Alex Pereira wanted wrestling help for UFC 335, so he called a former heavyweight champion. Cain Velasquez, a two-time UFC heavyweight titleholder, posted Instagram footage of the two of them drilling technique at the UFC Performance Institute, as Yahoo Sports and MMA Junkie reported Tuesday.
The clip is about as unglamorous as fight camp content gets. Velasquez walks Pereira through breaking out of standing back control, hand position and hips, the stuff that never makes a highlight reel. It’s also exactly the stuff a guy still new to heavyweight needs to have down before he spends up to 25 minutes in a cage with a 20-3 big man.
Pereira (13-4 MMA, 10-3 UFC) moved up to heavyweight in June and lost his debut to Ciryl Gane. The former two-division champion gets his rebound fight on Dec. 12 at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, where he meets Sergei Pavlovich (20-3 MMA, 9-3 UFC) in a five-round co-main event. Five rounds in a co-main slot tells you how much the UFC thinks of this matchup, and how little room Pereira has to drop a second straight fight at the new weight.
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Yahoo framed the session as one more example of Pereira chasing new skills. It was a busy week around his camp generally. His coach, Plinio Cruz, made his Misfits Boxing debut Saturday and won by TKO in Round 2, according to posts from Championship Rounds and Spinnin Backfist. A separate clip shared by Happy Punch showed Cruz unloading a string of profane insults on Chase DeMoor while Pereira visibly enjoyed every word of it.
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Pereira also turned up in a video posted by Dovy on X, leg kicking a fan at what the post called 20% power. The fan, for the record, seemed to survive. And Bruce Buffer told Helen Yee that Pereira, Conor McGregor and Jon Jones are the only fighters who deserve his “The one the only” introduction, which is the kind of company you keep by winning, so Dec. 12 matters for that too.
My take: this is the smartest thing Pereira could be doing with his camp. Losing to Gane in your first heavyweight fight is no disgrace, but it exposed how far he still has to go at the new weight, and the fix is going to come from grappling, because nobody needs to teach him how to hurt people. Velasquez spent his title runs living on top of heavyweights, and if he can teach Pereira to peel a 250-pound man off his back and get back to the center of the cage, Pavlovich loses his easiest path to a win. A drill video in October proves nothing about December, but drilling the escape tells you the camp has a clear idea of where Pavlovich might try to drag this fight. We find out at T-Mobile Arena on Dec. 12.
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