Georges St-Pierre recently sat down with fitness coach Thomas DeLauer and during the conversation, he reflected on two major shifts in his thinking over the course of his career: his skepticism toward traditional cardio training and his stance on skipping breakfast.
St-Pierre was blunt when discussing conditioning for combat sports. Rather than chasing traditional endurance metrics, he said his focus has always been on maximizing efficiency.
“I don’t really believe in cardio if you’re a combat athlete. I believe in efficiency,” he said.
He explained that sprinting remains a core part of his routine, but not for the reasons most athletes might expect. Instead of viewing it as a way to build endurance, he sees it as a controlled way to push his body hard in short bursts.
“I sprint because of the benefits it gives me,” he said. “I don’t believe sprinting will increase my cardio. I just believe that doing something as hard as I can for a small amount of time, taking a break, and then repeating it again and again has huge benefits for me, especially as you get older.”
For St-Pierre, the real advantage in combat sports is not simply being in better shape than an opponent, but using energy more efficiently. That, he argued, ultimately determines who fades first in a high-level bout.
“I don’t do it for cardio purposes because I believe in figh ting it’s all about efficiency,” he said. “Even if you’re in better shape than me, if I’m more efficient than you, you’ll get tired before I do.”
To illustrate his point, he pointed to the Japanese Olympic judo program, which he believes prioritizes skill repetition over traditional conditioning work.
“A lot of them didn’t do any conditioning. They only do judo, and they’re the best in the world,” he said.
At the elite level, St-Pierre believes physical conditioning eventually reaches a plateau. Once athletes achieve a high baseline, marginal gains in metrics like VO2 max do not necessarily translate into better performance inside the cage.
“I believe, especially at the elite level, all athletes have a top VO2 max,” he said. “Maybe they can increase it a little bit, but it doesn’t change performance that much.”
Instead, he now views conditioning as a tool for maintaining his body rather than pushing it to new extremes.
“All the training that I do, the conditioning that I do, I think it’s mostly for therapeutic reasons and less for performance,” he said.
Using a simple analogy, St-Pierre compared the human body to a vehicle that requires regular maintenance to stay functional over time.
“If you have a car and you do your service on your car, it’s important to keep it for a long time,” he said. “I use conditioning not to increase my performance, but to increase my longevity.”
The conversation eventually shifted to nutrition, where St-Pierre revealed another change in perspective, this time about meal timing.
Over the years, he said he has come to believe that when you eat can matter just as much, if not more, than what you eat, particularly when performance is the goal.
“One thing that I changed my mind on diet is I think for me, it’s more important when you eat than what you eat, in terms of performance,” he said.
That shift in thinking led him to reconsider the long-held belief that skipping breakfast harms athletic performance. Based on his own experience, he now sees no issue with training on an empty stomach.
“If it’s for performance, I believe you can have an empty stomach and have a great performance,” he said. “You eat the night before, you wake up in the morning, you skip a meal, you’re still going to be able to perform, no problem.”
He added that this approach works well for him personally and likely applies to many others in similar conditions.
“I think so for most people, anyway. For myself, 100 percent,” he said.
However, St-Pierre acknowledged that the equation changes when an athlete is actively cutting weight or operating in a significant calorie deficit. In those situations, nutritional quality becomes far more important than timing alone.
