Corey Peacock & Chris Algieri Join Us for Episode #84

September 08, 2021

Starting off 2018 with a BANG!

In today’s episode, we talk with Dr. Corey Peacock and Chris Algieri about how they approach fight camp preparation. These two guys have a unique combination of education and experience that will help you design more effective training during your fight camps. If you are interested in learning how top athletes prepare for competition, then you’ll definitely want to listen to today’s podcast.

In this episode we discuss:

Communication between coaches
Determining the focus of each training camp
Utilizing technology to increase performance and recovery
Common nutrition mistakes
2 supplements that every fighter should take
Organizing training in and out of camp
Upcoming research related to combat sports
and more!

Chris Algieri, the Former World Boxing Organization (WBO) Jr. Welterweight Boxing Champion, ISKA World Welterweight Kickboxing Champion and WKA World Super Welterweight World Kickboxing Champion, with over 13 years professional fight experience. Been featured on HBO PPV, HBO Boxing After Dark, NBC Primetime, Showtime EXTREME, PBC on Spike, ESPN Friday Night Fights, and NBC Sports.

Outside the ring, Chris graduated from Stony Brook University with honors in May 2007 with a Bachelors of Science in Health Care Management and then went on to receive his Master’s degree from the New York Institute of Technology. He is certified as a Sports Nutritionist (CISSN) through the International Society of Sport Nutrition (ISSN). He often speaks at Sports Performance conferences, seminars and summits on various topics of Human Performance and Nutrition.

Chris was recently hired by Stony Brook University as the Head Performance Nutrition Coach. He has the opportunity to work with nearly 500 Division I athletes from 16 different sport teams. Chris’ interest and passion for nutrition and sport is evident in his dealings with the athletes on a daily basis through the grueling schedules of Division I Student Athletes.

Follow Chris on Instagram

Website –> ChrisAlgieri.com

Dr. Corey Peacock is currently serving a dual role as the Head Exercise Physiologist and Performance Coach for many MMA fighters and Boxers in South Florida. In this role, he is responsible for contributing physiological evaluations, strength & conditioning, and injury prevention methodologies. His experience as both a Strength Coach and Sports Performance Researcher have allowed him to implement state of the art injury prevention technology and coaching techniques within the team. A former collegiate football player and coach, Corey graduated from Kent State University with a Ph.D. in Exercise Physiology, focusing his application on human performance. He works closely with many Strength & Conditioning professionals from the NFL, NHL, MMA and NCAAF and is regarded as one of the top Performance Coaches and Sports Scientists in South Florida. Along with coaching, Dr. Peacock also works as a professor in the Department of Health and Human Performance at Nova Southeastern University. As a researcher, he has contributed multiple peer-reviewed publications integrating the fields of exercise physiology, athletic performance, and supplementation.

Follow Corey on Instagram

Website –> peacockperformance.com

Full Transcription of Our Podcast with Chris Aligieri and Corey Peacock

Interview with Corey Peacock & Chris Algieri talking about performance and nutrition

Corey Beasley [00:00:01]: Hey guys, is Corey Beasley with fight camp conditioning. And today I’m super excited. First podcast of the year and I got Corey Peacock and Chris Algieri on the phone. Guys. How are you doing?

Chris Algieri [00:00:13]:Doing well.

Corey Peacock [00:00:14]:Doing well. Corey, thanks for having us.

Corey Beasley [00:00:16]: Of course. I appreciate you guys taking the time. And for everybody that’s listening. Corey and Chris both on the east coast are doing some absolutely incredible things with not only from just a performance and strength standpoint, but also as a nutrition and these guys are doing a lot of cool stuff. Just really helping revamp people’s fight camps and really taking it to the next level as far as performance goes. So we’re excited to hear what they have to say here. So guys for everybody listening, can you give a little too sense of who we are and what you’re doing?

Chris Algieri [00:00:57]:Hey guys. Chris Algieri. I’m a performance nutrition coach and I work with professional boxers and MMA athletes as well as division one college athletes. I’m a consultant for Athletic Department at Stony Brook University. I’m also currently a top contender in the junior welterweight division of the world boxing association and on the former WBO super lightweight world champion in boxing.

Corey Peacock [00:01:27]:That’s going to be tough to top. I’m Dr. Corey Peacock exercise physiologists and strength and conditioning coach. Again, like Chris said, for both the boxing world and mixed martial arts as well, on top of that background is, is very mixed up in strength and conditioning. I’ve been through a lot of different sports formerly football at the division one level and now all my focus is on combat sports. Outside of that, I’m also an associate professor of health and human performance at Nova Southeastern University down here in south Florida.

Corey Beasley [00:02:14]: So just kind of to kick things off a little bit, Corey, you and I were talking the other day and Chris, I’d love to hear from you on this as well, but one of the things that kind of just peaked my interest when we were talking last week was just, you were talking a lot about communication between coaches with the athletes and stuff like that. Can you kind of go into a little bit more depth set on that for me?

Corey Peacock [00:02:37]:Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s a lot of headlines out there right now in the MMA world, especially as it pertains to proper periodization performance, weight cuts, nutrition, strength and conditioning strategies to optimize human performance. I do believe there’s a lot of negativity in that realm right now in this field. And I really do believe that it’s a lack of communication that realistically is leading to these problems. I believe that all of these, all of these great sports nutritionist that, that are out there, all these great strength and conditioning coaches that are out there along with the specialized mixed martial arts coaches are tried to do the best by their athletes. But I believe when there’s a lack of communication between coaches, a lot of times you could be red line in your athlete, your athletes aren’t on the same phase and the same program, especially when it comes to something like strength and conditioning and nutrition. So it’s huge. And I’ve experienced this firsthand being an MMA where I’ve had some, I’ve had some of my athletes that I’ve worked with work with different nutrition companies, a different weight specialists such as Lockhart, a Ricci and those guys. And those guys are brilliant. They do a really great job. I’ve had experiences with other nutritionists where the nutritionist wants to very much dictate what’s going on in every aspect of the camp and that hasn’t been as pleasant of an experience. And realistically, I believe the outcome itself wasn’t the best for the athletes. So Chris and I, really created and had a good ability to communicate with one another for the goal of what’s best for that athlete. And I’ll let Chris sort of weigh in on top of that.

Chris Algieri [00:04:27]:As Corey alluded to the communication is key between myself and him. We are a true performance team and the athlete’s performance watching in focus for us and we period eyes, the nutrition along with the phases. So I’ll meet with Corey before the camp even starts, ask him what his strength and conditioning program will look like throughout the camp, how it’s going to Change. And from there I’ll look at that nutrition, what our goals are at each phase of the camp and correct and adapt as we go and make any adjustments along the way. And I won’t know how those adjustments are going from nutrition side. If I don’t speak to the court and ask how the guys doing, if I don’t speak to the guy himself or the athletes themselves about how they’re weighted, how they’re feeling, what’s going on with this. So I think it’s paramount that the lines of communication stay open in between coaches and athletes themselves.

Corey Beasley [00:05:25]: Now as you guys are going into a camp, do you guys typically have like one or two things that you guys are focusing on or one to improve during that time from Kind of know a lot of times that the fight camps can go pretty quick. Right? There’s not a lot of time to really make a lot of progress in a lot of different directions. So typically we focus do you guys have kind of a plan of attack when you guys get down on things you get discussed?

Corey Peacock [00:05:52]:Sure. So one of the things that I will do right off the bat myself and Chris, I’ll utilize the laboratory at Nova southeastern university. A couple of the things that we’ll do, we’ll do either a traditional body comp test, whether it’s a bod pod or a DEXA. We’ll also do a BIA or looking at some sort of muscletech ultrasound to determine whole body water. I would say between that assessment, along with I will do a resting metabolic rate along with an exercise VO2 Max test. I think that gives us a lot of good information on where the athlete is in terms of muscle composition, whole body water. And I think it gives us a lot of information on resting metabolism along with the actual metabolism during certain heart rates, certain zones, utilization of macros and those kinds of things. So I’ll usually start with that, putting together sort of a overview of how they are metabolically and body composition wise. And then I kind of let Chris run wild with that.

Chris Algieri [00:06:58]:Yeah. From there, I take that, that objective data that, that Corey has has collected. And then for me, it’s really just sitting down and talk with the athletes themselves and collecting the subjective data. We speak about, what their current eating habits are what their history has been with weight cuts where they generally start their camp in terms of their weight and body fat percentage and what has been like in the past. And having a history really helps me kind of decide the best, the best route for an athlete. I’m also kind of dietarily what they’re used to dealing generally the guys that Corey and I deal with are very high level, so we’re not going walk in there and reinvent the wheel in these guys and change everything around. Like you said, the camps can go really quick, so you can’t make too many adjustments right off the bat. And it really is a process we normally like to have our guys for several camps and adjust as we go.

Corey Peacock [00:07:49]:Yeah. And go and going off of what Chris just said, I think that right there is a huge point of where that question of communication comes, comes into play. We not only communicate with one another but we communicate with the athlete and make those adjustments. We have such a short window of preparation in camp to keep the athlete firing at a very high outlet, both neurologically, metabolically and a lot of these adjustments in terms of an extra shake, an extra recovery meal, whatever the case might be, are occurring on a daily basis. So it’s really huge to not only utilize this data but be able to understand the athlete as we, as we approach the competition.

Chris Algieri [00:08:34]:Even as a nutrition, I like to go on watch the athletes train, I want to see what their metabolic output is going to be so I can adjust their nutrition accordingly. Listen, some guys trained harder than others. Everybody trains hard. But some guys are those guys that stay after their super workhorses. They put in that extra work. I have to know that when I’m putting together a dietary plan, these guys make sure that they’re eating enough, getting enough calories in, whether it be from the carbohydrates or fats or whatever. I also want to see what they’re looking like as soon as the practice goes on, are they eating late? Are they cramping up or are they completely done afterwards? I need to know these things and so I can make adjustments on the fly.

Corey Beasley [00:09:20]: Now with all of the objective and the subjective data that you guys are collecting, in addition to that, do you guys use any technology or anything like that throughout camp to kind of see where your guys are at?

Corey Peacock [00:09:33]:Yeah. So I have a lot of the guys monitored throughout camp. I’ve different athletes respond to different pieces of technology differently. So I think that’s where as a sports scientist, as a physiologist, I have to really make the determination of what’s valuable, what’s not valuable. I would say just in general, we’re definitely using sleep through the ready band by fatigue science. We’re utilizing polar for both GPS and heart rate data. We’re utilizing omega wave to look at nervous system function along with cardiovascular and metabolic function along with that we’re also utilizing a lot of different lab measures. Those tests that I was talking about. We don’t only do those at the beginning, but those are something that we’ll do as we switched phases throughout the camp. And then also as we approach fight week and the last cut throughout the camp. So we’re using a lot of different technology. We’re also have a lot of different research projects and things that are either currently underway or in process of being published. We’re using what is called catapult and GPS technology to look at different movement patterns look at accelerations, decelerations, a lot of different metrics, distances, workloads that the athletes are going through. And we’ve been able to do a lot of really cool stuff with that. Even with Chris as a client and not just a partner with this, we’ve been able to utilize some of this data with Chris during his boxing training to be able to, I mean realistically we can determine without actually cooking anything else up to Chris, but a GPS unit, how much body water he loses during that session. How much his body increases in temperature, how much he loses in electrolytes. We have a pretty good grasp on that now just by seeing how much output he’s doing in terms of movement and high metabolic load during these sessions. And that stuff’s carrying over into a lot of the athletes that we’re working with. So really a lot of technology is being involved for the idea that, it’s objective data. We still have to be coaches, we still have to be sports nutritionists, but objective data is objective data and you can’t argue with,

Corey Beasley [00:11:55]: yeah, I mean I’m sure it just takes a lot of the guesswork out of it?

Corey Peacock [00:12:00]:Absolutely. And that’s ultimately what we want to do. Why not use the resources we have to be as specific and precise as possible for each individual athletes. And that’s the way I feel about it.

Corey Beasley [00:12:14]: Now Chris, just kind of go down your road expertise here for a minute and talk about some of the method methods and strategies and stuff like that that you’re doing with the athletes as far as food and supplementation goes. Can you talk about some of that stuff just a little bit?

Chris Algieri [00:12:32]:So I guess I’ll handle answer that question this way is I kind of I’ve seen a lot of the wrong ways done the wrong methods and kind of the pitfalls that I’ve seen with these comments for athletes, number one is it guys just not eating an up totally under fueled being afraid of carbs kind of carver phobic and stand away from cars all together. And just not eating enough for one their body size and their weight, but also just for their activity level all these athletes are training super hard, usually two, sometimes three times a day, four, five, six days a week for eight to 12 weeks at the camp. So the metabolic needs of these athletes are so high. You see a lot of guys getting injured, a lot of guys getting sick. A lot of guys not making weight. A lot of that I think is because they’re under fueled and underfed throughout their camp. Another thing that I really see with a lot of guys they’re dehydrated they’re not drinking enough fluids or they cut their fluids far too early in order to get ready for their weight cut. Then you got guys that are still sparring 10 days, two weeks out from the fight and they’re worried about drinking water on sparring days, which blows my mind. But I’ve seen it time and time again over the years and all over the country with these guys just afraid of the scale, afraid to have it go up even if it’s just because they’re drinking water. So for me, when I first get a guy I generally, I’m upping their calories, opening their intake, making sure getting their water intake much higher. And oftentimes it’s the number on the scale does go up, guys freaked out and I kind of have to tell them it’s all part of the process, just the process. We know what we’re doing here. A lot of times these athletes, if you rationalize with them and tell them what the plan is and you’re confident in what’s going on, it’s very easy for them to buy into it. And especially after a few weeks and they start feeling great and performing that much higher that they really are bought in at that point.

Corey Beasley [00:14:41]: Now Imagine what the objective data that you guys collected the beginning with the body composition, hydration, the resting metabolic rate and some of those other tools you were about that has to make it a lot easier to get buy in when you’re kind of going through this stuff. Is that right?

Corey Peacock [00:14:57]:I really believe so. I’ll be honest with you there. I think that goes, I’d say it’s about 75 to 25% about three out of four, three out of four buy in. It’s something different to them. It’s science it’s going to bring the next level to their game. And then I truly believe that they trust in the system. I’d say one out of four, I’m here because he told me to be here. I don’t care what you do with the data just do right by me as the athlete. And I’m okay with that.

Chris Algieri [00:15:25]:But also part of that is the buying of a skills coach. You can do all these numbers, show them objective data, and this coach can look at you and tell you to go fuck yourself and they don’t really care. So getting an old school boxing coach to buy into a Vo2 Max is not even a possibility. So there’s always that blow back as well. And I don’t know if that’s ever going away. And we’re not trying to change that.

Corey Peacock [00:15:56]:It’ll never go away. But one thing that I do find with a lot of these old school coaches their acceptance for this. Believe it or not, internally, they are starting to believe in it a little bit, but if it’s not their idea, they don’t care. Eventually it’ll come out and say, wow, look at this, look at the gas tank, look at what we’ve done with them and things like that. But it’s just a matter of wins and losses are still always going to be the most important thing. If we’re on a winning streak and we’re winning fights and this is part of the process, everybody around it buys in. If we’re losing, guess what, this might be this might be part of the process that people aren’t buying into and it’s just the nature of the sport and be an assurance coach and nutritionist for sure.

Corey Beasley [00:16:37]: Well that’s cool that you guys are kind of fine tuning things and really getting down to the core of what’s going to change people, but then objectively showing them numbers I mean you’re not only assessing, but your monitoring and measuring progress over time so it can only help as things go. Right?

Corey Peacock [00:16:58]:Absolutely. And we not only do we want to do what’s right by the athlete with a lot of this data, but we’re also big into the research aspects of this. Chris and I currently have two publications in review, looking at different things between sleep metrics and performance and GPS and performance. We’re not only trying to do what’s right by our athletes, but we’re also trying to do what’s right by the sport and present some of this data and show some of the methods that we’re utilizing. Because ultimately we want the sport to progress. We want the athletes to be healthy over a long period of time. And that for us if we’re sitting on the information by ourselves, we’re not doing right by the sport.

Corey Beasley [00:17:46]: Now, Chris, as well as when you’re going to and kind of setting people up food-wise do you guys utilize any supplementation as you guys are going to?

Chris Algieri [00:17:56]:Absolutely. I think at this level at the elite level every point in a percentage counts. So if we can get a little bit extra out of our athletes because of some supplementation, I think it’s absolutely important to be on top of that and give your athletes any possible advantage or at least even laying in the level the playing field for the skills to step off. But I’ve been a drug tested athlete for years. I’m actually involved in Nevada year-round drug testing, a voluntary anti-doping association. I’ve submitted myself for year round random drug testing. I can get tested literally at any time. I actually had get tested on my birthday last year. They showed up at my door on my actual birthday. So I’m very well versed in what supplements are allowed and what to be wary of. So that’s something I always have to be involved with. When it comes to taking on a new client to go through their something and let’s get an idea of what they’ve been taking, what they taken in the past, what they’re taking currently. I had an athlete who’s being tested. So I submit the list of the supplements and we go back and forth in case there’s anything that there’s any additives or anything that are not on the no fly list. But I would say my favorite supplements for sports combat or combat sports would be Creatine monohydrate and Beta alanine are probably my two favorite performance supplements, Creatine one obviously we know about it’s for ability like allows you to be stronger and more explosive. But there’s a lot of really interesting research coming out that there was a neuro protective benefit to using Creatine, Monohydrate. And whenever you have a sport where those blows to the head and repeat impacts brand issues are always going to be in question. So anything that can help with any kind of neuro neurological damage I think is, is, is absolutely necessary. And everybody should be on this stuff. If you get hit in your head. And then Beta Alanine is just I mean especially with let me both sports with boxing especially it’s such an endurance based sport need is another buffer that allows kind of kind of increasing the gas tank, allowing those muscles to keep working for longer. So you’ve got those two coupled together you got something that reminds you to be more explosive and stronger and then you’ve got something that allows you to do it for longer, so more explosive for longer periods of time. I mean that’s exactly what a fight is. So those are my two favorite performance settles for Combat.

Corey Beasley [00:20:46]: Now Corey, we’re going we’ve got communication between all the coaches. We’ve got the focus for the camp, utilizing a bunch of different technology to monitor the boys throughout as well as food and supplementation when we actually get into the training. How do you kind of break up your camp like while using different blocks of training or is it vary in intensity throughout the week or how do you guys kind of run that?

Corey Peacock [00:21:11]: For me I’ll typically use phases. And same thing, Chris and I sort of have a three phase model with both our strength and conditioning and our nutrition obviously the furthest away from the fight depending on what kind of timeframe we have, what luxury the athlete is, whether or not they might be a short notice fight, whatever the case might be. But let’s just say with our traditional top level guy that has the luxury of somewhat of a little bit of an off period and stuff like that. We typically focus on recovery, improving the body. I mean camp is a grueling process. Even people who will sit there and say, if they see an athlete come out and fight and have a 42 second knock out, they think that athletes should be able to turn around and fight right away. Well they didn’t just watch the eight weeks of grinding and preparing for the worst that the athlete just went through, so realistically further away we really just work on basic strength, basic structure, basic joint integrity a lot of the corrective movements and things like that to try to just get the athlete back to functioning and firing at 100% even with some of the tests and things that we do you’re going to see a drastic decline following a camp at both the neurological level and cardiovascular level. And we’ve seen this time in and time out with a lot of lab testing that we do when we bring an athlete in immediately after a fight, so really trying to build some of that aerobic base while building a foundation of strength as super important. And at that point I think that’s just when Chris is really with his nutrition, trying to try to keep the athlete in a reasonable percentage of his fight competition weight.

Chris Algieri [00:22:57]:At that point for the nutrition aspect of course the recovery. I think making sure that the athletes are at that point that’s going to be the higher protein intake of their diet. They’re kind of rebuilding the tissue that was damaged during training camp the tissue they lost during the weight cut. Also anti-inflammatory foods, they kind of make sure that the body is healing correctly and keeping the blood flow moving the right way. So that’s really important as well. Making sure these guys are eating enough, getting their protein needs and eating the right kinds of fats and keeping their total body inflammation down as on top of Corey doing more heavy lifting, more heavy work, which is going to break down even more muscle tissues. So at that point it’s really important to make sure that these guys are recovering from not only the fight before, but also each training session at that point.

Corey Peacock [00:23:08]:As we move into the camp, that’s typically what we’ll consider. Our second phase will be the first block of actual camp depending on our timeframe, depending on sport to we approach boxing and MMA just a little bit differently with our phasing. But let’s just use maybe MMA and eight week camp, something like that. We’ll spend our first three weeks plus a de-load or transition week focusing on really strengthened their strength hypertrophy depending on where our athlete is in terms of their weight shot and those kinds of things will really press the glycolytic system and we’ll implement a lot of jump training at that point in time, after we hit that transition or de-load into our third phase of camp that’s really where we’re going to focus on speed, strength, power even more fight specific coordination type things along with real plyometric training not jump training but real plyometric training, keeping the strength shortening cycle really less than about 0.2 seconds. And really focus on fight speed and those kinds of things. And we put them into the fight and put them into the weight cut and that’s where we’re at.

Chris Algieri [00:25:08]:At that second phase that’s we’re going to be best going to be the bulk of the, of the live scoring. So it’s really important to make sure that the athlete is, is properly feels for sparring sessions, because that’s going to be actually mimic the fight. And at that stage we’ve been worked on actually cutting the athlete’s body fat percentage down, getting their weight down to the point for where they’re going to be when they step in the cage or the ring that’s where the bulk of that, is basically to be, like I said, which is going to make the fight. I want my guy to be the weight that he’s going to be when he steps into the ring. So at that point we want to keep them under 10% of their weight class up from the way they have to make, because that’s where we’re going to be about when it comes time for fight time. So it’s really important to make sure that, we did everything you need to up to that point so they can really focus on the skill aspect, which is going to be that last one.

Corey Beasley [00:26:03]: So these guys are talking about the first phase. Your first phase is basically out of camp?

Corey Peacock [00:26:09]:Yeah. First phase would be out of camps. Second phase would be majority of the volume going through camp. And then the third phase is really that last phase rolling into the fight depending on where the athletes had that for us is going to vary on the testing. Whether that’s five weeks out, four weeks out, three weeks out, it’s really going depend also the traveling schedule and those kinds of things. But like I said our second phase is really where we try to meet and hit a lot of our long-term objectives and then fine tuning in that last phase really just keeping everything very fight specific, high speed, high intensity, short duration. And that’s where we’re at.

Corey Beasley [00:26:56]: Now you guys, you kind of alluded to it a little bit earlier, but when you were talking about some research publications and stuff that’s coming out, can you go into that a little bit more?

Corey Peacock [00:27:08]:Yeah. So I think I mentioned a little bit of the GPS stuff. So we’re going to have a couple of different case studies small groups looking at the difference between a grappler during live sparring takedowns sparring, stand up sparring. We’re going to have more of a traditional BJJ guy. We’re going to have more of a traditional boxer we have all these different athletes coming into this and it’s really interesting to look at how some metrics such as player load and metabolic stress are affects these athletes in their certain specializations. And then also when they’re outside of their comfort zone. So we’re going to just present some data realistically just kind of showing what the data looks like outside of that, we’re also working on, we have in review right now, currently a sleep metric study looking at the, the influence on sleep, sleep timing, amount of sleep amount of time spent in deep sleep, circadian rhythm and different things like that. And we actually have that in a very, I mean as controlled of his environment as you could possibly get our subject population was placed in basically in an exhibition style competition, but they were really competing they were really fighting an exhibition fight and they were in a six to eight week camp depending on where they were at all basically all electronics, all external factors were taken out of it and eliminated. So it’s going to be a really cool study long story short, if I could sum it up, it’s basically, I think going into this, we all have the idea the athletes would sleep more going to be the athletes that perform. And then we kind of go back to what our objectives are as a performance coach and nutritionist and one of our objectives is maintaining high neuro function. And we’ve actually found that the more sleep in that little tiny window that’s known as camp wasn’t necessarily carrying over to better CNS function and actually better performance. It was consistency. So looking at athletes that even if they were on, let’s say a two day schedule, if they had the ability to even rest, lay down and sleep for 15 minutes between sessions and then the same thing after their second session and their total daily sleep was only five hours. They were still functioning at a higher level than some of those athletes that were sleeping eight, nine hours. But it was very inconsistent throughout the camp. So I think that’s really data and really interesting. So that’s in review right now. I’m hoping to get that published within the next three to six months, depending on whether or not the scientific community likes it. So we’ll see, outside of that, we’re really sitting down here with a lot of this stuff really something that we want to do. We found this a journal that we really like a journal of exercise and nutrition and their focus is and again I’m maybe putting a plug in here because I’m the editor in chief now, but the focus of the journal is more high performance athletes, case studies, it’s really hard in the academic world to get to get a subject population of high level athletes. It’s just really difficult. So you look at a lot of the sample sizes and things like that. If you bring in five former world champion boxers, to me that is information that needs to be out. Even though in typical academia the subject population is just too small to make any sort of inference towards whatever the case might be. So this this journal is really cool in the regards that case studies are welcome that brief subject, popular or small subject populations are welcome. Just don’t go out of your grasp. And make a huge generalization, again, even with the sleep study this may have just been for our subject pool. This may not carry over to boxing because it was mixed martial arts and will stay within those grasp. But I still think the data needs to be out there on these high level athletes because they are so different than your typical 18 to 23 year olds, physically active college students that are in the majority of these, what they would call high level studies, high level, high up elite athletes study. So something that we’re really trying to do. And it’s going to be really cool. And I think there’s a lot of people now in this combat sports world that are out there trying to do some of these things and collect some of this data and partnering with universities and things like that. So I think everything’s going in the right direction. And I just I’m lucky enough that myself, Chris we have college like Tony Ricci up in New York, Jose Antonio with the International Society of sports nutrition that are really jumping on board with this and trying to bring awareness and education and research into the realm of mixed martial arts and boxing.

Corey Beasley [00:32:39]: That’s cool. I think there’s a huge need for it. I mean obviously a lot of these sports are gaining popularity there is absolutely a need for this stuff to get down and tight so that sure these kids are just staying healthy. I mean if we can just keep them healthy, that’d be a huge advantage. So what you guys are doing, it sounds killer.

Corey Peacock [00:32:26]:Yeah. And that’s one of the things like Chris and I would say looking at that, it is really our two major objectives. I mean high neuro function, we have to get the best out of every session in that short period of time. That is camp. But the second thing, and I think this is where it really, where Chris has changed a lot of my perception on all of this is this whole this anti-inflammatory response with foods recovery, injury prevention, how much of this can be done with proper rest scheduling with proper nutrition implementation and proper strength and conditioning that’s been the biggest thing that I think Chris has brought to this partnership in my opinion, is that idea of keeping these athletes injury-free through nutrition. I think it’s absolutely amazing and it’s been, for me, somebody that just has relatively minimal knowledge in the field. It’s been that’s been the biggest eye opening thing for me is how much we can do through the nutritional aspect.

Chris Algieri [00:33:25]:And that came from just my aggression through my career as my level of competition rose and I got to the world elite level you always train hard, but really as you really get up there, you recover harder so you can train harder and you can be the best version of yourself each and every session. We keep alluding to how little time we have during a training camp there’s a very finite amount of time for these guys to get better. And when these athletes are not sitting there just trying to make weight for our camp, they actually have the opportunity to increase their skillset to get in better shape, to get stronger than they were the camp before. And ultimately that has to be the goal at the high level. If you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse. So we are constantly working on getting our athletes to recover fully between sessions and week to week. So they’re getting stronger through camp, not weaker which probably seemed more often than not, where guys are really breaking themselves down and showing up or getting sick and injured and not making weight and all kinds of stuff complete exactly which you’re seeing a lot of lately. And I think it’s something that that’s been going on for a long time fighters in general have a catabolic mindset. You’re constantly losing weight. You never want to see the number on the scale go up you push yourself beyond your limits as much as you possibly can. You suffer, that’s a training campus, suffer. So you’re ready for fight night. It doesn’t necessarily have to be like that especially physiologically we don’t want our guys breaking themselves down for 12 weeks and then showing up on fight night shadow of themselves maybe mentally they may feel like that, but we want them to be physically and physiologically a whole new beast by the time they get there as opposed to being weakly on fight weak.

Corey Peacock [00:35:15]:Yeah. And I think Chris hit on something important. You know, that that is our goal to improve our athletes during camp looking at one of our athletes right now over his previous eight week camp, we have achieved what sometimes science says is impossible with anabolism and catabolism. But we’ve been able to eliminate our lose 11 and a half pounds of fat while putting on four and a half pounds of muscle in a very short period of time. And I think if people hear that, that don’t work with these athletes on a daily basis. They’re going to completely shit on this. But realistically, these athletes are so different. And that’s part of the whole thing with the research. Like I’m learning every day, everything that I’ve learned with three degrees and exercise physiology is challenged on a daily basis. And that’s one of those things that if somebody told me that were the results over realistically seven weeks, I wouldn’t believe it. But then I see the objective data with my own eyes and I say it’s really incredible to watch these athletes and how they can respond to such respond to numerous kinds of stimulus, including strength training, nutrition, and those kinds of things.

Chris Algieri [00:36:34]:I knew I had known that I’ve been a superhuman for a long time. It’s cool to see someone else actually realize it and understand the magnitude of what that really means.

Corey Peacock [00:36:43]:It’s true. That’s the thing. It’s just they don’t, these, this population does not apply to traditional science. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m a scientist. I shouldn’t have said it that way because everything I do is based off of science and my education. But the ability to adapt and be able to take into consideration that these athletes are different is the biggest thing that I’ve had to learn how to adapt to over at this 0.3 years now working in combat sports.

Corey Beasley [00:37:19]: Well I think we’ll continue learning and with all the metrics that you guys have at your disposal the technology and stuff like that, all the things that you’re measuring along the way that wasn’t possible five years ago. And I remember talking to another strength coach and he was talking about Major League baseball and how much of a cluster that was 10 years ago. And they sports are growing so fast and you know, there’s just not data on these guys?

Corey Peacock [00:37:52]:So it’s crazy even saying that, like you were saying baseball about 10 years ago. Even I look at something like hockey I do some work with a couple of NHL teams. I think they’re behind where they, where they need to be. I think you see this European and Australian model of sports science and in technology that’s been going on now for 25, 30 years where this stuff’s really just over the past 10 years really started to make its way into professional sports here in the United States. And then you have a sport like MMA, that’s shit 20 years old half of its existence focus is in other sports and now it’s really just trickling into MMA and boxing.

Corey Beasley [00:38:37]: Yeah. Well that’d be cool to see where it goes.

Corey Peacock [00:38:40]:Absolutely. I completely agree. I nerd out over that stuff.

Corey Beasley [00:38:43]: Now for you guys are down in south Florida, is that right?

Corey Peacock [00:38:52]:Correct. Well, Chris you split time.

Chris Algieri [00:38:55]: Yeah, I’m a bit of a snowbird, so, I’m back and forth, up and down all the time. As soon as it starts getting cold, I’m a warm weather friend. So as soon as I was getting cold I go down south, me and Corey get a lot more work done in the winter.

Corey Peacock [00:39:14]:Now what for this year, 2018, what do you guys got going on? Whole Lot. Yeah, let’s start with this upcoming weekend volcanoes to mirror is one of our clients. He will be competing for the UFC light heavyweight title against a very tough Daniel Cormier. We’re looking forward to a great performance and great competition between two great athletes. We will have Matt Mitrione who we’ve worked with in the past. We’ll be fighting Roy Nelson for the, I guess the heavyweight tournament that they’re throwing in Bellator those are, I would say the two biggest things that we have coming up currently people that we’re working with outside of that we will continue our partnership with the international society of sports nutrition, both as nutrition consultant, performance consultant. Chris and I, if we ever find time we really are hoping to get a podcast up and running along with Tony Ricci up north and kind of focus on human performance a lot of different sports, but obviously it’ll always come back to combat sports because it’s what we’re most familiar with. And we’re going to do some seminar series. We’re working a couple things in the works. I think 2018 is going to be a really cool year, but we still have a few things that we’re going to kind of keep to our self, right now.

Chris Algieri [00:40:45]:Little too early to let out a bag, but we have some very cool, interesting. So I’m just going to happen, that’s going to be around her for a while.

Corey Peacock [00:40:54]:And I think Chris competition-wise hopefully get something going here pretty soon and I think that’s about it.

Corey Beasley [00:41:04]: Very cool guys. Well, it sounds like you guys got a ton of good stuff going on. You’re doing a lot of cool stuff for that all the different combat sports and we look forward to hearing more about it and learn from you guys along the way.

Corey Peacock [00:41:29]:Yeah, Corey thanks for having us. We appreciate the time and like I said, any awareness, any sort of education we can provide to others, we’re always available. So find us on social media, websites, whatever the case might be, and reach out because I feel like to improve the sport, we have to be able to share knowledge. We have to be able to educate, we have to be able to learn from others that are doing, that are doing wonders in the sport as well.

Corey Beasley [00:41:49]: I’ll put links down to the guys’ social media accounts and websites and stuff like that. So you guys can click over and follow these guys and stay in touch. And Corey, Chris, thanks a ton for your time. I really appreciate it.

Corey Peacock [00:42:04]:Yeah, of course. Thanks for having us.

Chris Algieri [00:42:06]:Absolutely. Corey, thank you so much.

Episode Transcript

Full Transcription of Our Podcast with Chris Aligieri and Corey Peacock
Interview with Corey Peacock & Chris Algieri talking about performance and nutrition

Chris Algieri [00:00:13]:Doing well.

Corey Peacock [00:00:14]:Doing well. Corey, thanks for having us.

Chris Algieri [00:00:57]:Hey guys. Chris Algieri. I’m a performance nutrition coach and I work with professional boxers and MMA athletes as well as division one college athletes. I’m a consultant for Athletic Department at Stony Brook University. I’m also currently a top contender in the junior welterweight division of the world boxing association and on the former WBO super lightweight world champion in boxing.

Corey Peacock [00:01:27]:That’s going to be tough to top. I’m Dr. Corey Peacock exercise physiologists and strength and conditioning coach. Again, like Chris said, for both the boxing world and mixed martial arts as well, on top of that background is, is very mixed up in strength and conditioning. I’ve been through a lot of different sports formerly football at the division one level and now all my focus is on combat sports. Outside of that, I’m also an associate professor of health and human performance at Nova Southeastern University down here in south Florida.

Corey Peacock [00:02:37]:Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s a lot of headlines out there right now in the MMA world, especially as it pertains to proper periodization performance, weight cuts, nutrition, strength and conditioning strategies to optimize human performance. I do believe there’s a lot of negativity in that realm right now in this field. And I really do believe that it’s a lack of communication that realistically is leading to these problems. I believe that all of these, all of these great sports nutritionist that, that are out there, all these great strength and conditioning coaches that are out there along with the specialized mixed martial arts coaches are tried to do the best by their athletes. But I believe when there’s a lack of communication between coaches, a lot of times you could be red line in your athlete, your athletes aren’t on the same phase and the same program, especially when it comes to something like strength and conditioning and nutrition. So it’s huge. And I’ve experienced this firsthand being an MMA where I’ve had some, I’ve had some of my athletes that I’ve worked with work with different nutrition companies, a different weight specialists such as Lockhart, a Ricci and those guys. And those guys are brilliant. They do a really great job. I’ve had experiences with other nutritionists where the nutritionist wants to very much dictate what’s going on in every aspect of the camp and that hasn’t been as pleasant of an experience. And realistically, I believe the outcome itself wasn’t the best for the athletes. So Chris and I, really created and had a good ability to communicate with one another for the goal of what’s best for that athlete. And I’ll let Chris sort of weigh in on top of that.

Chris Algieri [00:04:27]:As Corey alluded to the communication is key between myself and him. We are a true performance team and the athlete’s performance watching in focus for us and we period eyes, the nutrition along with the phases. So I’ll meet with Corey before the camp even starts, ask him what his strength and conditioning program will look like throughout the camp, how it’s going to Change. And from there I’ll look at that nutrition, what our goals are at each phase of the camp and correct and adapt as we go and make any adjustments along the way. And I won’t know how those adjustments are going from nutrition side. If I don’t speak to the court and ask how the guys doing, if I don’t speak to the guy himself or the athletes themselves about how they’re weighted, how they’re feeling, what’s going on with this. So I think it’s paramount that the lines of communication stay open in between coaches and athletes themselves.

Corey Peacock [00:05:52]:Sure. So one of the things that I will do right off the bat myself and Chris, I’ll utilize the laboratory at Nova southeastern university. A couple of the things that we’ll do, we’ll do either a traditional body comp test, whether it’s a bod pod or a DEXA. We’ll also do a BIA or looking at some sort of muscletech ultrasound to determine whole body water. I would say between that assessment, along with I will do a resting metabolic rate along with an exercise VO2 Max test. I think that gives us a lot of good information on where the athlete is in terms of muscle composition, whole body water. And I think it gives us a lot of information on resting metabolism along with the actual metabolism during certain heart rates, certain zones, utilization of macros and those kinds of things. So I’ll usually start with that, putting together sort of a overview of how they are metabolically and body composition wise. And then I kind of let Chris run wild with that.

Chris Algieri [00:06:58]:Yeah. From there, I take that, that objective data that, that Corey has has collected. And then for me, it’s really just sitting down and talk with the athletes themselves and collecting the subjective data. We speak about, what their current eating habits are what their history has been with weight cuts where they generally start their camp in terms of their weight and body fat percentage and what has been like in the past. And having a history really helps me kind of decide the best, the best route for an athlete. I’m also kind of dietarily what they’re used to dealing generally the guys that Corey and I deal with are very high level, so we’re not going walk in there and reinvent the wheel in these guys and change everything around. Like you said, the camps can go really quick, so you can’t make too many adjustments right off the bat. And it really is a process we normally like to have our guys for several camps and adjust as we go.

Corey Peacock [00:07:49]:Yeah. And go and going off of what Chris just said, I think that right there is a huge point of where that question of communication comes, comes into play. We not only communicate with one another but we communicate with the athlete and make those adjustments. We have such a short window of preparation in camp to keep the athlete firing at a very high outlet, both neurologically, metabolically and a lot of these adjustments in terms of an extra shake, an extra recovery meal, whatever the case might be, are occurring on a daily basis. So it’s really huge to not only utilize this data but be able to understand the athlete as we, as we approach the competition.

Chris Algieri [00:08:34]:Even as a nutrition, I like to go on watch the athletes train, I want to see what their metabolic output is going to be so I can adjust their nutrition accordingly. Listen, some guys trained harder than others. Everybody trains hard. But some guys are those guys that stay after their super workhorses. They put in that extra work. I have to know that when I’m putting together a dietary plan, these guys make sure that they’re eating enough, getting enough calories in, whether it be from the carbohydrates or fats or whatever. I also want to see what they’re looking like as soon as the practice goes on, are they eating late? Are they cramping up or are they completely done afterwards? I need to know these things and so I can make adjustments on the fly.

Corey Peacock [00:09:33]:Yeah. So I have a lot of the guys monitored throughout camp. I’ve different athletes respond to different pieces of technology differently. So I think that’s where as a sports scientist, as a physiologist, I have to really make the determination of what’s valuable, what’s not valuable. I would say just in general, we’re definitely using sleep through the ready band by fatigue science. We’re utilizing polar for both GPS and heart rate data. We’re utilizing omega wave to look at nervous system function along with cardiovascular and metabolic function along with that we’re also utilizing a lot of different lab measures. Those tests that I was talking about. We don’t only do those at the beginning, but those are something that we’ll do as we switched phases throughout the camp. And then also as we approach fight week and the last cut throughout the camp. So we’re using a lot of different technology. We’re also have a lot of different research projects and things that are either currently underway or in process of being published. We’re using what is called catapult and GPS technology to look at different movement patterns look at accelerations, decelerations, a lot of different metrics, distances, workloads that the athletes are going through. And we’ve been able to do a lot of really cool stuff with that. Even with Chris as a client and not just a partner with this, we’ve been able to utilize some of this data with Chris during his boxing training to be able to, I mean realistically we can determine without actually cooking anything else up to Chris, but a GPS unit, how much body water he loses during that session. How much his body increases in temperature, how much he loses in electrolytes. We have a pretty good grasp on that now just by seeing how much output he’s doing in terms of movement and high metabolic load during these sessions. And that stuff’s carrying over into a lot of the athletes that we’re working with. So really a lot of technology is being involved for the idea that, it’s objective data. We still have to be coaches, we still have to be sports nutritionists, but objective data is objective data and you can’t argue with,

Corey Beasley [00:11:55]: yeah, I mean I’m sure it just takes a lot of the guesswork out of it?

Corey Peacock [00:12:00]:Absolutely. And that’s ultimately what we want to do. Why not use the resources we have to be as specific and precise as possible for each individual athletes. And that’s the way I feel about it.

Chris Algieri [00:12:32]:So I guess I’ll handle answer that question this way is I kind of I’ve seen a lot of the wrong ways done the wrong methods and kind of the pitfalls that I’ve seen with these comments for athletes, number one is it guys just not eating an up totally under fueled being afraid of carbs kind of carver phobic and stand away from cars all together. And just not eating enough for one their body size and their weight, but also just for their activity level all these athletes are training super hard, usually two, sometimes three times a day, four, five, six days a week for eight to 12 weeks at the camp. So the metabolic needs of these athletes are so high. You see a lot of guys getting injured, a lot of guys getting sick. A lot of guys not making weight. A lot of that I think is because they’re under fueled and underfed throughout their camp. Another thing that I really see with a lot of guys they’re dehydrated they’re not drinking enough fluids or they cut their fluids far too early in order to get ready for their weight cut. Then you got guys that are still sparring 10 days, two weeks out from the fight and they’re worried about drinking water on sparring days, which blows my mind. But I’ve seen it time and time again over the years and all over the country with these guys just afraid of the scale, afraid to have it go up even if it’s just because they’re drinking water. So for me, when I first get a guy I generally, I’m upping their calories, opening their intake, making sure getting their water intake much higher. And oftentimes it’s the number on the scale does go up, guys freaked out and I kind of have to tell them it’s all part of the process, just the process. We know what we’re doing here. A lot of times these athletes, if you rationalize with them and tell them what the plan is and you’re confident in what’s going on, it’s very easy for them to buy into it. And especially after a few weeks and they start feeling great and performing that much higher that they really are bought in at that point.

Corey Peacock [00:14:57]:I really believe so. I’ll be honest with you there. I think that goes, I’d say it’s about 75 to 25% about three out of four, three out of four buy in. It’s something different to them. It’s science it’s going to bring the next level to their game. And then I truly believe that they trust in the system. I’d say one out of four, I’m here because he told me to be here. I don’t care what you do with the data just do right by me as the athlete. And I’m okay with that.

Chris Algieri [00:15:25]:But also part of that is the buying of a skills coach. You can do all these numbers, show them objective data, and this coach can look at you and tell you to go fuck yourself and they don’t really care. So getting an old school boxing coach to buy into a Vo2 Max is not even a possibility. So there’s always that blow back as well. And I don’t know if that’s ever going away. And we’re not trying to change that.

Corey Peacock [00:15:56]:It’ll never go away. But one thing that I do find with a lot of these old school coaches their acceptance for this. Believe it or not, internally, they are starting to believe in it a little bit, but if it’s not their idea, they don’t care. Eventually it’ll come out and say, wow, look at this, look at the gas tank, look at what we’ve done with them and things like that. But it’s just a matter of wins and losses are still always going to be the most important thing. If we’re on a winning streak and we’re winning fights and this is part of the process, everybody around it buys in. If we’re losing, guess what, this might be this might be part of the process that people aren’t buying into and it’s just the nature of the sport and be an assurance coach and nutritionist for sure.

Corey Peacock [00:16:58]:Absolutely. And we not only do we want to do what’s right by the athlete with a lot of this data, but we’re also big into the research aspects of this. Chris and I currently have two publications in review, looking at different things between sleep metrics and performance and GPS and performance. We’re not only trying to do what’s right by our athletes, but we’re also trying to do what’s right by the sport and present some of this data and show some of the methods that we’re utilizing. Because ultimately we want the sport to progress. We want the athletes to be healthy over a long period of time. And that for us if we’re sitting on the information by ourselves, we’re not doing right by the sport.

Corey Beasley [00:17:46]: Now, Chris, as well as when you’re going to and kind of setting people up food-wise do you guys utilize any supplementation as you guys are going to?

Chris Algieri [00:17:56]:Absolutely. I think at this level at the elite level every point in a percentage counts. So if we can get a little bit extra out of our athletes because of some supplementation, I think it’s absolutely important to be on top of that and give your athletes any possible advantage or at least even laying in the level the playing field for the skills to step off. But I’ve been a drug tested athlete for years. I’m actually involved in Nevada year-round drug testing, a voluntary anti-doping association. I’ve submitted myself for year round random drug testing. I can get tested literally at any time. I actually had get tested on my birthday last year. They showed up at my door on my actual birthday. So I’m very well versed in what supplements are allowed and what to be wary of. So that’s something I always have to be involved with. When it comes to taking on a new client to go through their something and let’s get an idea of what they’ve been taking, what they taken in the past, what they’re taking currently. I had an athlete who’s being tested. So I submit the list of the supplements and we go back and forth in case there’s anything that there’s any additives or anything that are not on the no fly list. But I would say my favorite supplements for sports combat or combat sports would be Creatine monohydrate and Beta alanine are probably my two favorite performance supplements, Creatine one obviously we know about it’s for ability like allows you to be stronger and more explosive. But there’s a lot of really interesting research coming out that there was a neuro protective benefit to using Creatine, Monohydrate. And whenever you have a sport where those blows to the head and repeat impacts brand issues are always going to be in question. So anything that can help with any kind of neuro neurological damage I think is, is, is absolutely necessary. And everybody should be on this stuff. If you get hit in your head. And then Beta Alanine is just I mean especially with let me both sports with boxing especially it’s such an endurance based sport need is another buffer that allows kind of kind of increasing the gas tank, allowing those muscles to keep working for longer. So you’ve got those two coupled together you got something that reminds you to be more explosive and stronger and then you’ve got something that allows you to do it for longer, so more explosive for longer periods of time. I mean that’s exactly what a fight is. So those are my two favorite performance settles for Combat.

Corey Peacock [00:21:11]: For me I’ll typically use phases. And same thing, Chris and I sort of have a three phase model with both our strength and conditioning and our nutrition obviously the furthest away from the fight depending on what kind of timeframe we have, what luxury the athlete is, whether or not they might be a short notice fight, whatever the case might be. But let’s just say with our traditional top level guy that has the luxury of somewhat of a little bit of an off period and stuff like that. We typically focus on recovery, improving the body. I mean camp is a grueling process. Even people who will sit there and say, if they see an athlete come out and fight and have a 42 second knock out, they think that athletes should be able to turn around and fight right away. Well they didn’t just watch the eight weeks of grinding and preparing for the worst that the athlete just went through, so realistically further away we really just work on basic strength, basic structure, basic joint integrity a lot of the corrective movements and things like that to try to just get the athlete back to functioning and firing at 100% even with some of the tests and things that we do you’re going to see a drastic decline following a camp at both the neurological level and cardiovascular level. And we’ve seen this time in and time out with a lot of lab testing that we do when we bring an athlete in immediately after a fight, so really trying to build some of that aerobic base while building a foundation of strength as super important. And at that point I think that’s just when Chris is really with his nutrition, trying to try to keep the athlete in a reasonable percentage of his fight competition weight.

Chris Algieri [00:22:57]:At that point for the nutrition aspect of course the recovery. I think making sure that the athletes are at that point that’s going to be the higher protein intake of their diet. They’re kind of rebuilding the tissue that was damaged during training camp the tissue they lost during the weight cut. Also anti-inflammatory foods, they kind of make sure that the body is healing correctly and keeping the blood flow moving the right way. So that’s really important as well. Making sure these guys are eating enough, getting their protein needs and eating the right kinds of fats and keeping their total body inflammation down as on top of Corey doing more heavy lifting, more heavy work, which is going to break down even more muscle tissues. So at that point it’s really important to make sure that these guys are recovering from not only the fight before, but also each training session at that point.

Corey Peacock [00:23:08]:As we move into the camp, that’s typically what we’ll consider. Our second phase will be the first block of actual camp depending on our timeframe, depending on sport to we approach boxing and MMA just a little bit differently with our phasing. But let’s just use maybe MMA and eight week camp, something like that. We’ll spend our first three weeks plus a de-load or transition week focusing on really strengthened their strength hypertrophy depending on where our athlete is in terms of their weight shot and those kinds of things will really press the glycolytic system and we’ll implement a lot of jump training at that point in time, after we hit that transition or de-load into our third phase of camp that’s really where we’re going to focus on speed, strength, power even more fight specific coordination type things along with real plyometric training not jump training but real plyometric training, keeping the strength shortening cycle really less than about 0.2 seconds. And really focus on fight speed and those kinds of things. And we put them into the fight and put them into the weight cut and that’s where we’re at.

Chris Algieri [00:25:08]:At that second phase that’s we’re going to be best going to be the bulk of the, of the live scoring. So it’s really important to make sure that the athlete is, is properly feels for sparring sessions, because that’s going to be actually mimic the fight. And at that stage we’ve been worked on actually cutting the athlete’s body fat percentage down, getting their weight down to the point for where they’re going to be when they step in the cage or the ring that’s where the bulk of that, is basically to be, like I said, which is going to make the fight. I want my guy to be the weight that he’s going to be when he steps into the ring. So at that point we want to keep them under 10% of their weight class up from the way they have to make, because that’s where we’re going to be about when it comes time for fight time. So it’s really important to make sure that, we did everything you need to up to that point so they can really focus on the skill aspect, which is going to be that last one.

Corey Beasley [00:26:03]: So these guys are talking about the first phase. Your first phase is basically out of camp?

Corey Peacock [00:26:09]:Yeah. First phase would be out of camps. Second phase would be majority of the volume going through camp. And then the third phase is really that last phase rolling into the fight depending on where the athletes had that for us is going to vary on the testing. Whether that’s five weeks out, four weeks out, three weeks out, it’s really going depend also the traveling schedule and those kinds of things. But like I said our second phase is really where we try to meet and hit a lot of our long-term objectives and then fine tuning in that last phase really just keeping everything very fight specific, high speed, high intensity, short duration. And that’s where we’re at.

Corey Peacock [00:27:08]:Yeah. So I think I mentioned a little bit of the GPS stuff. So we’re going to have a couple of different case studies small groups looking at the difference between a grappler during live sparring takedowns sparring, stand up sparring. We’re going to have more of a traditional BJJ guy. We’re going to have more of a traditional boxer we have all these different athletes coming into this and it’s really interesting to look at how some metrics such as player load and metabolic stress are affects these athletes in their certain specializations. And then also when they’re outside of their comfort zone. So we’re going to just present some data realistically just kind of showing what the data looks like outside of that, we’re also working on, we have in review right now, currently a sleep metric study looking at the, the influence on sleep, sleep timing, amount of sleep amount of time spent in deep sleep, circadian rhythm and different things like that. And we actually have that in a very, I mean as controlled of his environment as you could possibly get our subject population was placed in basically in an exhibition style competition, but they were really competing they were really fighting an exhibition fight and they were in a six to eight week camp depending on where they were at all basically all electronics, all external factors were taken out of it and eliminated. So it’s going to be a really cool study long story short, if I could sum it up, it’s basically, I think going into this, we all have the idea the athletes would sleep more going to be the athletes that perform. And then we kind of go back to what our objectives are as a performance coach and nutritionist and one of our objectives is maintaining high neuro function. And we’ve actually found that the more sleep in that little tiny window that’s known as camp wasn’t necessarily carrying over to better CNS function and actually better performance. It was consistency. So looking at athletes that even if they were on, let’s say a two day schedule, if they had the ability to even rest, lay down and sleep for 15 minutes between sessions and then the same thing after their second session and their total daily sleep was only five hours. They were still functioning at a higher level than some of those athletes that were sleeping eight, nine hours. But it was very inconsistent throughout the camp. So I think that’s really data and really interesting. So that’s in review right now. I’m hoping to get that published within the next three to six months, depending on whether or not the scientific community likes it. So we’ll see, outside of that, we’re really sitting down here with a lot of this stuff really something that we want to do. We found this a journal that we really like a journal of exercise and nutrition and their focus is and again I’m maybe putting a plug in here because I’m the editor in chief now, but the focus of the journal is more high performance athletes, case studies, it’s really hard in the academic world to get to get a subject population of high level athletes. It’s just really difficult. So you look at a lot of the sample sizes and things like that. If you bring in five former world champion boxers, to me that is information that needs to be out. Even though in typical academia the subject population is just too small to make any sort of inference towards whatever the case might be. So this this journal is really cool in the regards that case studies are welcome that brief subject, popular or small subject populations are welcome. Just don’t go out of your grasp. And make a huge generalization, again, even with the sleep study this may have just been for our subject pool. This may not carry over to boxing because it was mixed martial arts and will stay within those grasp. But I still think the data needs to be out there on these high level athletes because they are so different than your typical 18 to 23 year olds, physically active college students that are in the majority of these, what they would call high level studies, high level, high up elite athletes study. So something that we’re really trying to do. And it’s going to be really cool. And I think there’s a lot of people now in this combat sports world that are out there trying to do some of these things and collect some of this data and partnering with universities and things like that. So I think everything’s going in the right direction. And I just I’m lucky enough that myself, Chris we have college like Tony Ricci up in New York, Jose Antonio with the International Society of sports nutrition that are really jumping on board with this and trying to bring awareness and education and research into the realm of mixed martial arts and boxing.

Corey Peacock [00:32:26]:Yeah. And that’s one of the things like Chris and I would say looking at that, it is really our two major objectives. I mean high neuro function, we have to get the best out of every session in that short period of time. That is camp. But the second thing, and I think this is where it really, where Chris has changed a lot of my perception on all of this is this whole this anti-inflammatory response with foods recovery, injury prevention, how much of this can be done with proper rest scheduling with proper nutrition implementation and proper strength and conditioning that’s been the biggest thing that I think Chris has brought to this partnership in my opinion, is that idea of keeping these athletes injury-free through nutrition. I think it’s absolutely amazing and it’s been, for me, somebody that just has relatively minimal knowledge in the field. It’s been that’s been the biggest eye opening thing for me is how much we can do through the nutritional aspect.

Chris Algieri [00:33:25]:And that came from just my aggression through my career as my level of competition rose and I got to the world elite level you always train hard, but really as you really get up there, you recover harder so you can train harder and you can be the best version of yourself each and every session. We keep alluding to how little time we have during a training camp there’s a very finite amount of time for these guys to get better. And when these athletes are not sitting there just trying to make weight for our camp, they actually have the opportunity to increase their skillset to get in better shape, to get stronger than they were the camp before. And ultimately that has to be the goal at the high level. If you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse. So we are constantly working on getting our athletes to recover fully between sessions and week to week. So they’re getting stronger through camp, not weaker which probably seemed more often than not, where guys are really breaking themselves down and showing up or getting sick and injured and not making weight and all kinds of stuff complete exactly which you’re seeing a lot of lately. And I think it’s something that that’s been going on for a long time fighters in general have a catabolic mindset. You’re constantly losing weight. You never want to see the number on the scale go up you push yourself beyond your limits as much as you possibly can. You suffer, that’s a training campus, suffer. So you’re ready for fight night. It doesn’t necessarily have to be like that especially physiologically we don’t want our guys breaking themselves down for 12 weeks and then showing up on fight night shadow of themselves maybe mentally they may feel like that, but we want them to be physically and physiologically a whole new beast by the time they get there as opposed to being weakly on fight weak.

Corey Peacock [00:35:15]:Yeah. And I think Chris hit on something important. You know, that that is our goal to improve our athletes during camp looking at one of our athletes right now over his previous eight week camp, we have achieved what sometimes science says is impossible with anabolism and catabolism. But we’ve been able to eliminate our lose 11 and a half pounds of fat while putting on four and a half pounds of muscle in a very short period of time. And I think if people hear that, that don’t work with these athletes on a daily basis. They’re going to completely shit on this. But realistically, these athletes are so different. And that’s part of the whole thing with the research. Like I’m learning every day, everything that I’ve learned with three degrees and exercise physiology is challenged on a daily basis. And that’s one of those things that if somebody told me that were the results over realistically seven weeks, I wouldn’t believe it. But then I see the objective data with my own eyes and I say it’s really incredible to watch these athletes and how they can respond to such respond to numerous kinds of stimulus, including strength training, nutrition, and those kinds of things.

Chris Algieri [00:36:34]:I knew I had known that I’ve been a superhuman for a long time. It’s cool to see someone else actually realize it and understand the magnitude of what that really means.

Corey Peacock [00:36:43]:It’s true. That’s the thing. It’s just they don’t, these, this population does not apply to traditional science. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m a scientist. I shouldn’t have said it that way because everything I do is based off of science and my education. But the ability to adapt and be able to take into consideration that these athletes are different is the biggest thing that I’ve had to learn how to adapt to over at this 0.3 years now working in combat sports.

Corey Peacock [00:37:52]:So it’s crazy even saying that, like you were saying baseball about 10 years ago. Even I look at something like hockey I do some work with a couple of NHL teams. I think they’re behind where they, where they need to be. I think you see this European and Australian model of sports science and in technology that’s been going on now for 25, 30 years where this stuff’s really just over the past 10 years really started to make its way into professional sports here in the United States. And then you have a sport like MMA, that’s shit 20 years old half of its existence focus is in other sports and now it’s really just trickling into MMA and boxing.

Corey Beasley [00:38:37]: Yeah. Well that’d be cool to see where it goes.

Corey Peacock [00:38:40]:Absolutely. I completely agree. I nerd out over that stuff.

Corey Beasley [00:38:43]: Now for you guys are down in south Florida, is that right?

Corey Peacock [00:38:52]:Correct. Well, Chris you split time.

Chris Algieri [00:38:55]: Yeah, I’m a bit of a snowbird, so, I’m back and forth, up and down all the time. As soon as it starts getting cold, I’m a warm weather friend. So as soon as I was getting cold I go down south, me and Corey get a lot more work done in the winter.

Corey Peacock [00:39:14]:Now what for this year, 2018, what do you guys got going on? Whole Lot. Yeah, let’s start with this upcoming weekend volcanoes to mirror is one of our clients. He will be competing for the UFC light heavyweight title against a very tough Daniel Cormier. We’re looking forward to a great performance and great competition between two great athletes. We will have Matt Mitrione who we’ve worked with in the past. We’ll be fighting Roy Nelson for the, I guess the heavyweight tournament that they’re throwing in Bellator those are, I would say the two biggest things that we have coming up currently people that we’re working with outside of that we will continue our partnership with the international society of sports nutrition, both as nutrition consultant, performance consultant. Chris and I, if we ever find time we really are hoping to get a podcast up and running along with Tony Ricci up north and kind of focus on human performance a lot of different sports, but obviously it’ll always come back to combat sports because it’s what we’re most familiar with. And we’re going to do some seminar series. We’re working a couple things in the works. I think 2018 is going to be a really cool year, but we still have a few things that we’re going to kind of keep to our self, right now.

Chris Algieri [00:40:45]:Little too early to let out a bag, but we have some very cool, interesting. So I’m just going to happen, that’s going to be around her for a while.

Corey Peacock [00:40:54]:And I think Chris competition-wise hopefully get something going here pretty soon and I think that’s about it.

Corey Peacock [00:41:29]:Yeah, Corey thanks for having us. We appreciate the time and like I said, any awareness, any sort of education we can provide to others, we’re always available. So find us on social media, websites, whatever the case might be, and reach out because I feel like to improve the sport, we have to be able to share knowledge. We have to be able to educate, we have to be able to learn from others that are doing, that are doing wonders in the sport as well.

Corey Peacock [00:42:04]:Yeah, of course. Thanks for having us.

Chris Algieri [00:42:06]:Absolutely. Corey, thank you so much.

Corey Peacock & Chris Algieri Join Us for Episode #84

Full Transcription of Our Podcast with Chris Aligieri and Corey Peacock

5 Physical Challenges to Test Your Limits