Merab Dvalishvili doesn’t look like a man content to wait. Days after losing his bantamweight title to Petr Yan at UFC 323, ‘The Machine’ is already back on social media, posting a tongue-in-cheek Instagram carousel that flipped the roles from their careers past and present. He wrote, “And question is what’s gonna happen in 2026?”

Still, behind the memes and the trilogy chatter, reality is setting in. A brutal five-round fight. A year packed with championship pressure. And a body that has absorbed the workload of four title fights in 2025 alone. So when Merab Dvalishvili talks about what comes next, the most important voice right now isn’t his. It’s his coach’s.

Syndicate MMA head coach, John Wood, joined The Ariel Helwani Show recently and pulled back the curtain on what recove

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