UFC on Fox 23 headliner Julianna Pena recently spoke to Matt Serra on the UFC Unfiltered podcast where she spoke about Nunes’ last fight against former UFC women’s bantamweight champion, Ronda Rousey. Pena predicted prior to the fight taking place that Nunes would knock Rousey out in their fight, which actually ended by TKO in the first round.

Pena says Holly Holm showed the world what the gameplan needs to be to beat Ronda, keep your distance and punch her in the face. She also makes a stunning claim, revealing Rousey does not allow her training partners to hit her in the face during sparring.

“I’m mostly trying to have some banter at Holly but at the same time you have got to giver her credit for being able to implement the gameplan against Ronda and that’s to keep her away at a distance and punch her in the face because she don’t like that and she’s not allowed to get hit in sparring,” said Pena. “These girls have to sign these waivers to say that ‘We never hit Ronda, and we’ll never talk about this type of training ever and all this stuff, you know? She’s not really taking the toll in the fight camp of getting punched in the face legitimately so she doesn’t really know what that feels like.”

Pena goes on to say Rousey’s sparring partners are threatened with a $1 million lawsuit if they disclose how sparring practice went.

“I just think it’s one of those things where you’ve gotta protect the fighter and make sure she doesn’t get hurt before the fight,” Pena said. “She’s a superstar and they don’t want to see her get any damage. So, it’s like whenever the girls would go hard on her, whenever they’d come forward and start banging it out on her, they’d tell them, ‘Hey. Knock it off. Stop it. Don’t hit her so hard and then sign this waiver and say that you were never here and that you never punched her. Don’t ever talk about how well you did in training and stuff like that because you have to sign this dotted line or else we’ll sue you for a million dollars.‘”

Julianna Pena faces Valentina Shevchenko in the main event of UFC on Fox 23 this Saturday, the winner will most likely be the next challenger for UFC bantamweight champion Amanda Nunes.

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