Israel Adesanya dropped some big news on his YouTube channel, Freestylebender, on Friday afternoon.<\/p>\n
The former UFC middleweight champion announced he has left City Kickboxing (CKB), the gym he first linked up with in 2009.<\/p>\n
“So, Wednesday 20th May, I spoke to Eugene [Bareman, City Kickboxing trainer] face to face and I told him I am not coming back to CKB,” Adesanya said on his channel.<\/p>\n
“This was something a long time coming behind the scenes and we have an understanding.<\/p>\n
“I just want to get it out the way just because I want you to hear it from the horse’s mouth because no one else has spoken about it.<\/p>\n
“It’s bittersweet, but it’s the right thing for me, you know, especially where I’m at in my career. It’s exactly what I needed.”<\/p>\n
The 36-year-old’s career has been stunning at CKB, with the pinnacle being twice crowned UFC middleweight champion.<\/p>\n
He helped put CKB on the map, which has since trained several competitive UFC fighters, all under the watch of Bareman.<\/p>\n
“Insanity is doing the same s**t and expecting a different result, you know, so I think that’s it,” he said.<\/p>\n
Adesanya paid tribute to CKB.<\/p>\n
“They’ve trained a lot of great fighters, even better than myself.<\/p>\n
“CKB made me into the fighter that I am today,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Israel Adesanya dropped some big news on his YouTube channel, Freestylebender, on Friday afternoon. The former UFC middleweight…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":518997,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,213],"class_list":["post-518996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518996\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/518997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}