Joe Rogan talks to Dominick Cruz about his injury streak

Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. But for people that don't know what we're about to be talking about, you had one of the most horrific injury streaks in the sport, in your prime. You were considered to be one of the top pound-for-pound fighters in the world, and then you had a series of catastrophic injuries and surgeries. So for a lot of people listening to this podcast that aren't really hardcore MMA fans. So talk us through it, because you went through one of the most difficult trials in terms of recovery from injury. No, the most difficult I've ever seen anybody go through in the entire history of my time of calling fights. Well, for fighting, I definitely agree. In the sport of fighting, I heard of the sport of NFL because I researched them. These guys who went through three ACL reconstructions came back and competed. One of them was just competing. They almost made it to the Super Bowl. He had three ACL reconstructions in the game of football and came back and was still playing. He was over 30. People like that need to be around in this world. Sure. Just to let you know that it's possible. Just to let you know that it can be done. Yeah. That mindset right there, when you make it bigger than yourself, is the only way you get the power to get through stuff like that. That's what got me through, is understanding that I go through these knee surgeries. It becomes bigger than me when I come back and succeed. It's not just about me coming back and getting my belt. I already had belts. I already knew what it felt like to be a five-time world champion by that point at the age of 26 before I blew my knee out. I was on top of everything. I had everything that I thought I needed and wanted. Blew my knee out, get my belt stripped, go through three ACL reconstructions. You soon find out that you actually have no idea who you are. No. What was your initial injury? ACL, MCL. What happened though? I was training while I was getting ready on the Ultimate Fighter back in 2012 or 11 for Faber Fight. We were getting ready to compete at the end of the show. I was training with a guy and it was just a hard week. We were the first show that ever went live and was training for the fight at the same time, being tough. We were the first and only live show that they did. That meant that while we coached, we were also going to compete at the same time. I had to do my fight camp while I trained the Ultimate Fighter guys simultaneously. I was doing four practices a day, two with the tough guys and two with myself. That workload was just insane. That was a hard, hard training camp. Ended up breaking me down, hurt my knee, just sparring. It was a sparring day. Guy went for a grappling transition and sagged at my hip weird and just blew my knee out, a crappy takedown where they sag instead of actually get the takedown. It just blew my knee out. When I blew my ACL, MCL, I was like, it's all right. You'll be fine. I fought it. I almost literally fought the injury. You're too tough. You're too strong. You're too young. You can do this. Let's go. Fought the injury meaning not get surgery and try to rehab? Meaning you just heard what I just said. It didn't happen. Mentally. I did. That wasn't the problem though. That's my point. The problem isn't if you're doing all the things right to get better. It's understanding that it was understanding that I didn't need to fight to be better. Giving up on it was when I finally got better. Understanding I didn't need fighting to be who I was. When you say get better, you mean get better emotionally, psychologically? Well, physically. Even physically. I did not get better until I gave up on fighting the injury. What I mean by fighting the injury is saying you'll be fine. You'll come back. Just keep training. Keep training. Keep training. Keep training. I trained but in the logic that I was given with what I'm allowed to do according to my physical therapist, Gavin McMillan, he would say you can do this, this, and this. Don't push it. I wouldn't push it. I would do the things aloud. But I'm telling you, that wasn't the issue. The issue was surrendering. The issue was knowing that fighting was the only way I was going to be happy then. Being able to compete was the only way I could find peace. Being able to prove that I was as good as I always was even after the injuries became everything that I was trying to do. It was just a nonstop fight to just get healthy. And I'd get through my second ACL reconstruction on the same knee. Then I'd blow my quad out before I was supposed to fight. How did you blow out the second one? You had the injury, you had it reconstructed, and then how do you blow out the second one? It's the same knee and I was training on Christmas. How many months after the initial surgery? Six. So it's real recent. It's probably not 100% healed yet. It's not 100% healed yet. Nine months is supposed to be full strength. But six months is when you get to start pushing it to get ready to fall. So now you're like six months to six months, you're not allowed to do any kind of cutting. Cutting, meaning some side of the slide. No lateral movements, just straight down the line. Nothing risky. Keep your brace on when you're trained out of a six month mark. They're like take the brace off. You got to start getting the stabilizer strong. You can start testing it more. You can start doing things, but you still got to wear your brace when you do live scenarios. But you can drill without it. You can, you see what I'm saying? So you're actually pretty strong, but now it's supposed to be strong enough that it's not going to tear. But that's when I had a cadaver ACL. So it wasn't as strong as it should have been at that six month point because it was cadaver tissue. My body did not adapt to the tissue as well as it could have. Do they do an MRI to see where it's at or did they just kind of base it on how it feels? They base it on the end point and the stability of your knee. When they manipulate it? When they manipulate it at the six month mark, you're going in every two to three weeks for six months to double check with the doctor. I've had two. I've had two reconstruction. Well, I was doing that at Curlin and Joe. They were good doctors and they tried to stay on me. So you've had two, so you know. And you know at the six month mark, it's like you can push it, but you don't want to overkill it because you tear it. So the second one, I wasn't over killing it, but I was doing what I was allowed in my brace. And I made a cut like a turn and it just popped. It just wasn't anything like, oh, I shouldn't have been doing that. It was kind of like, you know, I was boxing in my brace. I had it taped. I warmed up. Were you sparring? I was doing drills, boxing drills. Just drills. Yeah, boxing drills. But you just pivot wrong and it just pops. And then you know, like I remember sitting there and I just, the pain's very specific and then it goes away too quick. That's when you know, because it's there real, real, real, real hard pain. And then it goes away in like two minutes. Because the ligaments are gone. It's torsion. You don't have pain anymore. And I'm like, oh no. So I sit down and I go, all right, my knee's torn. And that was when I hit like a real bad rock bottom on that one. That was like, that one like, oh my gosh. When I went to the MRI and got home, I literally like called my friend and I told him to come over. I mean, I pretty much just drank as much of a bottle as I could because I was in pretty good shape at that point. So it put me out. I passed out. My head was, I woke up in my porch with my head on the grill in the morning. Just a mess. It was not, it was not pretty, but I didn't care because I was out for nine months. You know? Right. So everybody hits these lows. You know, it's normal. What were you doing financially back then? Because that's where it gets rough, right? That's another part of it. I mean, us athletes, we all know, or you know, we only make money when we, when we're fight for the prize, you know? And thank God, you know, Lorenzo and the UFC, they gave me a decent chunk of money for a good part of time while I had the belt. And then once they took the belt, I stopped getting that chunk of money even when I was hurt. So they were paying me a little bit of stifling while I was hurt and that helped me. And then when I, when they stripped the belt and gave it to brow, they stopped with that, you know, because I'm not the champ anymore. And then it was kind of like, that's when, that's what I mean. That's when it kind of got turned reality. Like you're not the champ on paper anymore. You didn't really lose it, but that's it. So what are you going to do? What is this it? You know, how are you going to make money? How are you going to do this? How are you going to do that? And I panicked, but I knew that I was going to still come back and fight because I was still young and I saw I hadn't given up on fighting yet. Still only in my second ACL surgery. So I'm still not fully admitting that I'm not, that I'm a mess. Right. I'm kind of not really like admitting it to myself yet. And it's screw what you're saying to everybody else. So I'm trying to say it's what you believe to yourself is all that matters. Right. Period. And I was like, I'll be fine. This isn't that bad. I can do this. I've gone through worse. So in doing it, I still hadn't really just given up yet. And that's, so I'm still, I'm still competing in my mind, which is the problem. And that's when you just, you're overworking and not just doing things you're not supposed to on your knee, but just in general in life, I'm just overworking. I'm doing my Fox stuff now to make money. And then I'm trying to do my rehab five days a week because I have to come back and fight for the belt when I come back. And that's another thing people don't equate as I was the champ. So I got to come back and fight for the belt when I come back after this injury. I don't just get to come back and fight somebody three rounds. I got to come back and fight five rounds. Never been done before. I had nobody to bounce this thought off of. I just had to wing it. And so I was, and that caused I think a lot of problems with me because I didn't have the mental capacity to deal with it at that point with all the things that I was doing. So I just kept grinding and then I finally get back to health after the second ACL. Six months, nine months goes by. All right, let's take this Baral fight. So I'm ready. I'm training in camp about a month in. I have like a weird pinch in my groin. It turns out to be the exact same injury Daniel Cormier just pulled out of the fight for. It's the extensor tendon in your, or no, it's the, I forget the name of the, there's a tendon in your groin area that pulls and then you got to just rest it. I tore the, mine was a little bit worse. I tore the muscle, the quad muscle off the bone. So it like separated from the bone, but it wasn't all the way. It was just enough that it was, I could still like think I was okay, but it would just fail on me occasionally. So I could tape it some days and it would be all right. Shoot a bunch of Toradol, which is a, for anybody who's curious, it's a natural, it's a legal anti-inflammatory. A lot of football players take it. Toradol? Toradol. It's a, yeah, I think that's, yeah, I think that's what it's called. But anyways, it's, it's a natural or it's an anti-inflammatory, not a natural one, but it's like ibuprofen, but stronger. And I would take that and that helped. But it just, it wasn't right. I remember I was sparring one day and I went to throw a right hand and my leg just gave out and I fell on the floor and I wasn't kicking. I wasn't shooting. I just threw a right hand and the feeling that of falling because I threw a right hand made me know like something wasn't connected. Like it just didn't feel right. Cause it just failed me. It wasn't, it wasn't like it hurt and I stopped. It just literally, there was no pain and it just failed. And I was like, something's way mechanically wrong with me. I can't fight mechanically wrong like this. And that was about four weeks out of the fight, three, four weeks out of the fight. Well, I had already done a month camp with this injury trying to tough it out. So my camp was rough. It was a hard camp and I didn't want to pull out obviously naturally. So I ended up calling Dana and, and it's one of the few phone calls I've ever had with Dana. Unfortunately, and this is probably one of the times you remember is telling him, I'm sorry, I got to pull out. But I remember not wanting to have my manager call him. This goes back to what my mom, how my mom put something in my head where you deal with this face to face or talking. So I called and I said, look, I don't want to do this, but I got to pull out of this fight. I need some doc. I need, if you got any doctors, you can have MRI, me, whatever you want, but I'm telling you something's wrong with my leg. So he's like, okay, I'll do it. I got, I got guys on it. We can't have you pull out now. I'm sure you're fine. Check it out. Get the doctors check it. Yeah. Your quads torn. You can't fight. So the UFC pulls me, you know, Dana's naturally pissed, but then that slides a favor. In there. Boom. Favorite gets the shot with, with brow ends up getting knocked out in that matchup. But I pull out of that fight. That's when they strip my belt. And then that was the beginning of me giving up on fighting to an extent. And what I mean by that is it's different than you think. It sounds negative, right? When you say that I'm giving up on fighting, but it is actually the building point in my life where I finally let go of control. I always had this thing up to that point where I wanted to control everything. It's just something that I, I always had the gift of being able to do this last one after the two ACL reconstructive surgeries coming back and then tearing my quad. After that, I said, like, I don't know what else you want me to do. I've gotten through two ACL reconstructions. My higher power is God. So I'm praying at this point saying, I don't know what you want me to do. So you're talking to God saying, what do I gotta do? What do I gotta do, man? You want, I'm in this for reasons bigger than myself. I want to come back and show people this can be done. I'm not the only one that can do this. Anybody can do this, right? I'm here for you, bidding your will. God, this is my talking. And no answers, no nothing. And I said, maybe that's the answer. I remember thinking maybe that's the answer is just you might not ever fight again. Are you okay with that? And that was something that I never allowed my brain to even go to ever until all these injuries hit me and I would have never been able to unless I went through all that. That was literally all the stuff because I'm so stubborn and so just tough that I had to go through all that just to mentally say, okay, you might never do this again. It could have been if to the first one I could have done that, but I didn't. When I did that, my health skyrocketed immediately. I started, I just went to therapy every day knowing I was trying to get better, but I didn't care if I fought again or not. I focused all my energy in Fox and coaching the guys at Alliance Training Center to make them better and try to make the team better. So that when and feed off the thirst and the hunger that those guys had to be the champion that I still wanted to be. And I decided that if I focused on Fox, focused on the positive energy of these guys at the gym, kept training, kept my mind in the sport, my body will be there because my age is compliant with my body still. I'm still young enough that I'll be okay. So I just needed to get my mind wrapped around the sport, stay in it mentally, but understand that if I never have it again, that's okay too. And when I did that, it took away so much importance off of needing to fight as have the title as the person that I was, that it allowed me to open up and say if you never fight again, you're still a great person. You still did great things. You still laid the tracks for the Bantamweight division in a lot of ways. You did this, you had a great career down, it's okay if this is it. And I kept that mindset, kept focusing on the things that I could control instead of the things that I couldn't, like the fact that I wasn't competing yet. And as I did that, I got healthier and healthier, came back, fought Mizugaki, that set me up to fight Mizugaki. Then, destroyed Mizugaki, one of your best performances ever. Role win, first round, destruction. That was the most at peace I've felt in a long time, walking in that fight. I remember interviewing you after the fight and you were like, I don't even remember what happened. Yeah. You just went, like you went into a trance. It was weird. It was one of the weirdest performances of my whole career, easily. Because the walkout was different, just I was so, I had no connection. I had no connection to the win or the loss at that point. There was nothing. It was just, I was just there to enjoy being there again after three and a half years and all these injuries. Like I can't believe I made it here, I'm not injured. And I remember thinking like, just, you're in front of these people, enjoy the limelight, man, enjoy this ride. Like this is incredible. There's people that would pay millions and trillions of dollars to get this walk you're about to get and go fight somebody in this octagon. Just enjoy it. Don't work, don't connect. By letting go, man, by letting go of the injuries, by letting go of the win, by letting go of the loss, by letting go of either mattered. I was in my zone and it allowed me to just be free. And that was the best performance of my career. But more than anything, it showed me a mental thing that I'd never opened up before and it was letting go of the things that you can't control will give you actually more peace because it disconnects you from what happens. So you feel like that peace was a significant factor in your body recovering because the pressure and the stress and the anxiety, all of that was playing. It was wrecking not just your mental state, but also your physical state. 100%. Every piece of it. That's really interesting. Every piece of it. And that's the biggest thing I learned is that it wasn't my physical body. It was my mind doing it to my physical body. So it was initially a physical injury and then it was the cascade of psychological issues that came with the physical issue that led to more physical issues. It was the cascade of trying to figure out why I was so sad with all these things that I earned around me. I already had everything that I thought. When you grow up in a trailer like I did and then you go to winning a GTR, the car you wanted since you were a kid in a prize fight and having a home that you bought with your own money that you never thought you'd be able to own a home in California because you live in a damn trailer park in Tucson, Arizona. It kind of like makes you feel like that's it. You've done crazy great things and those were all just dreams. They happened so quick. I didn't get my house until later but when I got those things, I was still sad. I had my depression that was hitting me. So many people in this world are dealing with depression. It's a huge catastrophic problem across the planet. It's in my bloodline on both sides of my family and it's something that everybody, not just myself, deals with on a daily basis in certain people's lives. That hit me very hard and I didn't understand why it hit me so much harder now after I stopped competing. Why is it so much worse now? The reason is my body was used to the activity, just go, go, go. What I realized is I turned off all my emotional, spiritual, and mental issues with exercise to where I never ever, ever dealt with them ever. I only physically worked them out. So my physical was perfection. I'm a world champion, monster killer, whatever you want to call me in your own perspective mind, right? But emotionally, physically, and spiritually, I was a cricket and I never understood that until I was hurt, trapped in my own body like a prison cell. Couldn't train, couldn't run, couldn't walk, couldn't bend my leg, laying on the couch eating pain pills, realizing, man, unless you train, unless you compete, you hate yourself. You hate yourself. You're a piece of shit in your own mind without those things, without the beautiful girlfriend, without the beautiful house, without the nice cars, without the big money to show people you hate yourself. So what am I really doing? Why am I doing this? I lost sight that the whole reason we're fighting is it's a spiritual, emotional, physical, mental battle that helps you grow as an individual and as a human being. It's not just to have these things that you think will make you happy. You have to learn those things through the process. And I didn't know that until I was trapped in my own body. And I literally felt like I was in a prison cell and I knew that wasn't right. We shouldn't be in our own body alone without people around us to keep us company and on the couch feeling like we're in a prison cell. Should we? No, definitely not. No, we shouldn't. But I did for three years. So how did you get yourself out of it by just accepting it? And you, you might, there must have been some sort of a mechanism that you used. I have people that I talk to professionals, obviously like sports psychologists, sports psychologists, and then you got to get a psychologist in general to deal with the depression, whatever, when you hit your lows, like it's okay to get, you know, if you're bench pressing 300 and 50 pounds, it's okay to have a little touch. It's okay to have a little spot here and there, you know? And then after you get a couple of spots, now, after a while, you can do it yourself. You don't need the spot anymore. That's how I look at psychiatric help to an extent for some people, especially if they're battling depression. Sometimes you just need a floaty and you did, and then you can take the floaties off after a year. You see what I'm saying? It's a mental, it's a mental floaty and it's okay. Because we all hit low part, low points in our life where it's unbearable and you either allow it to continue to be unbearable and just deny it or you deal with the task at hand and say, I'm a little low right now. I need the floaties. It's okay. I'll get through this. And then when you take the floaties off, you realize I only needed them for a little bit of time and now I'm okay. I'm here. And that's kind of what it felt like. It's like I just needed a little bit of a push. I needed to get through this and learn some things about my own, my own mind and understand my own emotions and understand that I didn't need all these things that I was thinking weren't real. It was me not being in control of my own emotions. Your own emotions are your choice. And I chose to feel trapped. I chose to be sad. I chose to feel like I was jack shit. I chose all these things and it's like you don't need fighting to be these things. You need to let go of fighting to learn that you are something without it. And that was actually a gift. It became a gift because I learned so much in life now, bigger than fighting. I look at the things that I went through as a gift because I have gotten the gift of feeling retired during my career. Who else gets that? Some people retire for five years, lose their freaking mind, end up in the bar and come back and try to fight again 10 years later. With a weakened body. A mess. Some abuse. Why? Why though? Why are they doing that? They're not doing it because they're physically capable. They're doing it because they never dealt with their life away from fighting. Fighting was their life. Fighting is who they are. Fighting is their persona. So take away fighting. What are they? They're in the bar drinking away what they're not. Instead of drinking, putting the booze down and knowing what you are without fighting, being happy with that chapter of your life and being able to live who you are. I've gotten to feel that. And now I can fight with a peace of mind knowing how good I am without fighting and how great I am with it too. And that's what this thing is about. All these fights, me attacking those challenges, coming back and winning and getting my belt back. That could only happen because I let go of control of the things I couldn't control.