Frank Shamrock is a super dope fighting machine. World Extreme Fighter’s friends over at Askmen.com were lucky enough to ask him some questions and cool enough to let WEF post it. Check out what Frank had to say about MMA, his training, taking supplements and much more.

Askmen.com:

When did you get into martial arts?

I can tell you exactly when: It was April 5th, 1994. It was the day after my mom’s birthday, and I got my ass kicked to first aid, so it was imprinted upon my mind.

It was pretty much like that… you know, I was going to college and I wanted to drop out and I wanted to live at home with my dad, but he said in order to do that I had to have a job or I had to go down and try the wrestling thing my brother was doing. I was 22 years old.

So you do a combination of boxing, kickboxing and wrestling?

Yeah, it’s mostly considered submission wrestling — which is the same thing as wrestling only it’s a little bit more aggressive — boxing, kickboxing… that’s pretty much it.

Each sport was kind of created to solve a certain problem: Kickboxing focuses mainly on the stand up, wrestling focuses mainly on the ground, boxing, you know, is just punching, so each sport by itself has its own rules and its own game, but when you put them all together, the rules kind of flow together.

How often do you train?

In fight season, I train about six hours each day, six days a week, and it’s all that I do. So, I have a two-hour session in the morning and a two-hour session in the afternoon and a two-hour session at night.

I’m like the ultimate fighting machine: This is all that I do… it’s really bizarre.

What do you do to train?

Everything: I have a strength and conditioning coach, I have a cardiovascular training coach, I have a boxing coach, I have a wrestling coach, I have a submission coach, and I have a track and field coach. And then I have a master coach who looks over everything, and each one of those people trains me in each one of those activities.

So, each morning I do track and field and resistance training, and that’s either weights or kettle bells or a combination of lifting drills, bodyweight drills, the sled — which is pretty crazy. And then in the afternoon, I usually hit mitts with my boxing coach and then after mitts, traditionally, I’ll work with my kickboxing coach on my kickboxing technique and strategy and theory. Then in the evening, I work with my grappling and submissions coach and my wrestling coach, and then my coach of all coaches supervises my evening sessions, which usually end in technical strategies or technical applications.

Can a fighting athlete train too much?

Oh yeah, rest is huge. And one of the hardest things to do is to become mature as a fighter and to be in touch with your body. And so the reason I have all these coaches is that they’re usually the ones who tell me when I’m doing it too hard, when I’m going too hard or when I look fatigued, and then, the other part of being a mature athlete is listening to your own body and knowing when it’s time to stay in bed instead of getting up to train.

But, you know, I train for a fight traditionally for an eight-week time period, and the first two weeks are very challenging, the next three weeks, are really, really challenging, and then, once I’m in that ridiculous physical condition, it’s mostly technical training, technical sparring, technical wrestling, and stuff like that.

I rest from seven to 10 days before a fight. I’ll go in, I’ll stretch, I’ll warm up, I might do a little bit of shadow boxing and shadow rolling, but I won’t do anything before my fight except for eat and sleep and watch movies and read.

Do you have to follow a strict diet as an athlete?

I eat whatever I want because I work out so hard that I could eat lard all day and it would burn off my body. But I do eat good food because it makes my body feel better. So, I’m one of these old dogs that’s been at it for 13 years as a pro, and I know when I eat bad stuff that my body doesn’t feel good; I get gassy or I get indigestion or I get tired or heavy… When I eat good foods, clean foods, live foods, I feel better. Good food is anything that is alive and/or not fried, processed, frozen or otherwise, so for me that’s chicken breast, fish, beef, turkey, and then fresh vegetables [and] fruits.

I eat about six meals a day — that’s excluding snacks — I eat, you know, six meals the size of my [frying] pan during the day. And, because I’m a smaller guy fighting in a bigger weight class, I eat an enormous meal right before I go to bed.

It allows my body to not eat the muscle that’s on the body during my time of sleeping, which is healing time, and that’s when the body shuts itself down and looks for ways to heal itself. And if I don’t have food in me — most people have a lot of fat on their body, I don’t have any fat; it’s just muscle — my body will immediately start eating the muscles instead of consuming whatever food is available. So I have to eat every night before bed, and I generally take about two naps a day.

What are your feelings on supplements?

You know, it works… 85% of it is crap, 80% of it is never going to make it through your intestines, but it is essential, especially if you can’t get enough food… you know, eating six meals every day is challenging. If you can’t get it done or if you can’t do it in time, that’s when your supplements come in.

And now that I’m 34, I take Glucosamine MSM for my joints because they’re starting to hurt a little bit. And it works: It takes six months to get into your joints and get saturated and that’s when people usually mess up their supplementation, you know, they take it for four months and then don’t see any results and they stop. So it takes about six months to really get in there and start helping you.

What does “visualization” before a fight involve?

Well, all these coaches are training me in these different techniques physically. And then they give me their ideas and their basic theories and stuff behind it. So, when I’m done physically preparing, and even during that physical preparation time, what I begin doing is I begin visualizing the actual techniques. So, even though my body is not doing it, my brain is doing it, and it’s going through the techniques, step by step, timing it… when to do it…

So, in my mind, I go through the techniques over and over, and I think about correct mechanics and I think of the feeling that my body had while I was doing it, and I kind of train my brain to program my body to do the same techniques.

Have you ever had a serious injury?

I have. Let’s see… I have broken my right leg in sparring… and my right foot in fighting… and my right hand in fighting… I tore my shoulder in sparring…and… tore my knee out in wrestling.

When did you get into acting?

Acting was one of those accidental things. I had, you know, dreamt about it and thought it would be cool, you know like most of these guys think it would be cool. But, um, I was friends with Chuck Norris and became close with him through the martial arts, and he was doing an episode of Walker Texas Ranger that involved cage fighting, and his people called me and asked me if I would do it and be the star of the episode since I was the best cage fighter in the world. So I said, “Yes,” and that’s how I got into acting.

You’re also a teacher; do you have a teaching philosophy?

I pride myself on my teaching and I really believe that the best teachers find out how people learn and then use those tools to teach them. Everybody learns differently. Some people are physical, visual, mental, some people do well with sounds, some people do well with a combination of the two, some people do well with theory… I really feel that, as a teacher, my goal is to find out how people learn, and then give them the knowledge that I have with those tools.

And I teach everybody. I teach kids from two years old to 15, I teach adults from 15 to… my oldest student is 64, and I teach the police, the customs FBI… you name it, I’m teaching them.

What do you do to relax and have fun?

I like to read — I’ll read anything; I read a lot on training, but I like to get out of my own mind so I read fiction, I love science fiction, I love murder mysteries, any kind of espionage or antigovernment [stuff] I love, and, when I’m training for my fights, I like to read serial killer books.

When I’m not training, I like to be in nature. I like to hike and walk in nature, kind of picnic and hang out… I’m very family-oriented and community-oriented, so most of my social settings are with my martial arts community or with my fighters or with my team, and I like to travel. Me and my wife, we travel all over the world.