Woman Left Paralyzed by Inverted Sit-Ups Injury at Gym

A 23-year-old Brazilian woman just went viral after sustaining a horrifying injury while working out. Now, Marcelle Mancuso is opening up about the temporary paralysis she suffered when her ab exercise went very wrong.

When the incident occurred in January 2016, Mancuso was reportedly doing inverted sit-ups, a more intense version of the regular ab exercise in which your head angles down when you extend and your legs are elevated. If that sounds tough, it is: Working against gravity in this way creates a very difficult movement, as certified personal trainer Brittany Ross tells Allure. But it can be dangerous, too: Mancuso slipped off the apparatus and hit her head on the floor, breaking the fifth vertebra in the neck section of her spine, as The Independent reported earlier this week. Another vertebra was also knocked out of place by Mancuso's fall and a third was smashed, compressing her spinal cord and resulting in paralysis from the neck down. Mancuso was taken to the emergency room and later diagnosed with tetraplegia, with no movement in her arms or legs.

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Miraculously, however, Mancuso has made a recovery after undergoing physical therapy. A month after beginning therapy, she took her first steps since the accident. "After four months I started to improve my leg strength and five months after the accident I stopped having fainting and dizziness while walking," she told The Independent. "After six months I managed to walk and my legs did not sway anymore."

Noting that she hasn't treated Mancuso so has no direct knowledge of her case, Charla Fischer, an orthopedic surgeon at NYU Langone Health’s Spine Center, says that it seems Mancuso had paralysis from a traumatic spinal cord injury rather than a typical gym injury. "This poor woman sustained a fall directly onto her head and neck at the gym. So to me, she sustained a trauma, and not so much a gym or sports injury," Fischer says. "A trauma is a random accident or event that causes a large force or impact to the body. A more typical gym or sports injury is something that occurs from injuring the body through pushing it too hard in physical activity, like pulling a muscle."

Ross, meanwhile, cautions that it's vital to ensure equipment is properly set up before trying inverted sit-ups. "There are plenty of safe ab exercises to do on the ground that does not require this kind of contraption that puts the client at risk," Ross says. "If a trainer or client wants to add excitement to their training by going upside down, it's extremely important that the trainer do everything in their power to ensure client safety and be at the ready if something goes wrong." Fischer is also a fan of floor ab exercises, in which your body weight serves as your resistance. She points out that while random accidents do happen, it's smart to enlist the help of an experienced spotter if you're insistent on trying an inverted sit-up.

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