Maycee Barber made her UFC debut at UFC Fight Night Denver, defeating late replacement opponent Hannah Cifers by second round TKO.
An undefeated Barber called out fellow undefeated fighter Mackenzie Dern after the bout, but Dern is a one dimensional fighter at this point in time according to Barber.
“Her jiu-jitsu is great, but it kind of takes (us) back to when the UFC started….her style. She’s got jiu-jitsu, but what else does she have? I mean, she’s learning the rest of it and she’s growing in the rest of it. She’s definitely the jiu-jitsu fighter and I’m not a jiu-jitsu fight and I’m not a striker, I’m a well-rounded fighter. I have all the transitions, I have all the in betweens and I have the advantage in that sense. I think the person who can put it all together is the person that’s gonna win that fight, because if you don’t want to go to the ground with someone…you keep the range. Its hard to take someone down when they keep the range on you, if you wanna take someone down…you gotta strike your way into clinch and the only way to take someone down is to blend your striking into your clinch and into your takedowns. That’s definitely something that she has not mastered yet, she’s getting better at it, but she has not mastered it yet. We definitely have the advantage in that area,” says Barber in an exclusive interview with Fightful’s James Lynch.
Dern has yet to respond to the challenge from Barber and she doesn’t have another fight booked at this time.
Barber had one big issue during fight week and that was the weight cut, but the fighter is taking steps in the future to ensure it isn’t a problem going forward.
“No, it was a hard cut. Just like I said on my post-fight interview, I’m flying out tonight to Vegas to start working on getting it reversed….getting my diet back up. I haven’t been above 1,000 to 1,2000 in a year and a half, I haven’t and I’ve been training sometimes four times a day. Its about time that I can find someone who can help me reverse out of that, I’ve had a lot of nutritionists that I’ve worked with an they’ve been amazing. But clearly they’re not nutritionists, anyone knows that you can’t function…even a normal human cannot function on 1,000 calories, let alone a professional athlete. The good news is that I haven’t even scratched the surface of my performance potential, everyone thinks that was a good performance on Saturday Night, but that was me working off of a 1,000 calories a day. Lets see what happens when I’m on a real train and nutrition plan that’s gonna elevate my performance and let me be the athlete that I need to be, this week…the weight cut was rough. I started fight week around 134 (pounds), which was not what I was trying to do. We were trying to come in at 126 and for twelve weeks, we tried to diet down. It didn’t work, so I just increased the workload and take a few more rest days every once in awhile and try to get my cortisol levels down. I ended up cutting somewhere near 16 or 17 pounds of water, too much…way too much. It was rough and we needed every second that we had,” says Barber.
The undefeated fighter is somebody known for finishing fights, with five of her six professional MMA wins coming by either KO/TKO and/or submission.
