UFC star Alex Pereira and the mystery of punching power

THE SCARIEST FIGHTER in the world is mashed into the side of the cage. Alex Pereira barely moves, for nearly a minute, his sparring partner draped across both legs in a controlling position. Pereira locks around the guy's arms and just stays there, to the point that his stillness becomes worrisome.

This is Pereira's final training session from his home base, Teixeira MMA & Fitness in Connecticut, before he heads to Vegas to headline UFC 313 on March 8. He'll defend his light heavyweight title belt against Russian star Magomed Ankalaev, who hasn't lost since March 2018.

He's been sparring for five five-minute rounds, against five different fresh opponents, to mimic what will happen eight days later in The Octagon. It would be easy to mistake this moment as him being tired or trapped as his sparring partner tries to finish a double leg takedown. But neither of those things is true. With Pereira, he is all coiled energy. His calmness is usually followed by a brief burst of punches and kicks that are so sudden, so violent, that it's terrifying when the coil snaps. In this case, the coil is just about at its breaking point.

Pereira is a living embodiment of the old saying about why "Jaws" is so scary: It's not the shark, it's the ocean. The water is mysterious and unknowable, generating so many scary options that our minds fill in the blanks with fear, the way that reality can't come close to. Pereira is certainly a shark when he decides to launch. But he's the ocean most of the time. He's just so eerily calm that his nonchalance begins to seem like he's gassed or disinterested. "Even a few minutes before a fight, Alex looks like he is going to the grocery store, not into a cagefight," says his coach, UFC legend Glover Teixeira.

With the side of his face mushed against the fence, Pereira suddenly explodes. In an instant, Pereira surges upward and away from the side of the cage. He underhooks and pushes the guy away, and now the two fighters are a few feet apart. Pereira begins his prototypical pawing at his opponent's face, measuring range. Then he uncorks a 1-2 of a heavy right, followed by his lethal left hook, that makes a sickening thwack-thwack sound. In just five seconds, he goes from being in danger to being the danger.

"Sometimes my power even scares me," he says later. "I know my opponents choose to fight of their own free will. But they have families and loved ones, and I know I can hurt you."

He's the perfect window into the mysterious nature of punching power. Fighters are usually very similar in height, weight and training techniques. So how is Alex Pereira so much more powerful than his opponents?

Experts say the secret sauce that separates the powerful from the devastatingly powerful is a surprising skill -- the ability to relax.

ON THE SURFACE, a punch is just a math problem. It's force equals mass times acceleration, matched against the mass and velocity of the thing you're punching. "It's basic physics -- you are transferring momentum from your body to your opponent's head," says Dr. Peko Hosoi, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. "The more mass you can activate, the stronger the punch."

Dr. Stuart McGill agrees with that math, but has a long history of studying the science of punching power, too. He's conducted dozens of studies on MMA fighters specifically attempting to understand the many nuances of how power is generated. He's found that the basics are all critical for elite fighters -- footwork, timing, not just using your arms for punches -- but also discovered that many of the world's most devastating knockout artists were very good at relaxing.

"The ability to stay loose and relaxed allows them to express the speed of their athleticism, which is counter-intuitive to so many people," says McGill, a longtime professor at Ontario's University of Waterloo.

McGill now understands Bruce Lee's explanation that to hit fast and hard, "Relax then focus all of the energy into the fist." He explains how footwork establishes the angle of force, a twitch that launches the fist and then relaxation increases the closing velocity of the target. Then, just before impact, the body pulses to stiffen and deliver the most energy into the opponent. McGill says Pereira is incredible at the way he manages to position his feet and align his body to direct force and calmly generate what might be the most frightening power in UFC history.

Casual observers often mistake muscles for power, McGill says. Multiple people interviewed for this story point out Brock Lesnar as an example of a very strong human who actually didn't have the technical skills to generate as much power as you'd expect. When Lesnar encountered outstanding strikers Alistair Overeem and Cain Velasquez later in his career, he got TKO'd by both. "Having measured great athletes for the better part of 35 years, raw strength doesn't translate to performance the way most people think it does," McGill says. "It's guys like Matt Brown who you have to fear the most."

McGill has worked with Brown, the recently-retired MMA veteran, and Brown credits McGill's studies for how he managed to stick around for 15 years in The Octagon and end up with the second-most knockouts (13) in UFC history. Brown is 6-foot, 170 pounds and far from imposing. But his technique and toughness combined to make him one of the most lethal finishers in the history of cage fighting.

When Brown talks about fighting, he ought to put on a lab coat. He refers to his ability to throw nasty right uppercuts and elbow strikes as "activations" and "creation of effective mass," terms that McGill often uses, too. He's one of the sport's pre-eminent punch thinkers, and he believes his brain helped him become one of the longest tenured fighters in UFC history. "Power actually begins in the nervous system first," he says. "Your brain starts the whole process, and mental relaxation is fundamental for power punchers."

When Brown ponders the most dangerous punchers ever, he names Pereira first, and then he pauses -- almost like it's Pereira and then everybody else. He eventually mentions peak Conor McGregor as a good example of technically-brilliant power generator, then ticks off Francis Ngannu and Dustin Poirier, too. But he eventually comes back to Pereira, who he thinks is the ultimate product of the 32 years that the UFC has existed.

"Pereira is unbelievable," Brown says. "The first thing I notice about him is his ability to relax. He's very long, which creates a lot of leverage. His length and ability to relax generates a lot of power. He can fire his muscles so fast and create so much energy when he activates. He's also very accurate, which can be trained but also most of the time, you're born with it."

And that's the rub. As much as data and technique can be culled and trained, there will always be an element of unmeasurable magic to who is powerful and who isn't. "There's absolutely some mystery in who's born with power and who isn't," Brown says.

At first, as Pereira contemplates where his power comes from after his sparring session, he says there are two main factors, technique and genetics. He is a flawless striking technician with both his kicks and punches. He acknowledges his relaxed aura is critical to his power, and he credits his training for why he can be so still in what is often a frantic sport. Even during ring announcements, when many fighters pace the side of The Octagon to burn off nerves, Pereira usually stands like he's in line at the deli. "When you train like I train, you know the work is done, and that gives you the confidence to relax before and during fights," he says. "I'm not afraid or nervous."

He gets into his stance to show his technique for throwing a big punch. He launches about the nastiest shadow-boxing right hand you'll ever see, then he begins to trace the power backward.

He starts with his fists, which are much bigger than you'd expect from a 205-pound fighter. His knuckles seem like they might have other knuckles buried underneath. They are pointy and strong, and when he slams his right hand into his left palm, it makes a nasty slap noise. "I have dense, heavy bones," he casually says, and he shows how he slightly rotates his right hand at the last millisecond before it lands so that the knuckles of his index and middle fingers connect first. As his knuckles fly forward, it's actually a little haunting to imagine those cement knobs connecting with a human face.

He then moves his left hand up his right arm, to the shoulder, down through his core. He pauses there, saying that he concentrates on having the middle of his body twist violently to throw the right hand so that he is perfectly coiled to torque his body back in the opposite direction and fire off his left hook with an equal amount of force the other way. "Bang-bang," he says, twisting and throwing two punches in one pendulum swing.

Finally he moves his hand down from his core to his thighs and calves. He stops for a moment and lifts his right foot up and into his hand. He has his coach/interpreter, Plinio Cruz, describe how he is about to show the key to everything he just said as he points to the ball of his right foot. Pereira has a smirk on his face as he waits for Cruz to finish the Portuguese translation, like a chef that's about to reveal the secret ingredient to his best dish.

In this case, Pereira is talking about the area under his right big toe. He seems supremely proud of the muscle he's developed underneath there. "This is where the power begins," and he swings his foot back down to the ground and starts to pogo up and down on it. Earlier, his head coach, Teixeira, had said to watch Pereira walk, because he walks the way that he fights. It's an upward, straight-ahead gait that originates from his big toes springing him more up in the air than forward. It isn't very elegant but matches how he walks down his opponents -- steady, calm, inevitable.

Now, Pereira says, he should address the genetics part of the power equation. He says his dad handed down the strong, grizzled hands and arms working as a bricklayer his whole life. Pereira's nickname, Poatan, translates as "Stone Hands," and he thinks his dad was Poatan, Sr. Pereira's sister, Aline, is a professional kickboxer with big hammer hands, too.

Pereira listens to Cruz translate what he had just said about his DNA. But the same way he fights, Pereira bursts back into the conversation, cutting off Cruz as if a light bulb just flipped on in his head. He seems to have stumbled into a revelation about the lethality of his own fists.

"Genetics and technique are huge parts for me," he says. "But so was the tire shop."

WHEN HE WAS ABOUT 12, Pereira got a job at a local tire shop in Brazil. In fact, at one point when he joined the UFC in 2021, fight fans managed to find the Google maps shot of the tire shop, and there stood Pereira, in the middle of a sea of rubber.

He talks about those days with reverence, and also as critical to his fighting origin story. He had to learn how to generate power in bursts to jam a rim into a tire, or yank a rim out. As he speaks, he describes something that sounds a lot like how Mr. Miyagi used household chores to teach Daniel LaRusso martial arts skills in "The Karate Kid."

Pereira worked there through his teenage years, developing a cadence of explosive movement that is similar to the way he fights now -- aim, relax, fire. "I owe the tire shop a lot," Pereira says.

He'd had a few scuffles as a kid, but never did any boxing or MMA training. Pereira can remember the exact moment when he began to realize that he had potential. It was after a heated pickup soccer game when he was 18. A guy chirped at him for an hour, with the game becoming more and more physical. Pereira can picture the man to this day -- much older (probably 26 or so) and bigger, with a mouthy fearlessness when it came to escalating the tension.

As the game wound down, Pereira and the man squared each other up and began to fight. The man hit him, but Pereira moved forward and got close to him as he began to throw punches. He connected once, twice and then the man fell to the ground like so many of his UFC opponents, out cold. Even back then, his friends commented to Pereira that they were startled by how placid he seemed as he entered into a fistfight. "You should forget soccer and start fighting," they said.

So he did. Peireira began training boxing and kickboxing as he reached adulthood, and he loved it. People often get tripped up by Pereira's age (37) compared to his modest 12-2 MMA record, but he's been one of the busiest punchers in fighting since 2010. He had 25-plus fights in amateur boxing, then went 33-7 as a high-level pro kickboxer for the next decade, dabbling in MMA fights starting in 2015. Since he joined the UFC in 2021, Pereira has been a remarkably reliable UFC star. If he beats Ankalaev this weekend, he will have defended his light heavyweight title belt four times in less than one calendar year, an unheard of pace in today's UFC. His last four wins have all ended by varying methods of viciousness -- two by punches, one by head kick, one by elbows -- and last April, he went to the UFC's Performance Institute and broke heavyweight Francis Ngannou's record for the hardest punch ever recorded by a fighter.

After the bell rings during his last sparring session before UFC 313, Pereira collapses onto the floor. He sparred hard that day, but hard is relative for him. He spent long periods marching forward but not unleashing anything. Watching. Computing. Being the ocean. It's such a menacing thing to watch. The violence is just there, nearby but just out of sight.

When the final bell rings, Pereira lays face down on the canvas. His work is done before he takes a private jet to Vegas for fight week. His knees, elbows and head are propping him up as his coaches come over and pull off his shin pads and gloves for him. Pereira stays in that position for about two minutes before he climbs to his feet and walks out of the cage.

Teixeira's gym, located just over the New York border in Bethel, Connecticut, has a three-row set of wooden bleachers beside a long, rectangular cage. Pereira sits down on the lowest row. He's sweating so bad that his feet have left sopping Pereira paw prints behind him as he goes. The marks from those giant big toes are particularly gooey on the ground.

He sits down for 10 minutes, dripping a massive U-shaped puddle of sweat around him. Coaches and teammates eventually circle him, just outside the sweat pond, and Pereira raises his head. They all talk in Portuguese for a little while, with the conversation revolving around his evolution as a fighter. That day, Pereira looked fantastic at defending takedowns against some of the best wrestling sparring partners in the business. His coach, Teixiera, again says his ability to relax amid the chaos is what has allowed him to have gotten so good at defending takedowns, which was supposedly his weakest area.

Finally, Pereira stands up. He marches into the other room, his big toes sending him up and down. He retrieves a water bottle and comes back and sits down in the same spot, flanked by his own sweat. He stares off into the distance for a moment, then tilts his head back as he pours water into his mouth. The ocean needs a drink.