Issue 190

When a UFC fighter is struggling to shed pounds who do they call? Mike Dolce, of course - author of The Dolce Diet and the most acclaimed nutrition expert in mixed martial arts. But what’s he doing better than every other coach in the industry? Let's find out.

Mike Dolce is the most sought-after diet coach in mixed martial arts for good reason. His famous Dolce Diet has helped an array of the sport’s biggest and brightest stars not only safely cut down to a weight division, but also live healthier lifestyles too.

Former UFC light heavyweight champions Vitor Belfort and ‘Rampage’ Jackson, and former number-one contenders Thiago Alves and Chael Sonnen all subscribe to Dolce’s nutritional beliefs, and he’s helped them produce some of the best performances of their careers.

But where did the Dolce Diet phenomenon come from, and how did it single-handedly manage to change the landscape of MMA nutrition in just a few short years?

Here Dolce explains how he went from a 282lb power-lifter to the lean 195lb physique he maintains today; why the weight-cutting philosophy of most pro athletes is ancient, redundant and in some cases even dangerous; and why he believes his work on the UFC FIT DVD course can help anyone get into the best shape of their life.

Born in New Jersey to an Italian family, Dolce’s nutritional education began in the kitchen helping cook family meals. Like many young men, Dolce had a fascination with ’80s action heroes and wanted to look just like them. Yet while his peers simply headed for the weights room in a bid to match the physiques of their idols, Dolce understood from the start that there was much more to becoming physically impressive than exercise alone.

“As a child I always wanted to be big and strong, I was enamored with the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Jean Claude Van Damme,” he explains. “I started paying attention to nutrition and strength training at around eight or nine years old and I always had a propensity for it. I was always very physical, very strong and I became a wrestler as a 12-year- old so I was always switched on.”

Fast forward to today and Dolce is using the knowledge he’s accumulated over the past two decades to help fuel today’s combat stars.

The Dolce Diet

Unlike others who see the athletes who hire them as simply clients, Dolce thinks of the people he works with more as a family. Therefore he preaches strict rules when it comes to eating. For example, in The Dolce Diet lifestyle there is no such thing as a cheat meal.

“What we have are called earned meals. Cheating is a negative connotation. You don’t cheat on your wife and you don’t cheat on your best friend in a game of poker, so why should you cheat on your health?” Dolce says. “My earned meals are simply a higher quantity of the foods that I eat every day now, because the foods I eat – I don’t know if there are many chefs here in Vegas who are better than me. Nutritionally speaking I know there nutrition isn’t as good as mine because my meals have the best possible nutrition and they’re freakin’ delicious.”

Even though everything Dolce eats now is of the highest nutritional quality, keeping him at a lean 195lb and 7% body fat, there was a time when he ate everything he could get his hands on to enable him to maintain the size and strength he needed to compete in power-lifting.

“I was 282lb at my biggest and I was five-foot-ten, I looked like a square,” he says with a wry smile. “I had a huge neck but I only had a 36-inch waist, which isn’t huge, but I certainly wasn’t lean, I was probably 18% body fat. I ate everything, all the good foods and all the bad foods, the calorie-dense foods. It’s a matter of calories to get that size because I’m not naturally that big of a guy. I’m naturally a 185lb man, which is pretty normal.”

As impressive as his ability to bulk up to an Incredible Hulk-like size was, the way he managed to get rid of a large amount of the weight when he eventually started his MMA career at 170lb is what dumbfounds people.

Dolce explains: “I managed to lose 110lb, I went from 282lb to fighting at 170lb in the IFL. I did my drop down in weight in stages. I lost 20lb to 30lb at a time then I would let my body level out and let my skin catch up, and then I would drop down again. I was constantly monitoring my health and making sure I was doing everything properly. I was never in a rush to get anywhere.”

“A normal morning always starts with the Dolce Diet breakfast bowl. That’s one of my favorite meals and it’s probably the favorite meal of the guys I work with,” he reveals. “From there I’ll eat things depending on what I’ve done so far that day and what I’m going to do because I’m trying to figure out what type of energy load I need. So at lunch, typically, I’ll have an omelet with all sorts of fresh veggies chopped in there. Or we might have a roasted chicken with grilled asparagus, that would be a very typical lunch.

“I also love fruit, cashews, chia seeds, olives, avocados and apples too. We have a bowl of all of those so people can just grab a handful whenever they want during the day. Dinner is always something spectacular. Recently I had the flaxseed fried chicken with muscle sprouts, which has my own healthy twist to it.

“We eat until we’re done because I don’t believe in calorie restriction or template diets. My way is filled with delicious recipes made with real foods that have earth-grown nutrients in them, which is the first principle of The Dolce Diet. Earth-grown nutrients are so important and if that’s the only thing we do right then we’re doing everything right. Quantity doesn’t matter.”

UFC FIT

“UFC FIT is a 12-week training system that covers every aspect of your lifestyle. A DVD and manual, I designed the entire program based on the science I use with my elite athletes delivered in a manner that everybody can use. It was created for three-week cycles and each cycle builds you to get to the next one.

“The first cycle was made for someone who hadn’t trained for six months to two years that could be 20lb to 100lb overweight. I build levels of strength, flexibility and coordination in each phase because I’m a world-class strength coach. I have the science and I have it spread out the same way the elite athletes do in their training camp. “I’m the on-screen coach so you see me in the nutrition manual, every motion you see and every word you hear is me.

"One of the great things about UFC FIT is that I’m a real coach, all the other fitness programs out there have actors, dancers or fitness models and that’s good but I’m the black belt in this industry and that’s something the world has never seen.”

With one of the most hectic schedules in MMA, it’s incredible Dolce is able to get any sort of workout in himself, let alone look as good – or even better – than most professional athletes. He’s quick to admit it’s not the easiest thing to schedule, but somehow he makes time for it.

“I have one of the most difficult schedules to find time to work out in. I can be in Canada for six days, then off to Vegas for 12 hours, then to LA for a day and then I’m back in Las Vegas... that’s pretty much how my life is all the time so consistency is difficult unless you plan,” Dolce says.

“My workouts are so simple now that I’ll just take a minute to do as many body-weight squats as I can, I’ll try and do that a few minutes throughout the day when I’m helping my athletes cut weight. I’ll find a moment to do some push-ups, sit-ups, find a hallway to do some sprints and other times I’ll go to the hotel gym. I was a power-lifter, but right now I love bodyweight exercises."

He adds: “However, once every five to 10 days I’ll go and do one strength workout for 20 minutes. That could involve me using a steel bell, throwing it above my head and slamming it, rowing it or hurling it, etcetera. Or I could be in the gym with 120lb dumbbells just doing sets of rows and deadlifts, as many as I can in a short period of time and then I’m out.”

With all of the Grade A knowledge he’s acquired over the years in both strength and conditioning and nutrition, how do the exercises he loves complement the diet plan he practices so efficiently?

“Within The Dolce Diet I have a set of principles that involve nutrition and strength training. On the strength side you should be able to perform every body-weight exercise for 100 repetitions before you use any sort of resistance. If you can’t perform 100 body-weight squats with perfect form you have no business putting a barbell on your back, or using a dumbbell or a leg press because you have to train your anatomy and your physiology first.

"Guys, you have to train within your own skeletal system before you expand out.

“I actually believe I’m a better strength coach than I am a diet coach, but ‘The Dolce Strength Coach’ doesn’t sound half as cool as The Dolce Diet,” he says with a laugh.

“I have a very strong role in all aspects of the training camps of my fighters and some athletes I work directly with on their strength and conditioning. Guys like Thiago Alves, Mike Pyle, sometimes Chael Sonnen or, say, Luke Barnatt.”

The secret to cutting weight

Standing next to another of his new clients, Brit John Maguire who successfully moved down to lightweight with Dolce’s help for UFC 161, it’s clear Mike has come a long way from where he was just three years ago. When the world watched Rampage Jackson weigh-in for his showdown with Rashad Evans, many wondered why Dolce was even there and why he wore a T-shirt with his name front and center.

However, once it became public knowledge he’d helped the former UFC champion lose 50lb for the fight, Dolce quickly became one of the most wanted coaches in MMA.

Although his current weight-cutting methods are seen as groundbreaking, Dolce will be the first to admit he’s personally experienced plenty of the terrible things a fighter is willing to do to shed the extra pounds it takes to make weight.

“I’d put myself in a garbage bag, punch out the arms and legs, put on hats etc. I had a heater that I’d put next to an old exercise bike with a missing pedal and I would ride this bike for hours with the heater right next to me in a room that’s already hot so I could cut weight,” he recalls.

“This is the same thing guys are still doing today. A lot of professionals still do that stuff. I’ve done some bad things to cut weight, shadowboxing in saunas, pummeling and even grappling in saunas with plastic suits on. They were really terrible, dangerous situations and that’s why we do things the way we do them now, we never step in a sauna now. If we have to step in a sauna or wear a sweat suit then we did our job wrong.”

Cage ready

So what is he doing that’s different to what everyone else practices? Why are other fighters struggling to even walk up the steps to get to the scales, whilst Dolce’s charges appear hydrated, happy and healthy?

He explains: “I want my athletes to always be between 8–12% body fat. My athletes in the off-season should be between 10% body fat. Three weeks before the fight my athletes are 7% body fat and we maintain that body fat percentage until we step in the cage. Any lower is counter-productive, unhealthy and leads to poor performances.

“We maintain 7% body fat because that allows us, as they train harder, to eat more food all the way through. My athletes are eating more and more food as they get into fight week and they’re heavy. Johny Hendricks was 196lb on Tuesday before the weigh-ins, and he weighed in at 171lb. He beat Carlos Condit in a war and Condit is one of the most superbly conditioned athletes in the game.

“We take the weight off in the last day and we do it via nutrition and stimulating the metabolism, we do it through adjusting the metabolites and low-activity sweat sessions. The ability to sweat whilst not burning precious calories really helps.”

He adds: “With Chael, for his second fight with Anderson Silva, we were eating and relaxing and that’s the honest truth. He was eating constantly, drinking water and black coffee. He was super hydrated and was eating four to six times a day. He’d eat four whole meals then two snacks throughout the day. We were stimulating his metabolism and the faster his metabolism ran the more weight he’d lose naturally, the more hydrated he was the more readily his body would remove the water it had already stored.”

For Mike Dolce, years and years of making mistakes, learning and experimenting have brought him to where he is today. From being an unsatisfied and unchallenged tax assessor in his hometown of New Jersey to traveling around the world helping fighters achieve their dreams, he has gradually, yet successfully, changed his life and the lives of thousands of others too.

While most fighters struggle to get rid of those dreaded last few pounds, Dolce and his team seem to breeze through weight cuts as if they were nothing. According to the diet coach the key to having an easy and successful drop down in weight is relatively simple.

“The most important advice I offer anyone is to eat, drink and be merry,” says Dolce. “You must be healthy in order to compete at your best. If you are not happy, why do it at all? Some may say it is not possible to follow this advice but if you stay accountable to your health and your career 52 weeks a year, it becomes very easy.”

So forget about cheating with that double quarter pounder with cheese meal from your nearest burger joint, instead reprogram your lifestyle to live healthy and happy.