Joe Rogan believes Alex Pereira has an edge over other middleweights

• Sports

The main association with Alex Pereira, aside from being the UFC middleweight champion, is his size. One Israel Adesanya, who was almost always taller than his opponents, this time was several centimeters shorter. However, apart from the fact that Pereira was a taller fighter, he also seemed much bigger and stronger than Adesanya.

This has prompted many experts to question whether Pereira belongs to the middle category. The middleweight limit is 83.9 kg, which is how much the fighters must weigh when they step on the scale the day before the fight, but it is widely known that rehydration after the weigh-in brings the fighters back to normal, i.e.

they gain a few kilograms. This is usually up to 10 percent of the body mass, but some fighters knew how to exaggerate. For example, Paulo Costa used to regain up to 16 percent of his body mass, which means that if the scales show him 83.9 kg, on the day of the fight he will weigh 97 kg.

So Alex Pereira posted a picture on social networks that shows that on the day of the fight he weighed 95.9 kg. While he is not in the training camps, Alex walks with 105 kilograms, which is normal for fighters who drop down to the light heavyweight category.

Commentator and podcaster Joe Rogan believes that the difference in weight between Adesanya and Pereira had a huge impact on the outcome of the fight.

Sanctioned cheating

“He could have been. Yeah,” Rogan said when asked by Steve-O if Pereira really weighed 220 pounds (h/t Sportskeeda).

“He certainly gets above that in-between fights. He has a hard time making 185. It’s a bull***t thing. It’s basically sanctioned cheating. It really is. But everybody does it”. Rogan may be right about everyone doing it, but some have a genetic predisposition to lose weight much more easily than others.

Alex Pereira is clearly one of those "wonders of nature". There is little talk about it, but once someone suffers from losing so much weight, some changes may be introduced.