Tag: mike dolce

FIGHT MAGAZINE: ‘BEHIND THE FIGHT’ WITH MIKE DOLCE

by Terry E. Bush, Fight Magazine
Former power lifter and pro mixed martial artist Mike Dolce knows about making the cut. The author of Three Weeks to Shredded and The Dolce Diet: Living Lean has found a compelling niche in the MMA world—working with fighters to help them win the battle against the scale.
How did you get started helping fighters make weight?
We all eat and breathe and sleep every day, and I just happened to start paying attention to all these variables at a very early age. I’ve been collecting and applying this data my whole life, so it was a natural progression.
What is your job title?
My role is as a coach, which is really how I identify. I’m not just a lifestyle coach or a diet coach or a performance coach. I try to coach the whole system. I try to fill in the cracks where necessary. I’ve been an athlete. I’ve been a fighter. I’ve cut 40 pounds in a week. I know what it’s like. I’ve experienced fighting at a very high professional level. I’ve been a part of that as a teammate and a coach.
You’ve had more than 20 pro MMA fights, which speaks to your level of commitment to the sport. Does this add another layer of understanding that transfers to your clients?
I believe so. I hope so. I like to lead by example. I train when my athletes train. I train right beside my guys. When my athletes cut weight, I cut weight. We do the same things. We eat the same things.
You’re working with some of the top names in MMA—Chael Sonnen, Michael Bisping, Rampage Jackson, Thiago Alves, Vitor Belfort, Gray Maynard, Jake Ellenberger, and Johny Hendricks. Historically, some of those guys have had trouble making weight. What is the process like when a fighter calls to hire you?
It’s absolutely amazing when I get a phone call. I try to see what they need, and if it’s something I feel I’m capable of doing, we meet face to face. I spend some time with them just to see if we get along. I usually shadow them. I go through their day, I watch them eat their meals, and I look in their cabinets and their refrigerator. I go to work with them, I pick up their kids from school with them—it’s a day in their life. Then we’ll have a conversation about changes and adjustments and formulate plans.
Who has been a fighter who you’ve been really proud of with the end result of a transformation you were able to assist with?
Thiago Alves is really high on the list. And Vitor Belfort has a special story. He won the world title when he was 19 years old, and he’s now 35 years old. That’s 16 years of competing at a world-class level. That’s a long time to do that to your body and go through so many training camps and so many wars, so for him to bring me on after he missed weight against Rich Franklin was important for me. They brought me in to help him make 185 pounds, and his next cut was the easiest weight cut of his career. His wife cried and they called me their angel because they were all so nervous about him cutting weight because he’s a big guy and he’s already healthy. He lives on really clean and healthy food, and he and his family live that lifestyle, so for me to be able to come in and make that type of dramatic improvement was really great. I don’t work with an athlete for just one fight, I work with them for their career. I’m not going to leave them for a bigger payday or bigger limelight or any of that stuff. It’s a family. We plan years in advance. I have a seven-year plan with Thiago Alves. It’s a science that’s result-based and data-driven.
What’s on your horizon in the coming months?
I average being on the road six months out of the year. It’s a very erratic lifestyle, so I’m just sort of this floating soul who’s trying to share my knowledge. I keep going and I keep answering the call and the call keeps getting greater. It’s not just athletes—it’s corporations, too. I’m continuing the evolution—just to keep helping and spreading the positive energy and keep pushing that forward.
 
Article published in FIGHT! Magazine, September 2012

September 21, 2012 – Vitor Belfort weighed in at 204.2 LBS. via The Dolce Diet for his championship fight against Jon Jones. The fight will take place in Toronto at Air Canada Centre on Saturday. Preliminary fights begin on Facebook (6:30 p.m. ET) and continue on FX (8 p.m. ET). The main card airs on Pay-Per-View (10 p.m. ET).
For more information about UFC 152, visit UFC.com
For more information on The Dolce Diet, visit TheDolceDiet.com

By Ariel Helwani – Video Reporter and Writer
MMAFighting.com
Aug 12, 2012 – DENVER — Watch below as Nik Lentz talks about why he decided to drop to featherweight, his new coaching staff and diet, how he was able to finish Eiji Mitsuoka at UFC 150, and much more.

DOLCE PAVES WAY FOR SONNEN’S EPIC UFC 148 WEIGH-IN

by Bryan Armen Graham, SI.com

LAS VEGAS — Chael Sonnen, the motor-mouthed challenger to the UFC middleweight title held by Anderson Silva, weighed 205 pounds on Thursday afternoon.

When he stepped onto a scale less than 24 hours later, Sonnen weighed 185 pounds — thus making the division limit for Saturday’s UFC 148 main event.

Watching from backstage at the Mandalay Bay Events Center, where nearly 8,000 fans congregated for Friday’s weigh-ins, was Mike Dolce. Casual fans might not have recognized him — he doesn’t fight in a steel cage, at least not anymore — but he’d just scored a high-profile victory.

Sonnen’s weight cut is the latest resume bullet in a body of work that’s earned Dolce a reputation as one of the top nutritionists in mixed martial arts, a weight-loss guru whose efforts with such fighters as Vitor Belfort, Thiago Alves, Rampage Jackson, Gray Maynard and Jake Ellenberger have drawn hearty praise around the sport.

Such a rapid reduction in mass could raise concerns with anyone familiar with the well-publicized medical dangers of cutting weight. Athletes in weight-restricted sports like boxing, wrestling and MMA have subjected themselves to severe dehydration, caloric restrictions, diuretics, laxatives, vomiting and rubber exercise suits. Consequences have ranged from impaired muscle recovery, cardiac complications and even death.
Yet the 36-year-old Dolce, who defines himself as a longevity advocate rather than a sports performance coach, views such methods as barbaric. He bemoans the practices prevalent in boxing, where fighters start cutting weeks ahead of the weigh-in, sometimes training in plastic suits to shed water weight they’ll only gain right back.
“It makes no sense because as soon as they lose it, they’re suffering,” explained Dolce after Friday’s weigh-ins. “And then they’re starving themselves, they drop their calories and now they’re malnourished. Then they drop their fluid intake, so now they’re dehydrated. But they’re pushing themselves constantly and the body can’t recover, it can’t repair, it can’t rebuild. Their bodies just give out before they even get on the scale.
“I step into these guys’ training camps and their lifestyles and try to teach them how to eat properly and how to get rid of all those old serial bodybuilder sadomasochistic methods of torture and destruction as a means to lose weight. We start feeding the body again and treating it in the right manner.”
Dolce said Sonnen woke up at 205 pounds on Thursday morning, ate four meals (mostly “earth-grown nutrients” like blueberries, chia seeds and avocado) and drank two gallons of water. Although he’d consumed four pounds of food and 16 pounds of fluid, Sonnen woke up Friday at 192 pounds. He was able to shed the remaining poundage during a morning workout — after breakfast, of course. Dolce’s tenets of proper nutrition and electrolyte manipulation, which increase the body’s metabolism and core temperature, help purge the weight in the healthiest manner possible.
“We don’t sauna, we don’t take any drugs, we don’t take any supplements, we don’t do any of that garbage,” Dolce said. “The body does what it’s supposed to do if it’s working with them. It’s a very calm, serene state, you have a vital level of health, and that’s the way we’re able to do it.”
A former fighter himself, Dolce competed on the seventh season of The Ultimate Fighter, the reality TV series to which the UFC’s dramatic rise from near-bankruptcy to lucrative mainstream attraction is widely attributed. Yet his experience with weight cutting began decades earlier in a more improbable venue: the clubhouse at the old Keystone Racetrack in greater Philadelphia, where Dolce’s father owned and trained thoroughbred racehorses.
“The jockeys used to baby-sit me,” recalled Dolce, a native of Bellmawr, N.J, who regularly joined his dad on trips to different tracks on the East Coast. “I used to sit in the saunas with the jockeys. They’re spitting and cussing and chewing on Jolly Ranchers, just like wrestlers were doing. So all those conversations they were having [about cutting weight] and I was kind of a fly on the wall, that absorbed into me when I was 5, 6, 7, 8 years old.”
He was 9 years old when his father suffered a massive stroke that Dolce attributes to his workaholic lifestyle — “burning the candle at both ends,” as he describes it, and not minding his diet on those early 4 a.m. drives to the track — after which Dolce became compelled by the concept of longevity through nutrition.
A standout powerlifter as a teenager, Dolce orchestrated the weight cuts and ran the conditioning classes for his entire high school wrestling team as the captain, then moved into nutritional consultancy on a local then national basis. By the time Dolce started as a consultant for Sonnen in 2007, he’d already put in time as a strength and conditioning coach for several MMA teams in addition to basketball players at the college and NBA levels.
Since collaborating with some of the UFC’s biggest names, Dolce’s results have spoken for themselves. When Jackson needed to slash 45 pounds over eight weeks after a 14-month layoff, Dolce was the architect and Rampage’s conditioning shone even in defeat. When Thiago Alves found his UFC contract in jeopardy after twice missing weight, it was Dolce who helped turn his career around. He takes a great deal of pride in conjuring “career-defining performances” from his charges.
To prepare for Saturday’s highly anticipated rematch with Silva, Sonnen paid Dolce a weekly fee plus expenses to move into his Las Vegas home for the past month to manage his diet. The results paid off Friday afternoon, when Sonnen appeared healthy and energetic on the scale — no sign of the sunken cheekbones or sickly pallor common to those athletes who drain themselves to make a weight limit with one of the most important physical competitions of their lives just a day away.
Dolce, who is bullish on Sonnen’s chances in the title fight, was highly specific about what to expect on fight night.
“He’ll weigh 218 tomorrow night in the cage, and he will be the epitome of what a world-class athlete should look like,” he said. “It’s easy.”

FRIDAY JULY 6, 2012 – Chael Sonnen weighed in at 185 lbs. via The Dolce Diet for his UFC 148 world title fight against Anderson Silva.

It’s here! The companion cookbook to Mike Dolce’s #1 international bestseller The Dolce Diet: LIVING LEAN will be available Friday, July 6 for instant download on Nook and Kindle for $9.99 (USD).
The Dolce Diet LIVING LEAN Cookbook features 100 new recipes that are interchangeable for breakfast, lunch and dinner, as well as snack and dessert options.
Mike Dolce is known for his whole-foods approach. All the recipes in the cookbook are all-natural and most feature Vegan, Gluten-Free, Health-Minded and Athlete variations.
The Dolce Diet LIVING LEAN Cookbook will be available for download in the iTunes iBookstore by mid-July.  A print version will follow at a later date, to be announced.
 

Gray Maynard weighed in Thursday at 155 lbs. for his five-round non-title fight against Clay Guida. The lightweights will headline an FX-televised main card tonight that follows preliminary fights broadcast on FUEL TV and Facebook.
Photo: MMAJunkie.com

by Todd H.
MyDolceDiet.com Member

As of March 2012 it has been a year that I have been Living Lean.
The results from this lifestyle change have been clearly evident to me and others around me. When I see people that I have not seen in while they immediately tell me how trim, fit and healthy I look. It is a great feeling and whenever that happens it gives me an extra boost to continue on my path of healthy living.

As I have reported in prior blog posts, I went from 215 to 188 in just over a month on 3W2S.

Using 3W2S as my template I started to change every part of my life, cleaning out the junk and replacing it with pure energy provided by the earth. Now Living Lean has given me yet another boost in the right direction. I love the recipes and workout suggestions, and have made them a part of my daily life.
Speaking of recipes, my favorite is the “Oats & Berries Smoothie”. I took it upon myself to name it, “The REAL Big Gulp”. It is a welcome treat for me pre-workout or post workout and my wife loves it as well.
My first goal was to get trim, I did. My second goal was to feel better, that came. Other by products of Living Lean were, I got faster, stronger, better cardio, sleep more and better, able to train harder and longer. I have hit all my goals that I set.
This year’s goal is to gain some muscle but stay lean and fast.

I have already gone up from 188 to 191 since I have focused on strength (while still retaining my six pack).

More weights, kettle bells, tractor tires and old school stuff such as pull ups, push ups, burpees, sprawls, etc.
I know it is hard to break ingrained habits, especially when it comes to food. I encourage you to work hard, break those habits. You WILL see and feel the results and you will never want to look back.
A great movie quote taken from eastern philosophy, Morpheus said, “There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.”
Don’t just read it, do it, walk the path and others will follow.

LISTEN HERE: Whole-foods advocate & elite Peak Performance coach Mike Dolce speaks with The MMA Show’s Mauro Ranallo about The Dolce Diet, weight cutting, and why his methods are so popular.