The Untold Side of the Most Famous Injury In UFC History - Anderson Silva's Broken Leg

The UFC is known for its ferocious knockouts and its fair share of serious injuries, but what happened to Anderson Silva at UFC 168 is con

side

red by many to be the

most

serious

injury

in the

history

of the sport. Welcome everyone to your number one source for learning about everything related to sports injuries. In sports medicine news in this video by popular demand, we are finally going to take a look at Anderson Silva's leg

injury

suffered at UFC 168, we will cover a number of aspects about these injuries and you can learn all about why this. happened and how it happened, please subscribe if you like learning about this type of content so you can stay updated with my future videos and let's get started.

This is without a doubt one of the

most

serious injuries we have seen in any professional. sports period when Silva goes to kick with his left leg, Weidman is able to block the kick, but the force of the impact causes his tibia and fibula to fracture quite significantly. Silva suffered a fracture in his tibia and fibula, which are two bones. which form the lower leg, fortunately for him this was not a compound fracture, a compound fracture is when the bone actually breaks through the skin. This is like what we saw happen to Louisville basketball player Kevin Ware when he broke his tibia where the bone actually came from. through the skin, making it a compound or open fracture.

Silva was very lucky that it wasn't a compound fracture because it carries all kinds of additional risks of things like serious infections when we see an injury like this in any professional athlete. Of course, the first thing we think is how is something so serious possible in a such a high level athlete. In Silva's case, there were a number of key factors that led to this unfortunate event. The first factor is the anatomy of our body around those bones in the lower leg. Our tibia and fibula are pretty well protected on the back of the leg with the different calf muscles, but on the in

side

front of the lower leg there really isn't much protection for the bone itself from the muscles and surrounding soft tissues, in fact, in parts of the lower leg, basically all that protects the bone is just a very thin layer of skin.

If you run your hand across the front of your shin, there's no muscle there, right at the crest of the shinbone, it's skin, and then right under that skin is bone. This is in contrast to our femur or thigh bone and that thigh bone is surrounded by a series of large, bulky muscles that give it additional support and trauma section like what happened here with Silva, could cause a fracture in the bone, so when Silva does this leg kick, the point of impact on his tibia is right where there is minimal muscle protection around that bone, this means there is less tissue there to absorb the force of that bone. impact and everything is sent directly to the bone causing the fracture, the second factor that led to this was the location on Weidman Lake where Silva's kick landed.

Silva's leg made contact with Weidman's knee around the location of what we call the tibial plateau. The shape of the tibia bone naturally has a larger area nearby. the knee joint and then narrows down through the longest portion of the bone and then widens down through the ankle, but there isn't much muscle protecting Silva's tibia from breaking, there isn't much here either. a lot of muscle around the area on Weidman's leg where Silva made contact, so you essentially have two bones that are only protected by a thin layer of skin that make contact with each other.

When this happens, there is no muscle to help dissipate and distribute that load, which increases the stress that those bones will be under and makes a fracture like this more likely. The third aspect of this was unfortunately only due to Silva's good skill and power. If we look at this view of the injury here, we can see how much torque he is applying through his body. to that leg to rotate that leg for that kick every time your leg makes contact with Weidman's, there is still a lot of momentum carrying that energy forward through your leg, causing you to continue wanting to move in that kicking motion every time he makes contact with Weidman's leg it suddenly gets stuck, but the end of his leg or his foot still has that momentum to want to carry out the kick, which is what caused his leg to basically look like it was wrapped around of Weidman's after the breakup occurred.

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It's a great product. I think you all will really enjoy using it, so thanks again to the rich guys for sponsoring the video and let's move on. Going back to our learning, managing an injury like Silva's begins as soon as the medical staff enters the ring, the first thing we think about whenever we see an injury like this is blood flow and any damage to the nerves, there is a quantity of blood. The vessels and nerves that run from the tibia to the lower leg and these can also be injured every time a bone is fractured.

If one of the blood vessels is torn or pinched, not enough oxygen flows to it. tissues below that level and you can have severe death of those muscles and other tissues in the leg now Silva was actually very smart here because the first thing he did when he fell to the ground was grab his leg essentially stabilizing it himself, you can see The staff The doctor here in the ring checks the pulse in Silva's foot. This is a specific blood vessel called the dorsalis pedis and you check forward by basically placing your fingers on this specific point on the top of the foot and if you can feel the pulse.

That then tells the medical team that blood flow is still intact and everything is fine from that perspective. The next thing you can do is have them try moving their toes or touching them to see the sensation on the skin and see if the nerves are still there. healthy or if they have been injured once this is done, the next thing you will do is make sure to stabilize that fracture to prevent it from moving further during transport to the hospital. You can do this by placing any variety of splints or air casts around the leg to make sure you keep those bones as correctly aligned as possible Now, when he arrived at the hospital, we heard that he finally had surgery to insert this metal rod into his leg .

There are three types of general approaches to managing these types of fractures that I want to address the first is basically putting on a cast and not doing any surgery. This can be done for very mild fractures that are not displaced or that are not severely misaligned and basically you put the cast around the leg to allow those bones to heal and you don't need to do any type of surgery, but as we saw that happen With Silva, sometimes these fractures are more serious and some type of surgical fixation is necessary to get those bones back into proper alignment to heal.

The type of surgery that Silva underwent was the placement of something called intra. Our bones have a unique structure where they have this hard outer layer with bone marrow contained in the center, we call it medullary canal and you can insert things like a titanium rod. through this space because there's not a lot of rigid bone there, so what surgeons will do is place one of these rods into that spinal canal that keeps the tibia in proper alignment to allow it to heal. The third option that sometimes has to be done. it's something called external fixation this is what we saw happen with Washington Redskins quarterback Alex Smith this is a type of surgery where the hardware that holds everything in place is on the outside of the body this is that contraption that Alex Smith had on your leg after This injury is an external fixation device that is most commonly used if there have been a lot of injuries to the skin or the muscles or what we call soft tissues.

The use of external fixation facilitates surgical repair and correction of these soft tissue abnormalities. and then come back and have those bones finally heal later. People often ask when we see these types of injuries if there was any pre-existing damage or injury to the bone that made it susceptible to a fracture like this, many times we don't see any abnormalities there and even in this case the silver surgeon said that his bone He seemed healthy and perfectly normal and people might wonder more why someone like Anderson Silva, who employs a lot of kicking techniques in his fighting style, wouldn't have had more conditioned bones to handle a kick like this, let's address that question now because there are some interesting concepts here about how bone can be remodeled that I think are incorrectly applied to situations like this, we have two main types of bone, we have soft bone, also called cancellous or trabecular bone and then we also have hard bone or cortical bone, this Trabecular bone resembles this type of honeycomb-like tissue, while cortical bone is more tightly packed and rigid.

This trabecular bone is most often found at the ends of the bone, while cortical bone. It is located more in the middle or in the axis of the bones. Now our bones are really smart and actually have the ability to adapt their specific structure and shape based on the loads they are trying to support or support. This is a concept called Wolf. The law and I've seen it applied a lot to situations where people are trying to condition shins, where they repeatedly kick trees or do things to try to make the bone thicker, but I think there are other aspects of this that we need to consider. . which are incorrectly applied here whenever an area of ​​the bone is exposed to excessively high stress or load for a longer period of time which generates what we believe to be an electrical signal that causes the bone to basically remodel and increase in volume in that area so that it can bear more load.

Some common examples of this is the location of the tibia where the patellar tendon inserts. This is an area called the tibial tuberosity and it's basically a larger type of bone area because it has to maintain all that load from the quadriceps muscle that puts such high stress on the bone. Another example of this is tennis players who have bigger, thicker bones on their dominant side due to all the swinging and muscle loads that are applied to those bones, so when you read about kicking boxers who do this type of conditioning from pimples, this is often one of the principles cited here, but I don't think it necessarily applies.

Wolf's law applies whenever there has been a high load over a long period of time, usually from a muscle pulling on the bone. This is in contrast to the types of high-impact repetitive loads that involve repeatedly kicking something with your shin. The other myth here is that somehow every time you break a bone, it becomes stronger after being repaired. This is partly true because in the initial phases of bone formation. When healing after a fracture, there is an area of ​​calcium formation called a callus that is actually stronger than the original bone, but what happens is your body remodels that callus back to the original healthy bone type, so so your bone is not stronger in the long term.

It has

broken

. I searched all the different research databases and couldn't find any articles that talked about this idea of ​​shin hearing or repetitive microtrauma causing bone thickening and conceptually it's hard for me to believe that bone actually becoming thicker or denser after doing this repetitive type of kicking, if so, is something that simply hasn't been studied and, as far as I know, hasn't been quantified. ItWhat is most likely to happen when people do this pimple conditioning is that there is a buildup of scar tissue. around the bone and a certain desensitization of those nerve fibers is obtained so that it is not as painful and you can tolerate more impacts as bad as this type of injury.

Silva was really lucky to not have a more severe result, fortunately the bones healed quite well. and the fact that the skin was not

broken

, there was no damage to the muscles, the blood vessel nerves actually recovered quite easily, once the bone was able to heal from that fracture, the mental block is probably the hardest thing to get over. it's just because you never know when it might happen again, so that's it for the video. I hope you enjoy taking a look at one of the most well-known but most serious classic injuries in UFC

history

. I hope you learned something here. about the anatomy of bones and the different mechanisms by which these bones fail, how we treat these types of injuries and I got a good idea about these types of things, let me know any questions or comments you have below and see you next time