Dana White On UFC Injuries: We’re Going To Start Fixing This

Recently UFC President Dana White came out with some harsh comments about San Jose, California’s famed American Kickboxing Academy (AKA), a gym known for its world-class fighters including UFC heavyweight champion Cain Velasquez, Daniel Cormier, and Luke Rockhold.

But unfortunately the gym is also known more nefariously for its sordid history of injuries, including Velasquez’s sit on the sidelines since his UFC 166 win over Junior dos Santos in October 2013. White’s criticism, which deemed the training practices at AKA ‘stone age,’ was apparently a bit of foreshadowing, as AKA team member Khabib Nurmagomedov was soon forced out of his anticipated UFC 187 bout with Donald Cerrone after suffering a knee injury.

Speaking during an interview with La Afficion, White fleshed out his views on the current rash of injuries bogging the UFC down, noting that the most elite MMA fighters in the world simply can’t keep beating each other up on a daily basis:

“AKA is one of the biggest and best. I call camps like [AKA] and Greg Jackson‘s, ‘super camps.’ They have all the best guys in the world. That’s what I’m saying. You can’t have all the best guys in the world beating the living s**t out of each other every day. You can’t do it. These guys have to have camps built around them where guys are working with them, not trying to hurt them.”

Head trainer and owner of AKA Javier Mendez was quick to call Nurmagomedov’s knee injury a ‘freak accident,’ and he obviously understands that his fighters not being able to fight is hurting his otherwise elite gym. White said that Mendez has been working with them to create a solution to the problem:

“The response from the trainers has been good. Listen, Javier Mendez said, ‘If Cain isn’t fighting, nobody’s getting paid. I’m not getting paid. Cain isn’t getting paid. The UFC isn’t making money to pay Cain. It’s not good for anybody.’ So it’s awesome that a guy like Javier gets it. There’s no ego involved. He wants to do what’s right by his fighters.”

And to do right by his fighters, White said, AKA is going to have to start having a lot less contact between their top draws:

“The conversation that I was having with Javier Mendez is that we’ve got to start training these guys differently in the gym. These guy have to start having a lot less contact when it comes to sparring.”

At the end of the day White knows that injuries are just an unfortunate byproduct of a sport like fighting, However, he’s not entirely sure that Nurmagomedov did all of the rehabilitation necessary to return to hard training after originally injuring his knee right after signing on to face Cerrone at last year’s UFC 178. Things like that and the hard sparring are aspects of training that MMA is going to have to start cleaning up in White’s view:

“Injuries are going to happen. You’re going to have injuries but you have to be so careful. The question becomes with Khabib, did he do all his therapy that he was supposed to do on his knee after surgery? Did he do all the right things? We’re starting to get our ducks in a row and we’re going to start fixing this.”