Injury is the enemy!
Injury is the Enemy!
It’s true to say that BJJ training demands consistent effort over time … and, not withstanding the many changes in life circumstances which will challenge your commitment to regular training, there is the spectre of injury which might side line you for a period of time too!
In any sport there are bound to be injuries and BJJ is no exception, how you handle them however, is really important to your ongoing development.
I have over the years injured just about everywhere on my body. Not all of them doing BJJ, but previous Martial Arts, some pretty serious, others just niggles, some of them persistent work arounds to this day, others have fully recovered.
What I have learned though, is that unless attending class will exacerbate the injury directly its important to stay in the groove, to stay in the habit and go training, to stay connected to your team mates and coaches and all of the goings on at the academy. It’s important to let your coach know you are injured of course, and you must take responsibility for managing what you can do to protect your injury whilst you practice whatever you can to keep your game moving. I’ve trained with one arm in a sling, I’ve known guys tie belts in ways that restrict their injured knee from full extension, others have tied their knees together … and they still trained in the class and rolled at the end. There is always something you can do, something you can work on, some small part of your game that could be improved by your time and attention being paid to it! … always !
As with most combat sports, we need team mates to train with, training partners to facilitate our development, to push us out of our comfort zone, to challenge our skills, highlight our weakness and strengths etc … yet we don’t compete together like a regular sports team, when we enter the arena, we do so alone. For us, our team mates have done their bit in the build up to the competition or match, they have helped us prepare, helped us improve and develop by showing us our strengths and weaknesses… but in the arena we stand alone and we find out against strangers, intent on their own victory, exactly where our game has got to! So in a way, it could be argued that your competitive win is a win for everyone in the team, you could say they had a hand in you winning it because of the hours they spent with you as you moved your game along. And of course the same goes for you with their victories and defeats. You help them, firstly by being there (I’ve always been cognisant that skipping a class denies my team mates an opportunity to develop) and secondly by being a good training partner.
A good training partner takes an active part in your development, they are as much invested in your development as they are their own. They understand improvements to your game will push them to improve theirs. They will match your pace and intensity, weight and skill level, flow roll when it’s time to practice, roll hard when its time to push, yet be chilled, communicative and encouraging when it’s technical and time to learn or bed in a new movement/skill/technique. They will be aware not only of where their own limbs are, but also where yours are, they will be able to control the use of their weight, looking to match yours or slightly overload it to give you a challenge without crushing you.
Another important aspect of being a good training partner is to ensure that you are not passive during the technical drilling part of the movement learning/bedding in process. When your partner is practicing/bedding in a particular move for instance, don’t just switch off whilst they execute it (and certainly don’t have the muscle tonus of a wet lettuce whilst they do). You should be practicing during the process too, I don’t mean by physically resisting, but by analysing their movements, identifying the critical pathway (sequence of steps) looking to identify weaknesses/opportunities to counter, working out how you might defend, spotting when mistakes have been made etc - you may not be the UKE in the traditional martial arts sense of the word (the one who receives the technique) and you may not be resisting during the technical or flow drill phase, but you should be active cognitively and working on aspects of your game relative to the position being worked on.
Most students don’t really think about being a good training partner until they have experienced what a bad training partner is! That is, someone who is always trying to “win” in class like it’s a life or death battle, adds “resistance” when its a technical or flow drill, flails around explosively with uncontrolled movement and awareness, has a history of often injuring their training partners or indeed themselves, refuses to tap and expects you to be the same, snaps submissions on, rather than squeezing them on from a completely controlling and dominant position! They view you as the competition or the enemy, to be beaten at all costs or, more usually, driven by their ego, they fear and must avoid defeat at all costs, even if that causes injury to you or themselves!
But injury is the real enemy for BJJ players, not your training partner, and it’s important to grasp this. The purpose of training is to develop our skills through learning and practice. Training should be about consistently trying to get better at the things we can’t yet do, which means that until we can do them, they aren’t going to be any good! We need to make mistakes, learn, assess, adapt and retry. It could be said that in training we should focus on the things we can’t do well, but in tournament or a competitive match, we should focus only on the things we can do well. Of course, you don’t have to compete to enjoy the benefits of BJJ training, indeed many students at GBGlos develop high level skills and games and never compete. Their goals maybe to improve fitness, weight loss, engaging in challenging physical exercise, social interaction and camaraderie etc all of which BJJ training provides in abundance. They are not preparing for a competitive match or tournament, they are training for the enjoyment of the development process.
Don’t be mistaken though, in the rolling and positional/specific training elements of even an everyday class, especially as skills, strength and fitness reach higher levels, things might well get ratcheted up and even get seriously intense to an outsiders view. In reality though, it’s still only a “friendly” match with a highly skilled team mate, it’s still only training to get better, both need to be cognisant of their responsibility for avoiding causing injury to either, so that, importantly, both survive unscathed to enjoy training the next day and so on! It’s not always possible of course, injuries will happen, accidents do happen, but the risk of injury is particularly amplified when there is an imbalance in the intensity “setting” each player is working at! Addressing this imbalance is critical. It would of course be detrimental to a players development to simply “water down” the intensity of these exchanges just to avoid injury, because intensity is an essential element of BJJ. So it’s really about finding the balance between the training partners’ intensity “settings”, or perhaps more succinctly addressing any imbalance, with what I call cooperatively-matched intensity! Unless its agreed between you beforehand, this usually means the one of you has to dial back to a point that challenges your partners 100% intensity setting but without crushing them. Of course given the mix in an academy it might be you that is at 100% next and your partner dialling back to match your intensity!
Competitors however, will have a different agenda and its important that they can differentiate between everyday training and competition training. The competition preparation phase must always be more intense for them, as there is the pressing need to replicate ever closer, the conditions under which they expect to be competing, to expose their resolve and decision making when completely fatigued mentally, and physically, and to experience the additional strength of adrenaline and will-power of their fired up opponent etc yet they still need to steer clear of personal injury themselves and at the same time keep the other competitors free from injury in the run in. At GBGlos we accommodate these needs through the specific competition preparation classes that we run in the build up to a competition (camp), and we keep the water simmering with our twice weekly “Porrada” classes when we are between competitions.
Murray