Joshua Van Explains Why He Studied Dustin Poirier Footage in Reverse

Joshua Van has a study habit that sounds odd until you hear the logic behind it. The UFC flyweight champion, now 18-2 with nine knockouts, says he used to flip Dustin Poirier's fight footage — literally mirroring it — to break down the striking of a fighter he considers a stylistic twin.

Van's reasoning is simple. He sees Poirier as a boxing-based fighter, the same mold he puts himself in, and the same category he slots Petr Yan and Ilia Topuria into. His approach, he explained, is to pick one of the greats, dissect what makes them tick, and fold it into his own game. Yan, he added, is the primary blueprint.

Why Poirier Makes Sense as a Model

It's not a random pick. Poirier carries a 30-10 record with 16 knockouts and seven submissions across one of the deepest resumes in lightweight history, even if his last outing was a unanimous-decision loss to Max Holloway. For a striker trying to reverse-engineer combination punching and pocket exchanges, there are worse film libraries to raid.

The mirror trick isn't as strange as it reads either. Flipping the footage can force your brain to process an opponent's movement fresh, without the muscle-memory shortcuts you build watching the same clips over and over. For a fighter obsessed with the details of boxing mechanics, it's a way to see the same punches with new eyes.

Then there's the Yan connection. The bantamweight champion sits at 20-5 with a technical, volume-heavy boxing style that Van clearly admires, and he's set to meet Merab Dvalishvili again at UFC 333. If Van is stealing from Yan's toolkit, the results speak for themselves — his last performance was a decision win over former champ Alexandre Pantoja.

That's the throughline here. Van isn't name-dropping legends for a soundbite; he's telling you exactly how a flyweight champion builds his striking, one great fighter's tape at a time. Sometimes right-side up. Sometimes not.