Lucas ‘Hulk’ Barbosa is one of the top BJJ competitors at ATOS and now he’s making his return to MMA at the upcoming PFL 7 event on August 5th. Barbosa has spent an incredibly long time out of action when it comes to professional MMA, having his last fight all the way back in 2012. Barbosa lost his debut in September 2011 to Geydson Cardoso on the regional circuit but he quickly bounced back with a pair of wins over Tiago Sena in the following year.
At that point Barbosa decided to change his focus and he concentrated on his BJJ career instead. That took off in 2015 when he started to make waves in brown belt competition, even managing to win an IBJJF world championship at that level. Since being promoted to black belt in that same year, he has won several IBJJF world titles both in and out of the gi and also managed to win a bronze medal at ADCC 2019. In the last year or two however, Barbosa’s attention has returned to MMA and he’s been planning to make his return to the sport for quite some time now.
Barbosa has managed to defeat some of the best grapplers on the planet in recent years, including Leandro Lo, Yuri Simoes, and Rafael Lovato Jr. Even more recently he managed to submit top UFC welterweight contender Gilbert Burns at BJJ Stars 7. Although his opponent at PFL 7, Elmar Umarov, is a solid MMA fighter in his own right, it seems unlikely that he’ll be able to offer anything on the ground that Lucas ‘Hulk’ Barbosa hasn’t seen before. He won’t be focusing exclusively on his MMA career however, as Barbosa also received an invite to compete at ADCC 2022 in the 88kg division as a result of his podium placement from the previous edition.
Lucas ‘Hulk’ Barbosa announced the news that his return to MMA is just a matter of days away at PFL 7 in a post to his official Instagram account:
