Blog #3 Training Through Injury

Training through injury can be the most difficulty thing one can do. You finally find a solid groove in your training and then with the injury coming about we feel derailed, sometimes even questioning if we should continue Brazilian jiu jitsu. This is natural and quite common. I know personally my mind want to go to the extreme and think that this injury is forever. When I was a white belt I read an article by Royler Gracie in which he recommended finding what you could do with your body in regards to BJJ. So if you injure your neck, doing leg lock drills would be something you could work on, If your arm is injured, roll with one arm. I know once i injured my right knee pretty bad and for the next six weeks I repped gi chokes only as my knee healed. Now what came from this was very interesting, I thought that once my knee was better i would be gi choking everyone. This was not the case. Two years later though the gi chokes became a huge part of my game. I have always attributed the time in which i spent repping the gi chokes while my knee was healing the very thing that made the gi chokes come alive for me. Every time i have had an injury i follow Royler’s methodology and it always seems to eventually make a huge shift in my game. Even if it doesn’t directly impact my game in the short term, what it does for my mental health is huge.