Aljamain Sterling's DIY Conditioning Program | Joe Rogan

You know, I try to do a good job of bobbing and we even move in my head and slipping off the center line. We throw a lot of kicks too. You keep guys on the outside. You have a weird style, man. You're too close, man. Yeah. That's what it is. You're too close, man. You're too close, man. Back the fuck up. Did you start out from a... I mean, I know you have a wrestling base too. Yeah. What did you start out with? What was your first martial art? I didn't have any. We... You know the karate kung fu VHS tapes? I shit you not. I have a family of... I think there's 20 of us now. My dad just had a newborn son. No! I shit you not. He's 57. The guy is out of his fucking bird. Wow. But he just had a newborn son. I haven't even met him yet. That's one. And all the boys grew up. We had these karate tapes, VHS tapes, and we would imitate the characters and we'll be like, we're the drunken master or we're the white tiger, white lion, and we have to do their fight styles. And we're like little kids, so we're still flexible and malleable. We don't break as easily. Yeah. We just start beating the shit out of each other, but we do like spinning backkicks, jumping off the couches and shit like that. And I think that might have translated, because that was like... We did that for years. But that was the most combat we did. We didn't do any wrestling, nothing traditional at all. Before I ever got into martial arts, I used to do that same thing. I used to throw kicks with my friends. I didn't know what I was doing. But it was fun. But yeah, you watch a Bruce Lee movie and you start throwing kicks or some Chuck Norris film or something like that. Yeah. You learn how to do stuff by watching it, but you could also develop some terrible habits. Yeah. But you don't look like you developed any bad habits. Like if I had a guess, I would say you have a traditional martial arts background. And what? The way you throw kicks. Like you throw kicks like a guy who started throwing kicks when you were really young. Yeah. But they're right. You throw them right. Which ones would you say? Like... All your shit. Your roundhouse kicks, your front kicks. You have great front kicks, man. You're really good at keeping guys off of you. You have good movement. You know, like you got a style that's a unique style. Like so when guys have to fight you, they go, oh, this guy is going to be kicking at me from the outside. He moves a lot. He bobs and weaves. It's hard to hit. You got a lot going on with your style. It's very tiring. I was going to ask you that. I was going to ask you that too. Because we called that your last fight, like the third round. You were kind of slowing down a little bit. I'm like, imagine all the energy this guy's using. Yeah. Because you're always bobbing and weaving and moving and kicking and moving and kicking and moving. And Moonjose is just, you know, bobbing towards you and throwing traditional type shit. Bobbing his head too. Like if you looked at like energy output, like how much more energy you must have put out in that fight than he did. Just in terms of the amount of kicks you throw and the amount of jumping back and forth and leaping in and leaping out. Like that's all like a plyometrics. It's a ton. And the good thing is credit to like the training that we do, you know. We get the... I get the right work. I got that guy, Marab Devachili, who's a freaking psycho. That guy does not get tired. We call him the machine for a reason. The guy, he would finish sparring with me. And I'm like, I did my rounds, championship work. I'm done. I'm just going to get on the bike or hit the pads, whatever it is, or band work. Just to get a lot of extra cardio push. And he'll be in there and grab two, three, sometimes four more bodies to spar with. And I'm like, this guy just doesn't fucking stop. He's out of his fucking bird. This is no exaggeration. This guy is out of his fucking bird. But it's the reason why my cardio, I'm like, you want to get your cardio top notch. Get yourself a fucking Marab. Get yourself one of those guys. He's a man. He's a good dude. He's a good dude. Sometimes too much of a good dude. I'm like, Marab, I can carry my own wallet. You know, it's like it gets to the point like that. Like, dude, thank you. But I appreciate it. But you know, but yeah, it's a very tiring style. But we do a lot of work and I do my own strength and conditioning just from having a background in physical education and soon in Portland. So do your own. Yeah. So I've been doing this since I was amateur, like writing my own thing, my own program, because they told us how to like work on like isometric squeezes and different type of like explosive muscle endurance workouts and stuff like static holes, like holding on the pull up bar and going out to punches. So I put together a pretty decent program. It's been working. I can't complain. So when you do it, how do you design it? Do you design it for the entire camp? Like, do you set it out every day like where you want to be? And do you adjust it depending on how you feel and injuries? Like, how do you schedule all that? Exactly like that. So when I'm further off from camp or not in camp at all, I'll do more lifting and I'll lift heavy and I don't really do like benching no more. I think that's just like stupid for fighters. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I'm not going to bench press somebody off my back, you know, you know, whatever. But I'll do that and I'll just the training camp and just the the the programs when I get close to the fight. And I don't mind to like sharing this because I think guys, they make it more complicated than what it should be. Like I sometimes I see all this crazy shit. I'm like, I just don't understand the whole necessity behind that. But I know I'm no physical strength, conditioning doctorate or anything like that. But from what I've seen that works for me, I just try to mimic everything that I feel in the fight and implement it into a workout. And I figure out which ways I could do that, whether it's bands, push ups, box jumps, wall sits. I do wall sits get ups with two plates. So I'm sitting down on my butt and I do like a technical stand up and I use the wall and I push up. So it's a lot of leg works, a lot of core work and two plates with two plates. It's fucked up. Sometimes I like I come there and I do it by myself in the morning. I go to the law and made by myself. 9am and I'm like, why am I putting myself through this? Like it could be so much easier and more simple, like just to do the other stuff, like the plyometric stuff and which is a little not as much impact on the body. But this is what I enjoy. I think this is what translates to the fight because this is what I feel. And I feel when I do this, I notice a drastic difference from one sparring session to the next. But to answer your question, like I adjusted. I'll do it for my legs on fire and I feel like they're really beat up from sparring. I'll do more upper body. And then if my feel my upper body is more beat up, I'll switch it off to the lower body. And if I feel like I'm fresh, like I had a good week, maybe I didn't spar on a Saturday and I come in fresh on a Monday, I'll hit it hard and do full body everything and I'll give myself five rounds of pushing it. But I separate it into rounds, simulate the fight with rounds. So I do every single minute, but I'll do about 40, 40, depending on how far I am from the fight. If I'm like just on the training camp, I don't want to kill myself. I want to ease my way into it. So I'll start like anywhere from like 30, 35 seconds to like 50 seconds. And that 10 second window or that other 30 second window is my time to recover and get to the next station. And I'll just wrap whatever I'm doing, burning out, burning out. I'll do the med ball between my legs. I'll do the foam roller in my arms and I'll squeeze it, I'll simulate the rear neck and choke and I do it for two minute intervals. And I'm just squeezing the piss out of it. And obviously you can't do it, but you do it to failure and your arms get tired, you switch and go to the other side and you switch your legs, you figure forward, you scissor the legs. So you give yourself different type of stimulation to your body to kind of account for everything that you may possibly be in for the fight. And you never know, it's like this fight, I did a lot of grappling, but I also did a lot of punching because I thought to myself, there might be a chance, it might be a possibility that I do not get paged to the ground. And I was happy I didn't force the takedowns because that would have fatigued me even more. I was like, if it comes, it comes. But we did, I did a lot of output just burning out the arms, getting that muscle endurance, kind of using that Floyd Mayweather structure of a workout, just getting the heavy back count, like high punch count in a five minute round. And I'll do that for a couple of rounds. And we did a couple of times a week. And I think you implement that with the lateral footwork that we do in a cage and just staying on your bike and having people like, like stalk you and like just not going crazy, but it's controlled. Like they're throwing punches like hooks or they're throwing a one, two and you got to like bounce side to side and get out of the way. So it's a lot of like, at least I think it's practical for what you're going to actually see when you get in the fight. And I think sure enough, a lot of the things we did pretty much happened in the fight. Just think long, long squeezes is a great idea. I was insane. Cause that's something that comes up often in a fight where you maybe got a guy in an arm triangle or something like that. And it's that close to whether you get it or he escapes. It's like, how much squeeze, how long can you keep it down? You know, when you're caught in something and it's like, you're almost kind of tapping the guy. Let's go. You're like, we don't know. If you just hold it a little bit longer. Long squeezes, like my friend Scott Epstein, Einstein, he teaches at a 10th planet West LA. He's always been a big fan of slow, slow workouts. Like he'll do chin ups like this, like super slow. I think that's what they call it super slow. And he'll do chin ups like he's doing a chin up. It might take him two minutes to do a fucking chin up or the entire time. So like when you're grappling with someone, it's like you're trying to squeeze it. If all of them in, you've still got that long term squeeze endurance. Like quicksand. Yeah, it makes sense because if everything is fast and exploding, but then you get a rear naked and you have to like continue to compress or a guillotine, you can't squeeze. It's different. It's such a different. It's such a different feeling. It's kind of not kind of reminds me. It is exactly like my Brian Carraway fight. Although I did do three workouts on the day of that fight before the fight, even Matt told me in the back room, he's like, Aljo, save some for the fight. I was like, no, man, I'm good. And I'm just going crazy. I was like in my head, I'm like, I did all the work, but I just want to be so prepared because I knew it was the biggest fight of my life. I knew if I beat him and finished him, I was probably going to get a title shot. It's four and oh undefeated coming off three finishes. And I knew if I finished him, I'm more likely going to get and they lined me up too. Because the next week I went to Fox and I was supposed to talk about the dominant cruise fight versus your favorite fight, which I went. But the fight didn't go my way. So it kind of had like a bittersweet taste to it. So do you think it had anything to do with the extra rounds you put in or the extra work? Oh, 100 percent. I think if I had just done my one morning shakeout, 15, 20 minutes, it was what I do now. Just get the food moving through my system so that my body can get like just feel like it's more alive again like it does during training camp. I think I think that fight easily done in first round or even a second because he survived the first. But I think the second round, I think I get him out of there. But it's just experience, you know, learning and becoming more mature about the game and trusting your training. Do you think that has anything to do with you training yourself? Do you think that if you had a legit strength and conditioning coach who's monitoring your heart rate, are you monitoring your heart rate and all that stuff? No, I just started doing stuff with the P.I. Center and I try to because I saw that guy, Brendan Davis, he's 45 foot to beat. And he's a he's a big fucking dude. He's 135 now, which is insane to me. So I don't know how he makes it. That's what I said. So I'm like, dude, if I'm going to have to be finding these giant guys, I need to figure something out. And like they they explain how he was able to cut the weight like he was running like 10 miles or something. A day a day, which was insane to me. I know you're saying like some of it was like walking. But it's all about your heart rate, your resting heart rate, where you burn the most fat and calories or whatever you want to call it. He's so big. When I was standing next to him, I couldn't believe he makes 135. It's insane. I was actually pretty upset. I was like, fuck this guy. Go back up to your class. He is right there. And didn't he say that he weighed? I think I asked him what he weighed in the cage. I think he said somewhere around 160. Yeah, I don't get that big. What does he say? Look, I'll check. It's bananas, man. He's so gigantic. And he's what he like six one or something like that. Yeah. That's crazy. I want to wait class. I don't want to fight a guy that six one. You got it. I got it. I got the unfair advantage right now. You take your ass back out to 45.