ChrisWrestling's blog

Ok, I am not going to argue that injuries never happen in wrestling but there are certain things that make injuries more likely.

When people begin wrestling there is this mentality that they are going to fake out their partners, if they move faster they'll have an advantage, if they are stronger and use more muscle they are more likely to win.  No.  Winning comes from having a toolbox full of tools and experience to use them.  You can make your partner give you what you want, for example, if I have taken side mount meaning I am sitting on their side, one leg behind their shoulders and one foot infront of their belly and I want an armbar, if I start to pull on that arm they will grab it with their other arm, tuck their elbow in and they will fight you.  If I lace my hip side arm under the arm I want and use my other hand to push their bottom side arm to the mat like I may be trying to get that front foot over their bicep to secure a triangle, they will guard that bottom arm with the top arm.  I am pushing down so they are pulling up and that top hand will be on top of the arm I am supposedly attacking making that top arm easy for me to take so I jerk up with my under hooking arm to get it away from the bottom arm and now I am ready to armbar.  Understand?  By attacking something else I put what I really want in a more vulnerable position.

When people emphasize speed when they spar they are asking for elbows in the face.  We call this spazzing out.  You're not in control and this is where accidents happen.  Being more experienced I will go half the speed of a spaz which allows me to see and feel their mistakes much easier and I can usually get an attack out of it but more importantly I get to control the pace of the roll preventing accidents.

Several years back I was doing an in house tournament and I was muscling everything and I depleted my glycogen stores in my forearms which is where most of the muscles which control your hands are actually located.  No fuel, and the hands become useless.  There is nothing worse than going against a skilled grappler with hands that don't work.  That's not the only consequence either.  Muscling everything is exhausting and oftentimes the person with the most gas in the tank at the end of the round is the one who wins so learning to conserve energy will lead to more victories.  But let's also consider this: the gogli tendon organ responds to muscle tension, especially over time, and it will actually cause the muscle to relax in order to prevent muscle or tendon damage.  Too much tension and muscle strains and tears become more likely.

Yes, it's true that wrestlers emphasize hypertrophy (muscle development) but that is making the muscles stronger, not trying to use more muscle in the moment.  Muscles that become stronger are less prone to injury and if you don't rush hypertrophy the tendons will adapt as well just much slower as they have fewer capillaries due to their density.  The trade off is that larger muscles use more energy so unless one is also training with high rep activities like battle ropes, they are unlikely to develop the mitochondria and capillaries needed to have sufficient energy for a wrestling match. Basically you want to train in a way that wrestling is the easier activity than what you are used to.

In BJJ the mantra is position before submission.  A rookie mistake is to see a possible submission and attack without any kind of control of their opponent and the opponent escapes.  If you can't control your opponent you can't control their safety.  When I set up a submission, I do so in a way that escape is incredibly difficult so that I can take time with finishing the submission.  If you have to go fast because your opponent might get away, then you are not in control of the submission and the risk of injury goes exponentially up.  If I lock my legs properly for an armbar my hips are keeping their shoulder off the mat a little bit, my thighs have a strong grip on their upper arm, there are tricks to breaking their grip if they are holding onto the arm I am attacking and once I have that arm and it is out of their defensible range I have all the time in the world to finish it and they have all the time in the world to tap.

One thing I see as being particularly problematic within this community is that rarely do people seem to think about what happens with a successful submission.  By successful I don't mean getting your opponent to tap, I mean the submission doing to their body what is designed to do.  An armbar dislocates the elbow joint.  An Americana or Kimura tears the head of the humerus out of the shoulder joint.  A camel or boston crab compromises the spine and can sever the spinal column leaving the victim paralyzed from the waist down.  A heelhook twists the knee tearing the ligaments and menisci requiring surgery.  I have talked about this quite a bit but a choke can lead to cardiac arrest, stroke, ocular damage, aneurysms, among other things.  Yes, even my favorite bodyscissors come with the risk of breaking ribs, causing hernias and I don't doubt my hiatal hernia came from a bodyscissor.  So think about what the hold is supposed to do if they don't tap and think about how you can reduce that risk.  Holds like heel hooks don't even have a pain cue before permanent damage is done so it's best not to do them at all.  Kneebars are a little safer because they feel stretched but there is a reason they aren't allowed in competition til brown belt.  Calf and bicep slicers separate the elbow and knee respectively and can lead to bone fractures but people usually tap because the muscle compression is seriously painful. The problem with some slicers is that they use the dropping of the hips to achieve the submission and if you can't control that you may not be able to release the hold safely.

The other way people get hurt is stubbornness.  I like this story to illustrate this point: my coach was in a tournament and he got a straight ankle lock on a guy and it was locked on good and he started to finish it.  This was a paid match that wasn't going to be over til someone tapped or passed out.  The guy didn't tap so my coach broke his phalanges.  The guy didn't tap so my coach adjusted and broke his metatarsals.  Dude didn't tap so my coach adjusted and broke his ankle and then the timer ran out and my coach won on points from getting the takedown.  Afterwards his opponent hobbled over to him and said, "I guess I should have tapped".  You think?!  Guys, submissions are designed to injure.  People lose matches all the time, is it really worth getting benched for six months to a year and take on medical debt in the process just so you can say you didn't tap?  Fuck no.  Tap out and catch your opponent on the next round dudes.  It's not worth it.  I see it in people's profiles on here, "I never tap", translated: I am a dumbass!

At the end of the day, having a safe roll is about being in control of yourself, not matching your opponent's spazziness, and knowing when to give up/stop.  This is supposed to be fun, not dangerous and while injuries will happen from time to time, that is just a reality, even if you do everything right, injuries will happen.  You and your partners can do a lot to reduce the risks, reduce the severity of those injuries.  If you are new, accept that you don't know anything.  I can't count how many people with no training tell me that they are going to own me on the mats.  No, you're not, I have 10 years of formal BJJ training and nothing a newbie can do, no matter how strong or fast they are is going to change that I know how to move and control and they don't.  When you step on the mats, be humble.  Take loss as a lesson.  If you don't know what the lesson is, ask your more advanced partner what you could do better.  My friend, Justin, started listening to me a couple years back and now he's a pain in my ass when we roll because he knows some basics.  The difference between a white belt and a white belt with two stripes is actually pretty big.  I have lost to white belts with 4 stripes.  Hell, Thunderstorm was a white belt last time we rolled and he wiped the floor with me because he was slow, smooth, and strong.  His control was ridiculously clean.  Yeah, I listed strong as an asset because it can be but that strength had technique behind it and that's why he was successful.  So you have my permission to be slow and deliberate.  That builds into smoothness, smoothness eventually becomes speed and that's when you win.  The longer you focus on fast, chaotic, muscly sparring the longer you are going to suck at wrestling and the more injuries you will get and will cause so chill out.  Sounds counter intuitive but this is the way you get good.