BELO HORIZONTE, Brazil — Lucas Martins dropped two weight classes for his UFC Fight Night 28 bout, and he won in devastating fashion.
Less than four months after his third-round knockout win over lightweight Jeremy Larsen at UFC on FX 8, “Mineiro” needed only 70 seconds to blast Junior Hernandez with punches and choked him out cold with a rear-naked choke Wednesday night.
“I’m here to stay, I’m here to shock people,” Martins said following his win in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. “They can put anyone against me, I’m ready. This fight was easy, but the next can be tough so I’ll keep training.”
Martins believes the weight cut was tougher then the fight itself, but the drop gave him “the heaviest hands” of the bantamweight division.
“I believe my hands are the heaviest of this division and will drop a lot of people,” he said. “The weight cut was tougher than the fight itself. The feeling I had when I made weight was unique. I suffered a lot, but my team was there all the time with me and family did the diet with me as well for two and a half months.”
“Mineiro” weighed 163 on fight night, and he thanked MMA veteran Jorge Patino for the impressive post-weigh-in recovery.
“I lost a lot of weight, but I weighed 163 pounds at the fight,” he said. “When I started training MMA, ‘Macaco’ was already fighting for a long time and he knows how to do it. When I woke up on Wednesday after the weigh-ins and I saw I was at 163 I was like ‘wow’.”
With two finishes in the UFC, and one “Fight of the Night” bonus, Martins promises more stoppages in his upcoming bouts.
“I’m ready for everything,” he said. “I always train looking for the knockout, but if the fight goes to the ground I’ll submit. I have 45 muay thai fights on my record. When (Hernandez) went down I wanted to keep punching, but his neck was there so I choked him out.”