Issue 102
What makes the champ? UFC’s Joe Rogan presents his own theory on GSP’s success.
MAKING THE CHAMP PART ONE by Joe Rogan.
I’ve been doing these interviews for the UFC’s new online show Ultimate Insider and although they’ve all been very interesting, one subject has really stood out. It was the interview that I had with Georges St. Pierre.
There’s quite a few exceptional things about Georges, the first one that always comes to mind being that he’s such a nice guy.
Over the years I’ve seen him interact with hundreds if not thousands of people, and he’s always friendly and genuine, and although confident of his capabilities he’s always very honest about past shortcomings, and extremely open and expressive about his thoughts and fears.
He has what I would call an exceptional character.
I believe it’s a quality that a sizeable percentage of the best fighters in mixed martial arts possess. When you look at the ‘ingredient list’ of a group of MMA champions, you’ll find quite a few variables.
There’s going to be the guys with extreme physical advantages, or guys like Semmy Shilt and Fedor Emelianenko that consistently outperform bigger, stronger men through technique and intelligence.
There’s going to be outlandish physical specimens like Alistair Overeem, and unassuming destroyers like Cain Velasquez. Some will be tall for their weight, others will be short. But the number one characteristic that all mixed martial arts champions share, is that they’re all bad motherf**kers. Period. End of discussion.
Each and every champion is an exceptional performer in the most physically difficult and mentally demanding sport on the planet.
They may not be perfect. They may in fact be troubled. But if they’ve reached championship level they’re able to produce a level of intensity and focus that only a tiny percentage of the people on the planet are capable of.
That’s a champion’s number one characteristic: are all exceptionally intense and dedicated people. That’s 100%.
Now the next question of course is what separates the ‘very good’ from the ‘great’ and from the ‘epic’? What ingredients have to be on hand to create an Anderson Silva? What other characteristic do almost all of the pound-for-pound greats have? The answer is they’re nice people.
I think that is one powerful quality that almost all of the great fighters have; they’re not burdened down by a sh*tty personality.
I firmly believe that a person with said sh*tty personality carries an incredible amount of extra weight through this life. It’s very difficult to be happy and to get things done at an extremely high level if you’re a douche bag, and I truly acknowledge that’s one of the main reasons why so many champions in this sport are exemplary human beings.
Fedor, Anderson, GSP, BJ, Machida, Couture… all some of the friendliest people you could ever want to meet. I don’t think that’s just some sort of coincidence.
Being a civilized individual in any endeavor means you have the advantage of having one less opponent that you have to compete with in order to achieve your goals; yourself.
Most troubled people can’t even understand why there’s all this turmoil in their life, and very few have the control of ego and objectivity to look at the possibility that their ‘being’ is imbalanced, and that perhaps a great deal of their troubles here on earth are self-manifested.
The nice guys are free of all this extra self-struggle.
They’re on a healthier and much more positive path that always encourages balance.
This crucial balance is far more important in combat sports than it is in any regular athletic pursuit, because the combat sports most accurately reflect your true spirit, your essence as a being.
In the sport of basketball a guy can be an egotistical a**hole, and he’s probably still going to be able to keep a career together as long as he practices and he’s physically talented.
In football you can be a troubled person, and still perform on the gridiron when someone tosses you a ball. There’s just far less involved in these pursuits than there is in mixed martial arts.
There’s no guarantee in ‘regular’ sports that an athlete’s character is going to get exposed, even over a long career.
In combat sports, however, the chances of exposure are overwhelming. It might not happen in every bout, mind you. Things can go very well for a fighter and we don’t really learn that much about what really makes him tick. He might connect early with the perfect technique and end the match quickly, and all we learned from that is that he’s skilled, or that he can at least do one thing really well.
We didn’t learn how in shape he really is, and what kind of pace he can keep up in the third round of a tough fight.
Can you dig down to pull it off in the fourth and the fifth?
What kind of discipline and self-control do you have?
What kind of work have you put in preparing your body and mind for this confrontation? Have you considered all of the possibilities? Do you have a plan C?
When the crowd starts cheering while your opponent is winning, do you begin to wonder why people don’t like you? When you’re on your way to the cage, do you think incessantly about the rows you’ve had with your girlfriend recently? Can you keep it together when you start to get tired? These questions are still all on the table if a fighter is 4-0 with 4 quick KOs.
A basketball player may go through his entire career and we the viewing public never really get a detailed assessment of his human potential, but if a fighter sticks around long enough, and has enough quality opponents we will get the answer to each and every question about what that person’s made from.
There are brief moments in a truly great fight in the middle of a spectacular performance where you can see past a fighter’s flesh and sounds. And as your mind is awash with amazement, and swimming in pure chimpanzee-DNA-excitement, for a second there you realize that you’re seeing something other than just two men fighting.
You’re really seeing way past that. You’re seeing their souls.
The goose bumps rise, the ears ring with screaming cheers, and as the mind spins at an extraordinary RPM, for a brief moment you can
see… more.
It’s not entirely tangible but there it is. Your brain doesn’t know how to store it; it’s not a sound, it’s not a visual, but yet the brain is getting all this clear information that it is not quite sure where to process.
The brain is telling you, ‘There is that man’s essence. He has reached such an extraordinary height that you can see into his spirit.’
It’s a fleeting feeling, and since the mind has no category to confidently place the information in, it ignores it. Given a bit of time the inspiration will have subsided to normal levels, and the crazy idea that you peered into this man’s soul can just be dismissed as the product of an overly enthusiastic imagination. You may completely forget the phenomenon, but if you keep watching fights, one day in the heat of an epic battle, it will surface again.
Kicks and punches will be flying, and a man will dig down deep to reach heights previously unseen. The door will open to the furnace of your monkey brain and the bonfire inside will be blasted with winds of pure oxygen. And in that moment, you’ll see it again.
Like a ghostly apparition of a person you’ve only met in your dreams – you’ll recognize it, not quite understand it, and ultimately write it off as nonsense, because the idea behind it is a bit too crazy for most of us.
Almost every true fight fan has experienced these moments, and for many of us this excitement is what got us hooked in the first place.
When Anderson Silva caught Chael Sonnen with a triangle in the fifth round of a fight he was losing badly, we saw his spirit.
Same as when Dan Henderson knocked out Wanderlei Silva.
Same as when Cain Valasquez ran through Lesnar. Same as when Couture stopped Gonzaga with a broken arm. You might only sense it for a second, or it could last for an entire round, but it’s there, make no mistake about it.
To be a mixed martial arts champion you’re going to need everything, and being a good person is a part of that. It’s not a trivial component, but rather a crucial aspect of the being as a whole: vital for performance in each and every aspect of your life.
So what would you call that aspect if you had to give it a name on a flow chart? ‘The spiritual’ That’s admittedly a risky, new-agey word.
But objectively I think it’s the correct one for the quality we’re describing. Being healthy of humanity is empowering to your essence.
Call it your soul, call it your spirit, but whatever you describe it as, you’ve got to recognize that it’s a huge part of your success in everything you do.
So what’s the rest of the equation? Well, obviously physical and mental. Not necessarily in that order.
And that, my friends, is where the controversy kicks in. The interesting thing about the GSP interview, besides the aforementioned confirmation that he’s a terrific human being, was that he proclaimed to me that he no longer does any conditioning drills.
That, I found quite surprising.
In most people’s minds, championship level MMA and brutal strength and conditioning programs go together like Egypt and the pyramids.
We’ve all seen the brutal and captivating videos of top MMA fighters going through incredibly rigorous strength and conditioning programs. Images are forever etched in my brain of the UFC All Access episode with Sean Sherk.
They’re an insane montage of the chiseled champion: soaked with sweat sprinting up hills, pushing iron sleds and slamming hammers into tires with the intensity of a sword-wielding demon from a Lord of the Rings movie. He wasn’t just training, he was sending a message.
It said: ‘I’m willing to go through all this horrible shit, so that I never get tired when I’m beating the f**k out of you.’
The message isn’t just ‘Look how hard I’m working.’ It’s also ‘I know you’re not working this hard, and I want you to realize it.’ This has sparked a whole movement in MMA training where many fighters are devoting a considerable amount of their training time to extracurricular activity other than the already involving trio of MMA disciplines; wrestling, striking, and submissions.
Over the past few years this has become an established necessary evil in every champion’s training routine, and that’s why I found it so surprising that Georges was sitting in front of me saying that he wasn’t buying any of it.
He said one day a week he does Olympic-style lifting to stay strong and prevent injuries, but that all that footage of him getting up early and running in the snow of Montreal was just, in his own words, “fake.”
He said he didn’t run, and he didn’t even jump rope. He said: “Why would I jump rope when I can shadow box instead?”
I was surprised, but I found myself replying, “Yeah, why would you?”
It made total sense.
What Georges stressed was that the most important quality was efficiency. To be very technically proficient and get all of your cardiovascular training in performing martial arts techniques on heavy bags, pads and in sparring and grappling.
Immediately it made so much sense, but yet I was still surprised.
I was taken aback that he would be so honest and forthcoming about what could be really important information to his potential opponents, but I was also struck that he would be so passionate about it.
It was apparently something that he had “figured out” about his training, and he felt very strongly about relaying this information.
The video of this interview got online, and the response was very mixed. Some people saw the logic in such a training approach, while what with the Internet being the Internet lots of other people cried ‘fake.’
They weren’t buying it, and thought it was simply a psychological ploy by the clever champion.
I’ve thought about this quite a bit, and I think I can safely say that there’s no real one and only answer to this training dilemma.
Georges has found his method over trial and error, and it’s what he feels works best for him. What you definitely have to take into consideration however is that Georges is already an exceptional athlete. He’s already strong, and he’s already fast.
For another fighter that’s not really bringing that level of athleticism to the party, they may get better returns in their fights if they put some horsepower behind their already proficient skills.
For others, they’ve got the power, they just need to increase their cardiovascular capacity so that they’re confident enough in their endurance that we can see their true technical potential.
Every competitor is different, and that’s what makes a fighter’s training routine so complicated.
Each has to find his own perfect formula. For Georges, he believes he’s got it down to a science, and he’s willing to tell the whole world.
TRAINING DAY
A typical training day for GSP would include:
Plyometrics: box jumps, medicine ball drills, hammers
Olympic lifting
Strength work: weighted chins, weighted inverted rows, walking lunges, squats
Power work: sled pushing
STRETCHING
Jon Chaimberg: “From the beginning I’ve taught Georges to roll out, to self-massage, to active warm-up and to stretch. But I have to give him credit on taking it to another level. He’s really pursued massage by himself.”
WEIGHT CUTTING
Jon Chaimberg: “He walks around at 193lb, maybe 192. It’s tough for fighters to always eat clean, in Vegas for example, but Georges brings his own chefs to wherever he goes. It’s world-class food with no sodium, no carbs. It helps him get into a realistic weight cutting area.
I did Georges’ last cut with him and in 55 minutes he was able to cut 8lb in the sauna.”
BRIDGING
This exercise is enormously good for you. Not only does it prepare the body for ‘bridging’ an opponent off you from mount, it exercises many vital muscles and seriously improves posture (notice how it’s the opposite of the foetal position). In the ‘wrestler’s bridge’ the body is usually supported by the neck rather than the hands. While performing it can initially be daunting, it’s great for neck strength, and can be a boon for necks suffering from years of working at a computer.
NUTRITION
Jon Chaimberg: “I set him up with John Berardi for diet and he’s contacted Georges’ chefs. Georges is the most advanced fighter I know regarding diet and recovery.”
GAMEPLANS
Jon Chaimberg: “Other people have to prepare for him rather than the other way around. So he trains hard, tries to progress.
His skill’s on another level and it’ll be a while before someone catches up with him. So he can experiment with new things. For instance, if Rashad’s planning to break someone down over five rounds we can work on that. But Georges less than anybody.”
In terms of the Koscheck fight where GSP employed a jab to keep his opponent at a distance, Chaimberg does say: “For working the jab we’ll do some drills on the ladder.”
MAKING THE CHAMP PART TWO
Jon Chaimberg - GSP’s long-standing strength and conditioning coach.
Q: How did you meet Georges?
Jon Chaimberg: “Georges was the first MMA guy I trained. I actually met him just before the first time he took the title, from Matt Hughes.
I guess he didn’t want to fix what wasn’t broken. Hughes. The day after he lost to Matt Serra, Georges gave me a call and we first started working together a lot.”
Greg Jackson calls you ‘the Albert Einstein of MMA strength and conditioning,’ because of the way you put ‘everything together’...
“I just have my own style. I’ve learned from a number of mentors and I try not to have an ego: if I see something that works, I try to incorporate it. I have so many different athletes that I can’t afford to be close-minded. I can’t train Keith Jardine or Clay Guida the same way I can train an athlete with inherent explosive abilities like Georges.”
Q: What’s your strength and conditioning philosophy?
“I like to focus on power endurance, so I use Olympic lifting, plyometrics, strength complexes. I also like to work with anaerobic capacity and lactic threshold. So sled work, sprinting, tabata...”
Q: How tough are you on Georges?
“I’m as tough as I have to be. As a coach it’s difficult to stay on top of how tired they are how much they’ve been sparring and any other work they’re also doing.
The sport is very demanding and you don’t want to create injuries, you have to keep them healthy. I’m nervous about overtraining and undertraining.”
Q: What have you learned about the champ from working with him?
“He’s very competitive – he has a big ego in a good way. If he struggles with anything he’ll work on it so he can do it perfectly the next time.”
Q: Whose idea was the Olympic lifting?
“I introduced Georges to the Olympic lifting: the one-arm snatch and triple extension. Georges actually uses Pierre Roy as his Olympic lifting coach, who’s very high level.
After I met him Georges fought Koscheck, Hughes and Serra in a very short period of time. So, not to risk injury we were giving him weighted jump squats and one-arm snatches. Then he had a break after BJ, where he learned how to Olympic lift. We’d consider him a novice right now, but at least he’s learning the movement.”
Q: What’s the next big MMA fitness trend Georges is going to break?
“He’s been playing around with gymnastics. He’s really trying to push the bar on what works for him. It’s amazing how many things he’s trying.”
Q: What’s up with Georges’ take on fitness?
“The difference with GSP is he’s so naturally explosive and he doesn’t like doing any conditioning really. You’d never catch him on a bike or a treadmill and he’ll stay away from the circuits. So for him it’s sprinting and sled work. Then he likes to work on power, so lifting and plyometrics.”
Q: How about his comments regarding conditioning on Ultimate Insider?
“He’s gone on record as saying he doesn’t believe in ‘strength and conditioning’. What he’s getting at is he doesn’t use much equipment. He’s a free weights kind of guy, a sprinting guy, a sled guy and the Olympic lifting.
His conditioning comes from the fact he does so much wrestling, so much sparring, so much skill work, so much ground ‘n’ pound on the bag harder than anybody.
He’s getting conditioned without running on a treadmill. Firas [Zahabi, GSP’s striking coach at Tri-Star in Montreal] is very good at making him do ground ‘n’ pound on the bag after sparring.”
Q:Is MMA conditioning just about core strength and explosiveness?
“Depends on the athlete. I definitely do like to work on making them explosive.
But it’s important to establish an anaerobic threshold where the athlete can explode and recover, then explode again. I trained Shane Carwin for his first fights, up until he fought Frank Mir.
Then against Brock Lesnar he totally burnt out. He had lactic acidosis. So I’m going to start working with Shane again for his next fight.”
MAKING THE CHAMP PART THREE: GREG JACKSON
GSP’s ‘Yoda’ on mentoring him during his stellar career.
Q: So how did you and GSP meet?
Greg Jackson: “It was a little bit before the Matt Sera fight. He was interested in training with the team so we met backstage at one of the UFCs after he’d worked out with Rashad and he asked if he could become part of the team.
Then after the Matt Serra fight he put me in the lead corner man position.”
Q: What techniques and training methods do you use with him? Are they personal to him or do you use them for everybody?
“I do use them for everybody but there’s still a lot of personal stuff to him. I work in tandem with Jon Danaher, Phil Nurse and Firas Zahabi. The moves that I help him out the most with are the ground ‘n’ pound and things of that nature.”
Q: What would a regular session include with Georges?
“It depends on who he’s fighting. It’s mostly structural strategy stuff, helping him out with a game plan. I run him through usually about three moves a day and get them working really well.”
Q: Georges says he doesn’t do a lot of conditioning because he spars a lot. How much does he spar and roll per week?
“He has a very set schedule where they have certain time set aside for sparring, but almost every day. He only has one day off a week, but Georges is an amazing athlete and he doesn’t need to do things that other athletes need to do. I wouldn’t recommend your normal guy not doing strength and conditioning but what works for Georges, works for Georges.”
Q: What aspect of Georges personality comes through when he’s training and what sort of partner is he?
“I think the main aspect is his intelligence. He’s a really smart guy. Even when he’s sparring, he’s learning, thinking, figuring things out.”
Q: And what is he like to work with?
“I think he’s the best kind of training partner. He doesn’t try to hurt you but he’s trying to push you. You know he’s gonna hit you, and he’s gonna try and take you down, but he’s never trying to hurt you. He won’t throw an accidental elbow or knee you. He isn’t going to do anything dirty or try and injure you but he is really going to push you.”
Q: Where do these effective game plans come from? Are they a collaborative effort?
“It’s a collaboration of all of us. All the coaches get together.
We’re all such good friends and we talk all the time. Georges has a tremendous amount of input because he’s so intelligent.”
Q: The Koscheck game plan was a different attack to recent wrestling-based approaches, being more about the jab. Don House has been saying that Georges has one of the best jabs in the business for quite a while now.
“That’s true. We were very concerned about Koscheck trying to find that right hand he was often looking for in the first fight. We were making sure Georges didn’t get caught with that, working on keeping his shield up, and utilizing that jab a lot.
Koscheck is a fast fighter so it’s very disconcerting when he meets a fighter that’s faster than him and that’s Georges. Just having the speed to put off Koscheck’s timing was very important.”
Q: Georges has talked briefly about sports psychology. Has that played a lot in his performance since you’ve known him?
“I’ve watched Georges get better and better. He’s always been a very strong guy. Anybody who thinks he’s weak is making a terrible mistake. He just likes to be able to maximize everything so if he has a mental protocol that helps him maximize his focus and determination then he’s gonna use it. I’ve watched him use sports psychology techniques to really enhance his performance and bring out the best in him.”
Q: How tough are you on him?
“I don’t need to be tough on him because Georges is more tough on himself than any coach could ever be. He does whatever I ask him to do in training and he’s his own biggest critic. It’s hard to be tough on someone who’s so good, and is actually mad when he wins because he wanted to do better.”
Q: What gets him motivated?
“Georges is such a veteran and he’s got so many great coaches around him that I don’t need to do anything to get him motivated.
And he’s really dedicated. I don’t need to give him a Rocky Balboa corner speech to get him riled up because it’s his job and he loves his job. When you fight for love then you don’t really need a lot of motivation.”
Q: What have you learnt from Georges?
“What haven’t I learnt from Georges. I’m always in awe of him.
Just the way he handles his success is very impressive. He’s always kind to everybody and he’s always generous to his team mates.
Those are the things that have really impressed me about GSP and I’ve learnt that you can be the best at something and still be a down to earth guy.”
MAKING THE CHAMP PART FOUR: FREDDIE ROACH
Freddie Roach spent several days training Georges St Pierre ahead of his UFC welterweight title defence against Josh Koscheck, proving the benefit of training with expert coaches.
Roach, who has trained 27 boxers to world titles, looked at several factors in GSP’s hand skills, and said initially he had found GSP to be “stiff in his movements” and helped to “loosen him up.”
That was visible in the fluidity of his jabs against Koscheck in the opening round of GSP’s defense of the UFC welterweight title, for which Firas Zahabi, GSP’s striking coach, must also take major credit.
Q: How did you and Georges hook up?
Freddie: “Georges came to see me with his manager Shari Spencer. So I worked with him at the Wild Card [in Hollywood, CA] and I trained George in the Philippines for two days, too.
He’s one of the best students I’ve taught. You teach him something and he must go away and practice and practice, because everything I showed him he seemed to learn overnight. I said to him one day, “You’ve been in front of the mirror going over and over it, haven’t you?” because he absorbs technique very well.
He even asked me to be in his corner on the night against Koscheck but I was in Vegas with boxer Amir Khan.”
Q: What’s the difference between training MMA fighters and boxers?
“I like training those guys – Anderson Silva, GSP, Andrei Arlovski... they are some of the best athletes out there.
GSP thought he could box when he first came to me, but he soon learnt he had different skills. Georges was very square and very tight and I got him to loosen up.
He was a great student, in all honesty, who tries really hard.
It will have improved his game a little bit. You know what I also really liked about him? He trains his ass off every day no matter what day it is, even when he’s not in training camp. He trains every day of his life.”
Q: We saw you on The Ultimate Fighter, how did you find the experience?
“I even went on The Ultimate Fighter and helped the guys in his team and you know, the greatest compliment was that the other guys in the house in Koscheck’s team were complaining that they didn’t get to work with me.”
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