Injuries in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (Part 1)
BJJ has been one of the best experiences that I’ve found during my adult life. I’ve been training consistently over the last 9 years and don’t plan to stop anytime soon. Unfortunately, this sport that I’ve come to love also has a fairly high risk of injury. Recent research has attempted to quantify this risk with numbers ranging from ⅔ of participants within a 3 year period reporting an injury that sidelined them for 2+ weeks (Hinz et al. 2021) to even 85.7% of participants reporting an injury within a 12 month timeframe (McDonald et al. 2017). Trying to understand the true injury rate is very difficult though and I believe there are a lot of factors that may skew these statistics (but that’s a topic for another time).
With these stats and from my own experience, if you train BJJ long enough you’ll likely experience an injury or two. Hopefully nothing major, but little things do happen during training. It’s a highly physical sport that demands a lot from our bodies. Many individuals jump straight into training without the physical capabilities or pre-requisite movement abilities that may elevate the risk of injury. I do believe that BJJ can be for anyone that is willing and motivated to try, but you have to understand that if you’ve spent the last 10 years performing very minimal physical activity or even just basic weight lifting, your body may not be prepared for the strain that you’re going to place on it. This is the basic recipe for injury: putting more strain on bodily tissue than what it can withstand. This dives into the topic of physical preparation along with load management in regards to your training volume (which includes your BJJ specific training hours along with the rest of your physical activity/exercise during the week).
Physical preparation is something I stress to everyone that enters the gym wanting to jump on the mats. Every individual that walks in is starting from a different point, so hopefully your coach understands this and can gradually introduce you to the sport. I started running strength and conditioning classes 5 years ago with these ideas in mind. Come check one out at CTA Portland Monday/Wednesday/Friday at 12:00pm to see how you can prepare your body for training and increase your performance on the mats too! The goal is to make sure that you have the necessary physical capabilities including: flexibility/mobility, strength, muscular and cardiovascular endurance, balance, and coordination so that you don’t end up in situations that could potentially lead to injury. You may put your body in certain positions, often under load, that you’re not used to so the more prepared you and your body are (muscles, joints/soft tissues), the safer the activity will be. Strength is incredibly important when we are talking about injuries. Not just how strong you are or how much you can lift with a certain exercise, but how strong is the tissue in your body? How resilient is it to the stress you plan to place upon it? You have to put focused effort on these things if you want to have longevity in this sport.
When thinking about injuries, physical preparation is a large component but another very important area of concern is training volume. Jiu Jitsu is a relatively newer sport, it has become a lot more popular and mainstream within the last 20 years as compared to other combat sports (boxing, wrestling, judo, etc.). Because of this, there’s often no standard way that BJJ gyms run classes or design their training sessions. It’s pretty regular to attend a class and go through a similar routine consisting of: warm up (jogging, basic BJJ movements), technique instruction with light drilling time, then finish with full sparring rounds. This is where having an attentive coach comes in. A good coach, like in all other sports, should be thinking about the intensity and duration of all of these activities when planning their student’s training schedule. Don’t get me wrong, coaching is a very demanding job and can be even harder when you’re trying to plan these things out for a large group of people that have very different levels of physical abilities, BJJ specific experience, weekly time in the gym and motivation in general. Even with the best laid out weekly training schedule, the participant has to also play their part and understand where they may be at in regards to total training time/intensity and adjust their sessions if needed. I bring all of this up because it relates directly to injury risk. Managing training volume is a huge factor related to injuries in all sports, BJJ is no different, and it’s one area that I see a lot of room for improvement. As a Physical Therapist, this is what I help my clients understand and adjust as needed when they’re coming back from an injury or working to optimize performance and reduce their overall risk of injury.
Physical preparation and training load management are things that we do have control over, but injuries can never truly be prevented. We work to reduce the overall risk, but these things will happen from time to time. This is where a knowledgeable Physical Therapist or rehab professional comes in. When I perform an assessment on a client following an injury, I’m looking to determine how the injury happened. Acute injuries occur from a sudden increase in stress or force to the tissue, causing damage that ranges from minor to severe (minor/partial tearing to full thickness tissue tears). Chronic injuries are the result of excessive microtrauma or stress over a long period of time resulting in tissue damage, pain and dysfunction. Determining if an injury is acute vs chronic may impact how I choose to manage it. Interestingly, chronic pain also doesn’t always correlate to tissue damage within the body so it’s even more important to have an in depth assessment to see why an area may be continuing to bother you by becoming sensitive or irritated. The initial goals are often the same following an injury or flare up in pain, but we need to assess other factors that contributed to the injury as this can impact our progression back to activity and long term goals.
In the next part of this series, I’ll discuss the initial steps you should take following an injury along with setting some short term goals to start the recovery process. Although the rate of injury does appear high in jiu jitsu, I believe there are a lot of steps that we can take to mitigate these risks. Injuries happen in every sport, we can never completely prevent them. Physical preparation is the first step (this goes for a lot of activities in life also) and one that we have complete control over.
A few takeaways for this article:
BJJ is a fantastic sport and hobby, but it is very physically demanding. The best thing you can do is first walk through the doors of your local academy and get started with a knowledgeable coach. They should be able to guide you along this process and ease you into the sport.
If you’ve already been training for a period of time, hopefully you have some supplemental training (strength training, flexibility/mobility training) to aide your efforts on the mats. If not, this can be a game changer in your ability to continue training for the long haul. Strength (both physical strength and the strength of the tissues in your body, which improve through appropriate strength training) and mobility can make the difference when you’re put in a bad situation.
If there are problems that you’ve found on the mats with your ability to get into positions or perform certain movements, take note and practice these! If you’re lacking flexibility, even 10 minutes per day of stretching or even better, focused mobility training can make a huge difference over time.
Take a bird’s eye view of your training volume, how many hours are you logging each week? How do you feel with it and are you recovering well? Can you dedicate 2 hours a week for a strength and conditioning program knowing that it may help mitigate your injury risk? If you’re newer, focus on gradually increasing these activities (even 2 sessions/week to start if you’re brand new and haven’t been quite as active lately then progress by adding 1 session after a month)
If you’re looking to build a strength and conditioning program to complement your time on the mats, improve your performance and reduce the risk of injury, reach out to me for a discovery call where we can talk about your goals and how to get started!
Sources:
Hinz, M., Kleim, B. D., Berthold, D. P., Geyer, S., Lambert, C., Imhoff, A. B., & Mehl, J. (2021). Injury patterns, risk factors, and return to sport in Brazilian jiu jitsu: a cross-sectional survey of 1140 athletes. Orthopaedic journal of sports medicine, 9(12), 23259671211062568
McDonald AR, Murdock FA Jr, McDonald JA, Wolf CJ. Prevalence of injuries during Brazilian jiu-jitsu training. Sports (Basel). 2017;5(2):30
