Cote Vs Silva at UFC 90 – Learn how to prevent knee injuries in MMA

If you had a chance to watch UFC 90 and saw Patrick Cote’s knee injury when he was fighting Anderson “Spider” Silva, you’d probably be disappointed that the 2 warriors didn’t get a chance to properly finish what they started.

I sure was. I love getting the chance to see Silva at work, and I thought Cote showed that she definitely has a chin.

But what I want to talk about is the knee injury that Cote suffered. You could see the shin bone move forward and laterally when he hurt himself. In some interviews he said that he is an old meniscus, but from the looks of it, I think he injured his ACL. Often with a buckling-type injury, it is a ligament that is damaged.

The ACL works to keep the shin bone (tibia/fibula) from slipping forward under the thigh bone (femur), but only when the muscles aren’t there to do their job.

Cote also mentioned in interviews that he hurt his knee kicking Silva. This would correspond perfectly with the common mechanism of ACL injury: when a person kicks, the lower leg is thrown out and the shin will slide forward on the femur if the muscles/ligaments do not oppose the force.

Picture it this way: Raise your right fist like at the top of a bicep curl, then place your left fist on top of your right fist. When you slide your right fist toward the computer screen, that’s the movement that prevents the ACL, and that’s what happened to Cote’s knee.

So the ACL will come into play in a really quick pivot type movement, like a runner cutting hard, or during something unexpected, like getting pushed off just before landing from a jump, missing a kick or part of it.

The ACL will also work to stabilize the joint if the muscles aren’t strong enough to do the job, so even if you’re waiting for the move or it’s a planned move, like a hard cut in soccer, if you don’t have muscles strong, the anterior cruciate ligament can still be torn.

To prevent ACL injuries, you need to ensure that your hamstrings and calves (gastroc) are strong and powerful. Therefore, exercises like stiff-legged deadlifts and Swiss ball leg curls are crucial for the prevention of knee injuries. The muscles worked in these exercises do exactly what the ACL does, prevent the lower leg from slipping forward on the upper leg.

You need to focus on 2 specific parts of each exercise: the eccentric phase and the transition from eccentric to concentric movement.

So, for the stiff-legged deadlift, it would mean controlling the movement all the way to the end range, then quickly switching from lowering to lifting the weight. All of these exercises are part of my MMA strength and conditioning program.

You must keep your muscles strong, but more importantly, powerful. Muscles need to be able to react quickly, so doing exercises like repetitive and explosive jumps like lunge jumps and others found in my NRG system complexes will train this quality.

Prevention of ACL injuries in MMA requires numerous specific exercises to ensure that the muscles surrounding the knee joint are strong and powerful.

Integrate these exercises into your strength and conditioning program and you can avoid bending your knee in the middle of a fight.