By combining Rodolphe’s muscle memory approach with Gavin’s all-around approach to rehabilitation, I’m actually reconnecting my own system to perform better. The result should be a more efficient, better-rounded GSP.
What I like about this new approach is more than the physical benefits. Now, when I work out or rehab my knee, I feel invigorated. My brain feels stimulated and I’m excited that my physical training is having a positive effect on my mental outlook. I feel that by focusing on smaller parts of my body—like my feet—I’m actually working and improving my entire body.
Now I’m less worried about plateauing. Plateauing is when your body lacks motivation to push itself to new limits. When you plateau, you feel like you can’t push anymore or make any more progress. You feel like your world is flat. So part of the joy of my rehab has been to discover new ways of training to stimulate new parts of my body.
The better I become at training, the more I realize how everything mental and physical is connected.
MAVEN: One of the guys who manages his accounts told me another Georges story. He told me that Georges, because he spends to much time on the road, could easily establish his residency in another country where the tax rates are much lower than Quebec’s. That it was recommended to Georges that he should do this so he could save money—just like Formula One drivers or other big international athletes do. And he refused, flat out and immediately without even thinking about it (or the money) for a second. Georges said: “I live here most of the time and I want to keep living here. I benefit from the services like everybody else, so I’m going to pay my share like everybody else.”
It’s not about the titles for him. It’s not about the money, either. It’s about the experience and sharing the experience. Now that I think of it, and knowing what I know about Georges, I think he was already thinking about the next fight.
What’s the point of all this? To say that losing the UFC title doesn’t matter. That’s not the ultimate goal. When the media were asking me about it when I announced the knee surgery, I told them the only thing that belts are good for is to hold up your pants.
MAVEN: That’s the heart of GSP, and people should know. It says a lot about him and his life priorities.
Overtraining worked for me for a long time, but somewhere along the road it became detrimental and destructive. I got to the point many times when I couldn’t stop myself from working out more.
When I tore my ACL, I was so intent on pushing myself that I couldn’t stop anymore. I’d get up and go to work out. Then I’d eat and go to gymnastics. Then I’d get a massage and go to Tristar to train with Firas in the ring, then on the mat, and then in the octagon. I treated my body like a machine, but I forgot that even machine engines need a rest, need some fuel, and need to relax. I was working harder to try and rid myself of negative energy that was the result of . . . overwork. I was unhappy and mired in a negative cycle of useless repetition.
Again, like so many things I’ve learned in my life and have tried to share in this book, the key is finding balance. The thing about balance, though, is that it’s never stagnant. It’s not something you discover one day and then it stays there for the rest of your life and you live a perfect existence. It’s the opposite. Finding balance is just a sign that you know how to invent your own life, but it’s a lesson that keeps evolving. Especially for people like me, who are goal-oriented and curious about change and evolution.
And so, what balance also taught me are the following two incredibly important lessons: 1) resting is growing and 2) waiting is training.
What does “resting is growing” really mean? It means that you have to give your body time to recover from tough workouts, especially if you’re training every day. It sounds really weird to people who work out so much, but that’s because they’re addicted to the workout. They can’t stop. Trust me, I’ve been there. It’s because the body and the brain are sometimes fighting battles. The body wants to rest and grow, while the brain thinks the body needs more work.
Since my knee surgery, I’ve started working out less and resting more. Just as a test. And oddly enough, my muscle weight is growing faster than ever before. I remember after the surgery, standing in front of the mirror and looking at my legs and how little my thighs seemed to me. They looked like they’d lost a few inches. So had my chest and arms. When I was able to return to the gym, I had a regimen to follow, and I couldn’t push myself too much. I wasn’t allowed, and it would have been stupid to do so. It was hard to hold myself back, to stop from going to train, or run, or fight. But I did, and one day, standing in front of the mirror, I noticed that my “things” were back, and they were my shoulders and back and chest and arms. But I’d been working out less than before.
It makes me feel so dumb for all the years I did things wrong. Now I know: resting is growing.
That’s why “waiting is training” is the next part of my approach. “Waiting is training” means that I can spend more time preparing mentally for my next session or fight, and less time physically exhausting myself. By waiting, I’m sending a message that strategy is more important than pure physical power, that tactics surpass repetition, and that the brain is the most powerful muscle in the body.
There are times when hitting the bags is important, but those decrease in importance as my expertise grows. Bruce Lee talked about this a lot. Hitting the bags or the dummies is good to create muscle memory while I’m trying to perfect a movement—a punch or a kick. But it means nothing else. Once I learn a movement or a style of kick well, I need to perform it against a willing opponent.
Sometimes, it’s a fighter who’s better than I am—which is creating the ultimate challenge for practice. And other times, it’s a fighter who’s not as good as me—which is creating a winning situation that gets my body accustomed to performing against a moving target.
As I mentioned earlier, it all comes down to confidence: your body can do great things only if it believes it can accomplish them. The only way I’ve ever made that happen is by preparing my mind for the worst conditions possible in training, and then surpassing them. This is why I always say that fights aren’t won in the octagon, they’re won in the months leading up to them, in a near-empty gym, in the lost hours of a day, whether I feel like it or not.
That’s training with betters and what it brings me. But I don’t always train with betters, with winners. I train with lesser fighters too, with losers. I don’t mean losers in the pejorative sense, but I mean that I train with people I know I’ll defeat every single time I go out there. I train with people who will lose to me every single time, guaranteed.
A big part of my training is to create conditions that make survival almost impossible, but I also want to ensure to build balance by creating conditions that make my success entirely possible. I want to make sure that my body and my brain get used to doing things right and feel every movement to its fullest.
Think about it for a second, as if you’re a baseball player. When a baseball player takes batting practice, he’s not up there to strike out. The person throwing balls at home plate isn’t trying to fool the hitter: he’s trying to make the hitter feel powerful. He’s trying to get the hitter to understand how to hit the ball out of the park, or safely for a base hit, with his eyes and, physically, with his whole body. The same is true for all sports—shooting open three-pointers, throwing the ball to wide-open receivers, et cetera.
Good training and preparation aren’t about creating losing conditions, they’re also about creating winning conditions. So at specific times during my fight preparation, my team goes out to the Gracie Barra dojo in Montreal with Bruno Fernandes, and I get to fight with a few blue belts.
First of all, this is very good for me because it allows me to practice my attacks. I have someone in front of me whom I know I can take down quickly. So I do, and I get used to the feeling of being the aggressor. My body and mind interact and understand how to execute the movement freely, comfortably and, hopefully, to pe
rfection.
What this means, contextually, is that I get to focus on success. I get “easy” wins in practice, and that makes me feel good. It sounds clichéed, but I’m now truly understanding that training is like life in that it can’t always be hard, because then it stops being fun. With success comes timing and technique. I can repeat certain moves over and over again until they’re perfect, against a willing opponent who knows just enough to make it challenging without being too hard. Succinctly put: training with lesser fighters lets me work on my timing.
And very basically, if an athlete constantly puts himself in losing situations, he or she can develop paranoia. An athlete has to win in practice too. He has to triumph and feel the flow of a perfectly executed movement so that his mind grows accustomed to victory.
But it’s good for the lesser, too. I mean, Rodolphe and I can’t just pick any blue belts in the class and put them through this training, but the ones we do pick learn from it too. They never get hurt—that’s the most important thing—because my technique is pretty good now. They get to experience firsthand what it feels like to be in against a tough opponent. Maybe the most important thing for them is that they get to understand what an opponent goes through in tough situations.
The only way to truly know what it feels like to get taken to the ground and be put in an armlock is to be the victim, not the aggressor. This is an elementary rule in martial arts, and everybody who learns goes through it. You’ll never understand what a punch in the head feels like if you’re the one doing the punching. And while it’d be fun never to be in that position, winning fighters all know that success comes from the ability to absorb punishment.
It’s not bad for my blue belts either. It puts them in new situations they can learn from It’s a win-win situation for everybody involved. It’s good for their confidence, and it’s good for mine too. I could never win real fights if all I ever did in practice is put myself in losing situations. I’d become a paranoid being who sees disaster in every event and situation.
Whatever their skill level, though, I’m always looking for a willing opponent who’s trying to beat me.
MAVEN: After each one of Georges’s title victories, he gives his belt away. He gives it to someone close to him, someone he feels helped him reach his goal. This is pure amazement to me.
After his big fight in Toronto, in front of the biggest live audience ever to watch a UFC championship, after he had beaten the only opponent the public felt could beat him, Georges gave me his belt. We were in the octagon right after the fight, celebrating. They put the belt around his waist and he turned around and he whispered in my ear, “This one’s for you.” That was the biggest venue in UFC history, his crowning moment in history, and he wasn’t thinking about himself. He hadn’t been wearing the belt for more than five seconds—no more than five!—and he gave it away. This belt represents everything he’s worked for, and then he turns around and gives it away. I can’t tell you how touched I was. What an incredible thing to do. I can’t say that I truly understand the gesture. I was perplexed that that’s what was on his mind after his fight.
Knowing yourself lets you differentiate between luck and movement. It places them at opposite ends of the spectrum. Luck is not within anybody’s control or prediction. It occurs, and it’s great when it does, but you can’t base your entire life on it. Movement, on the other hand, puts success within reach. The more you know about yourself, the better your movement through all facets of life.
This applies to everybody—doctors, cooks, farmers, whomever. The rule, when applied to me, is ordered by priority: 1) to stick to the things I know and do them well, and constantly improve; 2) to grow, slowly and surely, my knowledge base, to become the greatest martial artist I can ever be; 3) to get the maximum out of myself; 4) to develop my abilities into skills, because there’s a great difference between the two. Ability is related potential, but skill represents the concept of doing, of movement. But I digress.
I was sitting backstage at the Cannes Creativity Festival in June 2012, before we were due to give a presentation to people in the communications and creative world who wanted to hear about the GSP “brand,” the communications strategy that has allowed me to have so many followers on social media, and how I approach all of my sponsorship partnerships and my foundation against bullying. I told my team I felt like the luckiest person in the world. I get to do what I want in my life, and I can follow the path of my own choosing. Which results in something even greater than its component parts: happiness.
It’s true about the belts. I gave the first one to my mom, one to Kristof, and then one to Firas. Why keep a belt? It doesn’t bring me anything extra just by sitting there at home. For me, a belt is something you show off, and I’m not a showy kind of person. I keep the one I have in the closet. For Firas, Kristof—who have their own gyms and also train there—those belts have a meaning. Those belts play a role. I think it’s fair recognition for all the work they’ve done on my team. My mother keeps hers on display. The title is what is meaningful to me; that’s the true reward.
If you really want to know, that unicorn—the one my godmother, Madeleine St-Pierre, gave me before she died, when I was just a little boy—is one of the few material things that actually matter to me. It’s irreplaceable. I’ve taken good care of it and it’s still really pretty. She wrote me a letter and gave me a nice drawing before she died. I reread her words, and they make even more sense as I grow older, and wiser.
The world and its secrets are frightening, and there’s no shame in admitting that kind of fear. It’s the only way there is to face it, in any single moment. It’s why I don’t mind being scared: happiness.
BOOK 5
CONSCIENCE
WITH
RODOLPHE BEAULIEU, MANAGER/FRIEND
It is bad when one thing becomes two.
One should not look for anything else in the Way
of the Samurai. It is the same for anything that is
called a Way. If one understands things in this manner,
he should be able to hear about all ways and be more
and more in accord with his own.
—YAMAMOTO TSUNETOMO
I like being around people.
I don’t like solitude. I need to be around other humans. I crave human contact and interaction and laughter and escape.
Yet I know that this journey is unforgiving to my friends and relationships. My life, generally speaking, is organized around two events a year: a pair of fights. I can divide my existence into chunks of six months. I train, I announce my next fight and I prepare for it—that’s about four months interspersed with a week on a beach somewhere. Then I enter my training camp, and the next two months are emotionally excruciating.
The closer a fighter gets to his next fight, the more he or she feels alone. None of us can help it.
CONSCIENCE: No other person can have any understanding, any frame of reference, any clear idea of what exactly Georges is living in the weeks before the fight. Not even Firas, who possesses a mere a fraction of appreciation for it despite his brilliance and wisdom. Because he’s never been in the octagon as a fighter. He’s never been the world champion. He’s never stepped to the threshold before millions of people, with thousands upon thousands in the arena chanting his name, knowing that one false move, a single, stupid, minor mistake, can cause the empire to crumble into rubble. That this could be the penultimate moment before the end. That everything rides on fractions of seconds and flashes of brilliance—or failure. With all his knowledge, accumulated over years and years of practice and study, there are limitations even for Firas, and he is Georges’s head coach and closest collaborator. Only a few select people in the world understand the feeling of stepping into the octagon, and that’s because they’ve been crowned, at one point or another, as UFC world champion. It’s a unique kind of trip, as if entering the octagon was venturing into another dimension. Another world.
When I enter a training camp, I ca
n’t help but start to feel increasingly like I’m the only person on the face of the earth. It truly, truly sucks. I get home at night and there I am, alone. I take a look around me, and the silence hits. It strikes full force. It imbues my soul with this distant, ugly melancholy that carries me away from the world I know. From my friends who are out having fun, laughing, relaxing. It is, to me, the truest representation of the word solitude. I’d much rather be out socializing, but I can’t be. I can’t go out and do, well, anything.
And then, as fight night nears, it doesn’t matter where I am or whom I’m with. The world around me somehow keeps its distance. It doesn’t matter if I’m surrounded by people or not; loneliness forms an aura around my being, shutting me off from normalcy. Alone, in my solitude, with my own thoughts. It’s unbearable.
Misunderstood and alone in the world, I try to call friends, people who can help fill my mind with other thoughts, but it’s just a temporary distraction. And I don’t like chatting on the phone—fidgety impatience. Any text or telephone chat is a limited reprieve because the solitude is always there, waiting for me.
In the day, though, I’m always busy. I don’t fully enjoy most of the photo shoots and marketing events. There are more and more of them, admittedly, but it was even worse a few years ago, when there were fewer of them. Let me explain. Before Rodolphe joined my team, it was something I had to do, following the orders of people I didn’t like being around. At least Rodolphe’s one of my best friends, which makes it fun. I get to tease him too, because these are moments when he’s more stressed than I am.
The reason I find it difficult is how it greatly affects my personal life. I like freedom. I’m the kind of guy who often does exactly the opposite of what he’s been told. I’ve always been like that. I’ve always had a rebellious side, a teasing, malicious side. When cameras are present, I have to be “on” all the time. I have to be in the GSP character whenever the cameras are there. I don’t change the person I am, but I present him in a different light. The result is that I censor myself. I don’t share every thought that passes through my head. I don’t speak exactly the way I normally would, and I have to be conscious of it. I can’t say everything that’s on my mind. I’m still me, but somehow I’m more guarded.
The Way of the Fight Page 17
