The Joe Rogan Experience

Joe Rogan Experience #1200 - Ross Edgley

Ross Edgley is a former professional British water polo player who currently works as a model and personal trainer. In November 2018, he became the first person to swim around Great Britain.

Joe RoganhostRoss EdgleyguestJamie Vernonguest

Nov 12, 20182h 52mWatch on YouTube ↗

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Ross Edgley Reveals How He Swam 2,000 Miles Around Britain

Joe Rogan interviews ultra-endurance athlete Ross Edgley about his 157‑day, 2,000‑mile swim around Great Britain, exploring the physical, psychological, and environmental challenges he faced. Ross details how tides, whirlpools, cold water, jellyfish, and storms shaped the attempt as much as his own fitness did. The conversation branches into sports science—strength vs stamina, work capacity, movement efficiency, nutrition, and recovery—and how these principles apply across endurance sports, strongman lifting, and MMA. They also dig into mental toughness, motivation, and how athletes manipulate their bodies and minds to push beyond perceived limits.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Environment can be a bigger opponent than the sport itself.

Ross emphasizes that tides, currents, whirlpools, and storms often dictated whether he could move forward at all, forcing meticulous nightly planning and constant adaptation rather than just relying on fitness.

Work capacity and movement efficiency matter more than raw speed in ultra-endurance.

He designed a slower, highly efficient stroke using big back muscles and minimal wasted motion so his body could tolerate 12 hours of swimming a day for months without structural breakdown.

Extreme efforts require treating nutrition like a full-time job.

To sustain 15,000 calories per day, Ross relied on calorie-dense, relatively easy-to-digest foods plus whey, MCTs, amino acids and supplements, adjusting when salt destroyed his tongue and texture became painful.

Body type ‘rules’ change with the context of the sport.

While his heavily muscled 100 kg frame is a disadvantage in weight-bearing endurance like running, in cold non-weight-bearing swimming it provided heat, stored glycogen, and durability—arguably turning him into a “human whale” for this specific task.

Mental toughness is trainable through progressive adversity, not just innate.

Ross frames fatigue as an emotionally mediated ‘central governor’ and talks about deliberately seeking brutal experiences—marathon with a car, Everest-by-rope climbs—to recalibrate what his mind and body consider survivable.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

I realized, as physically fit as you are, the ocean just doesn’t care.

— Ross Edgley

It went from swimming, as I understood it, to basically surviving in the water.

— Ross Edgley

For something like swimming around Great Britain, it’s just an eating competition with a little bit of swimming involved.

— Ross Edgley

Your body is the alchemist—you can change your own biochemistry with your mind.

— Joe Rogan

What you did by forcing yourself to do that for five months… I think you could do anything.

— Joe Rogan

Planning and execution of the Great British Swim (tides, routes, safety)Physical toll: jellyfish stings, salt tongue, skin damage, collapsed arches, recoveryStrength vs endurance: concurrent training, work capacity, and movement efficiencyNutrition and supplementation for 15,000 calories/day in extreme conditionsMental toughness, intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation, and ‘feral’ mindsetComparisons to other extreme endurance and strength feats (fell running, strongman, ultras)Parallels with MMA: weight cutting, conditioning, wrestling, and psychological warfare

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