Jiu Jitsu is bad for your body.

Also I noticed in your first article that you said neck bridges are bad for your neck.
Is that the case?

I've always felt like it was a positive thing (increase mobility/strength).
"Bad" is relative to what you want to do with your neck. The average person does not need that much neck strength and traditional physical therapy would look at something like a wrestler's neck bridge and cringe because they're taught you're going to harm yourself. The neck is not really supposed to be load bearing (not in the way you hold a bridge) and it's not meant to generate much power (like explosively lifting your shoulders off the mat). But we invented a sport where you need to do those things, and wrestlers are going to be put in that spot with another person trying to smash them, so it makes sense they would need to be conditioned to it. How you train your neck and how much stress you put on it will determine if it's safe or not.

All that said, neck strength is important in combat/impact sports and there are other ways to train it. Check this out:

http://www.powering-through.com/neck-training/
 
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Here is a lesson I had to learn before I could fix a lot of the chronic pain and nagging injuries I had from BJJ: Improving athletic traits does not equate to improving your health as a human. Being a better athlete often makes you a worse human (not morally, just physically). In fact, you likely need to create potential health problems to take a sports-specific trait to its extreme, like being able to throw a ball 80+ MPH a hundred times a day or ice skate at full speed in the same direction around a rink. We invent sports and people find ways to maximize their performance, but maybe the body just was not meant to do that. Just because someone is bigger, faster, leaner, etc. does not mean they are pain-free or going to live longer. Over a lifetime, without doing anything to correct for it, BJJ is terrible for your joints. Even a simple mobility routine and a basic workout would help counteract that, but most people just want to get in, drill a little, spar a bunch, then get home.
 
This made me lol. It's so true. I've actually considered taking up kite surfing. But for me personally, there's just nothing like BJJ. It's physical, it's challenging, it's mentally stimulating, and it's cathartic. I thinking that's why so many of us do it. Sucks that it wrecks your body. But that's the trade off.
I have real second thoughts after a serious neck injury. It sucks and literally affects my life off the mat. Oh well, lol.
 
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Any excercise?? You think boxing is tough on the body/limbs if you know what you're doing?

Read the whole thing again...

I’m saying any exercise you actually enjoy is beneficial to the body and mind, not just jiu jitsu per se.
 
I'm a 46 year old hobbyist purple and I've thought about "how much longer" recently. Are there other disciplines that do gym sparring the way jiu-jitsu does where you see people in their 40's and 50's? I'm not talking about TMAs where you can do kata or forms but boxing, wrestling, Muay Thai, etc. I'm not very familiar with judo but are there regularly 45 + judoka in the gym every day?
I tried going that route for a little bit and found Judo to be even more taxing, although I will say most Judokos aren't nearly as aggressive.
I'm just shy of 50 and I had to stop.
Torn ACL and meniscus as well as bone damage- was out for about a year
wrenched neck- had me out for about two months
torn bicep- was out for six month
injured myself mountain biking with two broken ribs and even after they "healed" having someone put full pressure sent a pain right up my side especially a knee on belly
The thing that really did me in though was my lower back pain and sciatica, it got to the point where I'd need to stretch and do mobility drills for about a half hour before and after class and do some active stretching in the morning just so I could get going. After awhile I just said screw it, I'm done. The biggest problem was you'd have these injuries, a blue belt or higher and older- it was like an invitation for every young white belt to gun for their first "quality tap out", even though I'd beat them the next day it felt like someone beat me with a pillow case full of door knobs.
 
Here is a lesson I had to learn before I could fix a lot of the chronic pain and nagging injuries I had from BJJ: Improving athletic traits does not equate to improving your health as a human. Being a better athlete often makes you a worse human (not morally, just physically). In fact, you likely need to create potential health problems to take a sports-specific trait to its extreme, like being able to throw a ball 80+ MPH a hundred times a day or ice skate at full speed in the same direction around a rink. We invent sports and people find ways to maximize their performance, but maybe the body just was not meant to do that. Just because someone is bigger, faster, leaner, etc. does not mean they are pain-free or going to live longer. Over a lifetime, without doing anything to correct for it, BJJ is terrible for your joints. Even a simple mobility routine and a basic workout would help counteract that, but most people just want to get in, drill a little, spar a bunch, then get home.

“Sport specific trait to the extreme” yep... the time off helps me recalibrate. Nobody wants to listen to me. Weight training, mobility, swimming, walking, yoga, dancing... I need so many things to help me recuperate.
Thanks for your responses sir.
 
How did your spinal injuries happen?
That's something that I'm always cautious, and I avoid playing positions that put a lot of stress on the neck back (inverted/fighting from double unders, etc).
The spine stuff is wear and tear from years of training. I did a lot of striking arts ans team sports before grappling. Taking throws I feel is what really made things worse though. Having your body decelerate and your spine needs to stabilize everything, my fat head especially. lol. Judo and Aikido are bad for you, I blame them mostly for the spine issues. I also DH mountain bike, I've had my fair share of tumbles over the years and the contact beating your body takes from rough terrain aggravates all my issues.
 
I have the same neck condition. Any rocking motion from running or my head tilted forward for long or slamming the brakes on my car causing my head to flick forward exacerbates the injury so much that I’ve been to the ER twice. I sleep with a special pillow to preserve the natural alignment. Turning my head left and right is painfully slow, so driving or riding a bike is difficult because I can’t turn my head lightening quick like a normal person.

Being guillotined is the worst. It doesn’t happen much to me but when I feel my neck threatened, I tense up.
Yeah, I'll tap to an awkward neck or low back position in order to preserve my body - hahah. Last week, I tweaked my low back and I have been in constant pain since then. It's terrible.
 
"Bad" is relative to what you want to do with your neck. The average person does not need that much neck strength and traditional physical therapy would look at something like a wrestler's neck bridge and cringe because they're taught you're going to harm yourself. The neck is not really supposed to be load bearing (not in the way you hold a bridge) and it's not meant to generate much power (like explosively lifting your shoulders off the mat). But we invented a sport where you need to do those things, and wrestlers are going to be put in that spot with another person trying to smash them, so it makes sense they would need to be conditioned to it. How you train your neck and how much stress you put on it will determine if it's safe or not.

All that said, neck strength is important in combat/impact sports and there are other ways to train it. Check this out:

http://www.powering-through.com/neck-training/
Yea I did neck bridges for 5 years, I bought a harness finally like two years ago and Haven't done one since it's much more effective at contracting the neck.
. Even a simple mobility routine and a basic workout would help counteract that, but most people just want to get in, drill a little, spar a bunch, then get home.
I made a thread about how not allot of bjj guys lift weights or do strength and conditioning to help prevent injuries and imbalances and all the bjj hipsters got mad.
But what you posted above is the truth you don't need an intense lifting routine, guys who do nothing but bjj are injury prone I have been saying this since forever.
 
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“Sport specific trait to the extreme” yep... the time off helps me recalibrate. Nobody wants to listen to me. Weight training, mobility, swimming, walking, yoga, dancing... I need so many things to help me recuperate.
Thanks for your responses sir.
Totally listening to you...I like yoga and I think that massage can be helpful as well.
I have recently been painfully reminded that beer doesn't seem to facilitate recovery or performance although it may aid in re-calibration.
 
Wait what? A sport where the goal is to HYPER-EXTEND (at least slightly enough to make them tap) your partner joints turns out to be unhealthy? No way..... lol

All that stacking too...just fucking awful for backs and necks.
 
This thread is still going? I must have hit a nerve...

Speaking of nerves, anybody have a problem with the genitofemoral nerve? Years of asymmetrical training has caused my left side lots of issues. (Shoulder, knee, hip, hand... all left side) I’ve had multiple groin pulls on that side as well. Right before the Pan, I thought I got hit in the nuts. It turned out to be a nerve problem. The nerve that goes to your nut.

I was freaking out for a while. I still competed. Afterwards, I went to my doctor who sent me to a urologist. I had a scrotum ultrasound. So fun! Woo hoo! I thought for sure I had testicular cancer and they were going to have to amputate my penis. Yes, my mind went there.

After making peace with my maker, the results came back negative. Sweet! I took three weeks off and took some heavy duty anti inflammatory meds. I’m good to go now.

I can’t just “just train”, “throw some dirt on it”, use vagisil, or all the other bro science remedies. I need to be a jiu Jitsu scientist. I use the scientific method to keep me going. I want to keep my body together as best I can. I can walk away from this sport and maybe one day I will. I’ve accomplished enough...
 
I'm 43, do yoga, weight train, along with my 3 days a week of BJJ. Been training 6 yrs now and know how to train, know the difference between an injury and pain, and in the best shape of my life.

I am a hobbyist and don't mind tapping to young lions who have technique along with greater athletic ability. What gets to my ego though is tapping to the young competitors in my gym who use steroids. When I began BJJ, you only heard of the very top competitors using PEDs but times have changed. A great number of blue belts who compete at the local level are now using PEDs.
 


This podcast is eternally dumb. Sorry but these are the classic half truths.
What a load of shit.

He has no idea about what you stimulate by doing "cardio", what you change in your body (yeah its a lot more then just cardio) and builds up this nonsense antagonistic oversimplification strenght <> cardio or that diet is more important than cardio for heart health.
 
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This podcast is eternally dumb. Sorry but these are the classic half truths.
What a load of shit.

He has no idea about what you stimulate by doing "cardio", what you change in your body (yeah its a lot more then just cardio) and builds up this nonsense antagonistic oversimplification strenght <> cardio or that diet is more important than cardio for heart health.


Well you and him both seem to agree on putting "cardio" in scare quotes as it is non-specific terminology wrt programming. Certainly, it's obvious that doing something like jogging for an hour every day would result in some strength or explosive adaptation, but to what degree? If your interest is injury prevention, like implied by the thread topic, then it is also obvious using ones eyes and believing what your eyes are showing you when you look at real life examples in reality, that long distance running is a highly stressful and catabolic activity on the body. Of course every body's got a limited amount of recovery rate to 'spend' on adapting from certain stresses, so for what benefits? Is it, say, fortifying your joints? No, not nearly as much as resistance training does; in fact, it so often is something that exacerbates joint wear over time, something, (like many other athletic movements really) that you pay for with wear, rather than something you might do to build up resilience.

This last point is something Dr. Stuart McGill talks about a lot; through the course of playing a sport, you may be demanded to perform certain movements, such as crunching or curling for example (especially in jiu jitsu), which, however, does not necessarily mean you should reproduce those same exact movements in your conditioning program. Such movements would be the things that would be costing you integrity, so reproducing them in less-than-skill-specific training would just be piling on. You would do proper resilience building exercises in order to be able to perform those movements when you need to, be it in other forms of training or competition, over the course of a long career (which for spine health, in particular, would generally be anything that places the torso under tension while maintaining a rigid neutral spinal posture). To borrow his analogy, you would want to invest more into your 'body bank', so you can have more to 'draw on' later when you need it.

With regards to that very broad range of things that all sometimes are casually referred too as diet, i think the term needs to be unpacked a little; if by 'diet' you mean the (unfortunately) common perception of an eating pattern involving little or no lipid consumption, then yes, not only does it not ameliorate risk factor of developing heart complications or related dysfunctions to a statistically significant degree when controlled for other lifestyle habits, it can in fact be actively precipitating greater morbidity.

It just sometimes feels to me like there is practically a cottage industry of folks out there (or people who hear from people and just parrot), who get off on willfully misconstruing things Rippetoe says in the most uncharitable manners possible, not really appreciating how, perhaps regardless that he doesn't speak like a uni prof his instincts are good, and if you sit down and think about it you can see the logic or applicability of what he might be saying for the people he is talking about. The only thing i really quibble about to a great degree in his area of expertise is the recommendation of neat milk for any major capacity, but he's modulated his stance(s) on nutrition heavily over the years, so i don't really hold it against him.
 
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@rmongler

I dont want to capture the thread and dont have time at the moment but will get back to it and send you a pm. ;)
 
When I began BJJ, you only heard of the very top competitors using PEDs but times have changed. A great number of blue belts who compete at the local level are now using PEDs.

Lol, steroid use has been rampant in the sport, all sports really, for over 20 years. Maybe you've only begun noticing.
 
I think it's helped my body. Moved parts where they wouldn't have done before
 
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