During his time in the UFC, Khabib Nurmagomedov mauled almost everyone in the lightweight category. His impeccable 29-0 resume remains unmatched to this day and to this day, he credits his father Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov for instilling in him the values that made it possible. And now, while launching an ad campaign for an energy drink, the Dagestani legend has shared some of that wisdom with the world.
In a banger of a video clip showing the Dagestani fight camp, featuring UFC lightweight champion Islam Makhachev, bantamweight contender Umar Nurmagomedov and Bellator lightweight champion Umar Nurmagomedov, Khabib said:
“The most important thing in sports, it’s discipline. Discipline beats class, discipline beats any motivation and only then you’ll be at the very top.”
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Khabib grew up wrestling bears before he was 10 in the mountains of Dagestan. He never had any business being where he is now. But hard places manufacture hard men. But it doesn’t just happen. It takes years of struggles, fighting everyone involved literally, and winning like nothing else matters. And all that takes dedication and discipline.
Khabib’s rise to the absolute peak of the MMA mountain was only made possible by years and years of sculpted training. Like former double champion Daniel Cormier’s kids, who have trained in Dagestan with Khabib, had once told their father, ‘we practice here, there we train’.
And it’s why Khabib never even lost a round, not before UFC, not during the UFC and not even after winning everything. As a matter of fact, he still trains hard to this day, even without any scope of ever returning to the octagon as an active fighter.
UFC welterweight champion Belal Muhammad found this out the hard way. After training with the Dagestani fighter for his title fight against Leon Edwards in Manchester, Belal revealed that Khabib was still so good, he simply toyed with them.
How Khabib humbled Belal like a chad
Despite bidding farewell to the sport in 2019 after defending his title for the last time against Justin Gaethje in 2020, Khabib remained active, training religiously, helping his teammates prepare and hone their skills.
In fact, his training camps are infamous. The ex-champion ensures that you have no ego left during training, taking you to levels that you thought never existed.
Islam Makhachev, Usman & Umar Nurmagomedov have all benefited from his spartan regime and quite recently Belal Muhammad got the best of it.
The Palestinian American was seen training with Khabib in preparation for Leon Edwards. While he did achieve what he set out to, becoming the first Palestinian-born champion in the UFC, ‘Remember The Name’ also mentioned how ‘The Eagle’ humbled him in the cage.
During an exclusive with ESPN’s Brett Okamoto, he shared an instance where Khabib absolutely smoked him.
“Whenever you go with him, it’s kind of like embarrassing. Not even humbling because he just kills you and it’s to the point where he is on top of me and about to get me into a kimura and he’s ordering coffee to his boy outside the cage. I am looking at myself like bro, I am going to be fighting for the title soon. But it keeps me in that mindset of I still have a lot to learn.”
In a nutshell, for Belal, it was everything he worked for but for Khabib it was another Tuesday on the mat.
