Training Injured: When to Rest and When to Roll

Listen I am not a fucking doctor I cannot give you medical advice. I can however give you colloquial advice and you can choose if you take it or not. There are a lot of long running jokes about Jiu-jitsu people just dealing with pain or just ignoring injuries and not stopping their training.

In my years of training I have been the embodiment of this joke or stereotype. I have ignored injuries and kept training pushing through the pain. For me this is compounded since I deal with chronic pain as a side effect of RA. Sometimes I find it hard to tell what is just general pain that I live with all the time or what is pain directly as a result of injury. I have definitely powered through times when my body was telling me to rest, and let me tell you that is a bad choice.

People fall in love with Jiu-jitsu every day and that is awesome, but a lot of times people take their passion for this sport to an extent where they want to train all the time. This works really well if you are like 22 years old or on the gear and can recover really easily. However as you age your recovery decreases and how you train has to be more focused. Lots of people, especially when they are first starting out, train Jiu-jitsu like a sprint trying to get as many classes in as possible. However Jiu-jitsu is a marathon. We want to train for longevity and that involves listening and taking care of your body.

What I am not saying in this is if you are sore or have a minor bump or bruise to stop training. Soreness is a part of life when participating in any athletic endeavor, but when your body is actually hurting and telling you to take time off. It is important to listen to those signals from your body. I have only had a few “serious” injuries from Jiu-jitsu. And the majority of those which were not freak accidents came when I was a little bit hurt and continued to train and then I became much more significantly injured. As a result of me ignoring my body’s signals to take time off, I ended up interrupting my training for a longer period of time because of the larger injury.

I completely understand it sucks to take time off the mat and you are valid for having those feelings. However, a small injury being exacerbated can result in significant time off the mat. Several years ago, I had a small strain to my knee, which I could have taken a week or two off grappling and it would have been fine. Because I was stupid and kept training I ended up hurting my knee much worse which then sidelined me from serious training for over a month and then when I was coming back to training, I had to be very careful and limited in my training because my knee was not as strong as it used to be. I ended up playing from the bottom for a long period of time, which while great for my defense did limit my ability to improve in other areas.

For most people that do Jiu-jitsu we are hobbyists, which means we have to train like hobbyists. Does that mean we can’t train hard or push ourselves in training. What it means is that we are training for longevity to keep training for as long as we can. I train hard, frequently, however I still take time to listen to my body and take classes off when I need to to keep my body in good shape so I do not have to have an extended layoff from training. (Also my hockey team would be really mad if I got injured and couldn’t play).

I have heard many stories from old school black belts about people who trained really hard all the way through the ranks from white until they got their black belt. Once those guys got their black belt, they quit Jiu-jitsu or barely train anymore because they did not train for longevity or listen to their bodies and now they are injured to the point that they don't want to participate in Jiu-jitsu any longer. This is a loss for all of us in Jiu-jitsu because we end up losing out on that knowledge and experience from these people.

To finish this the way I started, I am not a fucking doctor, but take care of yourself and train smart, listen to your body so you don’t end up injured. This goes triple for Jiu-jitsu practitioners that live in the USA because our health care is horrendous.