Thanks for inviting me. It’s a pleasure and an honor to be here. It started back when I went into the military. I went into Navy bootcamp in 1985. I spent twenty years in the Navy Reserves, ten as an enlisted hospital corpsman and ten as a physician officer, all with a fleet hospital unit that supported the Marine Corps. That’s where my military career and my military medicine career both began.

I got out after twenty years, and five years later the Air Force came after me with a flight surgeon position, which is funny because that’s exactly what I’d wanted from the Navy in the first place. I had a buddy who was an F-14 flight surgeon, and I’d gone to a Navy recruiter once and said, “I’m looking for flight surgery for the Reserves.” He told me they had no need for reserve flight surgeons. I said, “You do, you just don’t know it yet.” Turns out I was right; it just took the Air Force to prove it.

So, I got out of the Navy, the Air Force brought me back in as a lieutenant colonel for flight surgery training. I made full colonel and became head of aerospace medicine for the Nebraska Air National Guard. When I made colonel, I also became what’s called the state air surgeon, which is the chief medical liaison for the state, the connection between the Guard’s medical side and the general in command. It’s a role that puts you in the room for decisions that affect every airman’s medical readiness across the state, not just the people you see in the clinic, and it gave me a perspective on military medicine I wouldn’t have gotten any other way.

The whole time, I was also in martial arts. I started in 1979, came up through the ranks as a competitor regionally and nationally, and made the national top ten in 1987 with the American Taekwondo Association. I ran clubs in South Omaha while I was studying exercise science. That’s really where military medicine, martial arts, and sports medicine all came together for me, right around the time I was finishing up my exercise physiology studies and still competing.

I went to medical school from 1990 to 1994. During that stretch, the director of exercise science at Creighton University, who wrote the sports performance series for the National Strength and Conditioning Association, approached me about doing a biomechanical analysis of a martial arts skill. I gathered my sources, did the research, and published what was, at the time, considered the first formal biomechanical analysis of a martial arts skill, a Taekwondo side kick. It ran in the NSCA Journal, which goes out to forty countries, and I was on the cover. That opened a lot of doors I hadn’t expected. A couple more articles followed in sports medicine textbooks, and I’ve stayed involved in sports medicine in one form or another ever since, all the way through medical school and into practice.

I was the team physician for the University of Nebraska Omaha for twenty years. In the early 2000s, a friend of mine, an orthopedic surgeon who did a lot of ringside work and served as cut man for world champion Terence “Bud” Crawford, pulled me into regional amateur and professional MMA ringside work, as well as some amateur boxing. Once Crawford hit world champion and started bringing fights to Omaha, I started working those championship cards as well, and that relationship just kept growing from there.

To date I’ve covered more than 4,000 professional and amateur MMA fights as a fight physician, over a hundred UFC fights as ringside physician, and ten world championship fights as chief ringside physician for Crawford, who just retired last summer as the number one boxer on the planet. It’s been a privilege to be in that corner for that stretch of his career.

Wow! How does all of that tie together? You mentioned the 3Ms when we talked before. How does it all fit into your life?

I’ve always introduced myself as a 3M kind of guy: military, martial arts, and medicine. As a flight surgeon taking care of air crew, and earlier as a field surgeon with the Marine Corps back in the ’80s and ’90s, you’re looking at operational medicine, the military athlete, someone whose body has to perform under conditions most people never face. From there it’s a short step to sports medicine and working with martial artists, professional athletes, collegiate athletes. My private sports medicine practice, my work as an emergency medicine physician, and my time in a sports medicine clinic all let me take care of those athletes in different settings, sometimes the same athlete in three different settings depending on the week. All three pieces have tied together into one career, and it’s been a good combination.

It’s very unique, being able to see things from that many angles. I imagine the military alone covers a huge range of people and situations. There aren’t many bases you don’t touch in some way. Tell us more about how you got started in martial arts and what it’s meant to you.

I started around 1979. My brother was into Taekwondo, and a couple of friends were too, and that sparked my interest. I made Black Belt in 1981, then 2nd, 3rd, 4th Degree, working my way up steadily over the years. I held 5th Degree for twenty-six years, from 1995 to 2021.

I had no real interest in testing again. I was happy with where I was. I’d run schools in South Omaha, had a commercial school with Grand Master Alan Pepin, a retired chief of police with the Omaha Police Department, as my partner. I was deep into sports medicine and ringside work by then, and frankly I figured my competition days and my testing days were behind me.

But the guys I’d come up with back in the early ’80s, competing individually, Grand Master Dan Longoria, who runs a school in Lincoln, Grand Master Todd Droege down in Marietta, Georgia, and Grand Master Steve Westbrook down in Florida, had all stayed active with the organization while I went off to medical school. I trained the whole time but was never tied to a formal organization, just training on my own schedule, around my own life. Eventually it came full circle, and they reached out about a new organization, asking if I wanted to join.

I told them, “I’ve got this going on and that going on. What if I come in as your sports medicine doc, director of fitness and nutrition, whatever you want to call it? I can be the eyes and ears that bring something different, something not many organizations have.” I felt I had something unique to offer, something most schools just don’t have access to. Grand Master Longoria, an 8th Degree at the time and about to test for 9th, told me Grand Master wanted me to test for 6th Degree. I said I was good; I didn’t need another plaque on the wall. He said testing was in July. I said, “Yes, sir.” I wrote out a game plan and a training program, tested for 6th Degree, made Master, and here we are.

So how are you putting your medical knowledge to use for martial artists? What would you tell our readers that they might be missing, based on everything you’ve seen?

It’s about the whole biopsychosocial picture: body, mind, and soul. We have some of the best martial artists in the world in our organization, so that aspect’s covered. Discipline’s covered too. What I’m pushing on is the daily piece, proper health and nutrition, attacking that every single day, building a genuinely functional lifestyle, the part that doesn’t show up on a scorecard but shows up everywhere else. For our school owners and the people who practice this, martial arts aren’t three, four, five hours a week of training, it’s a way of life. There’s 168 hours in a week, and we have to think about all the time outside the mat, because that affects daily life just as much as anything that happens during a class. We have Chris Hansen, who runs Impact 168, handling the lifestyle side for our licensees, getting them goal-seeking and setting real short and long-term goals as school owners. Not just business goals but personal health goals too.

Our Grand Master, G.K. Lee, wants us practicing well into our later years, and you can’t do that on a bad diet. World-class training with crappy fuel is like putting bad gas in a Cadillac body. You can have the best engineering in the world under the hood, but if you’re running garbage through it, you’re not getting where you want to go. Everything has to be on the same page. That’s what I’m trying to bring into the GTMA organization, the whole biopsychosocial wheel, so the whole martial arts athlete is covered, not just the parts that show up on the mat.

How’s that gone so far, in terms of getting it implemented?

Very well. I gave my first presentation at our inaugural national camp back in May 2021 and have given a number since then, including some over Zoom when I couldn’t be there in person because I was working an ER shift that weekend. The response has been good, people actually show up and ask questions afterward, which tells me it’s landing. I’m doing another presentation at Globals in July, in Little Rock, Arkansas.

How often do these folks actually train with you or learn from you? I’m curious how much they have to pay attention to all this day to day.

They can pay as much attention as they want to, but once they start advancing in years, the things I’m talking about start to matter to them whether they were paying attention early on or not. The body keeps the score eventually, whether you’ve been listening or not. They all have my cell number, they all have my email, and people text me at random times, asking questions about a sore shoulder or what to eat before a tournament. We also try to meet up a few times a year at minimum, in person, not just over text.

You mentioned nutrition and diet specifically. What are people usually missing or getting wrong? Are there a few specific things our readers could start with right now?

Yeah, absolutely. Across the general public in this country, we’ve focused way too much on a crap diet. I mean that in all caps, completely refined and processed food. The standard American diet is what we call the Sad Diet, because it’ll make you sad. The inflammation that’s taken over people’s bodies, hypertension, obesity, Type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, cancers, all of it traces back to a microscopic level of inflammation that’s directly tied to what people are eating. It’s not one bad meal; it’s years of it, compounding quietly until it shows up as a diagnosis. The goal is simple: decrease the crap, increase the good, increase the fiber, increase the fruits and vegetables, and slowly move people away from a diet built around a culture of highly processed, high-calorie, low-nutrient food, toward something that’s nutrient-dense and lower on calories.

When you say highly processed, what does that actually mean for our readers? I’m sure everyone understands Twinkies and Ding Dongs are processed, but where else should people be looking?

That’s right. Think of the grocery store like a vacuum that’s designed to suck you in. The healthy stuff, your fruits and vegetables, sits on the perimeter. Once you get into the aisles, that’s where the boxed and canned, heavily processed stuff lives, row after row of it. If you pick up a box and look at the ingredient list, you’ll know it’s processed. The goal is to spend less time in the aisles and more time on the perimeter. And honestly, that ties into something they’re working on out in Washington with the MAHA movement, Make America Healthy Again, trying to make that healthy perimeter food more affordable. You shouldn’t be able to walk into a grocery store, spend twenty dollars on processed junk, and fill an entire cart, while twenty dollars of real food barely fills the seat where you’d put your kid.

So, that’s the goal: more time on the perimeter of the grocery store, less in the aisles. If it comes in a package, a can, or a box, try to avoid it and stick with the whole stuff around the edges of the store.

That’s a really interesting way to put it, the perimeter. I’ve never heard it framed that way, but thinking about it, that’s exactly right, the good meats and produce are all out there on the edges of the store.

They absolutely are.

That’s a great metaphor, one I’ll probably steal. What does highly processed actually mean, technically? Is it about things like high fructose corn syrup, or just ingredients that are too far removed from the farm?

Let’s put it this way. If you go back to the early 1900s, there was a real push toward processed foods, an abundance of those and less of the healthier stuff. Most processed food traces back to petroleum-based products, petroleum, oil. Highly processed means things like your dyes, Red 40, Yellow 6, which come out of petroleum-based chemical processing, and all of that has to be FDA regulated. The FDA can’t regulate whole foods. You can’t regulate something that comes from God, fruits, vegetables, things that grow out of the ground. There’s no regulation on that, because there doesn’t need to be. Regulation kicks in once you start tweaking food with pesticides, with petroleum, with chemicals, once you change the chemical structure and add something synthetic that wasn’t there to begin with.

Then a simple way to put it would be food that’s been modified by outside chemicals or processes?

GMO-based. Genetically modified fruits, genetically modified food. If it’s been engineered or chemically altered before it gets to your plate, that’s the category we’re talking about.

We could probably do five articles on this. I’d genuinely love to put together a series for Go2 Karate Magazine if you’re willing. I think that’d be great for our readers.

I’d love to!

You’re clearly passionate about it, and this is something our readers should pay real attention to. What else would you want them to know about your background?

Just that people like me, with a real passion for health, sports medicine, and a martial arts background, are pretty rare. Not many people make it to the rank of colonel. I think I bring something unique to the table, but mostly I’m trying to get people to make lifestyle changes, to look seriously at chronic sleep deprivation, daily stressors, long hours, shift work. All of that affects the body, day-to-day function, blood pressure, in ways most people don’t connect until something goes wrong. We take it very seriously.

It sounds like what you’re seeing a lot of with martial artists is that they’ve got a ton going on and a real passion for the craft, but they’re missing some of these other pieces.

Exactly. Looking at the whole picture. When I talk to our GTMA licensees this July, I’m going to focus mainly on lifestyle, especially sleep deprivation.

Especially in this field. You teach classes until eight or nine at night, then clean up the school, maybe grab something to eat, stay up later than you should, and you’re back up at eight the next morning starting the whole cycle over on a few hours of sleep, building a school while running on an entirely different clock than the rest of the world.

Exactly right. We try to account for all of that, good food choices, staying well hydrated, water with electrolytes throughout the day, and trying to round out that whole biopsychosocial wheel.

You’ve done so much. What’s the drive behind taking on all these different things? Any one of your career paths on its own would be a massive success.

Definitely working my butt off. Our daughter’s getting married in September, so there’s extra stress on top of everything right now, on top of the day job and the sports medicine practice and the martial arts presentations. After that, I’m planning to make some lifestyle changes of my own. I’ll still be full-time in emergency medicine and running my sports medicine practice, but the goal is to draw down on emergency medicine and get to sports medicine full-time, at least four days a week. That’s the target, and I think it’s realistic once things settle down this fall.

Emergency medicine runs hours of nothing, nothing, nothing, then it’s balls-to-the-wall, crazy, adrenaline junkie territory, and then the crash afterward, a rhythm that’s hard on the body in ways people outside the field don’t always grasp. Up until a couple years ago we were working 24-hour shifts in the ER, and it got to be too much, too unsafe, making decisions on people’s lives at three or four in the morning with no sleep. I went to administration and said we needed to renegotiate down to 12-hour shifts. Even now, at the end of a 12-hour shift, I’m beat up, brutally beat up some days. So, I’m making changes on that front, because I can’t preach this stuff to martial artists, military people, medical students, and residents, and not practice it myself. This past year’s been pretty stressful. Something has to give, and I’d rather make that call myself than have it made for me.

Physician, heal thyself, or however that phrase goes. Sounds like you’re finally taking your own advice.

Yes.

But with this kind of drive, I’d guess you’ll keep adding things even as you cut back elsewhere.

Probably true. People have told me I need to learn to say no. But I’ve been this way since I was a kid in grade school, whatever I take on, I go to the Nth degree, and that’s how I’ve approached my whole life, work, training, family, all of it. My wife’s the same way, she’s a flight attendant for United Airlines, and that’s how we raised our kids, no half measures. Our oldest son is a Naval Reserve officer. Our daughter is a fourth-year medical student, currently working with Senator Kennedy on the MAHA movement out in Washington, DC. Our youngest son works as a corrections officer in law enforcement. Different paths, but nobody in this family is short on work ethic.

I think the readers here, and most of the martial arts community, share that same drive, and I’m glad they got to hear some of this from you today. It’s clear you’ve thought about this a lot, not just lived it.

One last question to wrap up. If someone reads your name on this list forty years from now and asks who Dr. Shirley was, what would you want them to know?

Just a well-rounded guy who really wanted to help a lot of people get healthier and live longer, more productive lives. That’s the bottom line. Everything else, the rank, the fights, the titles, is really just the path that got me there.

Perfect. Thank you so much for your time today, it’s been a genuine pleasure talking with you, and congratulations again on the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Thank you, sir, I appreciate it so much.