Earlier this week, Dana White put the American Kickboxing Academy Gym in San Jose, Calif., on blast. White's frustration is that heavyweight champion Cain Velasquez has been injured so frequently since the night he beat Brock Lesnar to win the title for the first time, some four-and-a-half years ago.
Velasquez is scheduled to return to action after 20 months out to defend the heavyweight title against Fabricio Werdum on June 13 in Mexico City. His success and inactivity give both ends of this frustrating debate.
Velasquez has proven to be the UFC's dominant heavyweight, the best inside the cage in company history. He's also arguably the best conditioned heavyweight in the history of the sport. Former training partner Herschel Walker, who has been around his share of top-tier athletes in a number of sports, called Velasquez the best conditioned man of his size that he's ever seen. So on one hand, you can argue Velasquez's training has been as effective as anyone's. But the flip side are the injuries and long delays between fights. Now almost 33, he's only fought 14 times.
Mendez notes that he believes Velasquez is the best heavyweight in MMA history, but due to injuries, he doesn't have enough fights under his belt to where he can really be given that label.
"Some of the camps are still in the stone ages and need to be brought up to date," said White in an interview with Setanta Sports earlier in the week. "AKA is one of those places. You've got Cain Velasquez, our heavyweight champion, who's always hurt. Those guys go to war every day."
"I love the fact that he's bringing attention to that and it does help me look to ways to improve," said Javier Mendez, the head coach of the AKA team. "I've been looking to improve the injury rate, and it does concern me."
"That's why I love Dana, he brought attention so we can correct ourselves. From the beginning of MMA training, we're always going to evolve. It shows he cares, but he's wrong for accusing us. I think he's primarily accusing us because we have the heavyweight champion."
But Mendez, and several of Velasquez's teammates, noted that his worst injuries, which led to operations on both shoulders, were not in training, but came from fights with Brock Lesnar and Junior Dos Santos.
"If you want to get rid of injuries, you'll have to get rid of the UFC," said Mendez.
Mendez said they've changed training as time has gone on, focusing on increasing boxing in training, which when it comes to actual injuries, Mendez feels history has shown leads to fewer injuries than wrestling. According to Mendez, wrestling leads to the most injuries, followed by jiu jitsu and then kickboxing. But he said you can't go into a fight without significant wrestling training either.
"Are we gonna not wrestle?" asked Mendez. "If you don't wrestle live (all out), and you face the guy from the other gym who is wrestling live, who is going to have the advantage? You have got to wrestle."
But boxing has its issues.
"Brain damage, yeah, that's part of the risk of boxing," he said. "If you get hit too much in the head, it kills brain cells, but the body doesn't get injured."
He also noted the gym rule is that if somebody gets dropped, even if they don't get a concussion, they aren't sparring for 30 days.
"If they want to come back, they have to give me a doctor's excuse. And I make them put on headgear, because stuff happens, accidental head-butts, and they get cut."
Velasquez chose to take the stone age comment as more of a compliment, even if it clearly wasn't meant that way.
"You know what, I've always considered this gym as an old school gym," said Velasquez. "He says stone age, I say old school.
"The best way to prepare for a fight is to fight. Yeah, I've had some injuries. But when we fight, nobody says we're not training right when they look at the way we fight. We're going to keep doing it. We could get injured again, but you don't come into training with those thoughts. I don't go in thinking about getting injured. We go to work, beat each other up, just like a fight. We don't go into a fight with those thoughts either
And other fighters talk too:
Javier Mendez, AKA stars respond to Dana White's critical remarks about their gym - MMA Fighting
