Developing The New Generation Of USA MMA Athletes & Breath Work For Fighters w/ Nick Fury (Ep. 48)

Nick Fury2:44

So they're fighting once a day for the next five days, I think. It's when it might be Tuesday, Wednesday, Tuesday there in Serbia.

James de Lacey3:18

So how does that tournament—how does the structure of that tournament work? Because fighting once a day every five days, what happens when, say, you get dropped on day one but still win the fight? You fight the next day with—I would think that that early in that big of a bracket, 32, 36 man bracket, that if you lost your first fight, you're probably out.

Nick Fury3:18

But if you won—I'm saying if you got dropped but then still won the fight, you fight—you got dropped and then you still won the fight—and then you fight the next day, you're still fighting the next day, unless you're medically disqualified because of a concussion.

James de Lacey3:51

Which—oh, I know the IMMAF is a well-structured, legitimate organization, but I also would think though that if somebody got dropped in one that they'd grease them through into the next round despite whether they were concussed or not. Interesting.

Nick Fury4:28

I think that, too, is kind of should be on the fighter in terms of whether they want to take that risk or not. Because being able to get to this tournament in the first place is a monumental feat. Just qualifying for Worlds is pretty freaking tough. And we're talking a hundred-plus countries competing in this event.

James de Lacey4:28

So what does it take to qualify? Maybe someone's listening now looking, "Hey, this could be a career path." Or is it even a viable career path? Is this something that can lead onto something else professionally, or...?

Nick Fury5:01

I mean, what we're seeing right now is that the IMMAF, the organization itself, the events that they put on, they are feeding athletes into the bigger organizations. In terms of using that as a pathway, it's a great amateur pathway into a very successful pro career.

And then you have to look at the stage that you're competing on in the IMMAF. The lights are bright there. These events are huge. You're fighting people from different countries with a lot of—there's just a lot more on the line than a local amateur fight. There's more pride, the accolades are high. And I would think that doing that through the IMMAF is going to give you equivalent pressure and reps compared to what you're going to see when you fight in one of the bigger pro organizations.

James de Lacey6:15

No, for sure. And what does it take to qualify for something about that?

Nick Fury6:15

Okay. Well, it's different by country. Most countries have a state-sponsored, IMMAF-recognized program, so they have their own state-sponsored amateur circuit. And you would compete in those events within your country and you would rank each competition. And then I believe some people got in by cumulative wins and points, and other people were selected to try out.

So we have the USFFL in the United States. So your opportunity to go to Worlds or any of these big global events for amateur MMA would be to compete in local events through the USFFL. They track your statistics and then you get invited to the bigger events like Panams and the different world events. And then, yeah, you can represent your country, depending on where you rank.

James de Lacey7:37

All before—before we go into the strength and conditioning side—if someone's listening to this and is maybe interested in trying to go down this road, how do they start competing in the USFFL?

Nick Fury7:37

Okay. So you would go to the website—I think it's fightleague.org, I'll have to look that up. But there's kind of a problem with that, so you would have to look for events that are sponsored by the USFFL and just register to fight. And if you couldn't do that, then I would suggest that you reach out directly to the USFFL—John Frank or Jim Nightingale—and they could kind of guide an athlete in the right direction in terms of how to get in the organization and then compete for them.

James de Lacey8:10

Gotcha. So, well, you've obviously had a fair amount of success with athletes, with the Ultimate Fighter you had in your house there, your little reality TV show at home. So to dive into some of your training philosophy, kind of how you prepared these guys for these events and eventually obviously how they eventually made it into this...

Nick Fury8:44

Yeah, well, from the beginning when I first started working with them, I had to maintain a perspective of long-term development. So I'd say the type of programming I had them on was a slow, continuous development, with projecting out years and years and years in advance of where they were and where we wanted them to be.

So slow, continuous training—it wasn't a sexy program at all, just the basic fundamentals. These are young athletes, right? What I find often—and so they're young athletes and they're in a sport with probably the most impact and risk for injury of any other sport aside from rugby and football and stuff like that. Every training session, something bad could happen. There's that much risk involved.

And I had to factor that into how I was going to develop and execute the programming on my end to make sure that they were getting continuously stronger, that their conditioning was developing, body composition and such, slowly over time without increasing their risk of injury. That's a slow, continuous program with very little peaking, to be honest, not through me. Most of the peaking for their conditioning was managed through doing the actual thing.

Something that you talk about in some of your articles—because the reality is, when it comes to conditioning and peaking an athlete for martial arts, it's not that practical to try to do it through training in the gym. They really need to be using those muscles in their body in the way that they're going to be using it in their event, with varying intensities and volumes and such.

James de Lacey11:18

Yeah. Before getting back to the podcast, I want to let you know there's a link down in the description for the Sweet Science of Fighting Underground community. You can get all the help you need for your combat sports training. You get every single Sweet Science of Fighting training program, online course, and you get access to a range of coaches within the private Discord community. So go check that out and back to the podcast.

And these guys were working full-time as well, were they, most of the athletes?

Nick Fury11:42

I trained full-time. Very few of them worked. A few of them were in school, some of them had little odd jobs that they would do like DoorDash, but the last two and a half years I had about 15 to 25 full-time training athletes.

James de Lacey11:42

Wow, okay. So what did a typical training week look like, say Monday to Saturday or Sunday?

Nick Fury12:16

Every day they would train. It was a two-hour block of training. Tuesdays and Thursdays were dedicated to just recovery work, so breathing, mobility, a little bit of yoga, mostly mobility. Monday, Wednesday, Friday was a structured push-pull with a little bit of conditioning.

I always did an hour of accessory work with them before we got into their programming. So Monday, Wednesday, Friday for the two-hour block, they started each session with movement flows, breathing, tissue mobilization, sometimes general and specific. Then we would go into pull-ups and deadlift and then a little bit of a conditioning round and then a structured cool down. That was the nuts and bolts of the programming.

James de Lacey12:57

Nice, okay. So to do that hour in the beginning, so the actual strength work itself, how many exercises would you have in there? Would it just be, say, pull-up and deadlift and then the conditioning, kind of low volume that way?

Nick Fury13:29

No, no, I had it all laid out based on where they were at with their individual difference in terms of where they were at with their strength. The sets and reps were different for each of the athletes, how many they were performing.

I used kind of the older Opex model and some of the stuff that they were able to draw from early CrossFit and just looking at other sports to create a blueprint for the benchmarks based on body type that you would want to see. So I was monitoring every one of their lifts and then trying to get them to a reasonable percentage of where you would want them to peak professionally within the period of time that I had them.

And the programming was adaptive, though, because as much as I would want to create a program for them that was laid out, that was progressing them each week, that just wasn't a reality with their training load. So say I wanted them to do a percentage of their one-rep max on a Friday and that's what it called for in the programming, that rarely ever worked that I was able to do it that specifically. Because it was hard to factor in all the other things that they were doing and how they were actually going to feel when they showed up for the session.

James de Lacey14:36

For sure, that's always a thing that sometimes just straight programs don't allow you to do is have that variability because you never know. If you had a hard session on Thursday, you come Friday and that's just not happening, whatever's on there.

Nick Fury15:05

And when I had them on a program where they were progressively loading week by week at percentages of numbers, maybe targets or stuff that we had already tested, when I had them on structured programming like that and I pushed them through it, I noticed a negative effect in a lot of them in the rates of recovery. Nobody ever got outright injured, but they did experience a lot of tissue stress that I just felt was unnecessary, an unnecessary risk.

Another thing that I really worked hard at with the programming that I developed for them was trying to ensure that I wasn't pushing them so hard each session that they were sore. And that I had to monitor session by session and athlete by athlete. It was all over the place, but I had benchmarks and targets and we were working towards those for each one of them in an adaptive, continuous way.

James de Lacey16:24

Sorry, what did the conditioning look like at the end of most of those days? Did that change based on the day or the athlete throughout that?

Nick Fury16:24

The conditioning would change kind of based on the period of where they were at. So it was mostly long aerobic conditioning for a lot of them, very little intensity in my programming, knowing that on any given day they would get more than enough intensity through their live rounds, which almost every single one of their training sessions ended with live rounds.

And there wasn't a lot of coordination on my end with the other coaches in terms of knowing, oh, this athlete's going to spar at this intensity this day and so on. That's frustrating, really. I tried to build up just that long aerobic base to keep them healthy, because at the end of the day for those short bouts of intensity that they're going to need in their fights, they do need a big engine in terms of metabolic conditioning.

James de Lacey17:27

For sure. So what did their technical training schedule look like? Because obviously you mentioned they did live rounds at the end of most of their technical sessions. Were they training Monday through Saturday once a day with their technical?

Nick Fury17:53

Some of them were training seven days a week. So some of them were training six days a week. Most of the guys that were training full-time, they were putting in five to six hours a day of training, and I didn't always know what their technical rounds looked like.

And some of it too is, depending on where that athlete was with their specific skill sets, there might be more boxing training or kickboxing or wrestling or whatever. Yeah, I wish I would have had the opportunity to meet with all the coaches and present my end of the programming and then have that come together with their technical rounds and when and where they had intensity, but that just wasn't a reality of what I was able to do.

James de Lacey18:30

Was that because of the coaches that were there you couldn't do that?

Nick Fury19:05

We just didn't really talk a lot. Well, I worked with originally the team at 10th Planet. Well, I didn't train at 10th Planet. I met a few people and then I ended up getting referred into this position where I'm coaching all these athletes, and that's how everything built up. So I wasn't actually on the team and meeting the coaches daily. I would just see events.

James de Lacey19:38

Yeah, okay. So yeah, I understand what you have to go through with stuff like that and trying essentially, having to guess what's going to happen when, and just not do too much where you're going to overpush the guys so that when they go to technical training or they come from technical training that you're not adding so much more on their plate that it pushes them over the edge.

Nick Fury19:38

Yeah, I definitely had to work with that a lot. That's frustrating.

James de Lacey19:38

But within the weeks itself, they were doing five to six hours of technical training and then the extra training with you on top of that, or was that five to six would be total training for the day?

Nick Fury20:06

Yeah, and a lot of, to be honest with you, and this is the reality of just what I was presented with in their states of development, a lot of the strength and conditioning work I did do was based on recovery. Because if you look at martial arts and MMA as a sport, it's a movement-based sport, right? And for a lot of these athletes to perform at the highest level and acquire new skill, they need a lot of mobility in their bodies to prevent injuries and just to create space for them to move technically within.

So that first hour of every session to hour and a half was just completely dedicated to making improvements in that space. Because I don't know what your experience is with movement dysfunction, but I found in my practice that eliminating those barriers to movement automatically translates to them performing better at a specific thing without even training that specific thing.

James de Lacey21:12

What kind of things were you doing with them within that hour, the mobility?

Nick Fury21:12

Basically, you're familiar with the FRC program, right?

James de Lacey21:12

Somewhat, okay. What's your understanding of FRC in terms of, is it joint, full joint movement basically?

Nick Fury21:52

I mean, so that was the nuts and bolts of what we were working on: stretching, breathing, tractioning out tissues with different tools like bands and such, and sometimes rolling stuff out of tissues. But really, and then trying to open up more movement space and then using movements to keep that space.

So if your ankles are tight, we mobilize the ankle and then let's put you in a position where you can actually use the ankle mobility, so like a squat, for example. I wish I could say that there was a lot of technical work going on. It was very basic. These are young athletes.

James de Lacey22:28

That's a good point you make there too, because a lot of people will think, okay, I'm whatever, I'm restricted here so I'm going to do whatever it is to get more range of motion, but they don't do anything to really cement that in. They kind of just, oh—

Nick Fury22:57

I can get a little further in what I'm doing, but they're not loading it like you mentioned there. Every single one of those positions has to be loaded in order for that to actually work for you. People, I think a lot of people get confused in thinking that great flexibility and range of motion is going to equal your ability to produce force in that space, and that's just not how it works, unfortunately. Otherwise it'd be very easy.

James de Lacey23:27

Nice. So along with all the MMA stuff, you're obviously training yourself in jiu-jitsu. Are you implementing any of these things with your own training?

Nick Fury23:27

Yeah, completely. I mean, the way my programming is structured now is pretty interesting. So I've actually incorporated cold work, which the benefits have been just amazing in terms of my ability to recover. So cold work, sauna, breath training, and mobility every day. Super light strength and conditioning—I'm 42, my rate of recovery right now is not what it was when I was younger. So I'm just trying to get progressively stronger each week.

And then I'm using the mats to develop my conditioning, but I do a fair amount of Zone 2 work each week—walking, light jogging, running, hiking—to keep building my aerobic conditioning and keep my system healthy.

James de Lacey24:09

Nice. Do you want to dive into some of your breath work? What are you doing there? Do you have any protocols that you use there or progressions?

Nick Fury24:09

I mean, I'm using pretty much right now two different systems. So the box breath for relaxation—explaining that one, 4-8-9-4. So it's a breathe in for four. I mean, what we're looking to do is lower the rate of respiration and inspiration, which ends up increasing our CO2 tolerance. That increase in CO2 tolerance allows us to carry more oxygen, thus resulting in improved aerobic output. But also tapping into the nervous system to be able to modulate periods of excitability and then resting and digesting and relaxing.

So the box breath to rest and create states of recovery, a better state for recovery. And then I'm really still just diving deeper into the fire breath from Kundalini Yoga, the Tumo.

James de Lacey25:16

Interesting. Yeah, do you want to go into a bit of that? I know nothing about that.

Nick Fury25:16

Are you serious? Okay. Well, I mean, I want to say I've been practicing this stuff for five to six years and I'm still learning every single day about how these things work and affect the body. But this is what the research is showing—is that these different breathing sequences can potentially give people more control over their physiology.

Obviously, I don't want to say his name, I'm not going to say his name, but we do know a guy, right, that's out there that developed a system. And they studied his ability to thermoregulate consciously—that's proven—control his immune system. And I think there were some other things that they were able to prove. And so that's an example of what can be done.

I mean, I don't want to go into another space of spirituality, but I mean, breathing is fundamentally the one thing that we have to do continuously, otherwise we die, right? So it's the source of how we live—it's the air, it's the oxygen we take in. And I, five to six years ago when I picked this up, I noticed that one, I didn't breathe in a way that was healthy. Held my breath all the time, had no control of my breathing, had no diaphragmatic control.

And then I started seeing that in other people, in athletes I worked with. And so I found this as an easy way to actually help people improve their performance—was just getting them into very simple breathing. Just be conscious of your breathing to start with, and then going deeper: inhaling in through the nose and out through the mouth, and then playing with the different sequences.

Like Tumo, for example, which is a rapid inhale-exhale through the nose ideally, or in through the nose, out through the mouth. And then using this to actually for performance—like from the Oxygen Advantage, for example. So teaching athletes how to control their breathing while they're performing, and then before and after.

So the guys I worked with had a charging program they would do before their events, and this is something that we practice every day in their training. And then they would have different breathing sequences to perform in the event—some of them to generate force. Most of the breathing to just, I wouldn't say stay relaxed or calm per se, but to stay conscious and to keep fueling their system with oxygen. And then recovery sequences in between rounds.

And we had a lot of success with people doing this, and I've had a lot of success with myself utilizing these breathing sequences in my own training.

James de Lacey29:03

Did you know you can represent Sweet Science of Fighting while you're training? We're more than just a membership. We also have rash guards and shorts. If you're watching this on YouTube, you'll see that we have the Sweet Science of Fighting 2.0 shorts, and we also have the Sweet Science of Fighting short and long sleeve rash guard. There's another design coming soon, but you can get those on XMmartialarts.com, and you can go down the description and you can find that. And back to the podcast.

Do you want to maybe go into some examples of those sequences? Like, for example, the charging one before the fight, the between-round recovery one, and then the one after?

Nick Fury29:34

Yeah, so the charging—what we would do is, to get the nervous system fired up, it depended on the athlete, because believe it or not, charging the diaphragm rapidly—that's going to be dependent on practice. So some of the athletes would be five to six sets of 30 breaths in through the nose, out through the mouth, fast, with a static hold at the end of each set, and two to three long diaphragmatic, rib cage, chest recovery breaths in between each charging round.

So we would do this ahead of the event to improve their ability to carry oxygen, to get them into a state mentally where they're focused. It's almost like a mini meditation for them to do the breathing before they even start moving. So that would be the charging routine.

And then it would be long, continuous breathing depending on how much rate of force they were producing in the fight, right? Just taking air in, keeping the mouth closed. And then bearing down when they're generating a ton of force and power, and then going back to that breathing. And then in between rounds, we would go to the box breathing or just the slow diaphragm, rib cage, chest.

James de Lacey31:19

Okay. And you know, I'm still figuring this all out—how it works, why it works. Yeah, and most of what I know now is that it does work. It's funny because I had—in Romania, so I have been exposed to this—in Romania we had a, I think she was a sports psychologist, come and was teaching this, that exact thing, the charging and the recovery breathing to the players.

Nick Fury31:19

There's not a lot of literature written about this applied to MMA. And so I basically—everything I've been studying is old yoga texts. And then I read about, okay, so there's a specific system in the yoga text that it says that it helps within the body, and I find that thing and then I pair it with the MMA. And then I'm always experimenting with it to see if there's a better or a worse way.

But the charging, the continuous conscious breathing with learning how to not really Valsalva, but you understand what I'm saying—it's what Hickson Gracie in that old documentary, Choke, I think it is. But to be able to generate force and then to get them into the most relaxed, calm state possible in between rounds.

And there's a group actually in California that really kind of expanded my awareness to this. Are you familiar with Underwater Torpedo League? Or Deep?

James de Lacey32:34

No.

Nick Fury32:34

It's underwater rugby.

James de Lacey32:34

No way.

Nick Fury32:34

So it's underwater rugby with a torpedo that they throw, with grappling.

James de Lacey32:34

What? Yes, you got to look it up.

Nick Fury32:34

But, okay. I wish there was more scientific, technical specifics that I could throw out there about the breathing. But from the people that I learned it from—and I mean, there is stuff that people can go look up if they really need that—but from the people that I learned it from, these were appliers of it in high-stress situations.

The UTL guys, the guys from Deep End Fitness, they were former Marine Special Forces. And so they use these simple techniques to stay relaxed and calm under insanely high pressure. Okay, so I would check them out.

James de Lacey33:52

Yeah. So where would you recommend if someone wanted to learn more about the breathing? They go just there, or other places?

Nick Fury33:52

Well, there's the Oxygen Advantage, which would be one book to read. There's a Russian system called the Buteyko method. Kundalini Yoga—they have a free educational site online that you can go, I think it's through 3HO, which is the main Kundalini Yoga group. And then self-experimentation. It's one thing to read academic research and then say, 'Okay, this...'

...is a great tool that I want to apply to the people that I'm working with, but I think self-experimentation before you start working on it with other clients is super important. Like, making progress in that space on your own and then implementing it into your programming is a responsible way to use it. I definitely think it's a game changer as a tool for helping athletes really understand their physiology better and how to use that under pressure.

James de Lacey35:09

I need to do a deep dive into this stuff too. But do you ever have fighters with issues that can't breathe well through their nose, so this breathing technique doesn't quite do what it should?

Nick Fury35:43

So yeah, great—like, they can't breathe well through their nose. There is some evidence to show that actually working through the exercises can help with some of the remodeling of the sinus way and opening up more air, their ability to take in more air over time. But yes, if they've had breaks and such and then they can't get air in, then obviously we have to use mouth breathing as well.

James de Lacey36:17

My wife's friend—she got the sinus surgery or something where they go up the nose and they clear out all the sinuses. Apparently that was game-changing, and I'm like, "Maybe I need to go try to do that at some point."

Nick Fury36:17

Interesting. A surgery?

James de Lacey36:17

Yeah, it's like not too invasive, I think. They go up the nose and they just clear it all out.

Nick Fury36:17

Just to clear it all out. Interesting, interesting.

But practicing the breathing itself, you start to notice that it does—that it's actually working that system and starts to really open up your space to breathe.

James de Lacey36:44

I'm so bad implementing a lot of this stuff with myself just 'cause I'm lazy. I need to do it because, yeah, there is value. So many people are doing this stuff and seeing benefits.

I mean, it's basically meditation, right, as you mentioned, so something you can do at the end of the day. That's what it really is, and it's so beneficial for everything else in your life and keeping you staying focused and more disciplined. And then being able to relax when you want to relax, and then being able to stimulate yourself through your breathing when you want to raise your level of excitation.

Are you ever using meditation apps, like guided meditation apps, for this stuff?

Nick Fury37:46

I am not using any guided meditation apps. I'm just experimenting on my own—no sound, no input, just silence. Well, I mean, I do my breathing and then I do my cold exposure. I do my breathing for like 20 to 30 minutes straight, and maybe I include some different mobilizations in between.

I've also found too that it's very interesting that you can use these different techniques with different postures and get slightly different results in your body.

James de Lacey38:21

Dive into that a little.

Nick Fury38:21

Like being able to use the diaphragm to help assist in opening the hips, like a pigeon pose, for example, and then charging the diaphragm in that position. Once your diaphragm actually starts to get strong too, you start to see how much actual movement that it creates in the body, like specifically in the hips. It's crazy.

James de Lacey38:21

All right, I need to do it.

Nick Fury38:59

It's similar to, almost instead of holding a stretch for time, you hold it for a certain number of breaths, and then you're actually fueling that activity with the nourishment it needs in the way of oxygen to be able to for those tissues to remodel and get stronger, or whatever—relax, and whatever it is that you're trying to do.

James de Lacey38:59

Nice. And now you've moved from Texas to Seattle. What have you got in the works now in terms of career-wise? What are you starting to create?

Nick Fury39:28

Well, I've got my clothing brand, which should be going live sometime in March—Politely Violent. So I've got rash guards and athletic wear through Politely Violent that's coming online. I'm doing a little bit of strength and conditioning work with remote clients.

I need to get better on the digital end, like you are, like getting online and actually building that out. And then I've got the gym opening in 60 to 90 days—Seattle Grappling Academy and Village of Wolves Seattle—which is pretty exciting, and that's going to be my focus till I get that stabilized and running the way I want it to run.

James de Lacey40:05

Nice. So if anyone's in the Seattle area and looking for a place to train jiu-jitsu, need to come along for sure.

Nick Fury40:05

Seattle Grappling Academy. Or, at this point, come to Marcelo Alonzo BJJ.

James de Lacey40:05

Nice, there we go. I think that's pretty much everything, a lot of all the topics that we've covered there. But do you want to maybe let everyone know where they can find and follow you, Nick, and see what you're up to?

Nick Fury40:38

You can reach me at Flow Performance Coaching on Instagram, and that'd probably be the best place to reach out to me at this point.

James de Lacey40:38

Perfect. I'll throw that down in the description anyway, so if you're watching on YouTube, Spotify, whatever, it'll be down there. But thanks for coming on, Nick. I really appreciate it.

Nick Fury41:02

Thank you.