The Major Cause of Minor Injuries

(Published February 9, 2023)

Hello Oak Harbor BJJ aficionados!

I was talking with one of my students about injuries and injury prevention the other day. 

When it comes to major injuries, things that require surgery and keep you off the mats for months if not years, I think John Danaher has it right when he says the major cause of catastrophic injury is uncontrolled falling body weight. 

But let’s talk about those more minor injuries that don’t require surgery, but still end up costing you mat time.

You know what I’m talking about. You tweak your shoulder/knee/lower back, etc.  And you can’t pinpoint exactly where or when it happened, but you train Jiu-Jitsu so it’s logical to think that BJJ class has something to do with it.

A lot of folks out there will tell you that the most common cause of this kind of injury is a lack of proper warm-ups and/or stretching.

And I’m not saying that warm-ups and stretching aren’t important. They are. I highly recommend all my students warm up before physical activity and then they stretch afterwards. Warming up and stretching are important.

But in my experience the number one cause of injuries in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is not due to warm-ups/stretching or lack thereof. 

I've seen plenty of folks who warm up and stretch religiously, and yet still get injured. 

More annoyingly, I've seen folks who skip warmups and stretching altogether, and yet manage to make it through months if not years of training relatively unscathed. Yes, we detest these people!

So what is the number one cause of injuries then?

Consider this...

You start a new workout program. You decide you're going to do it by the book this time so you don't get injured. You warm up beforehand. You stretch out afterward. You follow the workout to the letter!

It's an awesome workout and at first it kicks your butt. You are a drooling puddle of sweat on the floor by the end of your workout. But the masochist inside of you revels in it! So you want to do it again. And you know that if you continue with this work out eventually your body will adapt to it and you will be able to handle it. Your body will bounce back bigger, stronger, faster, better. So you stick with it. 

And you notice after a while that the same amount of repetitions at the same amount of resistance doesn’t destroy your body like it did at first. And this makes you feel pretty good about yourself. As well it should! 

And you think to yourself I could handle more repetitions and/or more weight. 

So do just that. You add more repetitions, more weight, more intensity to that workout. And you keep progressing in that manner because your muscles are adapting so quickly to the new stimulus that you are giving them... so why not, right?

But then you tweak something.

It could be your elbow, your knee, your lower back, etc..

And a lot of times it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly where, when and how you tweaked it. Sometimes you just wake up one morning and it hurts.

Other times, you bend over to pick up a lego your kid left in the middle of the floor and your back goes out on you! 

WTF? It’s not like you were trying to deadlift twice your bodyweight or anything. It was a frigging lego!

Super annoying! Am I right?

I kept a workout journal for years before I figured out what was what was going on there. 

Looking back through my workout journals I eventually realized that there was a predictable pattern. I would see very good gains for a period of about 2 to 3 weeks. I would feel as if I was building ever increasing, android work capacity. Seriously, I’d feel like I was on my way to superhuman levels of fitness… or at least Batman levels! 

And then like clockwork, at the 2 to 3 week point I would tweak something and my progress would come to a grinding halt.

Then I read somewhere about the fact that your tendons and ligaments will never adapt as quickly as your muscles do to a new workout program.

Your progress will tend to continue so long as and as fast as your muscles can adapt to the new stimulus. 

But since your tendons and ligaments cannot keep up, you eventually hit a point where your muscles outpace what your tendons and ligaments can handle

And that’s when you tweak something. You tweak your elbow, or your shoulder, or your knee, or your lower back, etc.

And get this. The article I read (wish I could remember where I read that) said that if you continue to progress as fast as your muscles can handle it, that will usually happen at the 2-3 week point... and my workout logs confirm this.

Now that I’ve been running a gym for a little over a year, I have noticed this same phenomenon with my new students who tend to be hard chargers.

The ones that will attend every class that I offer, the ones who will go 110% during the warm-ups if I have warm-ups that day, the ones who practice every technique with 100% intensity, and the ones who treat every role as if it were the last round of a championship fight in the UFC… These guys all tend to get injured “mysteriously" at the 2 to 3 week point, and they have no idea exactly what they did to tweak themselves.

I also see this with some of my more conservative students who have been training for a while and then decide that they’re going to pick up a workout program outside of class to give them that extra edge against the competition.

They understand the concept of efficiency when it comes to jujitsu. But when they do their workouts outside of class they adhere to the philosophy of no pain, no gain. They push themselves every workout be it kettlebells, powerlifting, P90X, or some other insanity.

They usually mention to me that they started whatever their new workout is. And then somewhere about 2 to 3 weeks later, they can’t roll because they tweaked themselves.

It doesn't matter how well they warm up beforehand.

It doesn't matter how well they stretch out afterward.

If they insist on progressing as fast as their muscles allow, they will eventually outpace what their tendons and ligaments can handle, and they will injure themselves! This is the number one cause of injuries I see in the gym!

So what do you do about all this? 

First, when you roll in class keep it playful. Don’t treat it like a championship match. 

Instead of rolling to satisfy your need for competition, roll for the purpose of skill development. Roll for the purpose of becoming more efficient. Pay more attention to your energy management. Close your eyes, and breathe through your nose. Simply doing this will force you to slow down and think a little bit more about what you’re doing.

Aside from making it easier on the body, it will allow you to glean more knowledge and experience from each roll which in turn will help you get better faster.

Number two, keep a workout log. 

And I don’t mean your bullet journal. Make a separate notebook where you only track your workouts. Don’t use an app. Don’t use a website. Use a physical notebook dedicated to logging your workouts and nothing but your workouts. 

And if you get injured, or I should say when you get injured (because let’s face it, you will get injured), take a look back at the last two weeks of training and see if you notice any patterns. 

It won’t happen right away, but overtime you will notice trends. 

Over time you will also develop a sense of what it feels like when you’re about to tweak something. When it’s time to back off a little bit. When you would be wise to take your foot off the gas for a week to avoid injury.

And until you get that feel for what it’s like when your body is about to get injured, make sure you plan your workouts ahead of time. 

Never ever make decisions on the fly in the gym on upping the weight, or the reps, or the intensity. 

Because when you’re in the gym your brain is on stupid pills! You’ve got all these endorphins running around in your body making you feel invincible… which is an awesome feeling! But that is not the time to make the decision on adding more weight and/or reps.

The next day, when you’re so sore you can barely even get out of bed and you’re asking yourself, “Dear God, why did I do that to myself?”, that’s the time when you should make the decision on whether or not to progress in weight and or reps.

Here's a rule of thumb to keep in mind that may or may not help you. I took an exercise physiology class in college taught by Dr. leg. And he said that it takes 6 to 8 weeks for your body to make a change. And then it takes another 6 to 8 weeks for your body to adapt to that change. Apparently this is why bodybuilders work in 13 week cycles. Six weeks to make the change, six weeks to adapt to the change, and one week to rest up and completely recover before the next cycle.

Now you might ask but Big Mike, these bodybuilders are adding weight in reps and sets all the time aren’t they? How do they continue the progress for 13 weeks without breaking themselves every 2 to 3 weeks?

I would offer you this. Bodybuilders oftentimes will work out each body part or each muscle group only once per week. They blast the hell out of it, but then they give it seven days to recover before they hit it again. They do this because they understand that your muscles grow when you rest. This also happens to give the tendons and ligaments way more time to recover and adapt to new stimuli. 

If you’re swinging kettlebells, running hill sprints, and attending Jiu-Jitsu class five to seven days per week then your poor tendons and ligaments don’t really stand a chance.

With all that said, I’ve never been able to come up with some mechanical rule on adding sets reps or intensity to keep myself from getting injured. 

Keeping a workout journal gave me a feel overtime for when I needed to back off and let my body rest and recover a little bit. 

Every single time I have been impatient, ignored my body signals, and tried to follow the no-pain-no-gain mentality, I have ended up injuring myself. 

Every time I have listened to my body, rolled light, taken rounds off, and done a week of light joint mobility instead of my regular workouts, I have always come back the following week feeling refreshed and able to pick up right where I left off, continuing my upward progress.

So start keeping a workout journal!

This really works folks! Do this, and you will learn how to recognize the signals that your body is giving you, begging and pleading for you to back off just a little bit so that the tendons and ligaments can catch up to the progress of your muscles.

Everyone I’ve ever given this advice to who has actually taken it, has come back and thanked me for it. You will too!

Back to Table of Contents