The Fight Science Podcast

Charles Stull is the Performance Nutrition Manager at the UFC Performance Institute, Las Vegas. Over the past 18 months, Charles has been pivotal in designing and implementing the UFC and Trifecta's Fight Week Meal Service in which they assist with the Nutritional needs of fighters making weight during Fight week.

2020 has been a crazy year for everyone, but none more so than the UFC, I have got Charles on to chat about what it has been like coordinating the meals of all the fighters during this time.

Charles has also contributed an entire chapter to the new UFC PI Journal all about Nutrition for Traumatic Brain Injury, in this episode, Charles will detail his major recommendations for athletes who have sustained damage to the head.

Dr. Reid Reale is the whose who in combat sports nutrition. He is one of the foremost published researchers in the area and is currently the Performance Nutrition Manager at the UFC Performance Institute Shanghai.

I wanted to get Reid back on the podcast to discuss his recent experience spending 5 weeks managing the Nutrition of all of the athletes on UFC Fight Island and discuss some burning topics that are hot in the world of combat sports nutrition right now.

Taylor is an accredited Sports Dietitian and owner of The Sports Dietitian, one of Australia’s most successful sports nutrition clinic that focuses on strength sports. Taylor predominantly works with athletes from the recreational to the elite in Crossfit, powerlifting, and weightlifting but also works with athletes in team, endurance, and combat sports.

Alongside her success in the world of Performance Nutrition, Taylor is a leader in the area of energy availability and makes a real effort to make athletes aware of the negative health and performance outcomes that can occur when they under fuel for prolonged periods of time.

In this episode, we discuss everything about energy availability, what it is, why you need to know about it, what low energy availability is, how that can lead to relative energy deficiency and how this affects a number of different systems in the body.

Chef Mario Limaduran is the Executive Chef at Trifecta Nutrition and is a pivotal part of the highly successful UFC Performance Institute/Trifecta partnership that fuels UFC fighters during their fight weeks.

In this episode we discuss Fight Island 2.0 and what the experience was like for Chef Mario and his team for the second time around.

Dr. Oliver has joined us again on the podcast to discuss his latest paper titled Reviewing the current methods of assessing hydration in athletes.

In this chat we discuss all of the current methods there are to assess hydration and discuss whether or not they should be used with combat athletes who are making weight.

This is extremely interesting given that ONE championship makes all of their fighters pass, a hydration test that assesses that concentration of the athlete's urine to officially make weight.

Oliver and I discuss if this is truly a good idea and an accurate measure of hydration and what the flaws are in this system.

At the back end of this chat, we also dive into some more philosophical questions behind the entire weight-making process including why we both believe it is an issue, how you would go about solving that problem, and the organizational changes that would be needed to facilitate that.

Dr. Carl Evans is back on the podcast to discuss his latest research paper 'Physiological and psychological consequences of low energy availability in a male combat sports athlete'.

In this episode, we discuss energy availability, the current recommendations, how they fit in with combat sports athletes, and the results of the paper.

Dave Niethe is a Master NLP Practitioner, Master Time Line Therapist, and Master Hypnotherapist. Put simply, he is an Elite level Mental Performance Coach.

Dave himself has competed at an elite level in rowing, rugby, and strongman holding many records in both power lifting and the New Zealand strongman. He is also the current GPC masters power lifting champion.

The reason I asked Dave to come on the podcast is to discuss his work with his elite-level combat athletes which include UFC Middleweight Champion Israel Adesanya, UFC Lightweight prospect Brad Quake Riddell and UFC Flyweight standout Kai Kara France.

Dr. Andy Galpin is a tenured Professor in the Center for Sport Performance at California State University Fullerton.

Andy has an Undergraduate degree in Exercise Science, a Masters degree in Human Movement Sciences and in 2011 earned his PhD in Human Bioenergetics.

In this episode, Dr Galpin and I discuss how he takes his extensive knowledge about the human body and performance, and helps develop more complete, efficient, and advanced combat athletes.

Sam Gilbert is a registered physiotherapist with the Australian Physiotherapy Association (APA) and certified strength and conditioning specialist (CSCS) with the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA).

He holds a bachelor’s degree in Physiotherapy from Latrobe university (Melbourne, Australia) and a master’s degree in Exercise Science (Strength and Conditioning) from Edith Cowan University (Perth, Australia).

Sam has combined his practical experience with an in-depth study of sports performance in relation to combat sports, and strives to help other combat athletes reach their full competitive potential, whilst at the same time decreasing injury risk and increasing competition and training potential.

Dr. Roberts received her doctorate from University College London, where she studied the control of cell growth and fat metabolism.

She is the founder of Feed, Fuel, Perform a Performance Nutrition company that works with a myriad of different athletes, including many different weight category athletes.

In this episode we are going to discuss the differences between making weight in combat sports compared to other weight category sports, such as powerlifting and weight lifting and we are also going to explore how Dr. Roberts successfully takes her athletes through the weight-making process entirely online.