What should have been just another day of training for the regional bodybuilding championship scheduled for May 2026 ended in a tragic accident. Ranieri Lopes Filho, a 31-year-old athlete, He suffered a tough injury while performing an extreme strength routine on the leg press machine.
The event occurred in the city of Teresina and was recorded by the athlete himself, who had decided to film his training with his cell phone.
A very hard injury
At the beginning, the exercise passed with apparent normality, but in a matter of seconds the situation became critical. The The 400 kilo load exceeds his ability to control and his legs open abruptly and unnaturally.
Immediately, Ranieri He puts his hand on his right knee and begins to scream desperately, while other athletes run to assist him and remove the weight. to avoid even more serious consequences. The scene, crude and alarming, quickly went viral on social networks.
The bodybuilder was rushed to a nearby hospital, where doctors confirmed a harsh diagnosis: rupture of the quadriceps tendon, a rare and extremely serious injury. According to specialists, this type of damage usually occurs in athletes subjected to maximum efforts, especially during exercises with eccentric contractions and excessive loads, such as the leg press.
The day after the accident, Ranieri underwent surgery to repair the affected tendon. Traumatologist Anisio Castelo Blanco warned that the recovery will be long and demanding. During the first three weeks, The athlete must keep the leg completely immobilized with a splint, without the possibility of bending the knee.
Later, between the sixth and eighth week, A progressive rehabilitation process will begin to regain mobility and strength, which will include physiotherapy sessions with electrical stimulation, a key treatment to promote muscle regeneration.
If the evolution is favorable, doctors estimate that Ranieri will not be able to resume intense training until the end of the year.
“The postoperative pain was even worse…”
“The postoperative pain was worse than that of the accident, but it has now disappeared. Today I no longer have any discomfort due to the pain of the surgery… Many athletes, and even non-athletes, perform this exercise with an equal or greater weight. It is not something so extraordinary,” he expressed in statements to G1.
“Many athletes, and even non-athletes, perform this exercise with an equal or greater weight. “It’s not something so extraordinary,” explained the athlete, who has been training for about ten years and participated in a bodybuilding competition in 2025. The weight used, 400 kilograms, is not unusual in his routine and he had done the same exercise on numerous occasions.
Ranieri Lopes Filho took advantage of his experience to warn about the risks of training with high loads, but rejected criticism that attributes this type of injury to the ego of athletes. “Whoever attributes an injury like this to ego or burden, in fact, does not have sufficient intellectual capacity to delve into a logical reasoning process that allows them to understand the complexity of this situation,” he said. He also stressed that he decided to publicly share the video of the accident to “make people aware that this can happen to anyone who sets out to train at a high level.”
