The Sonny Brown Breakdown

I talk to Dr Ian Dunican, a sleep researcher who has worked with elite combat sports athletes at the Australian Institute of Sport on strategies to help optimise sleep, recovery and performance and who is himself a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner and Ultra-Marathon Runner. We discuss sleep cycles, optimising training load and dealing with night time jitters after a workout and sleep tracking gadgets like the oura ring and whoop device. Finally, why martial artists try and cheat the sleep system and how instead they can sleep in and win.

I talk to Luke Martin, a Jiu-Jitsu coach currently preparing his athletes for the ADCC world championships out of the New Wave Jiu-Jitsu camp in Texas with John Danaher, Gordon Ryan, Gary Tonon, Nicholas Meregali and the rest of the New Wave ADCC competitors. In a special emergency broadcast edition of the Sonny Brown Breakdown podcast, he gives us a rare insight into what that experience is like and how John Danaher prepares his athletes for the biggest competition in grappling.

I talk to Eric Uresk, a Judo & Jiu-Jitsu Black Belt who coaches at Alliance MMA. We discuss his martial arts career and how he advocates for embracing vulnerability in his training to help conquer adversity. He explains his coaching philosophy and the hurdles he has faced while working with high-level athletes, including gaining trust from the athletes, mainly while working with Dominic Cruz. An athlete who has such an extensive knowledge of MMA that instructing him has its own set of challenges.

I talk to Ruadhán MacFadden. He runs a project titled The Hero with a Thousand Holds which looks at the culture and practice of folk wrestling styles around the world. In particular the people and places that the styles have emerged from and not just the techniques which they used. We discuss some of the mythology and culture behind these styles and what the future holds for them. And we get into some of the particulars of Icelandic Glima and Irish Collar and Elbow Wrestling and Scuffling.