Former UFC middleweight champ Alex Pereira is taking a break from his rivalry with Israel Adesanya. Ahead of his move up to light heavyweight, to face former 205-pound champion Jan Blachowicz, Pereira revealed on The MMA Hour that he has been training with another old opponent.
Pereira, who knocked middleweight Sean Strickland out in a single round at UFC 276, is helping Strickland tune up his boxing ahead of UFC Vegas 76, where Strickland will face Abusupiyan Magomedov.
Alex Pereira Training, Learning English With UFC Opponent
“I’m actually giving you breaking news right now. Sean Strickland’s coming to Connecticut next week for one week to train with me for his next fight. I’m going to learn English with Sean Strickland.” He’s a bit crazy, but he’s a nice guy. He talks against people, but he always treats me with respect.”
Pereira might pick up some colorful English training with Strickland. Sean Strickland’s reputation, particularly for expletive-laden trolling online, precedes him. Regardless, Pereira hope to see his new training partner move on to a title challenge.
“It’s a hard fight. Honestly speaking, anyone can go over there and swing something and happen to knock the guy out. But on our way to progress, winning round-by-round and dominating the class right now, I think it is very hard for anybody to do right now.”
Pereira, too, seems to have moved on from his old rivalry with Israel Adesanya. The two are 1-1 in MMA as it stands, but Pereira has moved into light heavyweight, and will focus on fighting at 205 pounds for the moment.
“No, I move on from here. I can’t keep holding grudges on that because, otherwise it would not benefit me on my next fight. So I gotta let it go.
I thought, re-thought about everything that happened to study everything, and the fact that I beat him three times made me feel a little better about it. So let’s just move on to the next one.” Despite this, there’s still the trilogy to settle. Will they fight again one day? If so, at which weight?
“Absolutely. I just took a break because he already made [middleweight] about 50 times, so I’m going to see how it goes in the next two, three fights. Maybe we fight at light heavyweight, maybe we’ll fight at middleweight.\
From now on, I want to let everybody know, I’m able to make [185 pounds] any time I want. But the way that I was making the weight over and over again in a short span of time, I needed a break so my body can perform better in the weight class.”
