from physical harm when someone is trying to hurt you, but what if the very martial arts you’re trying to learn causes you MORE harm than when you didn’t take it in the first place?
I’ve been taking BJJ for over a year now, I’m more after the skill and not the belt, but it seems the accummulation of injuries are getting to me. Currently I have been diagnosed with a pinched nerve that causes my arm to lose strength and feel painful, due to a choke in sparring. I know you said you should be careful, blah-blah, and you should only roll with safe partners, and yes, I’ve been doing that, but I honestly think BJJ has caused me a alot of injuries than when I was taking Kyokushin where there worst I got were just bruises.
For all you martial artists, if you’ve gotten yourself into so much injuries, how do you rationalize that it’s still okay to continue with your chosen art and risks more injuries, than quit?
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Do a cost benefit analysis. What do you get out of BJJ, and what does BJJ take out of you? Decide if what you get out of it, is worth the injuries you’ll receive. Personally I believe the benefits outweigh the risks, and if you truly love it, you’ll think so too. If not, then maybe BJJ isn’t for you.
edit: He was a relative nbie. He was kind of a spaz too. Anyways, perhaps its time that you analyze how you train and if you’re not warming up properly or going too hard. I’ve trained since 29 and I have yet to receive a serious injury. The most I get nowadays are nasty mat burns. I popped my elbow a few weeks ago but that was purely my fault. I think you should analyze if you’re going too hard or if your partners are going too hard. But yes sometimes serious injuries can just happen, regardless of how you roll. But you have a history of serious injuries, so its possible you’re doing something wrong or your partners are. A break in BJJ won’t change that. But I hope you decide to stick with it and I hope you remain injury free.
Well first off I have to wonder about the quality of the training you are getting. At a good school with a good, knowledgeable instructor training injuries are usually minimized for the reasons you are asking here in your question.
Do you warm up before working out for instance and is that required and is their a structured routine for that? Are people training there being monitored by the instructor and how far and to what degree they are taking things with smaller and/or lesser experienced training partners so that they are not getting hurt needlessly? Are students built into shape first and learning and developing properly before being taught more difficult and dangerous techniques or those with a higher chance of injury?
If the answer to any of those is no and its just learning and flying by the seat of your pants and basically survival of the fittest then you probably need to consider training some place else. There are schools and gyms that operate without structure and learning and flying by the seat of their pants and its survival of the fittest. If you are one of the lucky ones who survives it and the training they do and allow then you are lucky and that’s fine. But for everyone that can and does survive in such a place several don’t and the injury and turn-over of new students is very high.
A certain amount of all this comes with the training and I have had several serious type injuries including a detached retina. However at a good school with good instruction things are usually done in such a way to minimize training injuries and also include an element of safety. In places where martial and fighting arts are taught at a high level this is generally required for the benefit of all as well as the school or gym. Ones that don’t hurt, injure and ruin a lot of beginners or sometimes don’t survive long term and even sometimes get sued in court for their irresponsible and unsafe approach to things.
Martial Arts are not supposed to be fun! They can be a lot of fun for some people. We all have different ideas as to what is fun.
Martial Arts are supposed to be about learning how to defend yourself it attacked (self defense). Some arts have been turned into a sport.
Injuries can occur when training. That is a risk that we all take if we train. Not just in martial arts, but in anything physical. I’ve watch a student in the school were I used to work snap his leg by just running. The bone was sticking out the side. I know of a person that broke his leg in 3 places while playing golf. I’m still wondering how this was done. There are injuries in basketball, football, martial arts, hockey, boxing, wrestling, skating and just walking down a flight of steps.
If you enjoy training in bjj you should continue. But if you prefer karate or ping pong, do that. But before you rejoin any physically activity you need to speak to your doctor to see what they say.
Source(s):
Martial Arts since 1982
Have had plenty of injuries. Some in martial arts and others outside of the arts. But I’m still will to risk getting injured because of the love I have for the arts.
I’m probably not the best one to answer this but for me, the risk of injury is outweighed by the love, need and – to a degree – obsessive nature of my need for martial arts.
I have torn ligaments in my right leg and ankle that have only recently repaired but still limit my mobility, shin splints in both legs, the ligaments round both of my knees are prone to seize or swell, both of my hips still suffer from previous injuries caused by excessive bad use of heavy weights down at the gym when I was younger, the bones in my right wrist are prone to move out of alignment from previous injuries and the ligament in my right shoulder gives me grief four years after I started Aikido when a new guy applied shiho nage and did it terribly, putting me in a sling and out of action for what should of been two months or more. Stupidly I was training again two weeks later, but wouldn’t let people apply the same technique to the same arm for months.
If I don’t train daily or near as damn it to being daily, I get severely hostile, my weight shoots up in the wrong way, I get really lethargic, my joints go stiff, I start to experience chronic flu like pain across all my muscles, I get random muscle spasms (tightening of the muscles round the ribs that restricts your breathing is not fun), my old injuries simultaneously play up and I get horrendously depressed. It takes a few weeks of not training at all to get to that point, but you get the idea. The last time I was knocked out of action for two months with torn ligaments and cracked bones in my leg leaving me unable to weight bear properly was absolutely horrendous.
That said it doesn’t have to be too much at least – just forty minutes of training a day can help massively. So the problem isn’t about whether or not I should train and risk further injury, but how much I should train to stop myself getting in a bad state. If I keep using my whole body, then it seems to help a lot and I will accept people causing me pain in return for being able to avoid the consequences of what happens if I don’t.
I would let your arm heal before you do any rolling. If you are getting hurt that much then you may want to consider something else or maybe a different school. All martial arts have risk, but if you are getting hurt a lot then that seems unusual to me.