Issue 151

February 2017

You moved to Colorado to train with Team MusclePharm. What’s it like?

It’s great. We have the best facility in the country. We have everything you could possibly need there. I couldn’t be happier. We have great people around us. We have great support from the MusclePharm team. The sky is the limit for what we have going on there.

What does your cardio training consist of?

That’s a question with a long answer. I could write you a book. The further out from a fight, the higher the volume will be and the closer to the fight the higher the intensity will be. When it comes to types of cardio it is all based on goals of training.

I do every type of cardio there is, from running and biking to swimming and rowing. You name it, I do it. It’s just a matter of where it fits in to the program so I can peak for the fight.

You cut back on sparring for a number of reasons including head injuries. How do you spar now?

People spar for the wrong reason, with no real direction and end game in mind.

The sparring is, like everything else, a tool that will work toward an end goal. Sparring changes all the time. It can be specific sometimes. Other times it’s good to just go in and have fun and try to find a rhythm and find timing and try to see what a fight will be like.

The vast majority of the time it should be directed toward something specific with an end goal in mind.

Do you put a lot more emphasis on your grappling sparring now?

There is a certain place for that live feel that you need and you can do a lot more in grappling. It’s probably more important to do it on the ground. I probably do more drilling on the ground now than I ever have before.

My coach, Elliot Marshall, has been really big on drilling and really pushing me. It has created some great results and I feel better all the time.

Does that mean you do a lot of live action drills?

A lot of people get confused as to what real training is. Real training is not competing against someone in the gym. Training is drilling and micromanaging the skill sets and breaking them down into pieces and fixing each piece and creating a larger machine.

This a big missing piece in most training and it’s a very complicated thing to do. A lot of chemistry has to be had to make it all come together. I wish there was a mastery of it but that is one of the big balancing acts we play in this game.

There is no perfect solution. You will always be lagging somewhere.

How often do you do weight training and how much do you lift?

That’s another book answer. It changes all the time. Resistance training is a tool and once you know what the end goal is you can put it into your program.

Sometimes it’s about strengthening the muscles, sometimes it’s about recruiting more motor units. I can be about rehabilitation, which we are always dealing with due to injuries.

You follow a ketogenic diet. What is that?

I have done similar low-carb diets but I never did a low-carb, high-fat diet that produced ketones. I started doing it because of the research showing the positive effects of this diet in relation to traumatic brain injury and concussions.

I started it and I started feeling better. I did the research. Now it’s a much larger part of the cycle. It’s become a huge positive thing for me.