Peruvian MMA star Valentina Shevchenko is enjoying the gorgeous sun, sea, and sand in French Polynesia. Shevchenko, 36, shared a video of herself wearing shorts and a bikini top, displaying her incredible fighting skills on the beach close to the surf. “Fakarava Atoll incredible place in the middle of Pacific ocean ✨️ 💙 🌴🌊💚☀️,” she captioned the post. Shevchenko is one of the most unique champions in the MMA world—here’s what her fighting philosophy looks like.
Shevchenko trained Halle Berry for her role in the 2020 action movie Bruised. “We trained for two months before the filming,” the fighter told Screen Rant. “Two months, everyday training started from 7:00 AM and ended at 1:00 PM. So five hours of training nonstop. We never break for the rest. We never spoke or laughed during the training… too much sometimes, yes, but it was everything serious, but very enjoyable. It was not any kind of pressure to do it now, good. We knew we had to build it.”
Shevchenko was impressed both by Berry’s directorial skills and her fitness levels. “She doesn’t say too many words. She said one or two, but it’s the exact words that you want to hear,” Shevchenko told Screen Rant. “This is I think the best quality because she saw the picture, what she wants from the movie, her movie. She exactly knows how to describe it to you for you to understand what to perform. You know, mixed martial arts is everything. Its universal fighter and its universal fight with universal technique. Halle was training before this movie for two or three years. She’s very good at everything because yeah, she’s an MMA fighter now.”
Shevchenko says she prepares for every fight as if it’s the most important so far. “Doing martial arts for 28 years brings me a lot of experience,” she told Yahoo! Sports. “Second and most important, it’s like knowing what I want. What is number one for me. And to be able to get rid of all unnecessary things, and like to focus only one thing that’s really important, to be successful in martial arts, to be dominated as a fighter. And just to prepare for each fight is if it’s my best fight.”
Shevchenko deliberately does not set goals for herself. “Because you have this pressure and you are thinking, oh no, I have to rush in some way, or I have to do that, I have to like another thing,” she told Yahoo! Sports. “And if something is going not that way as they planned, they are so frustrated. They try and do like crazy things. They’re starting to act like, literally, like you’re thinking like, what they are doing. It’s not that’s how it’s supposed to be. And that’s why I don’t like it. I don’t like to set goals.”
Shevchenko is passionate about making her own space in the MMA world. “I just want to be a martial artist, to enjoy my life in the martial arts, to be successful, to be dominant champion, to open for any opportunities that’s going to come,” she told Yahoo! Sports. “And like it doesn’t mean that I’m stuck in one place and I’m not going to move. I mean about like fights opportunities. I open for anything, but I just want to like to be like as everyone expected.”