BJJ is wreaking my body

[M2CattleCo]

I'm 35. I stepped out of the boxing ring and MMA mat/cage at 32 and that was way too late. I've had more strains and tears than I can remember, broke several toes, one hand, tore the pleural lining on a lung, bulged a disk in my spine, all sorts of nonsense. I was pretty tough back then, but I'm not so tough now and probably not as effective as I would have been had I just learned some basics and trained somewhat frequently.

I'm 5'8", 135lbs. I carry a gun because I know my limitations and I'm not into exchanging bodily fluids with randoms miscreants and my size, honestly, I'm at a distinct disadvantage before the fighting even starts.

Exercise and stay in shape, train on your handgun and carbine.

[Dismas316]

Unless you are a very rare person, your mobility probably sucks.

Yes it does, thanks for the tips on exercises.

Great comments from all as hoped for. And you all are right, I need to slow it down and go easy. I am very competitive and hate losing. I new this going in but it has been harder for me to check my ego than I thought it would. I love competing and even beating some of the younger/stronger guys, but it's taken it's toll and clearly is not worth it.

This has been a humbling sport in more ways than one but the ego part is actually been a bigger challenge than I expected, but that has been the problem. Definitely need to check the ego at the door. Great comments from all of you as usual.

[45dotACP]

I look at BJJ like I look at my job... You'll get hurt...not a question of if but when, however you can condition, strengthen, and harden your body through a solid weight based exercise program and that can reduce the frequency and severity of your injuries. Also...take it easy, learn at a steady pace, and avoid the guy who likes breaking his rolling partners...because there's one in every crowd. Don't feel the need to go 100% each roll...getting tapped is not a reflection on your character or ability so if you're caught, take the tap over the snap every time. And whatever you do...

Don't pull guard

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[Paul Sharp]

Yes it does, thanks for the tips on exercises.

Great comments from all as hoped for. And you all are right, I need to slow it down and go easy. I am very competitive and hate losing. I new this going in but it has been harder for me to check my ego than I thought it would. I love competing and even beating some of the younger/stronger guys, but it's taken it's toll and clearly is not worth it.

This has been a humbling sport in more ways than one but the ego part is actually been a bigger challenge than I expected, but that has been the problem. Definitely need to check the ego at the door. Great comments from all of you as usual.

Wins or losses don't exist in the gym. We have to get that out of our heads. I constantly tell my new guys that no one is going to walk in with a camera crew, and a giant check to congratulate them on tapping out someone in the gym. Guys that keep track of who they tap out in the gym have issues, and usually don't last long. That stuff just doesn't matter.

I get tapped out every time I roll. I don't care. I'm working on something so I expect to get caught until I perfect it, then it's on to the next thing. Or maybe they're just having a great night? As Cecil said to me once, "sometimes your partner gets to have a good day, too." True story, sometimes they get to be the windshield.

Tap early, tap often, learn. One of the best things I ever learned about rolling was if I have to muscle it? Let it go. In other words if the only way for me to escape is to muscle my way out? Just tap. Do a quick hot wash with your training partner to figure out how you got caught, how to counter it, (if you don't already know), shake hands and go again.

Tom Oberhue is a fantastic coach in Beaverton, OR. Tom once told me, regarding tapping out, to tap out before I was completely caught. Because the submission I'm caught in, isn't the issue, it's all the things that I missed that happened before the submission that really matter. How did he setup this triangle, and how did I not see it coming? Those are the important elements that need to be hot washed. I can teach a Koala how to land a face choke, technically there isn't much to it. The setup for the face choke that my opponent never saw coming, that's the art. That's the important stuff, and you can't learn that if every roll is a battle of Highlander proportions with one guy standing in the middle of the mat holding his felled opponents scalp.

Plus? Rolling/training this way is a lot better for you on every level. You kill your own ego before someone else rips it out and crushes if for you, you save your body, and you learn the art.

[SamAdams]

Interesting thread that I'll follow. - I first trained in the martial arts when in my early 20s. Have worked out and been physically very active all my life. Looking back, the thing which slowed me down the most was various injuries through the years. Some of those long time injuries still nag at me a little, now & then.

Taking on drunks & bad guys isn't part of my current job description. I look for disciplines and techniques which will provide the greatest self defense benefits vs. the potential costs in a beat up body. Some of those disciplines are even suggested for women and seniors. None of them require hours of brutal practice in order to be effective. - They may not serve in every instance, but the odds & benefits vs costs trade off looks pretty good to me for this point in my life. YMMV

[Tuesday]

Regular moderate weight training will tend to make you more resilient, make time spent training for your sport easier, etc. In particular, lean mass and leg strength are strongly associated with longevity and quality of life as you age. Since you're trying not just to protect yourself from injury but also to avoid it, it might be a good idea to skip risky things like exercises at the limits of your range of motion (e.g. behind the neck presses and pull-downs, round back good mornings, and kettlebell arm bars), at the limits of your strength or endurance (e.g. one rep max attempts or going to failure or exhaustion), or things that offer a lot of pain for little gain (*cough* CrossFit *cough*). Dan John's Easy Strength isn't a bad place to start.

Although it'll probably be frowned upon as "cheating," if not outright illegal, you might want to look into theraputic doses of anabolic/androgenic drugs. Benefits you can expect are improved recovery and mood, increased sex drive, less joint pain, better calorie partitioning (more calories go to making muscle, fewer to making fat) and body composition, lower mortality, etc. There are usually few negatives at theraputic doses and they're usually easy to manage. And there's some suggestion that hormone replacement might be even more important to aging men than women.

Pain management can be a bit weird. While the classical methods of analgesics and gradual rehabilitation are effective, the biopsychosocial (BPS) model of pain also shows some promise. Basically what it says is that pain can be consciously controlled, and cites as evidence things like surgery performed under hypnosis rather than anesthesia, people like Wim Hoff who have trained others under controlled conditions to tolerate extreme cold, and how some 70% of amputees have phantom pain (pain in limbs that no longer even exist). Some people even go so far as to say that all pain is exclusively in the mind and totally consciously controllable, asserting that everyone can do it, and citing things like how pretend back surgery and rehab has been shown to be as effective at fixing back pain as real surgery. This may pose a problem as it places a burden of sufficiently strong belief on the patient. Basically, "If it didn't work, it's because you didn't believe strong enough. You don't need drugs, you just need to believe harder." This is one of the same arguments used to justify belief in parapsychological nonsense. Opiates, on the other hand, don't require belief to work. For back pain, I know of at least one study that says complete rest seems to be the least effective way of managing it and weight training the most. Unfortunately this doesn't offer definitive support of either side.

[Dismas316]

Wins or losses don't exist in the gym. We have to get that out of our heads. I constantly tell my new guys that no one is going to walk in with a camera crew, and a giant check to congratulate them on tapping out someone in the gym. Guys that keep track of who they tap out in the gym have issues, and usually don't last long. That stuff just doesn't matter.

I get tapped out every time I roll. I don't care. I'm working on something so I expect to get caught until I perfect it, then it's on to the next thing. Or maybe they're just having a great night? As Cecil said to me once, "sometimes your partner gets to have a good day, too." True story, sometimes they get to be the windshield.

Tap early, tap often, learn. One of the best things I ever learned about rolling was if I have to muscle it? Let it go. In other words if the only way for me to escape is to muscle my way out? Just tap. Do a quick hot wash with your training partner to figure out how you got caught, how to counter it, (if you don't already know), shake hands and go again.

Tom Oberhue is a fantastic coach in Beaverton, OR. Tom once told me, regarding tapping out, to tap out before I was completely caught. Because the submission I'm caught in, isn't the issue, it's all the things that I missed that happened before the submission that really matter. How did he setup this triangle, and how did I not see it coming? Those are the important elements that need to be hot washed. I can teach a Koala how to land a face choke, technically there isn't much to it. The setup for the face choke that my opponent never saw coming, that's the art. That's the important stuff, and you can't learn that if every roll is a battle of Highlander proportions with one guy standing in the middle of the mat holding his felled opponents scalp.

Plus? Rolling/training this way is a lot better for you on every level. You kill your own ego before someone else rips it out and crushes if for you, you save your body, and you learn the art.

When I roll with the higher belts this is pretty much the way it works. I have no chance with them so it turns out to be just a good learning of the technique of what I did wrong. And your right, I have muscled my way around when I've had to which has been way to much. I notice the guys that are the high belts are so relaxed and put forth what seems is hardly any effort. Good advice, it's been with the other white belts with a few strips who want to put a beating on my that I resist way to much. Will try and take the smarter approach you advocate.

[Dismas316]

Regular moderate weight training will tend to make you more resilient, make time spent training for your sport easier, etc. In particular, lean mass and leg strength are strongly associated with longevity and quality of life as you age. Since you're trying not just to protect yourself from injury but also to avoid it, it might be a good idea to skip risky things like exercises at the limits of your range of motion (e.g. behind the neck presses and pull-downs, round back good mornings, and kettlebell arm bars), at the limits of your strength or endurance (e.g. one rep max attempts or going to failure or exhaustion), or things that offer a lot of pain for little gain (*cough* CrossFit *cough*). Dan John's Easy Strength isn't a bad place to start.
.

Yes this has been a little bit of the problem as well. Biggest is the overhead press. Never once had an issue with my back doing these but since I've started doing BJJ these have seemed to be the worst culprit of my back issues. Been incorporating as many back stretches and exercises which have helped.

[Paul Sharp]

Cool, I hope you stick with the art and enjoy it well into your 90s and beyond.

At my academy, and in most of the Straight Blast Gyms, we don't allow the white belts to free roll any longer. It took me some time to get on board with this but now I'm fully on board. White belts don't know enough to roll. There are exceptions but for the most part they resort to doing whatever they can to survive which often means using attributes, and ending up frustrated, and/or injured. It's even worse when you have two white belts going at it, what exactly are they going to do? They don't know anything yet so they do what they've always done, which isn't BJJ...

Here's an example of how we do it; say I'm coaching knee slide guard pass. After working the technical side of it for 20 minutes, what we call the intro phase, we will then move into isolation phase. This means I'm going to put the timer on, put some metal on, and then one guy has a 3-5 minute round in which he attempts to work his knee slide guard pass while the other guy attempts to stop him. Here's the parameters; as soon as his knee its the mat on the other side of dudes leg, he has to reset. I want him to keep track of how many times his knee gets to the mat. That's as far as I want him to go. He gets to work against resistance, he gets to feed his competitive side because you know they are comparing numbers on who got the most knee touches... And they get about a hundred reps in on a fundamental guard pass, against resistance, within a structured environment. It's kinda rolling, but it's not. No one gets hurt, everyone now has a solid base built on a fundamental because we'll do this for a few weeks. Each week adding another step to the "finish" so that by the final week they execute the knee slide, and establish side control, THEN reset. Still not rolling, but it's close because there's lots of resistance.

This is how we do it. Not everyone digs it but the results convince me it's the way to go. My injury rate among white belts is almost nil. My 6 month white belts now are far ahead of where my 6 month whitebelt was when we didn't do things this way. We do this for every position with our white belts prior to them getting their last stripe. By the time they get to blue belt they are fundamental, and positional monsters. I wish I would have started this way. It would have saved a laundry list of injuries and frustration.

[45dotACP]

Cool, I hope you stick with the art and enjoy it well into your 90s and beyond.

At my academy, and in most of the Straight Blast Gyms, we don't allow the white belts to free roll any longer. It took me some time to get on board with this but now I'm fully on board. White belts don't know enough to roll. There are exceptions but for the most part they resort to doing whatever they can to survive which often means using attributes, and ending up frustrated, and/or injured. It's even worse when you have two white belts going at it, what exactly are they going to do? They don't know anything yet so they do what they've always done, which isn't BJJ...

Here's an example of how we do it; say I'm coaching knee slide guard pass. After working the technical side of it for 20 minutes, what we call the intro phase, we will then move into isolation phase. This means I'm going to put the timer on, put some metal on, and then one guy has a 3-5 minute round in which he attempts to work his knee slide guard pass while the other guy attempts to stop him. Here's the parameters; as soon as his knee its the mat on the other side of dudes leg, he has to reset. I want him to keep track of how many times his knee gets to the mat. That's as far as I want him to go. He gets to work against resistance, he gets to feed his competitive side because you know they are comparing numbers on who got the most knee touches... And they get about a hundred reps in on a fundamental guard pass, against resistance, within a structured environment. It's kinda rolling, but it's not. No one gets hurt, everyone now has a solid base built on a fundamental because we'll do this for a few weeks. Each week adding another step to the "finish" so that by the final week they execute the knee slide, and establish side control, THEN reset. Still not rolling, but it's close because there's lots of resistance.

This is how we do it. Not everyone digs it but the results convince me it's the way to go. My injury rate among white belts is almost nil. My 6 month white belts now are far ahead of where my 6 month whitebelt was when we didn't do things this way. We do this for every position with our white belts prior to them getting their last stripe. By the time they get to blue belt they are fundamental, and positional monsters. I wish I would have started this way. It would have saved a laundry list of injuries and frustration.

Damn...I need to get to one of your classes...

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