Talbott targets Figueiredo at UFC 332 after nine-month hiatus he used to rebuild his game

Payton Talbott heads into his UFC 332 bout with former flyweight champion Deiveson Figueiredo on Saturday at Delta Center in Salt Lake City having spent the better part of nine months away from competition — time he says he used to fundamentally reshape his approach to fighting.

The bantamweight prospect last appeared in December, when he defeated two-division titleholder Henry Cejudo. Rather than return quickly, Talbott stayed in the gym and turned the extended layoff into what he describes as a period of reinvention.

“Yeah, it was kind of weird,” Talbott told the UFC. “This is all still new to me, so I tried to just stay training and just stay ready. I mean, I trained pretty much the whole year, and I feel like I kind of reinvented myself a little bit and went back to my roots, went inward.”

For Talbott, the process was less about overhauling his style wholesale and more about carefully absorbing outside influences without losing what made him effective in the first place.

“You go and train out of town, and you pick people’s brains and sometimes you take things from them and implement them into your game,” he said. “But a lot of the times, the reason you got where you are is because of you. And so, you just have to correctly learn how to implement it and not let it fully change you, but just use the best of what you learn.”

Figueiredo, a former UFC flyweight champion, represents a significant step up in profile for the still-developing Talbott. The fight at UFC 332 on 4 October will be the clearest test yet of whether the changes Talbott made during his hiatus translate under pressure against elite-level opposition.