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How does “Poatan” win fights despite his opponents knowing what is coming? What makes his techniques so effective? How does Alex Pereira conduct his offensive onslaught?
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Alex Pereira: The low kick
Alex Pereira is a massive human being. At middleweight where the weight limit is 185 pounds, he would come in sometimes north of 210 on the day of the fight. Having such a size advantage plays to his favor.
“Poatan” knows his gifts. He knows his best strikes and he knows how to land them. He will set up the strikes with poking jabs to the body and the outside leg kick.
Made a big deal by just about everyone, Alex Pereira smashes the legs of his opponents with his own “shortcut” kick. Joe Rogan goes in about the technique obsessively and it is quite effective.
First we must understand the “traditional” low kick to understand what makes Pereira unique. To do that, we will turn to MMA’s most prolific low-kicker: Jose Aldo.
The turning over of the hips is the major difference. That and the shoulder movement, or lack thereof, from Pereira really set him apart from his Brazilian brother. Notice how committed Aldo is here with his hips and shoulders, turned all the way over. This allows an opponent to get a read with such a wide motion and counter with a body lock or cross.
The rear cross is the perfect counter to this and Pereira, utilizing his “shortcut” kick, looks to mitigate this by telegraphing it less.
Pereira’s “shortcut kick,” as he calls it in his Total Striking Control instructional on BJJ Fanatics, attempts to mitigate the telegraph. When Pereira kicks, he shifts his left foot at a slight angle and does not turn his hips over, nor his shoulders.
The thought here is that Alex Pereira is trading accuracy for power. Instead of slamming his low kicks with maximum torque from the hips and shoulders, Pereira wants to simply make contact and not get countered or checked. What’s interesting about this is that Pereira’s low kicks still cause damage. He’s constantly getting opponents to stumble or switch stances so that they do not eat any more kicks in that leg.
Another thing you will notice from Pereira is his kick selections. He’s faced an unusual amount of southpaws and switch hitters in his MMA and kickboxing days.
Because he doesn’t switch stances Pereira deals with southpaw and orthodox opponents with his offensive tools. Against an orthodox opponent, with both fighters putting their left foot forward, Pereira will go with the right roundhouse kick.
But when someone takes up a southpaw stance, putting Alex Pereira into an open side matchup, he changes how he kicks and attacks the legs differently. Instead, Pereira will start to throw the step up low kick as not to get countered by a straight left.
The consequence of throwing a roundhouse kick against an unorthodox opponent is perfectly illustrated in Dustin Poirier’s knockout of Justin Gaethje in 2018. (1) Justin Gaethje pressured Poirier to the fence and (2) threw a naked inside low kick. This kick doesn’t cause as much damage and allows Poirier to stay in his stance, dig in, and (3) land the counter right to wobble and ultimately finish Gaethje.
Knowing the threats from both sides of the plate is something Alex Pereira knows quite well. He looks to avoid this counter by implementing the step up outside low kick almost exclusively against the southpaw. One of the few times he did not adhere to this, Jan Blachowicz snagged a single leg takedown and brought Pereira down.
The mythical left hook
When talking about Alex Pereira, the main talking point is almost always the left hook. To break this down, I decided to bring in someone who can provide an alternative perspective on the technique. Miguel Class is one of the brightest minds in combat sports film study. Having just dropped a study on Tim Tszyu, who is left hook reliant, I thought that Miguel was the perfect person to explain the left hook and how Tszyu and Pereira use it similarly and the difference between the two’s use.
Click below to read the quote from the video above:
Miguel Class on the left hook of Tim Tszyu and Alex Pereira
In my video on Tim Tszyu, I talked about how his left hook is an important tool in his arsenal as a pressure fighter. Early in fights, he throws his left hook almost as often as his jab. Because he uses it to cut off opponents looking to circle away from his right hand as opponents start to be wary of the left hook, he starts mixing it up more with his jab. Hooking off the jab is a fundamental boxing technique because when you try to parry or slip the jab, it leaves you vulnerable to the left hook.
Alex Pereira isn’t a committed pressure fighter in the same way that Tim Tszyu is but when he does look to trap his opponents against the fence, as he did against Adesanya, his left hook plays a big role. Using the left hook to cut off Adesanya’s escape is what led to the knockout in their first MMA fight. Similarly to Tim Tszyu, Pereira mixes up the left hook with his jab to keep opponents guessing while he pins them against the fence.
Given Pereira’s size and range at both middleweight and light heavyweight, the jab is probably even more important for him, especially since he lacks the pocket defense of a boxer like Tszyu.
Another way that Tim Tszyu uses his left hook as a pressure fighter is to punish attempts to stifle him in the clinch. As opponents look to work their way off the ropes by pressing into him, Tim will hop back and meet them with a left hook.
One simple reason why the left hook is so effective in these instances is because mechanically, a proper left hook involves leaning weight back onto the rear leg, creating a pulling effect that naturally works well when hopping back. It’s no surprise that Alex Pereira is also great at this and fear of the counter left hook is one of the biggest reasons why opponents are often hesitant to close the distance on him.
Countering an advancing opponent with the left hook might be even more important for Pereira given that he’s not always pressuring. Generally, Pereira is content to stand in the middle of the cage and attack opponents with long-range weapons like his kicks. Again, his size and range make him very difficult to deal with on the outside so at some point opponents have to close the distance against him. When they do, Pereira is ready to shift his weight onto his rear leg and whip his left hook into their chin.
If you’ve not yet watched Miguel Class’ video on Tim Tszyu and his patient pressure, I suggest you pause right here and go check that out.
The best example of his knockout power was against Sean Strickland. The finish earned him a title shot. He set up the left hook utilizing that jab to the body mentioned earlier.
Against Strickland, Pereira repeatedly poked at the body, which is par the course for “Poatan.” In example 2, we will see Strickland beginning to react to the jab to the body and start to look to bat it away. Frame 3 shows us our final setup where Alex Pereira drops levels as if to throw the jab. Strickland reacts badly and reaches down to parry away a jab to the body that would never come. Frame 4 will demonstrate the consequence of that as Pereira pops up and lands the left hook to put the future champion down.
This is similar to what boxing legend Joe Frazier would implement, though it was more extreme.
Frazier would bend deeply at the waist and pop up with a massive, leaping left hook to send many to the canvas. Make no mistake about it. Pereira doesn’t do this as often as he should with all of his body jabs. But it is something that he could use and has in the past, as seen with Strickland.
In the clinch
With the kickboxing pedigree possessed by Alex Pereira, the obvious plan seems to be to get into a grappling situation. Being teammates and close friends with Glover Texiera, Pereira has developed a rudimentary game to counter grappling and it works well for him.
When clinched up, Pereira’s first modus operandi is to smash the body with a knee. He throws his hips back, creating space, and hammers home at the midsection. He will do this in space, against the fence and pressing to the fence.
If his opponent manages to get to his chest, he then puts forward a couple tools to make getting a takedown difficult and almost counter intuitive.
To prevent the takedown, Alex Pereira immediately grabs a whizzer. This prevents a pressuring fighter from dropping directly on his hips. Doing this forces them to go to a single, the next part in the MMA cage wrestling meta.
While the whizzer can be used to reverse a takedown attempt, as shown here, Alex Pereira uses it as preventative. He looks to negate the takedown to keep the fight where he’s most comfortable: standing.
When taken down, Alex Pereira almost exclusively looks to scoot to the fence. When there, Pereira will begin his slow wall walk up the fence. Here, he controls the hands of his opponent to make sure he’s not pounded out and once up, he will begin to go to the knees to the body and the whizzer as previously discussed to punish the attempt and failure to control the position.
But Pereira is not infallible by The any means in the grappling aspect, as is expected.
The bad: Alex Pereira’s holes
A double champion in two sports, Alex Pereira may seem invincible. The opposite cannot be more true. There’s the obvious point of him being too aggressive when his opponent was hurt. This led to him losing his UFC middleweight title with the knockout delivered by Israel Adesanya at UFC 287.
In kickboxing, we also see Pereira struggling to deal with a high guard and a patient fighter as was the case in his last kickboxing bout against Artem Vakhitov. In MMA, with the smaller gloves, this is not as much as a concern as it is in kickboxing with large, boxing style gloves.
In mixed martial arts, Pereira’s fatal flaw is that if the fence is taken away, he’s basically dead in the water. He will accept position there and wait out the round to get back to where he’s best and taking advantage of the rules of the sport.
He also bites on feints a lot. Most apparent in the Adesanya and Prochazka fights, Alex Pereira will reach and lean straight back. In the first round of his fight at UFC 281, Adesanya managed to stick a jab in his face at the end of the first round, and crack him with a left as he leaned straight back and reached for a strike he miscalculated.
Alex Pereira may be the heaviest hitter we’ve seen since Francis Ngannou. But he’s more than just a heavy hitter. Pereira likes to set his punches up, from his left hook down to how he approaches the kicking game. It all works in concert. It’s what makes him, and other fighters like Ilia Topuria, so dangerous on the feet when we’ve seen so many wrestlers dominate the sport.
