Former UFC and Bellator fighter Erick Silva has announced his retirement from MMA.
After fifteen years as a professional fighter, Erick Silva is ready to step away from the sport. The former UFC welterweight has suffered some health issues over the past year and has decided that now is the right time to walk away from the sport. Silva spoke recently with Globo about his recent issues, including a heart attack and hospitalization.
“In June 2021, I had a heart attack,” Silva said via MMA Junkie. “I didn’t train for a year-and-a-half, and I went to train with Joilton Peregrino, and I put in a lot of effort. We did a five-round workout, and I started to feel a pain in my chest. This pain confused me a lot with muscle fatigue. I didn’t understand what was happening, so much so that I went home, played with my son in the pool despite the pain, and only relieved it with breathing work. It relieved but didn’t stop. So I took the car and went to the hospital alone. There, we did the tests. My cardiac enzymes were very high, and I was hospitalized.”
Silva explains the heart attack could have come from his issues with coronavirus
Silva explained that he had suffered chest pains during workouts and later went to the hospital to get checked out. This was several years after his last fight with Bellator. Silva later explained that the issues could be COVID-19 related. He and his family contracted the virus in April of 2020.
“I stayed in the ICU for a week, and my cardiologist said that it could probably have been a sequel of COVID-19, because a thrombus was found in the coronary artery, and that was preventing the flow of blood afterward,” he said. “I was still for a while, then I did my routine exams, and it was found that the anatomy of my heart was perfect. But that fact was a decisive point for me not to fight anymore.”
Silva had a good career in which he fought some of the toughest men in MMA, including Paul Daley, Matt Brown, Josh Koscheck, and Neil Magny. Silva’s last fight was in Bellator back in 2019. He lost two in a row in Bellator before getting ill. Silva was a staple in the UFC welterweight division during his time there and although he ended with a 7-8 record, he secured finishes in all of his seven wins. He now owns a martial arts school for children called “Instituto Erick Silva” in Brazil.
