Adam Singer: MMA is dangerous, we need changes to training

Stephan Kesting recently conducted a wide-ranging interview with BJJ black belt and HardCore Gym co-founder Adam Singer. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is currently the biggest issue in contact sports, and Singer addresses it head on.

Stephan Kesting: You mentioned the wear and tear on a fighter’s body, and that’s actually something that I really wanted to talk about for today. As opposed to talking in the abstract, can you give us an example of the wear and tear that has happened to some of the fighters that you’ve trained?

Adam Singer: Well, I’ll use Forrest as an example because I was there with him on day 1, and I’m still with him at the end of his career as he’s retired.

He has a shoulder that’s barely functional. He’s had another knee surgery. He’s probably got a bunch of other things that hurt as well that, but because he hasn’t had surgery on them I don’t even know about. But at 36 years old, he has a lot of injuries and things that some he’ll never really recover from.

And we’re seeing other guys with those same things. It’s no different than a football player who retires after a 5 or 6-year player in the NFL. I know football players who they can’t pick up their kids anymore. They can’t lift an arm over their head. I’ve seen NFL players who have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. Their bodies are just destroyed.

It’s no different with MMA. It’s not just the damage that we see in the fights, necessarily. It’s all the time leading up to those fights. It’s all the training, the year-round banging away in the gym, everything that they need to do to keep that professional career. And it just wears on you. It just builds up over time.

You know football players practice and play, and then they have an off-season. But most MMA guys don’t really have an off-season. When you’re a young amateur or a young pro, then you’re training year-round because you have to be prepared to take fights.

The pervasive paradigm in the sport right now is based on training really hard, and sparring hard with tough partners, and heavy conditioning, and heavy strength training. I think it wears on you, and I think that we will see more guys who are going to have long term ramifications to their health. Not just from concussive injuries, but also just their joints and body parts wearing out. What’s Dominic Cruz’s knee going to be like in 5 or 10 years?

SK: Let’s go back to the concussion thing, because of course, the NFL is going through a whole bunch of legal problems and publicity problems. The sport of football is going through some challenges with people realizing the amount of concussive trauma that happens in that sport and the long term effects of it.

In soccer and rugby and other sports – boxing obviously – the effects of accumulated concussive and sub-concussive trauma are really becoming understood now, even though it’s not easy to tell when the person has that trauma – short of dissecting their brain which you can only do after they’re dead.

My opinion is that the UFC, and MMA in general, is going to be going through the same thing very, very shortly. I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing class-action lawsuits against the UFC for things like CTE and long-term brain damage regardless of whatever waivers the fighter signed. What do you think about that?

AS: If anyone sues the UFC in 10 years because they didn’t know that they could possibly end up with brain trauma then it’s bullshit.

Now if you played football in the 1960’s or 1970’s, before anyone understood this stuff, then you’re suing for something that nobody knew.

So to me, it’s sort of a catch-22. Everybody who plays football knows, and they start at a young age. It’s years and years of cumulative damage, from high school to college to the professional leagues. It’s terrible – don’t get me wrong – but I have a problem with people pleading ignorance about not knowing what the long-term effects are now.

So the thing about MMA fighters is most of those concussive events don’t even happen in fights. They happen in sparring and they happen in training, and I believe that we can change that aspect of the sport and reduce those concussive effects down the road.

There are people that go their whole MMA career without ever getting knocked out, without ever taking really hard blows in a fight: it’s all during training. Because we still have this mentality in MMA where we want to get together with 10 or 15 other top-level guys, put on the gloves and bang out rounds. And I think we need to move away from that.

The NFL, I’m not sure they can do anything because they have concussive events during practice and during the game. There’s nothing you can do about that. Two 300-pound guys hitting each other is probably not healthy for the body, but these guys know what they’re getting into.

I bet if you ask them, if you laid out the evidence, and asked them, Do you still want to do this?, they’d still do it because they’re pro athletes. To the highest level of their sport and achieve what they’ve achieved, they’re willing to make sacrifices. And a lot of times, it’s their health that they’ll sacrifice…

SK: But what do you think about the issue of informed consent? You and I, we get presented with this: we’re going to go bungee jumping, we get told that the bungee may snap, and we get asked, Are you okay with dying? And we say,Yes, I’ll sign on the line here.

But I think it’s a little bit different when you’re talking about kids in their teens, and people in their early 20’s… At that age you think you’re going to live forever. And you also don’t think about the consequences of being 40 years old and not being able to remember your phone number. That just seems so far away. At that age you’re young and stupid.

That’s why that’s the area that I have difficulty with; it’s not so much about the adults making these informed decisions, but it’s more about the youths and adolescents making those decisions because I don’t think they’re informed. They don’t really have a sense of what it’s really like to live for 30 or 40 years with Alzheimer’s-like symptoms, you know. That’s, I think, the tricky gray area for me…

AS: I agree with you 100%. The problem is if they consider the consequences even further, then you can’t fight because you could die in the ring or the cage. You can have injuries that last forever. You could end up with Alzheimer’s. There are so many things that can happen that if you start dwelling on these dangers, if that’s what comes to the forefront for you, then you can’t fight.

Coming back full circle, I think it’s imperative that as coaches and camps, we change what’s going on in the gym. We can’t change what happens in a fight. If we have good refs then hopefully people don’t take undue damage. In most cases in MMA we don’t see those repeated blows to the head over 30 minutes of a fight. And after a fight we can manage how long it takes to come back to the sport and how long we allow people to rest before getting back to contact training…

I think there are a lot of things we can do, outside of the event itself, to minimize the head trauma. We can’t get rid of it entirely because then we won’t have a sport anymore, but I really believe we can minimize it. In football, maybe you can’t minimize it because you have to hit each other in practice. I think in MMA, I think we can work to minimize some of that.

SK: So if you and I are both training for fights, then how can we train so that we don’t get hit in the head too hard or too often during training?

AS: Do we really need to hit each other in the head that hard? And if we do, do we need to do it that often? Do we need to do it round after round after round? Do we need to put on the gloves, the head gear and just go at it 2 or 3 times a week?

My buddy, John Kavanagh, is getting a bunch of guys ready for their fights, including Connor McGregor and Gunnar Nelson. I know that in their camp, they rarely hit each other hard in the head. And we just talked saw Robbie Lawler talk about not sparring. And we just saw Johnny Hendricks talk about not taking head contact. And I think hopefully those guys will start to pave the way for this kind of training. It starts at the coaching level, obviously…

SK: Yeah, it’s really the coach who needs to keep the egos in check so that 2 guys don’t start brawling…

AS: You have to keep egos in check. You have to make sure that the structure of the program isn’t based on sparring but rather is based on skill training.

And you really have to monitor the contact and the level of training. I’m not saying you can get rid of it in practice. Guys have to hit each other and feel that impact, especially earlier in their career. And as your career goes on you probably need a lot less of that.

Look at the injuries we’re starting to see on these UFC cards; we’re starting to fighters from every card. To me, that’s an issue of training as well. Yet, we still have this mentality in MMA that when you sign a fight, you start a camp where you go from whatever level you were formerly training at, all the way to one hundred percent, training 2 times a day, banging away, bringing in guys, and going round after round. I think we can change that mentality a bit. And I think it’s already started…

SK: Do you not advocate guys having camps?

AS: I’m not disadvocating anything. What I’m postulating is that our guys should stay at some level of ability all year round. Our guys should be in some level of shape, fairly close to their fighting weight all year round.

That way, when they find a fight, whether it’s 2 weeks or 12 weeks out, there doesn’t have to be this dramatic difference in their training. I’m still working this out – I’m testing it, Kavanagh is testing it, and friends of mine are testing it – but I almost believe that outside of camp, we should be training twice a day. Mostly skill work, but still twice a day.

And when we get to training camp, we should shrink down the amount of training we’re doing. The intensity can go up a bit but the amount of training shrinks, which is counter to the way most people train.

Most people are very lax in the off-season, outside of camp. And then when camp starts, they start training 2 or 3 times a day. It’s this 12-week countdown, and I don’t know if that’s necessarily the best way to do it. I’m hoping that it sort of changes as time goes on.

Read entire interview…