Liz Carmouche made championship weight on Thursday, and it took a pair of clippers to get her there. The veteran posted a video on Instagram showing her head being shaved to drop the last bit she needed. That made her inaugural PFL women’s flyweight title fight against Jena Bishop official for Friday night at the Wintrust Arena in Chicago, as Bloody Elbow first highlighted.
Carmouche explained the call in her caption. “This camp I had some easy and hard things to do to make weight,” she wrote. “With .2 left on the table the hair had to go. It’s just hair! Now to rehydrate for tomorrow.”
The belt is up for grabs because Dakota Ditcheva, the promotion’s biggest flyweight star, is out injured. That leaves Carmouche and Bishop to settle who becomes the first 125-pound champion in PFL history.
Why the scale matters for Carmouche
For most of her career, weight was the one thing nobody worried about with Carmouche. She made it for 29 straight fights before coming in one pound over for her August 2024 bout with Taila Santos, which is still the only miss of her career. A second miss would have meant two in eight PFL appearances, a bad look for a fighter whose reputation was built on reliability. A miss on a title fight also usually costs the fighter eligibility for the belt, and that’s the part that would have stung most.
The résumé is long. Carmouche challenged for UFC titles in two different divisions and then put together a long run as Bellator champion. Since moving to PFL, she won the 2025 women’s flyweight tournament, and she’ll be 42 when she walks out Friday.
She has also already solved Bishop once. In the August 2025 tournament fight in Charlotte, Carmouche knocked Bishop out in Round 3. A repeat would give her the first PFL flyweight title and could set up a 2027 fight with the undefeated Ditcheva, the matchup the division has been building toward.
Quick take
I’ll give Carmouche credit for honesty here. Plenty of fighters would have quietly stripped down behind a towel and said nothing. She went to the clippers and put it on camera. That said, .2 pounds is a small margin for a 42-year-old who has been doing this for decades, and it tells me the cut was tighter than anyone in her camp wanted. If she rehydrates well, I like her to beat Bishop again. She has the finish from Charlotte, and Bishop has to show she fixed whatever left her open in that third round. If the cut drained more than Carmouche admits, watch her output after Round 2, because that’s where a hard cut usually shows up first.
