Train BJJ longer/better with these 3 simple exercises
Train BJJ longer and better with 3 simple exercises
As a Physical Therapist and Brazilian Jiujitsu Black belt, I understand the demands placed on Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu athletes and the importance of injury prevention in their training regimen. Jiu-Jitsu involves complex movements that require strength, flexibility, and agility, making it crucial for athletes to prioritize exercises that enhance these aspects while minimizing the risk of injury. Incorporating exercises that target core stability, scapular strengthening, and hip mobility can improve overall balance and control during grappling exchanges, reducing the likelihood of strains or sprains.
It's essential for Jiu-Jitsu athletes to approach their training holistically, incorporating both physical conditioning and injury prevention strategies to ensure longevity in their sport and optimize their performance on the mats. By investing time in targeted exercises under the guidance of a knowledgeable physical therapist, athletes can mitigate the risk of injury and continue to excel in their practice of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Here are 3 injury prevention exercises to start on your Brazilian Jiujitsu Journey. Always remember to train sensibly, tap early to submissions, and get adequate rest between sessions.
1: Deadbugs with Swiss ball
Very good for helping you before more effective in the guard and take pressure off your back and hips
https://youtube.com/shorts/g13rvb31nTs?si=eieKjUcepLXG3ndV
2: Hip Posterior glide
Helps you get more hip mobility to have a more effective guard and put less strain on your back in knee during scrambles
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/LZcBtaj8xKw
3: Face pulls:
Helps you get scapular stability to make arm drags more effective, harder for your posture to get broken down, and take pressure of your neck
The muscle hurting all of our shoulders and necks
The Pec Minor is a muscle that gets a lot of attention from physical therapists because it can cause a whole range of issues. Let’s unpack this.
The pec minor is a muscle that gets a lot of attention from physical therapists. It’s a muscle that connects your scapula also known as your shoulder blade to the front of your rib cage around your chest area. It’s famous for tipping your scapula forward. And often times due our modern lifestyle. This gets too stiff because we’re always in that position. If you have a stiff pec minor this can cause a whole host of issues. From putting pressure on your neck, to making it hard to raise your arm, to compressing your nerve. Also, it just makes your posture look worse
However, If we loosen the pec minor we can see that we get way more range of motion in the shoulder, take pressure of the neck, and free up tension in the nerves going to our hand.
The first thing I like to do is stretch this muscle, by placing my hand against the door and stepping forward while rolling my shoulder blades back. After that, I like to strengthen my muscles to keep my posture in a good position, so that muscle stays nice and supple moving forward.
The shoulder muscle you are neglecting
Are you missing this key muscle in your strength training?
The shoulder is a very complex joint that can do some pretty remarkable things. From lifting hundreds of pounds overhead, to do balancing on handstands, or helping us swim across seas, it is incredibly versatile and impressive.
However, shoulder pain is a very common complain that I see many times. Often time there is one muscle that gets neglected and as such causes a host of issues down the chain.
The lower trapezius (AKA Trap 3) is a muscle that I believe is heavily under developed in most people and is causing issues.
Maybe that’s because this super important muscles doesn’t even attach to the shoulder bone. It starts at the spine at attaches to the shoulder blade. But what often times people don’t understand is that the shoulder blade is the root of a lot of shoulder dysfunctions.
Our modern lifestyle has put everything in front of us. Our computers, phone, and cars keep our arms in front of us all the time. We are not often lifting things overhead and rowing back. Because of this our back muscles get underdeveloped.
However many people know the importance of good back musculature but they still often miss the lower trapezius. That’s because since it’s so weak on so many people, they overcompensate with so many other muscles. Instead if you can teach that muscles to get stronger with very specific exercises we see that people’s shoulder pain gets much better and they can go back to doing all the things they enjoy.
How to pick you physical therapist?
Having a good physical therapist is a game changer? How do you know if you are picking the right one? Here are some things to consider.
Having a good physical therapist in your corner can change your life, but the field is really new and not all physical therapists are the same. Even the requirements to become a physical therapist in the United States has changed a lot in my lifetime.
For instance, not a lot of people know that some physical therapists have a bachelor degree and some have a doctorate degree. Some do additional training after graduate school (if they went), and some work immediately.
Here are a few different things to consider when selecting your physical therapist.
Level of training- Did they just finish school and go straight into the field or decided to residency? Unlike MDs, residency is optional for physical therapists and very few choose to do it. For instance, I chose to do one and less than 10% of my classmates in graduate school did it with me. It makes a big difference if you do one because if you complete one you can be a specialist.
Insurance- Sometimes a PT not accepting your insurance, or even taking insurance to begin with may not be a bad thing. Cash based clinics (no insurance) often means you get more time with the therapist and may get better results in less time.
Niche- Different clinicians have different niches. For instance, a lot of my clients are stunt performers and martial artists because I happen to be one too. I understand their needs and it makes it easier to treat them. Finding a PT that understands your needs is very helpful to getting great care.
There are few more reasons I outline in this video. Check it out and let me know if there are any other questions I can help you with regards to picking a physical therapist so you can improve your health and performance.
Master this exercise to live longer
Being able to do this exercise is associated with a longer life. Let’s break it down!
Squat! This exercise although super simple is very popular because quite frankly it’s very important and targets a lot of key muscles. Why is it important, well because if you try to lift something heavy off the ground (which we all need to do) without bending your knees, there is a good chance your going to hurt yourself. If you want to sit down into a chair, get off the toilet, or travel guess what? You’re going to need to do a squat. In fact, A 2014 study found that being able to get up and off the floor with as little support as possible was a predictor of mortality. Those who need less assistance from different parts of their body on average lived longer. In Eastern countries like China and Japan, they on average show much less prevalence of Hip osteoarthritis. Now we don’t know exactly why but one prevailing theory is that it’s because in those countries they squat very low as part of their day to day life.
So how do we build a good squat. First we need to make sure we have enough mobility, specifically in our knees, hips and ankles. If you don’t have the mobility you may still be able to squat low but you might compensating with rounding your low back and that overtime can lead to some pain.
Secondly we need to make sure we are turning on the right muscles. Are we activating our quads, glutes, and abs. A lot of people have a hard time with last two and there are a lot great exercises that can help you get there if you are struggling with that.
Third, we need to make sure we are strong enough. And in my opinion, just being able to get up and down isn’t enough because over time we will get weaker and we want to set ourselves up for success in the future, so let’s get a higher baseline now.
Lastly, if we have all those building blocks we just want to do it with good form. We should always lead with our hips because they are the strongest part of the body. If you are unsure, hire a physical therapies or coach to look at it for you!
Let’s squat to feel better, look better, do more, and for our loved ones so they don’t need to help us get up as we get older.
Dudda M, Kim YJ, Zhang Y, Nevitt MC, Xu L, Niu J, Goggins J, Doherty M, Felson DT. Morphologic differences between the hips of Chinese women and white women: could they account for the ethnic difference in the prevalence of hip osteoarthritis? Arthritis Rheum. 2011 Oct;63(10):2992-9. doi: 10.1002/art.30472. PMID: 21647861; PMCID: PMC3178680.
How to be more coordinated?
Always wanted to dance? Backflip? Fight off someone stronger than you? It takes skill and coordination? So how do we get that? Let’s break it down!
As a professional stuntman, breakdancer, and martial artists, I’ve spent my life trying to learn how to do weird things with my body. Wether it’s a backflip, spinning on my head, or fighting someone who is 100lbs heavier than me, it’s definitely been years of practice. So how do we get better at skills?
The answer which you can guess is practice. You hear it all the time. “Practice makes perfect”. It’s true except there is a subtle difference that I want to explore more. The challenge is not just practicing, it’s practicing well. What does that mean? I have two important criteria for good practice: First, is the task perfectly hard enough? Second, are you getting feedback?
Let’s break down the first one. I think this is the most challenging aspect of practicing, finding the perfect difficulty. We hear all these motivational speeches about getting outside your comfort zone, failing, get back up and get after it again. Yes that does hold merit but the problem is, if you’re picking up a challenge you’re not ready for, you may be making bad habits, you may get frustrated and give up, or you may even get hurt attempting. Instead we want to find the right level of difficulty. When I was learning how to flip, my coach use to say we want to train in the zone of “Difficult but possible”. That’s because it requires our attention to focus and sync everything up but it’s not so unreasonable we’re not going to make progress. In my opinion, if you’re attempting something and your success rate is less than 50% per trial, you should make it slightly easier so you can work on building good habits and eventually move onto something harder. Once your success rate is higher, on that task close to 90%, that’s where I would make it a little harder to add more challenge. I think this is a very important nuance that allows us to get more out of each session. If you want to get better at something that seems impossible, try to break the task down to something easier to start, master that fundamental than add a little bit more. I wish someone show’d me this while I was breakdancing and I probably could have avoided a few surgeries and have had a better career.
Once we get the right difficulty, we want to address the second problem. Are we getting feedback? If we want to get better at some skill, we need feedback to tell us if we’re doing it right. At the beginning specially we need lots of external feedback to tell us, but as we get better we can switch to internal feedback (Does this feel good or bad?). If you don’t have a coach to give you that feedback that’s where watching footage of yourself and analyzing it is very helpful. Often times you don’t realize your making mistakes till you see it in third person. However I highly recommend getting a coach or physical therapist to watch you instead.
I hope this helps you accomplish some skill you’ve been wanting to learn, or maybe something that even hurts and you’re trying to adjust. As always go see a physical therapist to help breakdown any barriers so you can better results, faster.
How to get stronger?
Strength is a power that everyone should unlock for a fulfilling life! Why is that? How do we get stronger?
There is a study that shows when you compare people with high strength to low strength there is a decrease in call cause mortality by 3-fold. It might be because being strong means you can hold onto things easier, get up and off the ground easier, and just do more. Well you might be saying, I can already do those things so why do I need to get even stronger? The issue is that no matter what, we will all lose strength as we get older. It is the nature of life. However if we can get our baselines really high, then even though as time takes it toll on us, we can end at higher percentage and enjoy our life more. I certainly want to try to be independent and able to do as much as I can as long as I can so I can enjoy life and my family does not have to help me.
So how do we get stronger? The first answer is simple: Exercise? However the nuance is in how we do that. If our goal is to simply get stronger then what we want to do is challenge our body just under our 1-rep max (1RM). 1-rep max means, how much can you perform a certain lift and not be able to do a second time without resting. There are ways of calculating that without having to fully test it but many people will get a coach or a physical therapist to help them test that. Once you figure out your 1 rep max number you want to be doing 3-5 reps of that exercise but only 70-85% of that 1 rep max. Essentially you are going below the level of your maximum but doing more reps of that.
Then the follow up questions are: How many times? How often? Rest? How many days a week? Dr. Andy Galpin is a famous exercise science research and on an episode of the Huberman lab explained the 3-5 principle. It goes: 3-5 reps (70-85% your 1RM), 3-5 sets, 3-5 minutes of rest between sets, 3-5 days a week. So when in doubt…3-5 is the answer.
How long till we see results? In general, strength changes take 6-8 weeks. That’s because our body wants to prove that we’re going to be doing this a lot in order to make changes. Consistency is key.
Let’s get strong so we can enjoy our lives and be independent. Remember, always consult with a physical therapist or healthcare professional to get better results and be safer.
García-Hermoso A, Cavero-Redondo I, Ramírez-Vélez R, Ruiz JR, Ortega FB, Lee DC, Martínez-Vizcaíno V. Muscular Strength as a Predictor of All-Cause Mortality in an Apparently Healthy Population: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Data From Approximately 2 Million Men and Women. Arch Phys Med Rehabil. 2018 Oct;99(10):2100-2113.e5. doi: 10.1016/j.apmr.2018.01.008. Epub 2018 Feb 7. PMID: 29425700.
How to activate muscles?
We need our muscles to be balanced before training? How do we do that?
Certain muscles are notorious for being quiet. It may sound silly but that is actually one of the biggest challenges in rehab. What happens is that being sedentary, injured, or doing the same thing over and over again changes the activation pattern of your muscles. This can cause pain, bad movement leading to injury, or just not letting you progress forward. So how do we fix that?
Well the first question is: Are we seeing a problem because a muscle is in fact “quiet” or is it because another muscle is being too “loud”? If a muscle is being too loud, that is where hands on techniques such as massage, stretching, deep trigger point pressure and more can quiet it down. I like to utilize this before my own training. If I’m trying to squat but my back muscles are taking over instead of my glutes, I will get on the foam roller and stretch those back muscles out to calm them down. Now I’m ready to fire those glutes up.
If instead the muscle is too quiet this is where activation exercises are great. The best one generally in my opinion are isometrics. That’s a really good place to start but some people respond better to different things which is why having a physical therapist analyze that for you is key. For instance, often times people have this called “glute amnesia” which means forgetting how to use their glutes. It sounds silly but it can lead to so many injuries and dysfunctions that cause pain. Getting people to turn on their glutes take a little bit of finesse because you’re asking someone to change a habit. We know that is not that easy. So I will make sure I position someone where there other muscles are quiet and have them do some basic glute exercises. All the while I’m monitoring that they’re not compensating with their bad habits. Once we dial it down, I want the person to turn on those glutes for so long that it starts to burn. This is so the brain can remember what that feels like. If it’s their first session and they don’t have any competitions coming up, I want those muscles sore so that when they’re walking around, going up stairs, sitting down and standing up, their brain remembers that feeling and they learn how to fire those glutes on command. There are definitely a few more nuances hard to explain on a blog post but if you feel like you need help getting certain muscles fired up so you can train harder or get out of pain, definitely consulting with a physical therapist is a great idea.
How to improve your mobility:
More mobility means more freedom to move, so how do we get more mobility?
First thing first, we need to address, what are the barriers to our mobility: Is it muscle? Is it joint capsule/ligaments? Is it nerve? Is a bony block that won’t improve? In order to get those answers, we need to do a good job testing? That’s where a good physical therapist comes in. They not only cans what your building blocks are but they can document where you at so we can track for improvement. That’s an important step because if we don’t know where we start, we won’t know if we’re getting better, and more specifically what is helping. Often times I see physical therapists just encouraging their patients to stretch without doing two big things: 1) Determining if their mobility is limited by something that needs stretching. 2) Measuring their baseline to know if that stretch is making improvements. Let’s talk about the first problem. 1) Your mobility may not purely be muscular. Often time’s it’s the joint capsule and if you don’t address that first, stretching may make things worse. The second problem 2) If you’re not getting baseline, then you don’t know if you’re making a change, wasting your time, and then inevitably give up. You know what motivates people? Results! If you can measure a baseline, do a treatment and get results, then that gets people excited to keep working harder.
Once we determine what is the building blocks needed, and what our baseline is. Then it’s time to get into treatment. I always like to do hands on therapy to my patients in the clinic so I can get some dramatic changes in the session and also recheck their levels so I know their home exercise program is going to work instead of guessing. If they have a home exercise stretching program all I ask for is 2 sets of 30 seconds because the research says 1 min a day is sufficient and sometimes you actually plateau afterwards. That’s not a lot of time but what I think is the hard part is the daily discipline to do it everyday. But that’s where solving those two problems I mentioned earlier come in. If you can get down to the root cause of their mobility you will get results faster and that will motivate. If you can prove you’re making improvement that will also motivate to do it everyday. No one wants to waste time. But that means let’s spend the time to get really good answers about what is holding your mobility back so we can make improvements.
If you want a little extra after a stretching session, I suggest exercising in that new range of motion. An example can look like: You’re working on hamstring flexibility. After your minute of stretching practice some light deadlifts, and leg raises to teach those muscles how to activate in that new range of motion. Remember, before starting an exercise plan I highly recommend you to visit a physical therapist. This is not just a disclaimer, it’s also so you get better results faster.
Why your rehab should be organized?
In order to get the best results we always need to ask ourselves what barriers are in the way of our success?
In order to get the best results we always need to ask ourselves what barriers are in the way of our success? As a physical therapist when someone comes to me with pain or difficulty doing something the question I ask myself is: What barriers are getting in the way of this person doing that activity or experiencing pain while doing it? Then we need to go into testing to figure it out. I always want to see four main things. Flexibility, activation, strength, and timing. And as a matter of fact I go in that order. Because if you don’t have enough flexibility to do the motion that you want to be better at or experience less pain, then all the things after that don’t matter until we address that. It’s really important we go step by step because if we skip steps than we’re just going to running into road blocks that get us nowhere. Unfortunately, I know this isn’t common practice probably because it takes long. But that’s why I believe longer appointment sessions are necessary. For instance, my initial treatments are 1 hour just with me because I need 30 minutes just to get all the data we need to answer why we’re having pain and what are all the building blocks we need to work on. That may sound like a lot of time in today’s fast paced world but it’s necessary to create results. I personally believe that if we do a good assessment, organize our treatment to address the needs first we can improve more people and get them in less pain. If you want to see more of how I organize my rehab or performance sessions, I have created a YouTube video that breaks it down.
https://youtu.be/vegnJlSDYgw