Exclusive | Pouya Rahmani’s Secret Weapon – Training with Khamzat Chimaev
Iran’s Pouya Rahmani trained alongside UFC champ Khamzat Chimaev, and explains that the middleweight titleholder may have heavyweight in his future.
Pouya Rahmani walks into the Coca-Cola Arena on February 7 as the heavyweight to watch in the Middle East. The Iranian-born fighter, now based in Dubai, carries a perfect 5-0 record into PFL: Road to Dubai, where he’ll face Karl Williams, a veteran American wrestler and former PFL World Tournament finalist.
Before he ever laced up MMA gloves, Rahmani spent roughly a decade on Iran’s national wrestling team. He captured the Iranian national wrestling championship, then pivoted to grappling where he won two wrestling world titles and became a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. His credentials on the mat are legitimately elite.
Pouya Rahmani Training with Khamzat Chimaev
But there’s another layer to how Rahmani got here. For two of his fights, he shared training camps with UFC’s Khamzat Chimaev. That partnership alongside the UFC champion taught him something about grinding through discomfort and staying sharp when the body screams to stop. In an exclusive interview with Tim Wheaton of LowKick MMA, he said:
“My brother. For two of his fights, we had camp together,” Rahmani explained. “So, Khamzat has very good discipline, you know. He’s totally different person than you see in the fight, you know. He’s so good guy. He’s so respectful.”
“The thing about him, doesn’t matter if you have injury or he don’t have good mood, he’s there every day, three sessions in training. So this one I learn a lot about him, because sometimes we don’t have good feeling, but we need to push more that day. As he said one time, he said, okay, yeah, today I don’t have good feeling, but if I don’t train, maybe in my fight day is same sh*t, you know, and I cannot stop. I have to, today I have to push more so I can fight easy. This guy is absolutely legend.”
“Khamzat is too big. Khamzat is 100 kg, 102 kg. He’s not a small guy, you know,” Rahmani noted when discussing his training partner. “Even he can fight heavyweight in future if you want, because he mostly, you know, when we was there, he mostly like to train with heavyweight, you know. Me and him was the best training partner, so we train cage control, wrestling, MMA, everything was together, you know.”
Williams will walk in with a 10-4 record and credentials of his own. The American made it all the way to the 2025 PFL World Tournament final on short notice, pushing reigning heavyweight champion Oleg Popov to a razor-thin split decision. A loss by the smallest margin tends to sharpen focus, and Williams has had months to consider what he’d do differently.
But Rahmani’s physicality is something else entirely. When you pair wrestling mastery with first-round finishing speed, you get a fighter moving upward quickly. The UFC heavyweight division has noticed too, Ciryl Gane brought in Rahmani specifically to sharpen his wrestling ahead of UFC 321.
Rahmani’s most recent finish over Slim Trabelsi, a fellow wrestler with African Championship gold, came in October 2025 at PFL Champions Series. He caught Trabelsi with an overhand right and unloaded ground-and-pound until the referee stopped it at 2:47. That’s textbook efficiency.
