The Real-Life Diet of MMAShredded’s Jeff Chan, Who Eats a Lot of White Rice—and Popeyes (2024)

Two years ago, a friend who moonlights as a fighter persuaded me to sign up at her Muay Thai gym in Manhattan. At the time, I considered myself in decent shape, someone who could play full-court basketball without getting winded. And then, in the middle of my first Muay Thai class, while flimsily punching a heavy bag, I had to bail and run to the bathroom, convinced I was going to puke.

I didn’t, thankfully, and then I came back again a few days later. And then the next day. And the day after that. There was something oddly addictive about Thai boxing, perhaps because any progress you make is extremely iterative: You’re constantly making micro-adjustments in pursuit of an idea of perfection that may not even exist, whether that’s the way you turn your hips when you kick, the way you breathe through your nose, or the way you prepare yourself mentally to get punched in the face by a training partner. Sparring, in particular, was especially intimidating, at least at first. That everyone seemed to have Milo Ventimiglia thighs didn’t help. And then I discovered MMAShredded on YouTube.

The channel is the life’s project of Jeff Chan, an Ottawa-based trainer and coach who fights professionally for One Championship. He travels and trains at gyms around the world (which inspire a specific type of FOMO), but it’s his cerebral approach to MMA, Muay Thai, and jiujitsu that was a revelation to me.

Specifically, his technique breakdowns are useful for instilling the bare-minimum amount of confidence to push ahead. What I really appreciate is how he always shows how those techniques get applied—and can fail—in real-time sparring. That there are hundreds of hours of him fighting on YouTube is great for students—but maybe not so great for him, since any future opponent can easily scout his tendencies and tactics. (And yet, his largesse prevails.)

GQ caught up with Chan, who had recently gotten over a mean bout of COVID, to talk about his training routine, what he eats to stay energized, and what he wishes more fighters would focus on.

Did you play other sports prior to that?

I played soccer, volleyball, basketball. I was a pretty athletic child. But then I quit everything for Muay Thai.

What do you think gave you that an advantage in martial arts? Was it a timing thing? Was it a footwork thing? What gave you that base to build off of?

Soccer. I think it came from soccer. I don't know how much of my channel you've watched or my sparring, but I'm a big low-kicker. I love low kicks. And the style of low kicks is from the way you kick a soccer ball across the field. I didn't really realize that the two connected until I found out that Jose Aldo was also a professional soccer player, and he has deadly low kicks.

How many years did you do Muay Thai before you switched to MMA?

I started in 2007. I actually started in jiu-jitsu first. I trained a single day of jiu-jitsu, and after that I went to Muay Thai.

Why’d you switch?

I was stuck in bottom mount for like five minutes, and the guy that was on top of me had a hairy chest and he wasn't nice. Or I don't know, maybe he was nice? But he didn't let me up the whole round and I’m just like, "Jiu-jitsu is not for me." So then the next day I switched to the Muay Thai program. I trained in that for four years until I went back to jiu-jitsu.

Is there an aspect of your game when you were younger that you wish you would have focused more on as a fighter?

I would say karate actually. It's funny, because a lot of people now, if they watch me spar or fight, they would be like, "Oh Jeff Chan's got a karate background," just cause I have a really wide stance. I tend to keep my hands a little low, my chin's a little bit high. And I move in and out a lot and I kind of point fight, but with Muay Thai weapons. So that's how I try to keep my style now. Karate footwork. But I use Muay Thai weapons and defense.

That's interesting. I would have assumed that you had some karate influence, too. Your stance is a little Machida-like.

Yes, yes, yes. But with that said, I wish that I trained karate to develop that flexibility. Because while I'm able to kick the head, I'm not able to snap that high kick. You know how karate fighters, they can just go and whip their foot and keep it up? I wish I could do that. And I'm having such a hard time developing that flexibility. I have the flexibility, again, to swing the leg up there, but I'm not able to keep it up there.

I feel like those weapons are kind of becoming in vogue right now in MMA. Conor McGregor used to often open fights with at least a few big, sweeping hook kicks.

Yeah. I find karate is definitely getting a lot more popular, whereas back then, it was like, "You train karate? I'm going to whip you."

How many days a week are you training now?

I train every day.

Are you doing a twice a day sort of thing? What is your workout routine like these days?

So if I'm in fight camp, I'd of course be every day, but I've moved my priorities more towards coaching and my channel and my business.

With that said, I'll train in the afternoon or noon, maybe 11:00, 12:00-ish, sometimes 1:00. And then in the evening, it'll be training but more so filming. I get two sessions in.

What are your mornings like?

I wake up early. I have to wake up around 7:30. I'll get up and eat a small breakfast. And then first thing, I get on the computer, answer comments, do my stuff on the computer, and then I'll train. After I train, I come home, eat another meal, and sometimes I'm really busy with work and I'll get down and just do more work. But I do like my naps. I take a lot of naps. Like, 30 minutes—it helps so much.

And then usually around five or six o'clock I'll have a cousin or a friend come over and we'll train and also film.

Can you walk me through what you're eating on a typical day?

So it varies depending on if I'm training for a fight. And it's funny cause when you reached out to me and you mentioned talking about diet, I was just asking my partner like, "Should I lie and say I eat healthy?" And just—

Oh no.

So to be completely honest, I eat whatever I want. I ate McDonald's yesterday and I had Popeyes chicken the day before.

Oh sh*t.

And I eat a lot of rice. I would say if there's something that stands out from my diet, at least from what I’ve been told, is I eat a lot of white rice and I don't eat that much meat. I like meat, but I don't eat that much meat.

For dinner or whatever I'll have a nice big plate. I usually have three-and-a-half to four bowls of rice, and then I have just a bit of meat on the side. So as long as I have a lot of rice and it fills me up, I'm happy. And I find the carbs really give me the energy to train.

That’s so great.

Yeah. Whereas when I'm training for a fight, or I’m two, three weeks out of a fight, that's when I really got to diet and cut the weight.

How do you go about the weight cut?

My fiancee helps. She's the one who cooks for me. And she takes out the rice and I immediately feel like sh*t. And I lose a lot of weight, just from the rice.

Does your energy suffer during training when you cut the rice?

Yeah. I switch it to sweet potatoes. I remember one time, I cut out white rice and I switched to sweet potatoes just to slowly get used to it, maybe like a month out. And man, the first three days I felt like I had COVID or something. I was so tired. I was so drained and my body was just so used to rice. And then after three or four days, my body got used to the carbs and I felt better. Now I'm back on the rice again.

Are you eating rice for breakfast too?.

Yeah, I like to eat leftovers. For dinner my fiancee will always cook whatever she cooks, usually rice and meat and vegetables, and she'll always cook extra so that in the morning I can have the rice.

Is it like a stir fry situation, usually?

She likes to change it up, but fried rice, rice with steak, rice with beef, rice with pork—honestly anything. I don't know about you or other people, but in the morning for breakfast, I like salty, hot food. Like sausage and eggs. I don't like cereal.

I'm a salty, hot food guy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Right now, I'm not trying to lose weight since I don't have a fight coming up. I'm just enjoying my life. And I actually want to be a little bit thicker, a little bit stronger and bigger. That's why I'm allowing myself to eat the rice. But if I'm in fight camp or if I'm training for something, I actually do intermittent fasting and I don't eat breakfast. I go into the training session kind of hungry, but I actually perform better.

Oh interesting. So you move a lot lighter and stuff.

Just a natural thing. I'll eat a lot of meat but it's more important that I eat lots of rice, and I've been eating a lot of rice since I was a child. Everybody who meets me, more specifically my fiancee and her family, when they see me eat the amount of rice I eat, they're like, "What the f*ck?"

I feel that. Even when I eat Popeyes now I’ll eat it with white rice. Does caffeine factor in at all for you? Do you drink coffee in the mornings before training?

Nope. No coffee, no tea. I'll drink tea if someone offers it, if I'm at a restaurant or whatever, but I don't drink any caffeine at all.

Do you do pre-workout and stuff at all or—

No. I think I get all my energy from the rice.

What does your recovery routine look like?

I stretch a lot and foam roll a lot. I started stretching ever since I fell in love with those karate snap kicks. I try to do the splits every day now. I can't do the splits, but I'm improving by literally stretching every single day, just for three sets of a minute or two.

Stretching has been a game changer. Just being able to bring that leg up for that high without as much effort changed everything. It makes everything so much more dangerous to be able to kick that high. And foam rolling, and massage gun, hitting the hips, hitting the butt. Whenever I have a friend over, he'll literally use his elbow and dig into the hips before we work out.

Say we do deadlifts that day. We both understand how important it is, so that for two minutes, I'll lie down and he'll just dig his elbows into my butt, my lower back, my hips and just loosen me up. Then I'll do the same for him. And then when we do deadlifts, everything is so much easier. It’s been a big, big, big game changer. I was actually thinking of making a video discussing the importance of foam rolling and just loosening up those muscles.

How do you go about your cardio? What's your cardio routine?

I would say in the afternoon class, it's cardio because it's the jiu-jitsu team. So it's usually live drills, live resistance training. So I usually get my cardio there. And then in the evening I'll have a cousin or a friend come over and I usually try to film something. After we film we'll usually hit pads, maybe like three [five minute rounds], not super hard, but just we'll hit and get a sweat in. I would say I stay fit and lean primarily due to the physical activity that I do, not so much what I eat. If I stopped training as much and ate the way I ate, I believe I would get big.

So you don't really run or anything? It's mostly just training to get your cardio in?

Training, yeah. I'll run if I'm training for a fight, because I've been told that running helps with the aerobic system, which helps with the rest of your anaerobic lactic systems. But I don't like running. I find it super boring. I like drilling and just sparring and pads.

Is there an aspect of a fighter's game that you feel most people don't focus enough on? Like, from your personal experience at the gym, what are you seeing that people aren't developing enough?

I would say being evasive. From the gyms I've trained at, or my current gym, I feel like people don't focus too much on footwork and being evasive and not getting hit.

I feel like that adds so much for longevity, too.

Definitely. People at my gym like to just kind of pressure forward. This is especially true of my experience at Tristar Gym in Montreal. Those guys are all grappling dominant, so they're in your pocket and they have a tight guard and they just move forward at you and attack. And when you counter, they go for the takedown. They change levels and shoot. So I had a very, very different style. I was running and they would chase me. I'd pick them apart from the side or they'd take me down and crush me.