“It feels good when guys reach out to be inspired - and you have shown people an example of how you can come back and be better than you were before when adversity strikes; and when the world predicts the opposite, you show them you not only can be successful but be great.”
“My dad would always tell me, 'When you meet a man, look him in his eye and shake his hand,' and that's just something I've been doing for a long time.”
“When I'm out, maybe I'm looking at the fried chicken, but I know I need to order the grilled. But I'm still from the country. I love my fried food and my neck bones and all that, too.”
“When you think about little league football, high school, and even on to college even more so, you're dealing with a lot of guys that are prideful, that think they're the best - a lot of alpha males. So, typically, you've got to have a guy that can control those guys, and, when he talks, they know he means business. He's a serious guy.”
“I try to eat a lot of baked foods, fish, chicken, potatoes, stuff like that. Grab me a Muscle Milk. That helps.”
“A guy like Bruce Lee, I've always been a fan. How he used to be able to move and be so quick. You look at some of the exercises that he did, and it was all majority free weight, like standing on your hands. That works every muscle. Everything is firing.”
“I thought I was Superman until I experienced that life-changing anaphylactic shock. I was eating lunch and gobbled down a couple of bowls of gumbo. Then, 15 minutes later, I'm in my dorm room resting up. My eyes started itching and my throat was swelling up. I could barely breathe.”
“I was always fast; I was always racing guys that were older than me and beating them, so I always had speed. I was able to make good cuts at a young age, on the side of the house with my dad, going through different plays, working on cuts and stuff like that.”
“I'll get out and do Pilates. I'll get in the ring and do some rounds of kickboxing and grappling and MMA conditioning. There's a lot of unique stuff that I do, too, that a lot of people wouldn't imagine or think about doing, like box jumps. You get a 42-inch box and dumbbells and practice working on your explosion jumping up on those boxes.”
“I'm always aware of trying to put my body in different positions to test it and strengthen muscles that you don't get when you do dumbbell press or pulls or weight-type exercises.”