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It Takes A Very Steady Hand, Or Foot

If you’ve trained Brazilian jiu-jitsu for any appreciable amount of time, you’ve had injuries.

Personally, I consider myself one of the more fortunate. Sure, I’ve had the occasional malady, but I have been lucky to avoid a major injury that would require surgery. Besides the pain and expense — as much it galls me to admit this — I don’t want to take the time off from training that a major injury would require.

One of the first pieces of advice I try to tell the new guys who go too hard is that injury is the real enemy: if you want to get better at jiu-jitsu, staying on the mats is job one. Especially for a guy who weighs 138, turns 40 this year and trains regularly, I’ve been very lucky.

It takes a very steady hand ...
It takes a very steady hand … and believe me, the “Skill Game Where You’re The Doctor” bit from the original game applies to our community’s rampant self-diagnosis.

That’s what I keep telling myself this month. Leading up to the New York Open, I had a nagging foot injury that I trained through. At the tournament, I re-injured it during my finals match. Now, every time it gets manipulated in the wrong way — even gently — it becomes debilitating.

But there’s the Catch-22: you can’t train without risking injury, but part of the reason you want to avoid injury is so you can keep training, especially with a tournament (like, say, the Mundials) coming up. Where is the line between being tough and being stupid?

The answer I’ve come to is that you must evaluate two factors: risk of re-injury and reward of training. When you’re nicked up, which is how I’d classify my current injury, you can still train some things. For example, one of my training partners hurt his knee and spent his healing time working half-guard. You also must evaluate your ability to protect yourself while drilling and rolling, and figure out whether you’re taking too great a chance on setting yourself back.

Naturally, figuring this out depends on the severity of an injury. I’ve had back injuries that were simple stiffness and would loosen up once I got moving, and back injuries that I’d have had to be a lunatic to train through.

Given my various experiences with being nicked up, I’ve often been surprised at how easy some injuries are to train with and how hard others are. I do a lot with gi grips, for example, but finger and hand injuries are relatively simple to train with. You can wrap ’em up and hide the injured hand. (In fact, at least one person reading this has choked me using only one hand).

The opposite end of the spectrum: rib injuries. I’ve had two ribs pop out. You use your core for everything, in jiu-jitsu and in life. One of my rib injuries was extremely painful and fairly debilitating. The other one didn’t hurt much. But then I tried to sit up and couldn’t. This foot injury has shown me — again, stupid as it sounds — just how much you use your foot, both in guard and on top. It’s harder to hide than you’d think.

After musing on which of my little bumps and bruises were hardest to train with, I made this graphic rating the injuries on a scale of 0 (a cakewalk) to 10 (sweet merciful crap, maybe we’ll stay in bed and watch videos).

This is just my own experience and is not meant to be taken very seriously. The only medical advice I feel comfortable giving is “you should eat right and train jiu-jitsu.”

This is a super-scientific image from my most recent x-ray and MRI. They combined them into an MRX.
This is a super-scientific image from my most recent x-ray and MRI. They combined them into an MRX.

There shouldn’t be many surprises here. The big muscles and joints are always big problems. I also always think it’s worth noting that if you have an infection, that’s a 10 and you should stay home, period: I raise an eyebrow at how many folks don’t get this.

One notable rating, and this might be a function of the severity of the injury: I personally found it easier to train with a messed-up knee than with a messed-up foot. Obviously, my knee injury wasn’t a major thing, but I was able to change up the things I was doing fairly effectively to protect the knee.

With the foot? Can’t be on top, you’ve got to stand on it. Can’t really keep the guard closed, and with open guard, you either have to step on hips and biceps (ouch!) or try to hide that foot by putting it further away from your opponent — which means you need to shrimp off of it (also ouch).

We all have strengths and weaknesses. In terms of the old remedy of Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation, my ICE game is tight, and the rest I have a problem with. (See what I did there?)

The old saying goes, “If you wake up one morning after training and nothing hurts, you died.” My hope is we all start to prove that saying wrong. Happy and healthy training to all of you.

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Don’t Get Staph

The headline summarizes my advice to you, the reader. After wrestling in middle school and a year in high school — and after 18 months of training BJJ — I finally zigged when staph zagged.

It’s frustrating, because I’ve been training really hard for the Pans at the end of the month, and when the infection hit I felt like I was better than ever in terms of technique, timing and conditioning. Making matters doubly vexing, I’m the guy who takes every precaution: I always wash all my gear after every use, even my belt; we mop our mats after every class; I use Athletic Body Care body wash and lotion.

Ultimately, no matter how many precautions you take, mat-borne illness can get you. It’s just part of the price of admission to this great sport of ours. (I’m particularly at risk, I must acknowledge, because I have eczema, so I have more breaks in my skin than most people on average).

I was lucky. I was also paranoid. These two factors enabled me to catch it early. I tell this story so others will know the warning signs. Hopefully you’ll never need to know these signs, but if you have the misfortune to get the illness, the sooner you get after it, the better.

Training the previous night had gone great. It was my 24th straight day training, but I didn’t feel run down or sore. But when I went to bed, my shin was sore. “Huh,” I thought. “I must’ve clashed shins with someone and not realized it.” I didn’t see a bruise, but you don’t always turn black and blue when you get whacked.

About a half-hour later, I noticed a small patch of my skin had turned red. I raised an eyebrow at this.

About a half-hour after that, a portion of my shin about 3.5 inches by one inch was red and swollen. My skin felt stretched out, and the ara felt warm to the touch. Uh oh.

I called the doctor.

Fortunately, they were able to see me just two hours later (if they had put me off, I would have gone to the emergency room). I was amazed to hear that most people my doctor sees that have staph wait until it starts to weep before they make an appointment. By this point, you’re a raging mess of contagion and it takes much more work to get the infection under control.

Since I have no illusions that I am stronger than a bunch of microbes, I eagerly accepted the powerful antibiotics she prescribed and gobbled those suckers down.

As if you needed convincing, having staph (even a mild case) is awful. There’s the pain, of course: mine felt about twice as sore as the worst bruise I’ve ever had. The antibiotics themselves mess you up, too, and take my advice: do not gobble these on an empty stomach. If you’ve been given the right medicine, you will get sick.

Far and away the worst part for me, though, was just not being able to train. I feel the same way about injuries: being off the mat drives me crazy, and retards my progress. Injuries are the enemy.

Infections are worse, though, because if you’re honest about what you’ve got (and you MUST be, unless you’re a real prick), a lot of people will balk at training with you. This is totally understandable: nobody wants this stuff, and with good reason.

So I played it safe. I was told on Thursday that I wasn’t contagious, but I waited four days after that to get back on the mat. No reason to take unnecessary risks, and even though it was driving me crazy not to train, I wanted to be certain I wasn’t putting anyone else in danger.

Needless to say, it was a big setback. I took time off from training, missed a US Grappling tournament (I’d signed up to do all eight divisions again), and generally had to sit inside and sleep a lot. And it could have been a lot worse.

So now, several days after that, I only have one more day in my antibiotic regimen. Hopefully, this will end both the staph and the “feeling like crap from antibiotics” portion of this training camp.

Fortunately, I have implemented a new anti-staph strategy in my training.

Rainbow tights: is there anything they can’t do?

The rainbow scares away the microbes, you see.

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Our Friend the Shoulder

Ah, the noble shoulder: integral part of brawny tasks.

Atlas used his to hold up the (mythical) world, Leonardo drew the (real) joint in detail, and modern English users have metaphor-ed and verb-ed what was originally a noun. We shoulder burdens and put our shoulders to the wheel: you wouldn’t do that with a pinky toe or a navel. When Carl Sandburg wanted to tell you how burly the city of Chicago was, he talked about the town’s shoulders.

And mine hurt, especially the right one.

Mine look like this on the inside, too. I hope. I also have more hair than the model. But not on my shoulders. I hope.

Important disclaimer: getting nicked up is a part of training. Everyone knows this. Call it “The Gentle art” all you want (and that’s really a misleading translation, but that’s a topic for another day), you’ll still be icing something every once in a while.

Why write about this now? Again, injuries are a part of training, and I want to be honest with myself about what jiu-jitsu does to my body — the good and the bad.

The pain’s not much: it only hurts appreciably when I move it horizontally from right to left, as if I were at the end of a ZZ Top music video. But when I do that, I find myself hearing Groucho Marx’s voice telling me not to.

Apart from that, there seems to be a good deal of soreness and much less range of motion. I decided at the start of the vacation that I was only going to train a little bit, substituting yoga and deep-tissue massage for shoulder activities.

I’ll be frank: I’m disappointed that my six-week strategy for recovery hasn’t succeeded to the level I expected. It has improved, but it’s far from fixed.

Granted, that six-week strategy of rest, relaxation, and massage took a bit of a diversion into training judo with the Palau team, but hey, let’s not nitpick.

I’d like to say that I’m going to take it easy for another couple of weeks. But training camp for the no-gi Pans is starting, and, well, you know how it is.

My shoulders might be half as brawny as normal, but they’ll do. I’m not from Chicago anyway.