Abraham Vidales is not your typical professional fighter. 

At night, he’s in the gym honing his skills on the heavy bags or in the training ring. By day, you’ll find him at dental school, where he is not far from graduating a fully qualified dentist.

“When I was a kid I wanted to be a doctor but as I got older I ended up veering off into dentistry,” he shrugs.

“I had a great childhood and grew up in a really nice atmosphere. We had music lessons and played all kinds of sports, but when my older brother started kickboxing and introduced me to it, I was hooked immediately.”

Vidales, from Monterrey, Mexico, had his first amateur fight “a few months” after he started training and was victorious. That was the beginning of a journey which would take him up the amateur rankings and then into the professional side of the sport. 

Win followed win until Vidales became the ISKA Mexico champion in 2018 (ISKA is one of the world’s oldest sanctioning bodies for the sport of kickboxing and winning an ISKA belt is a prestigious landmark for a professional kickboxer).

After that he joined GLORY and to this day maintains an undefeated record. With a fondness for fight-ending body shots, Vidales has claimed more than 80% of his victories by way of knockout, an astonishing statistic which puts him in the very top tier of proven finishers. 

“I am motivated by the feeling of winning, knowing that I did my best in the ring and back in the gym. I’m motivated by my past victories and what I can achieve in the future.”

Vidales fights out of Living Legacy Muay Thai in his home city of Monterrey. His team also has an affiliation with VFS Academy (Valle Flow Striking) in Wood Dale, Illinois, where GLORY welterweight Richard ‘Maximum’ Abraham can often be found in the training room.

While Vidales has set his sights on achieving greatness in his chosen discipline, he also has high ambitions outside the ring: he is a dentistry student and is on track to become a professionally qualified dentist, which career he intends to pursue when his fighting days are over.

That is in the distant future though: right now Vidales is in his competitive prime and looking forward to testing himself in the world’s toughest competition for martial arts strikers.