JRE MMA Show #183 with Rico Verhoeven

What It Covers

Joe Rogan interviews Rico Verhoeven, the 10-time Glory heavyweight kickboxing champion, about his controversial stoppage loss to undisputed boxing champion Oleksandr Usyk in Cairo. They cover the disputed judging, the fight's origins through Jason Statham, Rico's boxing transition strategy, the rematch conversation, his conditioning methods, and his emerging acting career alongside combat sports advocacy.

Key Questions Answered

• •Combat Sports Judging Reform: Glory Kickboxing uses five judges instead of boxing's standard three, which statistically reduces the probability of a corrupt or incompetent minority controlling the outcome. Rogan advocates adopting this model across combat sports, alongside a panel of credentialed experts — top trainers and commentators — scoring via a dedicated app to create transparent, collective expert consensus that can be cross-referenced against official scorecards in real time.
• •Southpaw Game Plan Exploitation: When facing a southpaw opponent, moving left (away from their power hand) rather than defaulting to the conventional rightward movement removes their primary weapon entirely. Verhoeven and trainer Peter Fury built their entire Usyk strategy around this principle, combined with forward pressure and volume punching — accepting that the first three to four punches would miss — to smother Usyk's footwork and negate his speed advantage through positional dominance.
• •Boxing-Specific Stance Transition: Switching from a kickboxing square stance to a proper boxing side-on stance requires a minimum of six months of dedicated retraining to make it instinctive under fight conditions. Verhoeven needed constant verbal correction throughout camp because the square stance is structurally necessary in kickboxing to protect against leg kicks — removing that threat in boxing finally allowed trainer Peter Fury to teach him orthodox boxing mechanics without the competing defensive requirement.
• •Heavyweight Conditioning Protocol: Verhoeven's strength and conditioning uses full-body circuits three times per week, starting at 20 reps per exercise with only 30-second rest intervals between movements, cycling through multiple muscle groups before returning. Total session duration is 35–40 minutes. Rep counts increase as fight camp progresses while weight stays constant, simultaneously building strength and cardiovascular endurance. He supplements with interval running and steady-state 60-minute runs on an anti-gravity treadmill to protect surgically repaired knee joints.
• •Recovery Modalities for High-Mileage Athletes: Verhoeven uses daily cold plunge, regular sauna sessions, red light therapy four to five times per week, and hyperbaric chamber sessions three to four times weekly to maintain physical condition and recovery capacity at age 37. He credits consistent use of these modalities — not just training volume — for maintaining his physical condition. He notes that the hyperbaric chamber produces noticeably better results when used three to four consecutive days rather than sporadically.
• •Mental Reframing of Fatigue in Competition: When physical fatigue signals appear during a fight, Verhoeven reframes them as confirmation that his opponent is in worse condition, given the documented training volume invested. This cognitive reframe converts a potential performance inhibitor into a competitive advantage signal. He identifies this mental skill — not superior genetics or training volume — as the primary differentiator between elite heavyweight athletes who share comparable conditioning protocols and physical preparation.
• •Career Transition Timing for Combat Athletes: Verhoeven identifies acting as a structured post-fighting career path, noting that the emotional suppression habits developed to fuel athletic performance — converting grief and loss into physical training fuel — become assets in acting, where accessing genuine emotion on camera is the core skill. He recommends fighters identify a second passion before retirement rather than after, citing Dave Bautista's WWE-to-film transition as a model for leveraging combat sports physicality into sustained entertainment industry relevance.