YouTube<\/a>. \u201cPeople know him the last five years, on the top, Islam. But JDM, he just won his biggest fight in his life against Belal, and people don\u2019t know him.<\/p>\n\u201cBut the way how he showed his skills, I think he\u2019s a very, very tough opponent for us. That\u2019s why we train so hard. \u2026 It was 11 weeks of very hard training, Islam is ready to go, and we expect a very tough fight against JDM and we give him credit and we know he\u2019s a tough guy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Makhachev has had to bulk up from 155 to 170 pounds to prepare for the opportunity to join an illustrious list of two-division champions that includes Jon Jones, Conor McGregor, Amanda Nunes, B.J. Penn, Daniel Cormier, and Alex Pereira, among other legends.<\/p>\n
According to Nurmagomedov, the build has been gradual, and he doesn\u2019t expect Makhachev to have any issues with the weight class change.<\/p>\n
\u201cHonestly, he was lifting,\u201d Nurmagomedov said. \u201cHe was preparing for this fight to move to welterweight after he finished his fight in January. The last six, seven months, he was putting on weight a little bit, but he was never more than 200 [pounds], no, never.\u201d<\/p>\n
As far as where Makhachev will land in the GOAT debate\u2014a conversation the undefeated Nurmagomedov is usually a part of\u2014if successful Saturday, Nurmagomedov isn\u2019t too concerned about that storyline. What\u2019s more important is to continue passing on the legacy set forth by Nurmagomedov\u2019s father and coach Abdulmanap, who passed away in 2020, prompting Nurmagomedov\u2019s exit from competition.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s like this, when I was young, it was people around me with who I was improving my game,\u201d Nurmagomedov said. \u201cAnd Islam was with me. He\u2019s younger than me and he was improving with me. I was world champion in amateur and I had, maybe, seven, 10 fights? Islam was just beginning. And when you look at the history and the way I was improving with other guys after Islam was improving with me, now Usman [Nurmagomedov] improving with Islam. It\u2019s like we\u2019re giving legacy to legacy, legacy to legacy, guys coming up, there\u2019s other young guys, they are not very famous but they are coming with Usman now. It\u2019s like stairs. This was father\u2019s plan. It was his plan, because of his wisdom.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Khabib Nurmagomedov has all the respect in the world for Jack Della Maddalena. \u201cJDM\u201d defends his welterweight championship…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":283168,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[444],"tags":[49,48,641,701,638,82,640,702],"class_list":{"0":"post-283167","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mma","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-fighting","11":"tag-latest-news","12":"tag-mma","13":"tag-sports","14":"tag-ufc","15":"tag-ufc-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283167\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/283168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}