Amanda Nunes Talks About How Nina Ansaroff Helped Her Out

In an interview with MMA Junkie, UFC women’s bantamweight champion Amanda Nunes spoke about how her girlfriend and training partner Nina Ansaroff helped her out on her way to beating Miesha Tate at UFC 200. Here are highlights:

On being open about their relationship: “I’m here to help people. For me, it’s natural. I post all of it in my pages. This is not a sickness. I don’t do anything to anybody. I’m happy, and this is bad? I don’t think so. We’re happy, we enjoy every day and we love each other, and I want to share this with everybody, because I think people have to respect it. People have to be happy seeing other people being happy.”

On Ansaroff as a training partner: “Nina is with me 24/7. She knows everything about me. She knows even the tiny things, like … the way I react to certain music, my emotions when listening to a specific song. This has been helping her to work with me, my emotions and everything. If anyone can help me by my side during a fight, it’s Nina, because she really knows me. It’s hard to find a training partner like Nina. Our training matches perfectly. She is very tough. She is 115 pounds, but we train as equals. For Miesha, my training was with Nina and the amateurs – I only had two training sessions with guys – and Nina was more work during training than Miesha was during the fight. So, it’s hard to find this type of type of partner, when you know you’re going to evolve even with her being a different division.”

On how their training changed as their relationship grew: “I started seeing Nina as a training partner and friend. And as a person I trained with in order to help, not hurt. Nowadays, it’s hard to spar with her. I don’t want to hurt this face! Everything changed when I started working at being a better person, seeing life from a different angle. I get a bit emotional because … you go through phases, right? You need to face those stages in order to improve as a person. This is something that helped me a out a lot. Meeting Nina made me change every day, even in practice. Nowadays, when spar with her, it’s entirely different. We stop, say ‘I caught you here, let’s not do this anymore.’ We help each other out.”