Injuries and how you deal with them will be important on your martial path. Through the years I have had multiple injuries. Some minor, some major. I have always made sure that I was able to do some training while injured. When my knee was badly injured I was still able to train with a major knee brace and I just had to be extra careful. As the injury became better I eventually reduced the brace to a sleeve and continued training and picked the pace up a bit. Eventually, I no longer needed the brace and resumed full on training at the accelerated pace I was on before the injury. I have had many other injuries that I have treated the same way. If you are training in the Martial Sciences you will eventually have an injury and you will have to find a way to deal with it. When one IRT practitioner damaged his knee he sat in a chair during class and continued to train on what he could. This inspired us all to train that much harder and to invest even more in learning and our skill sets!
Recently, I have an injured elbow with pretty severe tendonitis. So far I have had excellent benefit from compression sleeves. With this injury I am still able to train and teach but I have to be very careful with what I do. I am currently in the third week of the injury and I am seeing good results and look to fully recover shortly.
One thing when you are injured I would recommend that you go and see a medical professional ie. your doctor to be evaluated. Get diagnosed so that you know what you are dealing with. Once you know this then you can plan your rehab appropriately.
When I was in college I was exploring which degree I wanted to pursue. One was Sports Medicine and the other was Criminal Justice. Eventually I picked Criminal Justice and moved into that as a career field. However, during injury evaluation and prevention training we learned RICE. Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation. When you have an injury remember RICE and seek out a professional medical evaluation.
Train smart and prevent most injuries but when you have one figure out a way to train even if it is just going through mental skill sets!
See You On The Mats!
Brian R. VanCise
Note: This blog is opinion only and neither Instinctive Response Training LLC or Brian R. VanCise are responsible for any third party actions.
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So I’m not the only guy dealing with an injured elbow (tennis elbow) and wearing a compression sleeve. Most unfortunately I still hat to shovel snow, just another of the joys of living in the Northeast and there is another storm on its way this evening.
I have dealt with a lot of injuries over that last 40 years of MA and as I get older they take a lot longer to heal and I learned the hard way that you need to listen to the doctor or you will be right back where you started and I have done that way to many times and it took the last 5 years of dealing with foot, knees, elbows and shoulder injuries, one right after the other and sometime on top of one another to actually realize that I might have learned that you need to listen to your doctor but I had not learned to apply what was being said or that patients to follow the advice as long as I was supposed to. But out of this I learned to listen to my body, analyze what it was trying to tell me and go from there, and that is what worked for me. Sometimes my body was telling me to take it easy and it was the right thing to do, other times it was being lazy. But analyzing what it was trying to tell me was the key to understanding and being able to tell the difference. However there is still part of my mind, no matter what, that calls me a wimp and tells me to just go train, the MD be damned, and that is really hard for me to ignore, but I’m learning. Most recently I got hit in the eye and that caused a retinal tear and that took me out of everything and I, for once, did exactly what I was told to do and that has made all the difference.
So what is the point of all this whining; I found ways to train, even during the retina recovery. I read books on martial arts, I got DVDs on martial arts and I thought about what I was reading and what I saw. When I could I started back doing the basics of basics of my style of taijiquan and qigong. I also started doing more mediation and that has helped me with that little voice inside calling me a wimp every time I thought what I should and should not train. Basically I learned there are always ways to train, if you look for them, but it is very important for you to keep your head in the game during the injury induced down time.