Injuries - take it positively :)

A few weeks ago, I sprained the muscle under my floating ribs during a morning sparring session with a heavyweight. Many would advice to take some time off until it’s completely healed, and while that happens your game deteriorates. I tend to take this rather differently and start training light when they are healed sufficiently, not necessarily a complete recovery, for a number of reasons.

First of all is that I find that injuries tend to heal longer when you put it into a complete rest. However, putting excessive pressure on the injured area may prove to hinder your healing process, so you have to be really sensible when doing this.

Secondly, being sensible meaning that you have to avoid certain positions while injured, I simply train early and avoid the injured area, which most of the time are the areas which I have not been worked on for awhile. Take for example, when I injured my foot right before Java Submission 07, I was working my top game. After fiddling on different gameplans, I find that the most effective way to play with an injured foot was to pull guard, which then later further improved my bottom game. Now, the opposite happened when I injured my torso. Any pressure from being on the bottom would force me to tap out, therefore, I was forced to work on my top game and avoid getting to bottom position at all costs.

Of course, I need to underline the importance of being “sensible”, which includes:
Telling your training partners to be considerate on your injuries if you decide to do so;
Be extra careful with spinal injuries. I personally avoid training hard with those injuries;
And again, TAP EARLY! You’re injured already, if it gets re-injured, it will put you out of commission for even longer.

So, as a closing note, remember what Niko Han told me: “BJJ is like surfing - you take whatever mother nature (ie: situation) given to you and use them.” The situation can also be interpreted as the injuries and any limitation that your body has, but as a BJJ practitioner, most of the time, there are ways to play around them and help you improve.