Julianna Pena shocked the world when she managed to beat Amanda Nunes in a slugfest at UFC 269 on Saturday. The win was a very big one and will go down as one of the biggest upsets in MMA history.

The approach Julianna Pena took was to stay in the champion's face and not back down when faced with big power shots. She was able to take damage and keep attacking the champion at UFC 269.

“It was in the first round,” Pena said on The MMA Hour. “It looked like the naked eye – I mean, these are million-dollar cameras, and they’re great, but you would think that they would get the shot of, like, I’m about to snap this girl’s arm, I’m about to have the first-ever victory by straight armlock. That’s what was playing in my mind. People are probably like, ‘Oh, she’s going to choke her,’ but I’m like, ‘Dude, her arm is going to snap in half. I have her arm.’ I wish people could see that; I don’t know if they saw it or not, I haven’t seen the full fight yet.

“I had her in trouble in Round 1, and I knew that’s the moment. I was like, man, if this is how our grappling exchanges are going to be, I can do this all night long, and especially the amount she was breathing. She was just like, [panting], and I’m just, cool.”

Julianna Pena took the right approach at UFC 269 and figured out how to make the champion wilt. She had seen examples of it in her past losses.

“She’s a fighter that doesn’t do well when she’s fighting against adversity,” Pena said. “When she’s the bully and she’s the pressure, she’s great – girls fold, they crumple. But when she is being bullied and when she is being pressured, that’s what she can’t handle, and that’s what I knew was the case. You saw that when she was fighting Cat Zingano; Cat Zingano broke her, and I think maybe in Invicta I saw somebody else break her, too. She’s had losses. Those types of scenarios I knew still existed in her, and it just needed a chance to break through and rear it’s ugly head, and the only way to do that is to get somebody tired and make them work and make them fight.

“I told everybody: The only way you fight this type of firepower is when you fight fire with fire, and I knew that was how it was going to be. It was going to take more than one shot to put me away and put me down. I can take a shot, as you guys have seen from my previous fights. I think that when I was rocking her on the fight, I saw my team, I just see in my peripheral view, my team going ‘Go, go, go get her!’ So that’s when I pressed her to the cage, and the takedown was there, and the choke came in just as I practiced as well. The stars were aligning.”

Amanda Nunes will most likely be rematching Julianna Pena in her next fight. Both women have expressed interest in a rematch after UFC 269.