Ahead of his light heavyweight debut, Alex Pereira recently revealed that he’ll be training with none other than Sean Strickland. Moreover, the training also included English lessons from the middleweight fighter. However, the training session has proved beneficial for ‘Tarzan’ as he reveals what Alex Pereira made him realize about himself with regard to his fighting style.
UFC 291 is approaching fast and the fans will get to witness ‘Poatan’ making his light heavyweight debut against a veteran of the division, Jan Blachowicz. Alex Pereira made an appearance on the ‘MMA Hour’ show mentioning that his former rival will join him in training. Most fans didn’t expect this move and many shared their reactions to the news.
Student Poatan and Professor Strickland 😁 https://t.co/zve1YyLHvn pic.twitter.com/9LF7FVIwvL
— MMA Orbit (@mma_orbit) June 9, 2023
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Having fought each other at UFC 276, Alex Pereira stated he will have a week-long training schedule with Sean Strickland in Danbury, Connecticut. Additionally, he will have UFC legend Glover Teixeira training with him as usual. The fact that Pereira’s translator mentioned that Pereira was planning to learn English from ‘Tarzan’ was the most unexpected thing anyone would have thought of. Meanwhile, both fighters have shared instances from their training session on social media. Furthermore, it seems like Strickland has learned something about himself while training with the Brazilian ace. Let us see what the 7th-ranked middleweight had to say.
Alex Pereira made Sean Strickland realize a weak spot in his fighting style
Alex Pereira is a world-traveled fighter who’s won championships in many promotions. As such, it sounds like an exciting opportunity to be able to train with a fighter of ‘Poatan’s caliber. Apparently, it has proved to be very positive for Sean Strickland. He said, “Why I came here was obviously you have one of the best strikers in the world, you know.”
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‘Tazan’ realized that he had a weak point in his fighting style. It was his footwork and he didn’t know about that earlier. Strickland said, “With Alex, man, you gotta have your footwork on point and I didn’t realize my footwork was so f***ing bad.” Strickland claimed to have been doing a lot of footwork-centric drills and it seems to have helped him immensely. “I came here, I was doing a lot of footwork drills with Alex. He was the man, he showed me a lot of sh*ts,” said the middleweight star.
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Both fighters have shared footage of sparring with each other and this comes after less than a year of Pereira defeating Strickland. It is apparent that there are no hard feelings between the two fighters and both of them are looking to improve their own game. We will have to wait and see how that pans out.
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