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 to extreme stress, restriction, and dehydration

Why weight cutting sits in an extreme physiological zone

The cultural and psychological reasons weight cutting persists

Why regulation alone doesn’t solve the problem

How chronic under-fuelling affects everyday athletes

What proper fuelling looks like in high-performance environments

Supplement strategy that supports performance rather than masks damage

Stress, nervous system regulation, and recovery

Individual variability, including female physiology and cyclesThe trade-off between short-term advantage and long-term health

This episode is a grounded look at how elite athletes push the body to its limits - and how the right strategy can support performance without breaking the system designed to keep us alive.

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 skilled movement happens below conscious awareness, why thinking can slow you down, and why performance often breaks under pressure. We also unpack how the nervous system adapts through repetition and error, the role dopamine plays in learning and motivation, and why trust in your body isn’t a mindset trick but a neurological requirement.

This conversation reframes how we think about practice, coaching, and mastery. Not as a process of control, but one of adaptation, exposure, and timing.

If you’re an athlete, coach, or anyone trying to understand how skill actually develops, this episode will change how you see training and performance.

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.

We explore:
Why sleep is a trainable skill, not a personality trait

What “cleaning your brain” actually means from a neuroscience perspective

How sleep deprivation affects focus, reaction time, mood, and performance

The role of deep sleep in muscle repair, hormones, and recovery

Why REM sleep matters for memory, learning, and emotional resilience

How poor sleep disrupts appetite, decision-making, and training consistency

Practical, evidence-based tools to improve sleep without biohacks or gimmicks

This conversation is especially relevant for fighters, athletes, coaches, and anyone training hard - but it’s just as important for anyone navigating stress, pressure, or high cognitive load.

Sleep is free.
It’s foundational.And it’s one of the most powerful tools you have - if you know how to use it.

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 his room, and the mindset that carried him through cuts, knockdowns, and some of the toughest athletes in the world. He also shares how he’s passing the torch to the next generation as his three children rise in boxing, BJJ and MMA.

If you’re a fan of Muay Thai history, Australian combat sports, K1, or the evolution of striking, this is an entertaining, honest conversation with a pioneer who helped change the sport.

Topics:
• Training in Thai camps in the 90s
• Fighting at Lumpini Stadium
• K1 and the UFC
• Humour, fear, superstition and ghost stories
• Surviving cuts, knockdowns and 347 stitches
• Raising the next generation of fighters
• What legacy really means in combat sports

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 approach to high performance.

We explore:
• the paradox of control (why fighting fear makes it stronger)
• experiential avoidance and how it quietly sabotages performance
• the relationship between arousal, attention, and decision-making
• how values-based clarity creates real composure under pressure
• why seeking discomfort trains the mind more effectively than “positive thinking” ever could
• the difference between confidence and competence
• what true game day readiness looks and feels like

If you’re an athlete, coach, fighter, creator, or anyone who performs under pressure, this conversation offers a new framework for mental toughness - one grounded not in suppressing emotion, but in understanding it.