Cain Velasquez
Start talking about the scourge of injuries in MMA, and suddenly the experts pop up everywhere you look.
The problem is hard sparring, some people will tell you. The problem is super camps, say others – those select few gyms where great fighters smash their bodies against other great fighters until everyone is broken and sad. Or maybe the problem is certain weight classes. Or certain coaching philosophies.
Whatever it is, the one thing everyone seems to agree on is that there is a problem, and it needs to be fixed – soon. How to go about fixing it, that’s the hard part.
Statistical analysis might be as good a place as any to start. It might even have something important to tell us, or at least that’s how it seemed when Michael Hutchinson of LastWordonSports.com starting crunching the numbers to see the rate at which fighters from different notable gyms withdrew from scheduled fights.
What he found, both in the original analysis last fall and the follow up earlier this month, was that fighters from Sacramento’s Team Alpha Male gym were least likely to pull out of a fight due to injury. With 98 scheduled bouts in Zuffa-owned promotions since 2009, Alpha Male fighters withdrew from just five fights, giving them the lowest rate of injury withdrawal at 5.1 percent (the average, among 11 different teams, was 10.3 percent).
The question is, why? And what does Team Alpha Male know that other squads don’t?
According to Hutchinson, when he first released his data, many people pointed to the fact that Team Alpha Male is known as a home for smaller fighters in the lighter divisions.
“When I did my first article in October, that’s exactly what everybody said, that it was about size,” Hutchinson said.
Except, when he broke down injury withdrawal rates by weight class, he found that the divisions most likely to pull out injured were women’s bantamweight, welterweight and light heavyweight. Those least likely to withdraw were lightweight, heavyweight, and middleweight.
“So it’s really all over the board,” Hutchinson said.
Urijah Faber
How then do we explain Team Alpha Male’s stellar record for showing up to the fights its members sign up for? According to team founder Urijah Faber, it’s not just good luck.
“To be honest,” Faber said, “part of it is the lifestyle that we lead. … We don’t stop training throughout the year. It’s basically a type of lifestyle that breeds being in top shape, and that helps with injuries, as well. A lot of these guys get way out of shape, and then their training camp is them getting back into shape. For us, it’s the opposite. We stay in shape year-round and let our bodies heal a little bit closer to the fight.”
That sentiment was echoed by Team Alpha Male flyweight Joseph Benavidez (21-4 MMA, 8-2 UFC). While his fight against John Moraga (16-3 MMA, 5-2 UFC) on Saturday’s UFC 187 main card is his first since November, he said, “I’ve been in the gym every day, helping other guys.”
At other gyms, Benavidez said, some fighters view training camps primarily as a means to get in shape and get their weight down. That frantic push to go from couch shape to fighting shape lends itself to injuries.
As Xtreme Couture coach Robert Follis said when explaining the difficulties of maintaining a year-round, elite fight team in a city like Las Vegas, which is known for its buffet of distractions, conditioning is a major factor in training injuries:
“When you get tired, you get out of position,” Follis said. “And when you get out of position, that’s when you get hurt.”
That’s why, Benavidez said, Team Alpha Male fighters take such pride in staying healthy and well-conditioned – an attitude that is an essential part of the gym’s culture.
“Most of us, when we hear about a fight, we’re already ready to fight,” Benavidez said. “We’re in shape. Now we just know when we’re going to fight. That starts with Faber and his mindset. Ever since I’ve been there, that’s been his mindset, that yes, this is a job, but it’s also a lifestyle.”
So what does that lesson mean for other gyms?
For instance, take the American Kickboxing Academy in San Jose, just over a hundred miles away from Alpha Male. Over the same period of time, AKA had almost the exact same number of Zuffa-owned fights scheduled that Team Alpha Male did. But while Alpha Male fighters withdrew due to injury 5.1 percent of the time, AKA fighters pulled out of 14.4 percent of their bouts – a rate nearly three times higher.
That might be part of why AKA was singled out and criticized by UFC President Dana White for “stone-age” training techniques. AKA head coach Javier Mendez heard that criticism loud and clear, and he took it to heart, he said. At the same time, he cautioned that injury numbers don’t necessarily tell you what’s going on in a gym:
“Let’s be honest, the reason we’re having that conversation (about AKA) is because of Cain (Velasquez), because the heavyweight champion has been hurt and couldn’t fight,” Mendez said. “But two of those injuries that happened to him, they happened in his fights. He hurt the one shoulder against Brock Lesnar, and then the other shoulder against Junior Dos Santos. Two of his major injuries were from doing the sport itself, and it’s a dangerous sport. Look after an event how many guys are (medically suspended). It’s a rough sport, regardless of how you’re training.”
Still, Mendez said, the criticism aimed at AKA’s rate of injury withdrawals prompted him to rethink some aspects of his approach recently. Not so long ago, coaches left it up to fighters to decide for themselves how many times they wanted to spar each week. Now, Mendez said, they try to limit hard sparring to one or two times per week, and do their best to keep fighters like Velasquez and Daniel Cormier under tight supervision while they work together.
But a common misconception, according to Mendez, is that sparring is universally responsible for every training injury in the gym.
“When we’re doing boxing sparring, hardly ever do we have injuries,” Mendez said. “Kickboxing, I trained fighters in kickboxing since 1996. I think I had one who didn’t make his fight due to injury. Just one.”
At AKA, Mendez said, wrestling practice is where fighters are most likely to injure themselves. Jiu-jitsu is a close second. Solving that problem is not as simple as asking the fighters to take it easier on one another, he said. Instead, it’s a matter of understanding how his fighters are feeling, and tailoring their training to meet those needs.
Making that approach work, he added, is all about communication.
“I’ve been really trying to get them to talk to me,” Mendez said. “It can even be as simple as, ‘How are things at home? What’s your family life like? Is everything cool?’ Things like that are important, because especially on a sparring day, you need to know where your fighter’s head is so you can tell whether you want him to spar today. You need to know what all the variables are.”
While there are bound to be bad days during a training camp, Mendez said, and while every fighter will face adversity he needs to push through in the gym, there are also days when he’d be better served by rest and recovery.
“But if they don’t talk to you about how they’re feeling,” Mendez said, “how do you make that distinction?”
Already this approach is yielding dividends, according to Mendez. After weeks of encouraging fighters to be more open and upfront rather than hiding their injuries and stresses behind a mask of macho stoicism, he’s been surprised at the response.
“Man, all of a sudden everybody’s coming up to me,” Mendez said. “One particular fighter, he’s in the UFC but I won’t say who, was telling me that his wrist was all messed up. Then we’re doing drills, and I see him working against the wall. I was watching how he was using his hands, and I was like, ‘He’s going to hurt that wrist even worse.’ So I stopped him. If it wasn’t for him saying something, I would have never noticed that.”
A lot of these solutions seem simple or intuitive from the outside. It’s easy to tell injured fighters after the fact that they shouldn’t have gone so hard in the gym. Fully preparing them, mentally and physically, for the demands of an MMA fight without running them into the ground in the process? That’s a delicate tightrope walk.
To some extent, maybe it always will be. Even Team Alpha Male fighters get hurt sometimes. Just look at UFC bantamweight champ T.J. Dillashaw, who had his next title defense delayed by a broken rib suffered in training.
You can get yourself in peak shape. You can train intelligently and carefully. But, as Team Alpha Male’s Benavidez pointed out, a rib is still just a rib, and it can only take so much.
“At the end of the day, we’re fighting,” Benavidez said. “We’re not playing checkers. We’re wrestling and hitting each other. You’re going to get hurt sometimes.”
For more on UFC 187, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.
(Steven Marrocco contributed to this story.)
