The UFC middleweight mandatory challenger Paulo Costa vows to retires at the age of 36 and plans to donate his brain for research when he passes away.
The Brazilian is undefeated in his pro MMA career, having a 12-0 record and he’ll be facing the middleweight champion Israel Adesanya at some point in 2020.
Costa, 28, is still pretty young in the fight game but he’s already thinking about life after combat sports.
“We know that the brain is made up of cells that no longer regenerate, we are only losing them,” Costa said to AG Fight (translated by Google Translate). “As the age advances, this amount decreases, so reflex is slow, speech becomes bad, forgetfulness. From time to time I’m doing my own research about it. There is even Rose, from the Gracie family, campaigning for brain donation, fighters, for research on this. I want to make my career as fast as possible, conquer everything, and I don’t want to fight after the age of 36. I would give my brain with pleasure.”
“This is a very serious thing because we don’t have data to know how much it can affect each one. Each one will have symptoms and will react differently with that amount of strokes,” he said. “What you can do is do a type of fight that minimizes the blows to the head. In training maybe even wearing protective equipment, like a helmet. This can mitigate a lot. Wearing big gloves, I never do sparring with MMA gloves, always with 16-ounce gloves to avoid blows to the head.
Source: www.mmanews.com
