vrss Podcast

What actually happens inside the body when fighters train hard, restrict food, dehydrate, and push past their limits - and how do you fuel champions without compromising long-term health?

In this episode of the VRSS podcast, Liana sits down with Jordan Sullivan (aka The Fight Dietitian), one of the leading performance nutritionists in combat sports and the nutrition strategist behind multiple world champions, including Alexander Volkanovski and Israel Adesanya.

Together, they explore both sides of elite performance: extreme stress and intelligent support.

In this conversation, they discuss:

How the body responds...

What actually happens in your brain when a movement finally clicks? And why does thinking about it sometimes make everything fall apart under pressure?

In this episode of the VRSS podcast, we’re joined by Dr. Timothy Carroll, one of the world’s leading researchers in motor control and motor learning at the University of Queensland.

Tim studies how humans learn to move, and his work challenges many of the assumptions athletes and coaches hold about training, feedback, and performance.

We explore why most skil...

In this episode of the vrss podcast, we sit down with Sarah Jeffries to unpack the science of sleep, brain health, and performance - and why sleep may be the most overlooked skill in combat sports and high-performance training.

Sarah is a registered nurse with a Master’s in Nursing Science, a nurse educator, and a leading voice in sleep education. She breaks down what’s actually happening in your brain when you sleep, including how deep sleep and REM sleep work together to support recovery, learning, emotional regulation, and long-term brain health.

John Wayne Parr is one of the most influential figures in modern Muay Thai. In this episode, he looks back on a lifetime in the sport: from sleeping on wooden floors in Thailand as the only Westerner in camp, to becoming the first Australian to fight at Lumpini Stadium, to surviving 347 stitches across a career defined by resilience, reinvention, and an unshakeable love for the fight.

We talk about the culture of Thai gyms in the 90s, what poverty taught him, the fighters who shaped his style, the ghosts he swears visited him in...

Pressure doesn’t mean something’s wrong - it means something matters.

In this episode, world-leading performance psychologist Jonah Oliver explains why discomfort is the gateway to growth, and why trying to control your thoughts or emotions is the very thing that undermines performance.

With over two decades working across elite sport and high-stakes environments - from Olympic athletes, UFC fighters, and Formula One drivers, to AFL clubs, corporate leaders, surgeons, and top-tier teams - Jonah blends sports psychology, neuroscience, and behavioural science into a practical and deeply human appr...

When everything starts to go wrong - bad calls, unfair moments, missed shots - what separates fighters who spiral from those who stay composed?

Performance psychologist Dr Michelle Pain has spent decades helping athletes build mental toughness and regulate emotion under pressure. She helped establish one of Australia’s first sport psychology programs at Monash University, introduced psychological testing to the AFL draft, and has coached Olympians, professional club players, and esports competitors to perform at their peak.

In this episode, we dive deep into tilt - the emotional hijack that happens when expectations and re...

This episode was recorded on 8 October 2025, five days after ONE Championship Friday Fights 127.

Tyson Harrison, one of the most exciting fighters in ONE Championship’s Bantamweight Division, sat down with us still carrying the weight of his loss - the silence, the anger, the processing. What followed wasn’t an interview. It was a conversation about truth, resilience, and what it means to face yourself after the lights go out.

Tyson spoke about the fight, his relationship with pain, the legacy of “John Wayne Noi,” and the purpose he’s still wr...

This isn’t a story about opening a gym - it’s a story about building a community through chaos.

When the Monash City Council shut down his new gym just a week after opening, Vinh Le, founder of Honour Martial Arts in Melbourne, faced the toughest fight of his career - one that had nothing to do with the ring.

For nine months, his doors stayed closed while he battled permits, panic attacks, and the fear of losing everything he’d built. But through that chaos, Vinh discovered a different kind of strength: faith, resili...

What if training isn’t about becoming your best self, but making sure your worst self can still win?

That’s the philosophy of Luke Howard: a judo black belt, jiu-jitsu brown belt, and former pro MMA fighter who’s competed across nearly every discipline. By the time he was 18, he had qualified for the judo world championships. After breaking his back and enduring shoulder reconstructions, Luke shifted into MMA, fighting professionally from his very first bout.

Today, he’s grown to be one of the most respected coaches both in Bali and beyond, cornering fighters...

What does it really mean to be “in the zone”? In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Sue Jackson, co-author of Flow in Sports with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and creator of the Flow State Scale and Dispositional Flow Scale - the tools researchers still use to study peak performance.

Together, we explore:

Olympic boxer Tony Jeffries - a 7-time British national champion and Olympic bronze medalist at the 2008 Beijing Games - shares the fight of his life: what happens when boxing ends.

In this episode, Tony opens up about:

- Competing on the Olympic stage while battling fear and self-doubt

- The depression, drinking, and identity crisis after his forced retirement

- Moving to Los Angeles, being rejected from his first gym job, and building Box ’N Burn, later named California’s #1 gym

- How he turned his fighter’s obsession into o...

In the vrss podcast, we dive into the psychology, science, and soul of combat sports.

We bring you conversations with people at the top of their fields: from world champions and legends of the game, to the doctors, neuroscientists, psychologists, and coaches pushing performance to new levels.

At its heart, vrss means two things:
You versus the fight, whatever form that takes.
And the verses that get written through it.

We’re here to go deeper into those stories.
Into the internal fight, the philosophies, the truths.
Into wh...