. John had a performance like this against Ovis St. Preux when John kind of came back after the first suspension. It was a little lackluster. But at the same time, I don't think Santos was hyped up enough for John to really be scared of. And it probably, he might've just coasted in the fight thinking, ah, I'll just out point him and I'll use my length and I'll catch him. I catch everybody, you know? And then Santos is super pumped up. You're fighting John Jones, man. Every,

every minute of his day, I'm sure was debilitating in thinking about Jon Jones. Probably not as much for Jon, who's beaten Daniel twice and whoever else he's fought recently. So I think the psyche, again, going back to the psychological side. It does look like he was coasting. It looked like he was playing down to his opponent a little bit. But it also looked like he got cracked with a couple of good shots where he was like, I don't know, this is probably not a great idea to roll the dice on some of this yeah and i was like shit this dude is real this guy is better than i thought and some guys are a lot better in person than they look on tape you're looking

you're like that guy's not got smoke this dude you get like in the luke rockhold fight he luke looked like he was trying to pretend that he was hurt and he was trying to almost say that he wasn't hurt but he clearly got rocked a couple of times and then he ended up getting, you know, he ended up getting knocked out. And so I, I see the fighters do that a lot too, where it's like, oh, you hit me, but it didn't do much to me. And then the next thing you know, they're on their back, you know? And usually, you know, that's kind of the old saying, which turns out to be true. When an athlete plays off getting hit, it's usually because it hurt, right? It's the best thing is to just

stay stone-faced and just keep moving forward don't even acknowledge it good or bad you get if you get whacked just don't like blow it off as if it was no big deal because that usually is kind of a it's a tell like fuck man i just got hit but you noticed it it'd be great to see those guys fight again and maybe uh the the guy could put a little bit more into it and we can see you know what level jones could get up to. Sure. That fight, I hear that might happen. Yeah.

If they both put, Santos is probably going to be out for a while. What's the best fight you've ever seen live? Ooh. I'll do this two ways. The best fight I've ever seen was, this was on TV though, it was Spencer Fisher versus Sam Stoutout old fight ufc fight they

stood on their feet the whole time if you can like get fight pads and watch this fight stout versus fisher won they did a rematch and it was just never didn't work didn't work never lived up to the bill just killed each other it was just a bloody war it was just a war of attrition against two highly skilled strikers. Fisher, a little shorter and had to fight his way to get inside and really take a lot of shots to get in there. Stout, much more of a traditional striker. Good range, good distance, really clean, crisp, striking. I've watched that fight probably a hundred times just for fun, just for the entertainment value. That's a great fight if anybody can watch it.

I saw Matt Serra knock out George St. Pierre for the title. That was here in Sacramento, right? That was, I forget where it was. Yeah, I think it might have been here in Sacramento. And then I saw. That must have made you guys crazy because he's from Jersey, right? Serra, yeah. He was like East Coast boy. And then I saw. That must have made you guys crazy because he's from Jersey, right? Sarah. Yeah.

He was like East Coast boy. And, you know, I started my career, you know, with Henzo Grace. He's a part of that team. I'm surprised that's not a movie. Yeah, right. It should be. It should be. That should be a movie.

That's a Rocky. That's a real life Rocky story. Yeah. Matt Sarah beating George St. Pierre is wild. Yeah. Matt should play himself in that movie. He totally should. His personality.

But then saw at the Bell Center, I remember this one, when George came back and beat Sarah. That wasn't the best fight, but the best reaction. The crowd for that Bell Center fight, because I was at the first one, felt that one,

and at the second one, when George came back and won back in Montreal and beat Matt Sarah, man, that was amazing. The energy was absolutely insane um it quality wise looks terrible but this is that fight this is yeah is this is where uh matt sarah won or no this is fisher versus stout oh okay yeah super bootleg but it was this action pretty much the whole fight though dang you know and they just start getting bloodier and bloodier.

That fight with Don Fry and that giant Asian guy. You ever see that one where they're just holding the back of each other's head and they're just punching the shit out of each other? Yeah, yeah. That's an all-time classic. That is. What about boxing? Are you big into boxing? Yeah, I was huge into boxing throughout the 90s, early 2000s.

You know, Ward Gotti, you know, their, their fights were amazing, you know, some battles, um, you know,

back during the, like the reign of, of Lennox Lewis and Evander Holyfield, Riddick bow. That's when I was really, um, yeah, there,

there you go. Look at that guy. That guy's massive. Damn. Yeah. And they say this fight was like, you know, stage to a degree, like the spots were semi-staged, but the like you know staged to a degree

like the spots were semi-staged but the you know punches and everything was real wow boom boom boom boom boom you never see anybody go at it like that yeah how about the uh haggler hearns fight that's a classic classic that's from like uh probably the early or mid 80s maybe yeah maybe in the 80s yeah yeah it's kind of like once i got into mma i lost track of boxing for a little while and then when i turned back onto it it was boring yeah you know floyd was about the only one bernard hopkins i watched all his fights you know so he still kind of held it down um i think it happened to a lot of people because there's you're like well you can't kick or take the guy down yeah it's like it was boring it was super slow for a while

right and then even now it's hard it's almost like it's not as it's not dangerous enough to even watch no sounds kind of barbaric but that's probably the truth of it yeah and you think like even the heavyweights now it just doesn't it doesn't pull me and you watch yeah i watch a round or two it's like yeah you should be clinching here you know you whatever because you like you say you kind of you're looking like the mma side of it and it does seem a lot slower yeah and less technical in many ways it just it doesn't seem like it's a real fight anymore not to disrespect the boxers because they're all amazing what they go through is insane um but it's just it's a little boring now right you feel a little cheated when you watch ufc too and and like there's not enough action for someone to like get you're not

you're not sitting there hoping someone gets hurt but you want to see a definitive winner yeah and you can't really tell when you see two guys going back and forth evenly. Yeah. Well, how hard is it to watch a boxing fight after watching the Masvidal-Askrin, like, five-second? I know, right? Like, I can't watch that and then go watch, you know, a boxing match and really, like, expect anything, right? You know, it's like, holy shit to, all right, they're fighting now. It's like, it's so tough to go from that to the almost polar opposite. That's true. In boxing, they feel themselves out,

and they feel each other out for three rounds. They just kind of dance and jab and kind of move around, which you get it from a tactical perspective. It makes sense. From a viewer perspective, man, it's like watching paint dry now. How old are your kids? Four years old, my oldest daughter, and then two. So they're four and two, both girls.

Cool. What do they love to and two, both girls. Cool. What do they love to do? So my oldest. Cause trouble? Cause trouble. They're just sweet little girls. We're trying really hard to raise good kids, you know, like really hard to not be like helicopter parents, but give them structure to discipline them, but not be assholes and

like scorn for life. I just don't want my kids to be dicks. That's all. That's it. That's my goal. Yep. But I agree. It's like we're trying to raise just good people, good humans, you know?

And so like the oldest, she does karate and gymnastics. Now the younger one just started, you know, gymnastics, a little too young for karate. So like creating like body awareness, but also how to like be disciplined and how to listen to instruction and be a good teammate. And like, you know, my oldest, she wants and be a good teammate. And like, you know, my oldest, she wants to win everything, but it's like,

she has to understand, like you have to do your best. And if you don't win, like, that's okay. You have to try again, but you have to applaud when your teammate wins too. So like,

she's starting to understand that. And now like, I love the, cause I wasn't a karate guy. I was a wrestler. And I was like, man, fucking high school wrestler,

take down a 40 year old karate black belt like that. And trounce, I get that. And I pulled away from like that because it's not about that. It's about like the respect of the arts and respect and like the body awareness and like the discipline. So I see a lot of these like great things like through my kids now that they're getting from this. But we're pushing them, you know, into like the STEM side,

like the science technology um what's the e stand for and mathematics i'll say entertainment you know because that's the business we're in um engineering excuse me so we're really trying to you know push academics you know pushing arts pushing athletics but really it's just about being good people saying hi to people you know you know miss and mister and you know, miss and mister and, you know, all that good stuff. Listening to mommy. First time listening is a big thing in our house right now. First time listening, not fifth time listening, you know, keeping them off the tablets and the tech unless it's like, you know, more educational on that side. So trying to get them away from kind of

the mindless thing that you see running around. So again, we have no idea what the fuck we're doing. We're're doing we're just we're just trying to do like i don't i think i fucked up today but you know get another shot why the uh why the move to new jersey it's home you know so we went to where your wife's from as well yeah we grew up a town apart which was i we didn't meet until we're you know early 20s thankfully because she probably would have hated me if she met me in my teens um so we moved you know for the the team quest job you moved, you know, for the, the team quest job, you know, moved, you know, got married in New Jersey, went to Portland, Oregon,

did that, created this whole, you know, MMA and diet and fitness business, got it to the point that we wanted it to be. And then started to have kids and realized like I needed to unwind from this MMA world. Cause I was on the road 250 plus days a year for three years in a row. I mean, it's just had an athlete every week, really. And the phone calls kept coming in, which is a great thing until you want to have a family. And I said, listen, I want to, I want to be home. I want to be present. I want to be a father while my kids care about their dad being around. Right. So we started to unwind our lives in Las Vegas, you know, found the property that we wanted because we moved, moved back home. We wanted to do it correctly. So we bought a house on the beach, which is exactly

where, you know, it's where we grew up. You know, I grew up in a, I grew up in a house that was actually foreclosed on, knocked down and turned into a parking lot. So I grew up in extreme poverty. So the ability to like go out West, to build my business, to come back home and buy a home, you know, on the nicest street in town. It's kind of like a big, you know, a big, you know, life journey for us to be able to do that and to do it in a way that I think was honest and forthright. And we, you know, we did everything to the best of our ability to be good in the process, which is what we kind of continue to do. And now we're going to raise our kids just, you know, on the same streets that I and my wife grew up on. Our family's all there, you know, it's the same community. You

know, we live next to people who I grew up with and my mom, you know, grew up with their grandparents. So it's very, it's a super small town, small town. But when you come down, man, I'll tell you where we are. If we, you know, meet up and I mean, you got your own, your own business, but you want to come down and just take a look. It's a hidden treasure a hidden treasure it's it's you know one of the the most beautiful places i think in the country to live because of the diversity of what's there it's it's awesome you know i'll hype it up because and that's why we're going home small town living but it's i mean when we left we came back and we're driving around we're like how the fuck did we leave here but when we left it was like a bruce springsteen song because that's where he's from you know asbury park and whatever you know that area is like this this one horse town

and like i gotta get the fuck out of here because that's what it feels like when you're a kid yeah get the fuck out of here so we did we came back we're like everyone hates their hometown doesn't matter where you grow up right hated it and then like grow up in manhattan beach you know you can grow up in the most beautiful area but you're going to always think i need to get the hell out of here yeah and that's exactly what happened it's part of the cycle i guess so the ability to come home now and appreciate it so now we have a great appreciation of where we grew up and you know hopefully you know raise our girls the right way in this little area and then still able to do business out that way this now that you built it up enough to where people are attracted to what you're doing right yeah so our whole business now is mostly digital so we have an

online platform we produce our own you know books and content and things like that we still have a team of dietitians which are great so they do lots of consultations but it's all remote now you know we were able to structure the business in a manner that we can do it from anywhere in the world um i do have a studio not nearly what you guys have here, but similar, my own training floor, my own podcast studio. That's right in the center of town. So I can walk or ride my bike there, coffee shop around the corner, you know, run home, you know, have lunch with my family, take my kids to practice. So if I don't want to go to work that day, you know, I don't have to, my wife can do all her stuff cause she handles like the content side, um, of the business. So it is, is a family run business and she kind of runs all the back end of that stuff.

So we've kind of it was, you know, a long time to get to the point that we are. But, you know, it was the struggle to get there now that we're here. And you understand now we can really start to give back. We sponsor the local wrestling team, a bunch of the other athletic organizations. We're, you know, really try to give back mostly to the youth programs in the area. Now, how does it work with you and your wife, uh, working in the same business? You guys, uh, get at each other's throats here and there. We used to Jesus. And it's cause I'm an asshole. Cause I'm, I'm like this, this hard charging, like go getter, you know, like I had this big chip on my shoulder because of the way I grew up, right. Grew up in poverty, man,

no heat, no electricity, no running water in my house, like the whole fucking gamut. And I've always been motivated. Like, even today, I feel like the lights are about to get shut off. Like, I gotta get out there. I gotta hustle. I gotta get it done. Like, I gotta earn.

I gotta, and she's like, you just gotta calm down. I'm like, what do you mean? Did you do that? Did you call that? Did you file that? Did you get that in? Like, how many words did you write? Did you get the edit done?

Like, what about the, you know, the new design? Did you like contact the, you know, the publisher or whatever? And it's just like, slow down. So I, I understand how I can be in that relationship. God bless her. She didn't kill me or divorce me in the process. But like, we have four books out and she was my coauthor cause that's, you know, her world. She's a, her master's in communications and journalism. She was a journalist by trade. I'm kind of a talker by trade. So I would just walk around drinking coffee, talking, and she would just be like, you know, putting all the, our content together in many

ways. Which again, probably drove her nuts, but we were able to package it in a manner that was useful and effective. And, and we found an audience for it, thankfully. And now we just continue on. So we've been able to really step back a little bit and we have teams now that do a lot of what she and I did, you know, back in the early days. So it's not just her and I, we have great teams that all have, you know, good schedules and we have good feedback loops and, you know, everybody's accountable for what they have to do. And, you know, if somebody doesn't get their job done, then there's a number two waiting behind them, which is kind of eat what you kill concept. So once somebody says no, then they go to the back of the line and, you know, the number two person steps up. That cycle's worked really well and everybody's happy.

So everybody can handle as much work, take on as much work as they want. And once it gets too high, then they can just revert back and they get a little like part time. And then if they want to earn their way back in and they just keep saying yes, yes, yes, yes. And you know, their phone keeps ringing. So it's kind of a cool, cool little system we have now. Did you guys always plan on building this together? Was that like how it was in the beginning? know because it was so new when i was doing it nobody was doing it especially in the mma sphere so we kind of differentiated ourselves as a weight cut company right you know number one you know weight cut company in the whole history of mma and then from there it was like all right we have that audience but where are we going and i was working with so many athletes and i was dealing with their families and i was seeing like i'm working with, but then I'm seeing what your wife is going through.

And then you got a couple of kids running around and man, it's stressful for her and for them. And you're carrying the heavy load, but she's carrying heavy loads. Then we came out with our cookbook, which was really based upon our fight camp foods, but dedicated for families. And that took all, that was a number one bestseller in multiple countries but also it was like it was on itunes for three years straight in the top 10 on itunes it really just just kept going blasted a whole new door open a whole new demograph you know kind of came in so went from

like the mma get shredded weight cut to now all these like moms and families and like want our cookbook and they kind of got involved and they wanted to lose some weight so the business kind of kept growing that way so it wasn't pre-planned. It was just an evolution. Eventually, like initially I just wanted to build a name for myself and open a gym. So I wanted, and I would have been happy, like just coming home, open my gym and, you know, making, you know, 50, 80 K a year or whatever, you know, you probably make as a successful gym owner. And I would have been happy with that. And I remember, you know, when I was was i was still fighting at the time i was wasn't a great fighter i was like a journeyman fighter but i always took big fights against good guys and i had the opportunity to keep on fighting and

i was making you know 10 15 000 a fight or something like that which you know was not bad money to fight a couple times a year especially in those that time, it was either like going all that way or do I go in on this whole Dolce diet thing? And I remember thinking about it for half a night and realizing that if I went to the fight thing, it was only for ego gratification. I was just trying to build a monument to myself. Like it doesn't do anything for my family. It doesn't really do anything for my family. It doesn't really do

anything for the community, but this whole nutrition thing, that was really the big thing, but that wasn't a guaranteed paycheck at all. Right. Fighting. I knew I had probably, you know, good two, three more years at $15,000 fights. I could fight a couple of times a year and I don't really have to work that much. I got to work out all the time and, you know, and be quote somebody, you know, that felt important. The whole diet thing was completely different. And I said, you know, that's the way I think we can help the most amount of people. It gives my family the most stability and upside to moving forward because we can really dictate our future in that way. My wife and I can work together. So now we're no longer separate and we can kind of put it together. So, you know, I kind of chose really going all in on,

on the nutrition side and, and, and building the business there. And, you know, we came out with our books and just continued to crush and hire a team of dietitians and, you know, just, just kept seeing like how we can help people kind of like you do, like, how can I find people and meet people and give them, whether it's free content, we probably give more free content than sold content, right? It's just, can we help people like if they can if we can help them maybe they'll come back and buy something or maybe they'll push someone suggest us to somebody who eventually will and that always seemed to be the way it worked out for us which was nice um so we always focused on service service first you know so we're a service company

service oriented and trying to serve the community and i think nutrition and lifestyle is one of the most underserved areas. It's a big business, it's a big industry, but a lot of it is, is, is garbage, you know? So we're just trying to offer another, another take on it, you know, and, and, you know, again, back to my wife, she's been integral in supporting me through this process, you know, without me having her at home to keep that stability. It's, you know, we're equals completely in the process. Well, where can people find you? The dulce diet.com, you know, we're, we're on YouTube folks starting to grow that a little bit now. I'm on Instagram at the Dulce everywhere. It's, it's just the Dulce diet, whether it's our.com where we have an online membership program. Um, it's, you know, the books on

Amazon or wherever you might want to get those or, you know, just the basic social media stuff. Cool. Well, good luck. Good luck with the fight this weekend. I'll be there. I'm excited. I'm excited. It's been a while since I've been at a UFC fight, so I'm fired up for it. And it's been a while since I've been back here in Sacramento. So that's pretty cool. And Uriah Faber's fighting. Hometown boy, right? Hope he does well. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength.

Catch you guys later.