- Conor's coach, Coach Kavanagh, was like,
"I love you, George, but there's no way
"that he's gonna be able to eat all this food
"and have the weight come down."
He lost like five pounds the next two days
and he's like, "I don't know what kind of black magic
"you got going on here, man."
[beeping] Hi, I'm George Lockhart.
- And I'm Dan Leith and we're the co-founders
of Lockhart & Leith Nutrition which is the largest
combat sports nutrition company on the planet.
[upbeat synth music]
The reason specifically a mixed martial artist
would want to cut weight is to be the larger fighter
in the octagon or in the cage.
So if that means that they do need to do a drastic
weight cut to be successful, we're gonna be there
to make sure it's done as safely as humanly possible
and if need be, it's gonna be stopped.
We're there to help our athlete every way imaginable
but our primary focus is the safety
of the fighter in the moment.
This was grown out of a passion for fighting ourselves.
George and I were both competitive fighters,
we both cut weight, a significant amount,
throughout our lives.
I started doing it as a really young kid in wrestling.
I learned all the errors that there are to make.
I mean, I was hospitalized as a little kid,
I started going into renal failure.
Fast-forward from there like, I dunno,
10 years or something like that and I met this idiot.
And I was an infantryman in the Marine Corps.
I got back from Afghanistan in 2010
and got selected for orders to a place called
the Martial Arts Center of Excellence.
And George was already there teaching nutrition.
He and I hit it off right away.
I mean, we got talking nutrition, we were both fighters.
A lot of people say they don't believe
in love at first sight but I mean I certainly don't
love this ugly guy.
Our focus is constantly improving and spreading
information related to weight cutting
and getting it out to our fighters.
- Honestly, I think it's evolved a lot.
Time flies.
Over the last decade, the UFC, they actually started
doing something like that, they banned the IVs,
they brought in USADA.
People were so worried because every fighter
used to get an IV after they weighed-in so they really--
- [Woman] What was that for?
- Rehydration.
They felt they needed to take an IV
after they made the weight.
So, when they banned that, a lot of people started
taking a real long look at their nutrition.
They're like, "Man, I'm not gonna have the ability
"to take an IV anymore."
- You know, we were going into rehydration,
We started going into the World Health Organization's
standards for oral rehydration for countries
that were getting dysentery.
When you go to a third-world country and you have,
you know, tens of thousands of people
with really acute dehydration,
they don't IV every single one of those people.
They come up with an oral solution in bulk
and "Everybody drink this."
And so we started looking at okay, what are the numbers
that these guys are using?
How much sodium, what are they base this off?
- That's literally when we started really blowing up
because people were like, "Oh, wow."
But then people started realizing,
"Wait, there's more than just rehydration.
"This actually helps increase my performance.
"Like, we feel better, we recover faster,
"there's more to this nutrition stuff."
The cool thing is, a lot of people
that do call us last minute,
they realize what we could actually do
and they end up working with us.
Like, when I started working with Dustin Poirier,
it was his first fight in the UFC.
He was fighting a guy named Josh Grispi.
He had to lose like 28 pounds in 21 days
to get down to 145, which he'd never actually fought before.
So what we do is a 24-hour fast.
What we'll do is have 'em work out,
let's say, Friday morning.
They fast for the 24 hours,
and then they do another workout the next day
and then we reload 'em again.
That does increase hormone sensitivity.
It cleans out the system.
And it helps 'em just drop weight, too.
You know, he was doing things like that,
he was doing fasted cardio.
We worked with him, he made the weight, he won.
Now he's at 155, which is a lot better weight class for him.
But that's something also that we do.
Just because somebody calls us, we might tell 'em like,
"You know, that's not the best weight for you.
"That's not the class that you need to be in."
The kid's always been a gangster but at the end of the day,
when he was going to 145,
his whole fight camp was based on him making weight.
It wasn't about getting better at fighting,
it was about losing the weight.
The one problem that a lot of fighters make is they think,
"Well, if I go down a weight class,
"I'm gonna have an advantage."
That's not necessarily true.
When I first started fighting, I was a heavyweight.
Then I went to light heavyweight, middleweight,
and then I'm like, well, let's go down one more.
And I ended up fighting at 170
and all my losses were at 170.
- When you're at a really, really drastic cut,
like the example with Dustin going to 45,
so many things that you're doing on a daily basis in camp
are all centered around making weight.
You know, you have to be at a caloric deficit,
you have to be doing additional road work.
It's just energy and time that you're not spending
on things that you should, in my opinion,
be working on with your skill coaches.
The nutrition coaches should just be in the background
watching what each skill coach is doing,
what the strength conditioning coach is doing,
and making sure that the athlete has what they need
when they need it.
You know, the right fuel for the moment
based on what's happening in the moment in training.
- Obviously, I've known Dustin for a very long time.
Next thin you know, he's fighting at the interim
world title at 155.
He beat Max Holloway, a guy that does not let up on the gas.
Like, Max Holloway, his gas tank is amazing.
- That was what's so impressive to me about it was
seeing him move up to 55 and seeing just how crisp
and powerful every shot was,
he just looked so sharp and dialed in
and it was nice to see that evolution of him
and see him in that championship fight and look
the best he's ever looked.
- Again, I don't wanna toot my own horn,
it's not all nutrition.
The cool thing is, everything came together.
You know, if one of those pieces was missing,
like the nutrition was off
or strength and conditioning was off,
there's no way he would've beat Max.
And everything came together as a team and he won.
- Probably the fight that I worked with Daniel
that was most significant was the first time
I worked with him.
Only because that was when USADA first came into the UFC.
It was the very first fight when USADA was testing
all the athletes, they had banned the IV,
and it was a lot of concern that
because he did cut a significant amount of weight
to make it to light heavyweight,
everyone was a little bit afraid
that he wasn't gonna be able to perform the same way
because he couldn't use an IV to rehydrate himself anymore.
- A lot of people, weight cutting and losing weight,
they put 'em in the same category.
Losing weight takes time.
To lose one pound, you have to be
at a deficit of 3,500 calories.
So if I go to a nutritionist or a dietician,
they're gonna take your BMR.
This is your basal metabolic rate,
this is the amount of calories that your body consumes
in a given day.
Then they subtract about 500 calories a day which,
over the course of seven days,
is a deficit of 3,500 calories.
That's losing weight.
Fighters actually eat more calories during fight week
than they do during fight camp.
Fight week, they're cutting the weight.
Let's say somebody had a 10-pound cut.
That's means that they would have to be at a deficit
of 35,000 calories to lose that 10 pounds.
Nobody eats that anyway so even if you starve yourself,
you're not gonna make that weight.
What people don't realize is you need energy
to actually lose the water.
Everything's gotta be conducive to drop the water.
- And so, with Daniel, he made weight effectively,
followed all of our protocols for oral rehydration.
He went in and had a five-round battle
with Alexander Gustafsson and he got better
and sharper every round, he never got tired,
he won the fight, I thought, in really decisive fashion.
He said, "Man, I've never felt better.
"I've never felt sharper, I felt strong the whole fight."
I mean, in the first 30 seconds of the fight,
he went out and got a single-leg on Alexander Gustafsson
who's like 6'6", something like that.
- Yeah.
- And picked him up and cartwheeled him
upside down across the cage.
I mean, it was a validating moment to see
such a great champion be able to follow
all of these protocols, really do the work,
and then go out and perform like he did.
That was really a special moment for us.
- Then we started working with Alex afterward.
- Yeah, that's right, yeah, then we started working
with Alex right after.
- [Woman] Awesome.
- Yeah.
You get really close with a lot of the fighters
and then as they grow and they continue to be successful,
they end up fighting one another.
And so, it's become a really difficult thing
for George and I where I may know somebody really well
and George might know his opponent really well,
they're both our client,
and neither of us will even watch the fight.
Over time, it's just become harder and harder,
the closer you get with your fighter.
We spend more time with our athlete than any other person.
You feel like kind of like a dad,
like a parent, almost, you know?
Drive 'em to practice, "Do you have your gloves?"
Like, get their water, you know,
make sure they're going to bed on time.
Try to make things as easy as possible
so they can just focus on eating, sleeping, training,
eating, sleeping, training.
- If you're stressed out,
your body's not gonna release water.
So the more stressed you are,
the more you're gonna hold on to it.
So we try to make their life
as cool and relaxed as possible.
When I first started working with Conor,
it was the Jose Aldo fight.
We create programs around the person so what I asked was,
"Okay, what does Conor doing every day?
"What's his age, what's his height, what's his weight?
"What's his activity levels?
"How many times is he working out?"
And then we filled out a program.
We wrote up the program for him.
And I was giving him everything that he needed
based on his activities, age, and everything else.
So I didn't know what he was having before.
Obviously, he wasn't eating a whole lot.
I think he was only eating like once or twice a day
whereas the meal that I gave him,
I think it was seven times a day.
And his coach, Coach Kavanagh, was like,
"I love you, George, but there's no way
"that he's gonna be able to eat all this food,
"you know, and have the weight come down."
So he started following the program,
lost like five pounds the next two days, and he's like,
"I don't know what kind of black magic
"you've got going on here, man."
A lot of people say a calorie's a calorie
which is not necessarily true.
Every food that you eat actually creates
or needs a specific amount of energy to break it down.
Almost 40% of protein is actually used
in the digestion of protein.
So, what that's called is the thermogenic effect of foods.
The more calories a food needs to be digested,
the higher the thermogenic effect.
So what we do is we take that into account,
'cause, remember, we never wanna take calories
away from somebody.
Because calories are measurement of energy.
So I don't wanna take energy away from you.
I just need to switch up the macronutrients.
The program will do that for that individual.
They don't lose weight, it increases the amount of protein.
It doesn't change the caloric intake,
it just changes the macronutrient makeup.
The thermogenic effect of foods kicks in
and they lose weight.
- We've been really lucky, you know.
We've been exposed to so many athletes
since we've been doing this.
We were talking about doing this back in the Marine Corps.
I mean, we had no idea where we were gonna end up
and the experiences we were gonna have,
the fighters we were gonna get an opportunity to work with.
I mean, at this point, we've worked with,
I mean, almost every champion that's been in the UFC
over the last eight years.
And we've transcended MMA into boxing.
Now getting to work with Bodou Jack and Triple G.
I got an opportunity to work for a year with Demi Lovato.
I get to do it every day with my best friend.
I mean, all kidding aside, I really don't like looking
at George that much but he's my best friend in the world
and I got to build this alongside him. [laughing]
- We're only two guys, though.
In the United States alone, there's 25,000 MMA gyms.
In the United States.
So what we did is we started a certification process
and we have a bunch of people that are basically
starting their own companies based on the system
that we've taught 'em.
We go all over the world and we teach people
how to safely cut weight.
The amateur guys at the bottom of the barrel,
they need the same coaching, same system
as the Conor McGregors and the Triple Gs in the world.
- I would say anybody that's watching this
that does cut weight, do yourself a favor
and spend the time and money finding a coach
who has trained in this, has been through
one of our certifications
or has trained in this somewhere else.
Taking it on yourself, following old-school methods
is a quick way to get hurt really fast.