Category Archives: Injury

Avoiding Knee Injury Against Jumping Closed Guard

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I firmly believe that the road to improvement in any sport should involve the mastery of injury prevention. I am constantly trying to understand what positions may lead to injury and look to avoid those positions or it least avoid the aspects of those positions that result in injury. Let me be more specific with an example from a recent tournament…

A common dangerous situation is when I’m looking to take my opponent down and they are looking to jump closed guard. In most cases, neither person has extensive experience with this exact situation. Most grapplers do not drill (nearly enough) jumping closed guard, and I certainly don’t drill shooting a double while a person is jumping closed guard. Those drilling sessions are too painful to imagine. What has happened to me in the past a few times is I made the mistake of not keeping my knees bent (even just slightly). There are a million reasons not to keep you legs locked out, but when you get tired you do stupid things. So when my opponent jumps closed guard, it’s tempting to step the straight leading leg forward. If they jump too low, this will result in their bodyweight slamming up against my knee. Here’s an example:

When your opponent jumps closed guard, they often pull you forward. This naturally forces you to step forward with as the person does in this video. Injury result when this step is taken on a straight leg not a bent one. The way to avoid injury is to keep a strong base and a bent leading leg. That way the leading leg can support the weight of the jumping person’s body. In general it’s good to have at least a slightly bent leg at all time, kind of like Olympic-style wrestlers do. With a slightly bent leg you can change levels quicker, sprawl back quicker, move around quicker, etc.

A Single Leg is Hard to Finish

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I tweaked my hip yesterday and was limping all day like an old wise judoka. Add to that a lack of sleep due to a bunch of deadlines and stress at work, and I was a damn mess (and missed the usually very good competition training session at Marco’s). When I’m mentally drained in that way, I’ll drill at home and watch some instructional videos on the same several positions I’ve been working on over the last year. Here’s one: the single leg.

Look at 5:50 in the following video. It’s two minutes of AJ Agazarm trying to finish a single leg on Victor Silveiro in a brown belt match-up at the 2013 Pans.

I see this kind of battle a lot, especially at the lighter weights, and especially in no-gi, but it really spans all weight divisions and styles. As is often said in wrestling, the way to win this battle is early aggression. It’s best to attack in combinations before the opponent gets a chance to establish good balance on the one foot. For this reason, I don’t like the single leg in training. If the training partner doesn’t want to go down, there often isn’t a nice and controlled way to put them down. I like to work technique that don’t hurt people, because I want to get a lot of reps in, and it’s easier to get reps in when the other person isn’t being destroyed in the process.

A lot of jiu jitsu guys (Marcelo Garcia is a great example) like the “running the pipe” finish. I think it’s effective, but it never clicked with me the way the “sweep the leg” finish has. Kolat shows a good version of it:

Here’s a nice set of 9 videos on finishing single leg takedowns:

The way to finish a single leg is simple: (1) keep them moving, (2) combine attacks, (3) aggression. All that is a lot of work. I like to think of the single leg finish as almost a position in itself, and like any position my goal is to make sure that I’m expanding less energy than my opponent. I think I’ve often fallen victim to that adrenaline rush that goes with the feeling that I’m very close to taking the guy down. There is no “almost” in grappling or life. You have to do the smart thing up until the very end. Don’t throw technique and sense out the window just because you’re “almost” there.

Riding Out the Lows

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“It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.” - Dale Carnegie

sisyphus-happyI got trampled by the flu last week. For the first time since I started judo or jiu jitsu or even just working out in general, I didn’t want to do any type of exercise, not for physical reasons but purely mental ones. It was a strange feeling, and a pretty dark one that I still haven’t quite shaken. But I’ve lived just long enough to know that all such feelings pass, and all you can do is smile and watch it pass.

I still showed up to train every day this week, but far from my usual pre-planned purpose-driven practice. I just showed up and enjoyed it in a very different way than I usually do. I didn’t care about improving, learning, etc. I just enjoyed the simple conversation with the usual suspects. I get a certain comfort from talking to people who are always there, especially black belts and old timers, knowing that they’ve gone through this shit hundreds of times before. Everyone goes through dark times: due to injury, due to tension at home or at work, due to just the way the Earth rotates about its axis.

One of the things that was particularly upsetting to me is how little I wanted to compete. There was a local tournament this weekend that I was planning on going to because a couple of my buddies were going as well, but I just hated the idea of stepping on the mat. I promised myself a long time ago, that I can be scared shitless, tired, not ready, none of that matters. But if I’m not simply happy to step on the mat, there is no reason to do it. I compete to challenge myself, but at the end of the day, beyond the stress and nerves, I just love the thrill of “battle” if you could ever call judo or jiu jitsu that ;-) So it sucked very much not to look forward to competing.

I’m going to take it easy, continue drilling, training, watching videos, and hope to do the following upcoming tournaments. I might do none of them, but I sincerely hope to do all of them:

  • NAGA Philly (Feb 3)
  • World Pro Montreal (Feb 9)
  • Boston Open (March 3)
  • Pans (Mar 23)
  • NY Open (April 20)

Worst Flu Symptom: No Jiu Jitsu For a Week

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influenza_virusLast Wednesday afternoon I went from being healthy to a feverish mess in a period of two hours. I quickly got up to a fever of 103.5 and stayed there until Satuday. I oscillated between 103 and 104. I’ve had the flu a bunch of times before, but this was the worst one.

I have never taken 5 days off from training since I started. Surprisingly I didn’t think about training (or anything) almost at all. A high fever has a way of turning your brain into mush, maybe as a self-preservation mechanism. I would never go to train while with fever, since I wouldn’t want to infect others.

Not much positive about this experience, but here are some educational aspect that I manage to pry from its virus-laden jaws:

  • Get a flu shot every year: It reduces your chance of getting the flu by 40%. It’s not 100% but it has no downside. All the rumored downsides are myths, Google it please if you don’t believe me.
  • Hallucinations: As much as I didn’t appreciate the headaches and the chills, I found the hallucinations to be a humbling and eye-opening experience. I watched  ”Jiro Dreams of Sushi” so a lot of my hallucinations were about a restaurant kitchen and fresh fish. The power of the mind to take simple ideas and turn them into rich colorful ever-changing dream sequences just because my body temperature is 104 degree is amazing. I was literally laying in bed, eyes wide open, watching a 30+ minute show created entirely by my mind. I was basically Alice in Wonderland.
  • Running into things: Another educational part of this fever was a significant loss of balance. I kept almost falling and running into things. I dropped plates, spilled drinks, and felt as if I was an alien tasked with learning how to operate a human body. Basically, it’s like my body was completely drunk, while my brain was sober. Call me crazy, but I enjoyed the experience. It was a rare chance to step outside myself.

The above may sounds like a good time. It was not. It was unpleasant physically, but what was most difficult was the fact that I was out of commission “intellectually”. I had no interest or ability to think, read, write, or communicate. I did manage to compose a couple of emails but they were for the most part nonsensical and luckily were understood on the other side.

How to Prevent Injury in Jiu Jitsu or At Least Minimize Its Effects

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I had a streak of minor injuries in December that made training an educational experience. In terms of minor injuries, I think there are three types: (1) chronic, (2) acute from chaos, and (3) acute from specific technique…

Chronic Injury

The more you train the worse this injury gets. For me, both my shoulders are plagued by tendinitis. Basically, ice and rest makes these better, and training makes it worse. I think these tendinitis-type injuries are a part of life for most serious athletes.

icing-injuryHow to prevent it (or minimize its effect): Chronic injuries cannot be managed in a half-assed way. They can often take as much dedication as the training itself. You have to ice it religiously when it acts up. Also, you have to do the types of exercises on it that your doctor usually gives you after you get surgery on it. So for my shoulders that means doing rotator cuff exercises with resistance bands every day. It doesn’t take more than 5 minutes, but it makes the world of difference in strengthening the tiny support muscles around the vulnerable area.

Acute injury from random chaotic scramble/accident:

A one-time random clash of some kind that could not have been easily prevented in a cosmic sense. This could be something you do, your training partner does, or those training around you do.

How to prevent it (or minimize its effect): Even though I say that it “could not have been easily prevented”, I think the chance of that kind of injury happening could be drastically reduced based on your general approach to training and the style of your game. I think that there are million factors involved here including your personality, your age, your physical build, the training approach in your gym, etc. For me, what works best I think is to err on the side of a Xande-style game vs a Jeff Glover style game. What I mean by that is I stick to a very basic game, and don’t get too creative positionally. All the creativity happens in the tiny details of the movements not the broad movement themselves. I use more pressure than speed, and try not to move explosively unless I have already extensively drilled that movement and know how to avoid injuring both myself and my training partner.

Acute injury from specific technique

A wrist-lock, a heel hook, a half guard lock down, a reverse de la riva sweep, etc. This is when a very specific kind of technique applied with power behind it causes a part of your body to turn or move in a way it’s not meant to.

How to prevent it (or minimize its effect): I try not to put myself in any position where I don’t have strength supporting my joints. Put another way, I avoid using flexibility to go to positions where my core, arms, or legs are not able to apply strength to get out of the position (when needed to prevent injury).

The Art of Training Injured

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Injury is a part of jiu jitsu, as it is of any sport. If you train seriously, you will often have to train through minor (and not-so-minor) injuries in the neck, back, knees, shoulders, wrists, elbows, ribs, hips, groin, fingers, toes, etc. I believe that  it’s possible to train in jiu jitsu at nearly 100% while some part of your body is injured. The range of possible techniques is so vast in BJJ that you can construct a whole game around the injury that:

  1. Protects the injured area
  2. Allows you to attack without using the injured body part
  3. Does not violate basic jiu jitsu fundamentals (posture, balance, pressure, base, etc)

As I’m injured now, the question often arises in my head whether I should tell my training partners that I’m injured. In my experience, that provides very little benefit, in that the training partner often starts flow rolling with me like I’m an 8 year old white belt who is trying jiu jitsu for the first time. Of course, they are often not used to rolling like that and thus move awkwardly. This ends up increasing the chance of aggravating the injury, instead of decreasing it like they expect.

The approach that has worked for me is I change my game to avoid certain positions which increase the likelihood of affecting the injured area. For example, for me right now, that position is inside a tight half guard. So I adjust my passing game so that I don’t end up in half guard, or if I do I attack it immediately to switch to reverse half guard to avoid the kind of position that will put too much pressure on my injury.

In a way, training injured is a selfish act, because it’s much harder for the non-injured training partner to have to adjust. Some people choose to sit out all together. That doesn’t work for me. I always put a lot of emphasis on drilling, but live training is essential, and I find that if I come at it with no ego, it’s possible to train hard without aggravating the injury.

Injuries Before Major Competitions

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It seems that jiu jitsu and judo athletes get injured at a higher rate closer to major competitions. Partly, this is just a matter of misperception, since what probably happens is that athletes complain about their injuries more publicly leading up to tournaments. This is because they are more disappointed at the possibility of their injury preventing them from competing. And in the modern day and age, when you’re disappointed, you turn to Facebook ;-)

However, there’s probably some reality to this observation as well. For example, in a  attempt to improve my cardio, I have started doing more sprints, hills, and steps than I would ever do before. I turned up the intensity on this cardio-training as well. As a result, a few slips ups here and there have led to little issues with my knees, lower back, ankles, and toes. Any of those little tweaks could’ve been major injuries with some small likelihood.

It seems that the solution is to be very smart about how I turn up the training. I don’t push myself into new things when I’m exhausted, and I don’t try stuff that my muscles are not ready for. For example, I haven’t been doing Olympic lifts, and while they are a great heart-rate-raising exercise, this is not a good time to get back into doing them.

Also, I should mention “mental injuries”. It’s important not to burn out. I have to work a lot every day (as most of us do), and turning up training in any way can certainly be destructive to my motivation to compete. There is about 9 days left before Worlds, and I have certainly felt a few moments where I’m sick of jiu jitsu. It’s a fine line to walk. I have to remember that I have no chance of winning unless I step on the mat on May 31 truly excited to compete. If I’m too stressed, dreading it (in a negative way), and just want it to be over with, I might win a couple matches, but I will not be able to beat the tougher guys.

To beat the best of a big division, I have to really want it, and for that I have to remain injury-free, both physically and mentally.

Now, back to work… I have so much left to finish today… Sigh.

Training With Pollen Allergies

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During the months of April, May, and sometimes June, I get to experience my body’s allergic reaction to pollen which include: sneezing, nasal congestion, coughing, itchy watery eyes, runny nose, itchy throat, etc. I have trouble breathing, and because of that I also have trouble sleeping. Not surprisingly that has the added effect of fatigue and irritability.

This all makes training, work, and life in general notably less pleasant.

Whenever I train with someone in judo or jiu jitsu, I find a strange kind of comfort if they visibly are suffering from allergy symptoms as well. It’s like a brotherhood of mild suffering. We nod at each other with understanding as a stream of mucus makes its way out of our noses and down our faces.

It’s one of those things that I would never miss a tournament for, but it definitely takes me out of the competing mindset and can be a barrier to the kind of hard work required to grow as an athlete and academic.

I’m trying to figure out how to deal with it, but for the most part, just sucking it up works best. Every once in a while though, a whiny blog post like this will get out. More than anything it’s just a call to arms for the hay fever brotherhood.

The Six Stages of Grief After a Jiu Jitsu Injury

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My knee popped in training (MCL sprain). It hurts, but it’s manageable. Feels unstable, but I feel that recovery is possible without taking any time off.

It seems that once people start having knee problems of this kind, it has a long lasting effect, not just physically, but psychologically. Confidence in the knee’s stability is lowered, affecting many decisions you make while grappling. I definitely feel it now, but I’m staying positive and taking it all in stride.

With any injury, big or small (though with jiu jitsu my injuries have been all small so far), I seem to go through stages that resemble the stages of grief. For the fun of it, let me try to describe them:

  1. Shock: The moment an injury happens, the pain is usually most acute. I don’t know how bad it is, but the fact that it could be very bad leaves me in a state of shock where I just remain motionless, trying not to think about anything.
  2. Anger: Once I get a handle on how bad the injury is, I realize that I can’t train any more at that moment and have to go home. That realization leads to anger at myself, at the world, at the people around me, at everything really. It’s the kind of anger you feel when you stub your toe on something and you yell out a profanity of the creative variety.
  3. Depression: Anger quickly gives way to zen-like reflection of my place in the world, and how nothing really matters. Somehow, in this case, the result of this reflection is usually a kind of loneliness.
  4. Recovery Planning: After the nihilistic depression wears out (usually after a nap and a snack), I get very optimistic, and make grandiose detailed plans for recovery. I plan on what I will do if I can’t train. I plan on what I will do if I can only train lightly. And so on…
  5. Acceptance: I prepare myself mentally for taking time off if the injury does heal without prolonged rest. I imagine myself taking several months off (which kills me to think about). I slowly accept the negative elements of the circumstance, accept the plan of action, and try to focus on the hope that such a plan provides.
  6. Game Change: During the days and weeks after the injury I experiment with what hurts and how to avoid making the injury worse. Based on that I change my jiu jitsu game.

All that sounds kind of depressing. I don’t exactly go through all those steps, but I do experience parts of each. I just like putting things into a numbered list.

Anyway, hopefully I’m lucky in this case, and will be able to at least continue drilling (and maybe training) as often as I did before, and won’t damage the ligament any further.

There are a bunch of tournaments coming up, next one in 10 days, but I’m trying not to think about the fact that I may have to miss any of them.

The Psychological Challenges of Injury

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Japanese judoka throwing his opponent on his headThis post is inspired by Lori who re-hurt an injury from Friday, and was standing at the edge of the mat at judo practice today with the look like she was about to start crying from frustration.

I’ve been there, many times, and wanted to put down in writing some comments on the mental side of an injury. To me an injury is a solitary experience. You’re really never welcome on the mat with an injury. It sounds harsh, but for the most part people feel that either:

  1. You should take time off to heal and recover
  2. Your “injury” is not serious enough to adjust training or, worse, to sit out

I’m a big believer that the vast majority of injuries are the kind of minor tweaks that prevent you from doing some parts of training but allow you to do other parts. If you can move, you can train something, and more importantly, train in such a way that minimizes the chance of hindering progress toward full recovery.

I also think that overuse injuries are not a reason to take a day off, but a reason to restructure your training routine in such a way that the affected area is not put under much or any stress. Especially when you’re starting out (first 1-2 years of judo or jiu jitsu), this is an essential part of learning how to use your body efficiently to execute clean effective technique, avoid useless over-exertion, and understand the kinematics of the positions that lead to injury.

Of course, it’s a constant challenge for a coach to understand whether he needs to tell an athlete to stop bitching or if he needs to accommodate the training modifications required to go around an injury. In my experience, coaches lean too much to one side or the other: either baby me too much or turn Dan Gable on me. Walking that line effectively both for a coach and an athlete is tough.

Just a little personal comment… I don’t complain about my shoulders almost at all anymore. But they’re often over-stressed and hurt. I just learned to deal with them. I ice them after every session. I do a bunch of rotator cuff resistance band exercises every morning. And when the pain becomes acute, I’ll only work techniques that don’t heavily utilize my shoulders in training. I don’t tell anyone about it most days. I’ve figure it out.

On the other hand, a new “injury” happened to me this week: a tooth infection. I bitched about it to everyone. However, I know next time, I won’t nearly as much, since I learned how to deal with it, avoid it, quiet it, and in general just weather the storm. No one really wants to hear about my injuries or anyone else’s. When it comes to injuries it’s a “don’t ask, don’t tell” world.

And now for a related poll…