Issue 088

May 2012

After another spate of fighter withdrawals cost the UFC a series of main events, FO asks, are gym wars are to blame, and is old-school conditioning ruining modern-day mixed martial arts?

In the past year we have witnessed a curious and alarming increase in the number of training-related injuries in mixed martial arts. What makes it so strange is that even training under some of the best coaches in the sport with decades of experience and having the latest scientific methodologies and equipment at their disposal hasn’t seemed to quell the problem. 

Quite the contrary, in fact. In a 20-day period spanning from the final weeks of 2011 to the early days of 2012, no less than 22 fighters pulled out of upcoming UFC bouts. Though their afflictions and exactly how they were sustained varied, the explanations given to UFC matchmaker Joe Silva were, for the most part, the same: “I injured my *insert body part here* while training.”

Unfortunately, unlike most epidemics, the cause of this seemingly more frequent plague of injuries is unknown. Most outsiders assume that fighters are just training and sparring ‘too hard,’ and postulate that, by simply taking it easier in the gym and on the mats, they won’t get hurt.

But, according to Tristar Gym owner and head coach Firas Zahabi, that’s easier said than done. “Sure, you can change, with less intensity and have less injuries, but when you fight, the fight will be at a greater intensity and you won’t be well prepared for that level of intensity. You can mimic that intensity in practice with the proper equipment, but still, being exposed to that high level of fight intensity on a regular basis does injure the body eventually. It’s a given,” the revered Canadian trainer says. 

“Now we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. Do we do more relaxed training that’s safer, or do we train at a higher intensity where the risks are greater, but where the returns are also greater? A good trainer, in my opinion is going to manage the risk. He knows it’s there and he’s going to manage it.”

Unfortunately, Zahabi says that managing the risks and making a judgment call when it comes to his athletes not bowing out of a fight when they get hurt isn’t easy, especially when a decision can easily go either way. Take, for example, a recent experience he had with UFC bantamweight standout Ivan Menjivar – a fighter Zahabi has trained for the better part of the last decade and whose injury threshold he knows as well as any of the members of his team. 

Less than two weeks out from his UFC on FX bout with John Albert on February 15th, he suffered a severe rib injury while sparring. Unable to sit up due to the pain of what turned out to be torn cartilage and severely bruised ribs, Menjivar needed help getting dressed so he could go to the emergency room to get the injury checked out. Against the doctor’s and Firas’ suggestion that he let the UFC know he couldn’t fight, Ivan – a father of two who lost his job as an airport security agent in December – pleaded his case with his coach.

Convincing Zahabi that the anti-inflammatory medication he was prescribed coupled with equal parts resting and icing the injury would ensure that he would be healed enough to compete, Menjivar explained simply that he “had to fight.”

“I always tell my guys that they need to tell me if they’re hurt or injured. There’s a difference. Hurt means they can push through the pain and keep going. Injured means I have to call Joe Silva and say you aren’t fighting. I said, ‘Ivan, you’re going to get hit there once and you’re going to go down,’ and he said, ‘I’m sure I’ll be better by then. I can’t cancel the fight.’ As a coach, I’m in a tough situation because it could have ended badly,” Zahabi explains. 

“Yes, he came back and he won the fight, but he took a solid body kick and you could see him grimace and then he had to take a knee. If that fight was stopped because he sustained further injury to his ribs or even if he lost by another means, everyone would have been saying that it was my job as his coach to pull him out of the fight. Hindsight is always 20/20, and sure it turned out to be the right decision in the end, but it’s too difficult of a call to make.” 

GEORGES ST PIERRE

Unfortunately for Zahabi, another call that he helped make for one of his highest profile and best-trained athletes recently turned out to be the wrong one.

When UFC welterweight champ Georges St Pierre sprained his knee during a sparring session ahead of his UFC 137 bout with Carlos Condit, Firas conferred with GSP and his coaching staff to analyze the situation. After coming to the conclusion that a sprain wasn’t a serious enough injury to warrant the cancelation of the fight altogether, the group decision was made to push the fight back a few months. 

“When you have a full training camp and you invest a lot of time and energy into it and then you aren’t able to work to make the money back that you just spent on the last eight weeks of preparation, it’s tough,” Firas points out. “Georges makes millions of dollars. Am I supposed to tell him, ‘You can’t get your money because you have a sprained knee 12 days out from your fight?’ To these guys, something better be torn or broken if they put their hearts and souls into training for the fight and they have to pull out a week or two away from it.”

Rebuffing the doctor’s orders for Georges to sit out a few weeks while the sprain healed as he warned that favoring the injured joint could lead to further injury or to him hurting his other leg as he put more weight on it to compensate, ‘Rush’ returned to the gym within days of the accident. A month later he tore out the anterior cruciate ligament of his other knee while doing wrestling drills. 

“He was hurt, not injured. But the sprain actually led to a much bigger injury when he tore his ACL. In hindsight I would have definitely stopped the fight. The sprain created instability in the other knee because Georges was relying on his good leg more to take some of the stress off of the injured one,” Zahabi recalls.

“We shrugged off the advice the doctor gave us because we figured that it pertained to regular people, not a top-tier athlete in the kind of shape Georges is in. It turned out we were wrong and it cost us a lot more than a slight delay from pulling out of a fight.”

Golden Glory head trainer Martijn de Jong concurs with Zahabi that it’s common to see fighters compete with injuries that would garner most of us some time off of work, but he says that the current landscape created by the UFC’s firing of fighters who don’t perform as expected has made its athletes more selective about just how injured they will compete.

As a result of these increased stakes, he says, we see less and less fighters fighting with even mid-level injuries that they would have had no problem competing with even a few years ago. 

He says: “In the UFC if you lose a fight you can get dropped and if you lose two or three in a row, for most, it’s pretty much a given that you will get cut. People don’t take as big of risks as far as fighting injured because there is more money involved now with win and performance bonuses. Fighters are definitely a lot more cautious now. 

“A perfect example of how times have changed was when Gokan Saki fought his own teammate, Alistair Overeem, in the K-1 world grand prix a couple years ago and he was injured, but we didn’t know he was injured because I was in Alistair’s corner,” remembers de Jong.

“He had a broken hand and an injured elbow, but he still went in and fought. Ramon Dekkers was in his corner and he told him, ‘Listen, back in the day we used to fight every week whether we were injured or not. You injured your right hand, but you still have your left one and you have two knees and two legs, so go in there and give me the best you’ve got.’ 

“It was a big risk, but the difference was he wasn’t afraid of getting dropped by K-1 because he lost. If anything, it made them appreciate him more because he didn’t pull out of the fight, even if he couldn’t fight as well as he would have if he was uninjured.” 

JOB SECURITY

American Top Team founder and head coach Ricardo Liborio agrees with de Jong that a lack of job security plays into the decision fighters must make on whether or not to fight with an injury, and adds that the risk isn’t just for those who fight injured and lose. He says that a fighter who wins a bout via lackluster performance because he’s nursing an injury stands to lose almost as much as the one who goes out on his shield swinging, or perhaps even more.

“When you’re fighting at this level it’s inevitable that you’re going to get hurt to some degree. It’s like when swimmers swallow water when they’re swimming. They can’t help it. It just happens. If you’re a ballerina guaranteed you’re going to hurt your feet. It will happen during the course of a professional’s career,” Liborio says. “The majority of fighters I know have sustained some type of injury in training. But if you’re fighting injured, it’s tough to give it 100%, especially if it’s a serious injury. It’s an unfortunate reality. 

“If it’s a major injury that hinders their performance it isn’t worth the risk any more. That being said, most high-level fighters always have a nagging injury when they fight because of the repetitiveness of training and the way they push their limits when they prepare for a fight. Things have changed, though. Not only now do you have to win to protect your job, you also have to put everything you have into your fight performance-wise. It’s not just about pulling a ‘W.’ You have to go in there to try to get a knockout, submission or ‘Fight of the Night.’ That way you keep your job and your place in the standings as well as your fans and the favor of the UFC.”

The ATT leader admits there is a certain amount of pride that fighters take in not bowing out with an injury, but says that sometimes they need to put their pride aside when it clouds their decision-making ability and risks hurting their careers.

“There’s a common misconception by fighters that if they take a fight injured instead of dropping out, they will be given another opportunity when they are healed to make up for a bad performance, but that’s not the case. You can’t be boring or cautious any more – injured or not. You can’t afford to be,” he says, as the smile fades from his normally jovial face. “This is a hybrid sport that is equal parts sport and entertainment. If someone feels that they aren’t getting their money’s worth when they watch you fight, it becomes a problem.”

Like his two counterparts who both disagree with the common assertion that the higher intensity of sparring equates to the higher incidences of injury in training we’ve experienced recently, Liborio says as many safety measures they put in to minimize their occurrence, sometimes things simply happen.

“Part of the problem is that it’s difficult to switch gears during training from specific areas to MMA. You’re in the striking ‘zone,’ then you’re doing wrestling and you get taken down and you forget to break your fall and you [post out] and injure your arm. Or you try to escape from a submission that you think you can escape from, but you don’t realize it’s deeper than you thought and, boom, you get hurt,” he says. “All of these different techniques and disciplines lead to injuries because there are always surprises when you combine them. A fighter is always guessing whether or not his opponent is going to shoot in and take him down or if he is going to stand up and strike. The surprises lead to more injuries in my opinion.”

FIGHTER FATIGUE

Overtraining rather than unsafe training is the main precursor to injuries

All three coaches FO spoke to list overtraining as one of the biggest precursors to injury, stressing that keeping a close eye on their athletes is the best way to eliminate this problem from the puzzling injury equation. De Jong explains: “I was a fighter, and back in the day I didn’t have a teacher so I had to do it myself. I remember sitting at home and thinking, ‘Wow, I’m here on my couch and this guy is training. I need to get back to the gym,’ even though I was tired and hurt, which we now know probably only made things worse.” 

“That’s why I always watch my athletes and really monitor them to make sure they aren’t overtraining. I really have to watch them closely because sometimes they’ll go out running on a day they are supposed to be resting. I always watch my students and I say it’s better to take two days rest sometimes than to do an extra day of training. As a trainer I can see differences in the way they walk, talk, act and train when they’re tired and they need a rest. I can also tell when I need to push them a little harder. There’s a misconception in our sport that if you rest, you’re weak. The problem with that way of thinking is that you see a lot of fighters who over-train and peak too early and then they get injured when they neglect to take time off to recover.”

Like de Jong, Zahabi points to fatigue as being more of a factor when it comes to injuries than aggressive training in his experience. He explains the reason is that exhaustion typically makes fighters forget about form and technique. He says: “Once your muscles fatigue, they can’t protect the joints and that’s when we see fighters getting sloppy and that’s when things go wrong. You’re less in control and you start to get reckless and you start doing things like throwing haymakers and throwing with your shoulder and you might take a bad shot and slip and fall awkwardly.

“You’re also more likely to be clumsy as you become fatigued, which increases the incidence of injury. It’s not true that more training is better and it’s also not true that higher intensity is better. They’re all good, but you have to cycle them and manage them and it’s a very difficult thing to do. Farther away from the fight I train my guys for longer periods with lower intensity and closer to the fight I train them with higher intensity for shorter periods. Train too long at fight intensity and you’re going to get hurt. Injury is just one of the risks you take being a fighter. You can’t live in a bubble, though. Things happen, but it’s up to us to try to minimize how often they do.”

ARE DRUGS THE ANSWER?

Golden Glory head coach Martijn de Jong asks why performance-enhancing drugs are not afforded to rehabbing injured fighters

Martijn de Jong brings up one ironic overlooked reason for the higher than normal number of injuries, pointing to the crackdown on performance enhancing drug (PED) use as playing a role in some cases. Though he agrees the sport’s combatants should fight clean, he says PED use by fighters is somewhat of a double-edged sword that doesn’t just cause injuries to the user, but also inflicts inadvertent collateral damage to those around them.

The Netherlands-based coach concedes that some fighters who normally use PEDs for recovery have been discouraged to do so by out-of-competition drug testing by the UFC, and as a result have required longer healing time for nagging injuries or have dropped out of bouts altogether to avoid being tested when they haven’t timed their cycles right. The former fighter, however, says a bigger issue concerns those fighters not using drugs who try to mimic the breakneck intensity levels and frequency of training of their teammates who are getting a pharmacological boost.

“First of all, I’m not saying my guys are using PEDs, but we can’t deny it is happening in the sport. It would be very naive to think like that it isn’t. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about it, but nobody wants to go on the record about it. I think we can be honest about it though since a lot of people know what’s going on. I’m not saying everybody uses PEDs, and I don’t say that the majority do, but there are a lot that do,” de Jong says. 

“PEDs help an athlete to recover faster, and if you train three times a day and you don’t use any drugs, you have a higher risk of getting injured. That’s why athletes use them. There may be some guys who train with fighters who are on them and, either don’t know that’s why these guys are able to train as much and as hard as they do, or they know, but they don’t take them themselves because they want to fight clean or because they don’t want to get caught. But then they try to keep up with the volume and the intensity of the guy who is taking something and get hurt,” Martijn explains. 

“Your body is going to give out and you’re going to get injured if you try to force it to work harder than it actually has the capacity to do. I’m not saying people should use PEDs. I’m just pointing out that a few of the causes of injuries are directly, and indirectly related to the use of them and to the introduction of out-of-competition testing. I think that everybody should have to fight clean because that’s what sports are all about, but we can’t close our eyes to the fact that these things are happening. It’s funny that nobody wants to talk about it.”