How Neil Magny learned more than a few new moves at a Demian Maia seminar

Neil Magny and Demian Maia, UFC 190

For UFC welterweight Neil Magny, the roughly eight minutes he spent in the cage with Demian Maia at UFC 190 this past August was about as humbling an experience as a fighter could have.

He came into the fight riding a seven-fight winning streak, hadn’t lost in almost two years, and was feeling pretty confident about his chances against the Brazilian jiu-jitsu specialist.

“I felt great, honestly,” Magny told MMAjunkie. “I had a great training camp, felt like my coaches had brought in the guys I needed to train with, all that. But then getting in there and experiencing his pressure I realized, wow, this guy is on another level.”

Maia (22-6 MMA, 16-6 UFC) dominated Magny (17-4 MMA, 10-3 UFC) on the mat in the first round, then submitted him with a rear-naked choke in the second, snapping a streak that had at one point seen Magny tie the record for most UFC wins in one calendar year.

It was a disappointing loss, Magny admitted, but one he resolved to learn from.

Neil Magny

“I had kind of got to feeling like I was untouchable, then this guy comes along and exposes me on the ground,” Magny said. “I was like, ‘How can I get to the point that he’s at right now? How can I grow from this and use it in my future as a martial artist?’”

Then, on New Year’s Day, Magny opened up his Twitter feed and saw Maia promoting a seminar he’d be teaching the very next day at a UFC Gym in Henderson, Nev., just a few miles from the hotel where Magny was staying in Las Vegas. Here, he thought, was his opportunity to learn from the man who had so recently demonstrated just how much Magny didn’t yet know. It seemed like a lesson he couldn’t afford to miss.

So Magny replied on Twitter, asking Maia if he could come to the seminar. It seemed like the polite thing to do, he said, since both men are still active UFC welterweights who might cross paths again in the future. Some fighters don’t want past or future opponents to even see them train. Letting them sit in on a seminar might understandably make some fighters uncomfortable.

But fortunately for Magny, Maia isn’t one of those fighters. He invited Magny to the come to the seminar, and once there, according to Magny, he even tailored part of the lesson to suit what he saw as one of Magny’s deficiencies.

Neil Magny and Demian Maia, UFC 190

“He showed me how, at one point in my fight with (Kelvin) Gastelum, I had taken his back but then got in too much of a rush to finish, and ended up losing the position,” Magny said. “He kind of focused on that in the seminar, which I thought was pretty cool. I mean, here he is, still fighting, still in my division, and he didn’t hold back that knowledge. He just gave it to me, showed me what I did wrong, all so I could learn from it and use it to further my career. That he would do that, it really showed me what kind of person he is.”

The lesson didn’t stop in the gym, according to Magny. After the seminar concluded, he and Maia shared a car ride back to the hotel, both men having come to town for UFC 195 that evening. On the ride back, Magny said, Maia shared more of what he’d learned in his eight years with the UFC, including some hard knowledge he’d gained through mistakes both in and out of the cage.

“Not a lot of people would have done that,” Magny said. “It was great of him to share that knowledge, just opening up about some of the mistakes he’d made in the past so that I wouldn’t have to make them, too.”

For Magny, it reinforced what he’d learned about Maia from their brief time in the cage together. Watching him both before and after the fight, Magny said, gave him a glimpse of how a “genuine martial artist” carries himself, even in the occasionally disorienting spotlight of the UFC.

It’s knowledge that Magny will carry with him into future challenges, he said. And to get it, all he needed was the humility to ask.

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