We’re three weeks out from Conor McGregor’s disastrous UFC 329 comeback which saw the Irish sports star blow his knee out on the first kick thrown against Max Holloway. Not much information has been shared on what exactly happened. The only thing we’ve been told is “The Notorious” suffered an ACL and meniscus tear and will be out for a year following surgery.
There’s been a lot of conspiratorial voices out there questioning whether McGregor came into the Holloway fight injured, or if he went down and quit the moment the fight started. Now we have people questioning the true severity of his knee injury after McGregor posted multiple videos working out the injured knee. And these questions aren’t just coming from quacks.
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Dr. Brian Sutterer has been providing detailed breakdowns of UFC fighter injuries for years, and had some interesting comments regarding the latest batch of McGregor workout videos.
“We can see he’s sitting with his knee bent, it’s not like he’s got his leg out straight,” Sutterer said in a new YouTube video. “So right away, he had pretty darn good range of motion. Again, not like this is an impossible thing to see, but it’s something that is not really typical when you have a full ACL rupture.”
“We then see Conor doing these really aggressive knee extensions and his right knee looks fantastic. I mean, there’s like no swelling whatsoever in his right knee. Again, range of motion looks fantastic. He’s putting a lot of load through it … At this point maybe like a week and a half out from his injury, the knee looks fantastic.”
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At this point, Sutterer questioned whether McGregor had suffered a torn ACL or simply sprained it.
“This does not look in any way, shape, or form like an acute ACL rupture / torn meniscus, on-your-way-to-surgery knee,” Sutterer said. “Again, professional, elite athletes can heal and really kinda cope and compensate with a lot of different stuff. But seeing this is, like, wow. Like, that’s really bizarre and impressive that he already looks this good with this much muscle tone and bulk, range of motion, no swelling, that quickly, after a possible full ACL tear.”
“The most recent exercise video we saw was him just cranking it out on this rower. I mean, you would look at this and not even know which knee was injured. Like, this range of motion to get that deep into flexion is fantastic. To be able to push off like that seemingly pretty equal through both knees? Again, quad activation looks fantastic. Doesn’t seem to be even the slightest bit of swelling in his knee.”
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“It’s very possible that this is an ACL sprain that hopefully doesn’t need a full ACL reconstruction,” Sutterer concluded. “Best case scenario is that the ACL is injured, but not to the point that it needs surgery. I don’t know why they would still be waiting to go in and do surgery on the meniscus if the meniscus needed surgery.”
Sutterer finished off his video saying he hoped all this meant McGregor would be able to return sooner rather than later.
“I hope I’m not being too conspiratorial here,” he said. “I really don’t think that Conor is lying about this injury. I don’t think he’s making up an injury and he’s not actually hurt. I think there’s a real injury. I just don’t think we maybe, necessarily have all the facts and know all the details of it. Because it doesn’t seem to add up 100% with what we’re seeing timeline wise.”