Jailton Almeida has quickly made the decision to drop back down to the light-heavyweight division after his unanimous decision loss to Rizvan Kuniev up at heavyweight this past weekend.

That was the 34-year-old Almeida’s second loss in a row, having also suffered a split-decision defeat against Alexander Volkov back in October of last year.

In both fights Almeida had underperformed and struggled to make his mark offensively, which isn’t like him when you consider that 21 of his 22 career wins have come inside the distance, largely thanks to his dominant ground game.

In total Almeida has gone 7-3 during his heavyweight run in the Octagon, including having beaten the likes of Jairzinho Rozenstruik, Derrick Lewis and Sergei Spivac, and at one point wasn’t too far off from getting into title contention in the division, so it’s far from having been a failure.

However, Almeida has decided it’s time move back down to 205lbs for the first time since his UFC debut in 2022 when he TKO’d Danilo Marques in the 1st round.

It’s worth noting that Almeida has actually fought as far down as 170lbs right at the start of his career in 2012, before gradually moving up in weight as the years went on.

He first competed at light-heavyweight in 2019 and has a 6-0 record there so far, while his overall career record currently stands at 22-5.