I have been training judo for four years and Brazilian jiu jitsu for just over two years now, and I absolutely love it. During a recent holiday I was training up to three times a day, and during my regular working week I train around ten hours a week on the mats.
Having also been a physiotherapist in private practice for 5 years now, I have helped lots of clients through all types of injuries – from niggles, to major and severe injuries.
I wanted to give you this background so I can show you both sides of the coin.
As an athlete myself, I am acutely aware of the greatest fear an athlete has when you get injured and you have to go and see a doctor or a physio.
You are concerned that the doctor or physio is going to tell you to stop doing your sport. Hopefully temporarily, but sometimes they say stuff like “why are you doing that crazy stuff? You are going to get hurt, you should stop”.
This is super frustrating. You know as well as I do that if you train well, prepare well and have good technique you may have the occasional injury, but nothing that will make you have to give up your craft.
Well guess what?
There is a fine balance we can treat. When a martial arts athlete gets injured, there are plenty of ways to both keep you training, while recovering from the injury as quickly as possible. You will have to modify your training programme to a degree, to avoid specific positions and manoeuvres where you could be making your injury worse, but in reality I have found that only very rarely do you need to stop training altogether.
The training modification is simply to allow the injury to heal while not losing the fitness and skill you have built up over a long period of time.
When I see a BJJ or MMA athlete, or martial artist at the clinic at which I work, Scarborough Physio and Health, I will always seek to understand what you want to achieve when you come in. If you don’t want to stop, I won’t tell you to stop. We will find a way to get you right, without you having to stop training. You may need to tweak some elements of your training, but given I understand where you are coming from, your sport, and what you want to achieve, I can assure you that together we can overcome your injury as quickly and painlessly as possible.
Without needing to stop!
So if you have a niggling injury that is affecting your performance just give me a call to book in on 38801649, and if you are a partial artist I would like to give you a special offer for a Combat Sports Assessment 1 hour appointment for the price of a 30 minute appointment. You can read more about the offer here
Nick Mascali
Physiotherapist
Scarborough Physio and Health
