Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Bite 6: Mike Dolce - Too Much Muscle for MMA?

Episode Date: November 27, 2019

Today's Power Bite comes to you from our boy Mike Dolce in episode 228 where we discuss and debate how much muscle is too much muscle for an MMA Fighter. Listen and watch the entire episode here: https://lnk.to/Dolce Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Visit our sponsors: ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Perfect Keto: http://perfectketo.com/powerproject Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 15% off your order! ➢Quest Nutrition: https://www.questnutrition.com/ Use code "MARKSQUEST" at checkout for 20% of your order! ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots 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

What's up everybody, it's Andrew, producer and co-host of Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast here with a Power Byte. In case you guys don't know, a Power Byte is just a short snippet, a highlight clip from a full-length podcast that we did in the past that you might have missed, or maybe you have a friend that isn't really willing to listen to an entire episode so you can share an easy, digestible clip from the entire episode. Today we're going back to episode 228 with Mike Dolce where we discuss how much muscle is too much muscle for an MMA fighter.

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If you guys are digging this conversation, make sure you listen to the entire conversation by hitting the show notes, find the link to listen and watch on all platforms. Peace. When do we see muscle mass being an issue? Um, you know, I've heard Joe Rogan talk about this on his show before

and they've talked to guy about guys like uh like rumble and they've talked about some of the other guys who get super jacked yeah i think it was a problem for uh 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 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 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, we 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, body weight 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 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 the one of the biggest problem with conor mcgregor conor mcgregor i think is one of the 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 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. 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 100% out of 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. 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 repeats at 400-meter repeats. Good luck with that, right? And they've 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 right why everything's just turned on you out of nowhere i'm gonna get my ass kicked i can't do this what am i doing like i should have i should have stuck with my finance job like 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 you feel I feel great can you go more yeah all right we're gonna shut it down what do you mean we're to shut it down? I want to keep that in tank. 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 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 around 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 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 is he's an amazing athlete but

he's a journeyman luke was a world of 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 i'm 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 done 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 it 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 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. Okay, knowing that we're all insane, let's take you have to be aware of that okay 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 it's the rock hold fight yeah yeah he looked awesome uh looks wise i mean his physique looked awesome yeah oh yeah he got man he got popped with some good shots 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 first, it's like Chuck Liddell, you know, rampage knocked him out and 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. 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 dating Hollywood starlets. I would do that for sure instead of getting ready for the octagon. That would be my choice. But, man, you just don't 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, you know, just knowing so many of the guys, uh, you know, 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. No, ideally like 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 just you 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 sonnet 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 chail abso-fucking-lutely loves like a little boy in this this hulking man's body so we created what was called the four-hour window for chail a decade or so ago and it continues on to all of our clients i say pick two 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 Superbowl, 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 four-hour window is for those four hours i don't care what you're gonna eat eat whatever the hell you want to eat don't tell me about it because i'm gonna nitpick you and right you know just don't even tell me but go and have fun and purge that demon what happens i've been doing this long enough every time they do that that first four hour window is disgusting it's just this and it makes them feel like shit because I'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. They're like, I ate a quest bar. Yeah. You're like, oh shit, alright, well you really turned the corner I guess.

That's exactly what it turns out to be and they get pissed. They're like, man, fuck you. I can't eat the stuff that I used to love. I say, well why? They say it makes me feel sick. That's an educational opportunity. Let's think about that for a second. All that poison and that toxic material that you were dumping in your body is telling you 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, that you eat all the time that makes you compete at world-class levels. You fucking look like a 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 use a mursad bectic 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 8 10 12 ounce grass-fed steaks and but we don't we don't throw in bad food you know it's like man you want french fries we're gonna go we don't throw in bad food. You know, it's like, man, you want French fries? We're going to go, we're going to bake our own fries, slice up a couple of potatoes, sweet potatoes, make, make, it was like a 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, on the white potato, make yourself a big ass burger or two, you know, two eight ounce burger or four ounce burgers, whatever.ed grain bread cut off the cut off the crust lightly 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 like 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 we have it 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? And it's going to cost you 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. 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 pounds. Ate my way all the there. I've been there. I used to be 280 pounds. Ate my way all the fucking way up. You're not tall enough to be 280 pounds. It was disgusting. It was just like this odd shape and square just rolling around.

It was nasty.