Injuries mounting at AKA – What is going wrong?

In recent times, American Kick-Boxing Academy has come under a lot of scrutiny due to the mounting injury problems. This has surfaced due to another injury sustained by light heavyweight champion Daniel Cormier. This caused the UFC to pull the light heavyweight title fight from the UFC 206 card.  This isn’t the first time Cormier has pulled out of a title fight through injury. The UFC had cancel Cormier‘s title defense against Jon Jones at UFC 197 because he had injured his knee.

Cormier during a training session/Credit: Sherdog

Racking up the injuries.

AKA have quite the track record for having fighters pull out of fights. Former two time Heavyweight champion Cain Velasquez  pulled from a fight at UFC 180 against Fabricio Werdum  and then was replaced by Mark Hunt. But this isn’t Velasquez first or last injury either, in fact he is quite notorious for being injury prone. Over the past few years, Cain Velasquez has pulled from multiple fights with injuries such as a torn meniscus, a sprained MCL, a torn rotator cuff to name but a few. More recently though former middleweight champion Luke Rockhold was sidelined with a knee problem, this forced him out of a title contender match on the UFC Fight Night 101 card. As you can see AKA have been racking up the injuries over the years.

Velasquez and Cormier at AKA/ Credit:BJPenn.com

Something to offer.

With AKA having a high level roster, it clearly has something to offer, but what is it? The gym was established in the mid-eighties by one of the head coaches Javier Mendez. It was one of the first gyms to bring MMA into it’s training. With it forming just over thirty years ago, are their training methods still stuck in the past? UFC president Dana White seemed to think so in an interview with Setanta Sports. He was quoted to say “Some of the camps are still in the stone ages and need to be brought up to date”. Javier Mendez then responded to that criticism by saying “I love the fact that he’s bringing attention to that and it does help me look to ways to improve”. As well as “I’ve been looking to improve the injury rate, and it does concern me.”

AKA tops injury list from 2009-2016/Credit:Bloodyelbow.com

With all being said and done, are the AKA fighters being pushed too hard? Are their methods outdated? What should be the solution? Let us know in the comments section below.