I’ve written before about my aversion to doctors (I don’t know, okay) and my various injuries and inadequacies that have built up over the years. Today someone asked me on this post to do a rundown of what I do for recovery work on my shoulder, so I figured I’d just write up a post about my injuries and how I deal with them.

Here are a few hard-and-fast rules I use to prevent injuries before they happen:

Take your protein. Every damn day, take your protein. No, shut up, I don’t care. If you’re training more than 4 times a week, take your protein after you train. Things that feel lose or crunchy in their sockets are problems waiting to happen. Tape or brace. Do accessory work. This means that you should run or swim or bike or do something outside of BJJ. The better shape you’re in, the less likely you are to get injured in BJJ. You can see from my posts here that I run races– I also do triathlons. You can’t do everything at a high level, but you have to train your muscles to be used to working at a high level. Sometimes, you have to rest. Sometimes your body just says, “hey, no. We need a night off, ok? Stop it.” Maybe it says, “I know you’re supposed to be fasting today, but I really need food,” or “I know we reached our max calories today but I am still so hungry and fatigued.” You have to know the difference between what your body needs and what it wants. “I really want some chocolate” is really different from “seriously, Brain, if we don’t eat, I am going to pass out.”

Now that that’s out of the way, here are my major issues and how I rehab them.

Shoulder

My right shoulder is… crunchy. I can’t describe it better than that, but rest assured if I ever meet you in person and get drunk, I’ll demonstrate by making it make funny noises.

Whenever I feel it getting particularly crunchy, I use the Diesel Crew shoulder rehab circuit. I should be more vigilant about following the circuit, but honestly, real life gets in the way. I also start doing the following exercises with (more) regularity:

bench press

overhead press

pull-ups

handstands (hold for time, either against the wall or freestanding)

medicine-ball catch (we use a 10lb ball)

Game alterations: None. I don’t stick out my arms as a general rule, and I’ve never had a problem shooting right-hand dominant, even with the injury. I try to avoid taking serious impact on it, however.



Knee

I dislocated the patella on my left knee in January of 2011. It sucked. I was in the “robot leg” for 8 weeks. I wanted to stab someone. I decided I would never let it happen again. Here’s how I rehabbed my knee:

Swimming. Real swimming, hardcore swimming, not floating around in a pool. Swimming until you want to throw up. Swim with a pull buoy, swim with a kickboard, etc.

Once the doctor cleared me, I started running again. In straight lines. For a long time. No quick turns, but the running built up the muscles in my quad and hamstring that I lost due to atrophy.

I like to play medicine-ball-catch standing on one leg. This is much harder than it sounds.

Weighted leg raises. I use ankle weights. Don’t like to use more than 5lbs.

Turkish get-ups

Squats (heavy squats)– nothing has helped my knee quite like these. They stabilize everything.

Game alterations: I always pass to a specific side with the knee-slide pass. Always. But other than that, nothing that I’ve really noticed, other than always wearing a brace to give myself just a little extra stability.

Other Broken Things

I am always hurting something. Fingers, toes, hands, feet, fingernails, hair, elbows, ribs, whatever. Unless it’s seriously debilitating, I’ve found that for me, it’s best to just learn to deal with it. Minor injury is part of BJJ, as far as I’m concerned. I have comically small hands with what my mother calls “bird bones,” which means I’m constantly fracturing shit and dislocating stuff. Ugh, could my body seriously be less suited for BJJ? Anyway.