The Advice GSP Gives to Young Fighters

What's your Rogan experience? It's a very hard path and one of the happiest places for me to go and the saddest place to go. It's the gym, when I go train to the gym. It's the happiest place for me to go because I can practice the sport that I love because I love training. I love the science of fighting. It's very sad too because after training there's always some guys that come to me because they seek some advice. I always give them advice regarding fighting but a lot of them, my advice for them would be, Hey bro, you should hang up your gloves and find a real job. Because I've seen this movie and it's not a good ending my friend. But if I tell them the truth, they'll get mad at me because I'll be like, Oh yeah, you know what I mean? You're jealous. Yeah, he's jealous. He's arrogant and stuff. But that's the thing. I tell my real friends that when it's time to hang up their gloves, I tell them the truth. I said, Listen, what's good for you now? It's a little bit like in the movie with Bruce Willis, Quentin Tarantino. Oh, pop fiction. Pop fiction. If you would have made it, you would have made it before. When he made that speech, it's a little bit the same thing. But I love that monologue. It's amazing. But it's the truth. A lot of people should rely to this but it's unfortunate. Well, the reason why champions are so exceptional is because it's so hard to become a champion. It's so rare. All the stars have to align. You have to have mental prowess, physical prowess. You have to have great coaching. You have to have so many different factors have to come together and also fortune. I mean, your guy has been through some surgeries. And we all know guys who they get injured and they can never even train again. It happens. It's unusual, but it can happen. And we're dealing with this this giant hurricane of possibilities for someone to boom, come out of that and be a George St. Pierre or be a Khabib Nurmagomedov or a John Jones or someone who's exceptional. It's so rare. So when someone's kid comes up to you and says, I'm going to be the next world champion, you're like, the possibility that the odds of failure are so so high. That's the thing. I believe it's you need to have a certain predisposition. Yeah, I met in my life incredible mentors that add a huge influence on me. They taught me like great life lessons, techniques, and it's incredible. Like if I would not have had that those those guys who influenced me, I would never have been where I am right now. And plus on top of that, you know, I got I work really hard and I was lucky, you know, like the star were all aligned. But you need all that. And you need the great coaching is so important, too. There's so many guys that are really talented, but they they have meathead coaches and their coaches trained them the wrong way. So they spar full blast in the gym and then they go out and they they lose. And then they have their coach has them sparring a couple of weeks after they get knocked out and that kind of shit. And they don't have the technical prowess, the technical proficiency to teach a child or a kid or an athlete. Right. You can get unlucky, you know, I believe the best way to improve. It's when it's playful. I've seen so many guys, Joe, I can't say names, but it's crazy how many guys I've seen that left their career. In the gym. Yeah, because they spar too hard. Every sparring for them. It's it's about winning the rounds. Yeah. So life or death, you cannot improve like this. You need to be playful. Of course, when you're in training camp and your fight is coming up, you need to somehow trying to recreate that environment of this comfort, that stress. But when you're outside of that preparation zone, you need you need to be playful because that's when you improve when it's playful, when it's like a game, you know, because you will be more prone to trying new things. And by trying new things, you'll you'll adapt. You'll be like, oh, this one works. This one doesn't work. But the one that works, I keep it in my back pocket, you know, and it makes you grow. That's a problem, you know, I've seen like very often I see guys like sparring. They lose a lot of brain cells. It's terrible. It's terrible. And I'm well, I'm former world champion. You know, like when I spar with with guys, very often they are nervous. So they become all stiff. And when they hit the hits so hard, I tell them, I'm like, you don't get ready. You don't have any fight coming up. So I'm like, just have fun. But relax. I tell them relax. And they very often they relax. You know, some will try to make, you know, so I have to answer back. I have to. But very often they relax and they're surprised that because it's so so much of a negotistic sport, you know, like we have this mentality that, oh, if the guy tells you to relax because he's scared, you know, it's so stupid, you know, but it's that's how if you want to improve, you need to it needs to be playful and in everything, you know, we say, oh, you when I say sparring, when I when I'm about to spar with someone, I never sparred before. I that's what I do. I tell him, I say, would you like to play a little bit? I don't use the word sparring because sparring is like aggression. And I tell him, I say, would you like to play a little bit there? Then we touch glove and we play and I never go hard. I always start very, very slow. And if I see that he's going to our I tell him, I say, please go go more and more easy. And of course, if he's getting ready for a fight, it's different. It's a different situations. But you know, that's how it is. You know, when you need, you shouldn't be afraid to tell your training partner, hey, please, like, put it like slow down a notch, you know, like, like, when you see guys trying to throw a head kick to knock each other out, you know, in boxing sparring, it's different because we have big gloves, big head gear, you know, they can't go hard. I mean, even if it's not good, because it's repeatedly blows repetition with the blows the head. But in MMA, with the kicks, it's the damage is basically like a baseball bat hitting your head. You can't do that. It's it's crazy, man. The ties have it right, right? That's right. That's right. Because they have so many fights. They have so many fights that and also when you fight someone, when I fight someone, it happened very often in my career, like, when I fight someone, you have a connection with the guy you fight a lot of things happen here. And real fighter will know that what I'm talking about the connection that we have because you look at each other. And these disconnection, you cannot see it when you watch the fight on TV. But very often, in most of my fight, when I went to decision, I could see the guy break breaking folding, like, he's letting me know that he doesn't fight to win anymore. He's fighting to not lose. And like I said earlier, it's not up to me trying to trying to push the pace trying to finish him and increasing my risk of getting caught by a counterpunch and getting knocked out. You know, it's up to him to take the risk, you know, because he's losing the fight. And the idea in this game, you want to save yourself for another day. I mean, it's sad to say for the family, this is the truth. If you win, and that's what you're doing is good. You win. You're winning the fight, you know, you're going to get paid the same amount of money. Of course, if you have like an highlight wheel, something like that, it could increase your pay. But in terms of your career, I believe you should see your career as a matter of time. See your career as a marathon, not as a sprint. So you kind of save yourself. And a lot of time I fought guys, I could see in their face that he doesn't want to be there anymore. Like I know I'm winning the fight before even the fight is over. They get desperate. Of course, they're going to throw a haymaker or something, but I know they're not going to take any risk because they're hurt. They lost already. They know that I'm better than them. And that's when I know I get the fight. And I know that I just need to be on cruise control. I can win if they don't like it's hard to finish someone who doesn't fight to win anymore. You see very often champions in MMA have a very dominant career in the beginning. You know, they finish a lot of their opponent. But after a while it become it kind of big because all the entire UFC roster is studying you and they figure you out. Maybe they didn't figure you out how to beat you, but they figure out how to kind of survive and hang in there with you. John Jones is a good example of that. Everybody, myself, same thing. Like every like a lot of guy, Henderson, Silva, the the the all the the champions. That's what happened.