Training with injuries....

Do you train when you are injured? Should you train when you are injured? Of course it depends to some extent on the nature of the injury and whether surgery or other medical intervention is required to correct it.

I had an e-mail from someone who had fairly recently taken up martial arts but had sustained a shoulder injury requiring surgery and her doctor had advised her to stop doing martial arts. She was asking me what I thought about this advice and whether I had sustained injuries doing martial arts.

Well, who hasn’t sustained some kind of injury doing martial arts? Anything from bumps, bruises, sprains or pulls to ACL tears, rotator cuff injuries, fractured ribs or noses – you name it, it will have happened to someone.  It is almost inconceivable that you will never sustain some kind of injury when you train in martial arts – it’s an occupational hazard!

Surely if we gave up a physical activity every time we were injured we would soon become a world of couch potatoes. Being prepared to risk physical injury and endure the pain of it whilst training on is part of the mental and spiritual development that martial arts are known for.

I had a chronic ‘quad’ injury last year when preparing for my black belt training. I could barely lift my knee up let alone kick with that leg. It didn’t occur to me to stop training until it healed! However I was highly motivated to speed up the healing process (6 weeks from grading) and eventually got relief from a deep tissue massage. Now I have a chronic shoulder injury. I have had a course of physiotherapy which has brought about some minor improvement and I’m planning to try another deep tissue massage to my shoulder, neck and back. However, I have continued to train throughout, putting up with the discomfort and pain afterwards.

My husband continues to train with a chronic hip problem – he literally hobbles home sometimes. My husband is a doctor; if he were his own patient he would probably advise himself to stop doing martial arts. However, this advice would only help his hip (or maybe not – it might get worse with no exercise!) but it wouldn’t help him – he is a whole person, not just a hip. He would be miserable if he couldn’t carry on with training – he’d rather put up with the pain!

How far should we be prepared to go training with a chronic injury? I am always impressed with the courage and fortitude of people who fight back to fitness after a serious injury so they can continue enjoying the activity they love. Michele fought back from her ACL tear a few years ago and has now just been awarded her 6^th dan. Likewise, Middle-AgedMartial Artist tore his ACL during his black belt test but fought back to re-take the test a couple of years later. Tiger Lady is fighting back following a brain injury caused by boxing. I’m sure you can all name someone who didn’t give up their martial art because of an injury and fought back to fitness, probably in spite of their doctor’s advice.

Of course there are things we can do to minimise our chance of injury. Injuries often happen because muscles are not strong enough to stabilise joints, or our posture is bad or our technique is incorrect. Keeping our bodies in tip-top condition is a necessary part of martial arts training. Good posture, muscle tone, flexibility, general body movement, as well as good technique – particularly for throwing where you need to bear the full weight of your partner- will help to reduce the chances of injury and help to speed up recovery if it happens.

In my opinion (and I’m not a doctor) unless it is actually fractured, dislocated, sprained to the point you can’t weight bear, bleeding heavily, just been operated on or has rendered you unconscious there is no need to stop training. Grin and bear the discomfort and train on. If it’s bad enough to put you out of action for a while then phase your return as you build up your fitness again – but don’t give up all together.

Remember!  You are more than the sum of your parts. You are certainly more than your injury so don’t be defined by it. What’s best advice for your injury isn’t necessarily best advice for your whole person – you just have to be more sensible about the way you train in future. There are people out there training from wheelchairs, now that’s to be admired!

If you are determined to succeed you will find a way …

Happy training!

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor so don't take this post as advice on whether you can train with your injury. It's your injury so it's your call....

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Victim selection: it's all in the way we walk!

There have been many research studies into what factors make a person a potential victim. Most of these factors relate to body language cues and psychological factors such as dominant vs. submissive personality types. However, one of the most distinguishing cues that separate’s a potential victim from a non-victim is the way we walk…

The most influential study into non-verbal cues was carried out in 1981 by Grayson and Stein. Briefly, they shot silent black and white videotape of 60 people walking in New York City, without their knowledge and in a single location. They then asked inmates incarcerated for violent crime to rank them for perceived assault potential.

The findings were surprising because ‘victims’ were not selected on obvious criteria such as size, gender, race, or age. Interestingly, the inmates themselves could not articulate why they chose some people as potential victims and not others suggesting that victim selection was an unconscious or intuitive process.

However, careful analysis of the videotape revealed that victim selection was dependent on the way people walked. In particular the following five criteria were important in identifying a person as a potential victim:

1.       Length of stride: Having too long or too short a stride for their height.

2.       Walking rate: Walking faster or slower than the general pedestrian traffic around them.  Walking too slow makes you look like you lack purpose, too fast can makes you look nervous.

3.       Fluidity of gait: Having a jerky or uncoordinated gate. Shuffling, staggering or just looking awkward.

4.       Wholeness of body movement: Not moving their body from the centre as a coordinated whole. Swinging arms in an uncoordinated way. This projects an image of weakness, poor balance and lack of confidence.

5.       Posture and gaze: Slumped posture and downward gaze. This suggests submissiveness and lack of awareness.

Though each of these factors in isolation may give out important subconscious cues to an attacker it also seems that all these factors taken together make you look different to people around you and therefore make you stand out from the crowd. Perhaps, just as we look for those differences in behaviour that makes a potential attacker stand out from the crowd, an attacker subconsciously looks for differences in walking styles to identify a potential victim.

Can we or should we change the way we walk? Well, according to experts it’s virtually impossible to suddenly change the way we move or fake body language. Positive changes in gait and body language have to be earned!

Knowledge is power they say – the way to develop ‘positive walking’ is to firstly develop better awareness skills– which require you to look up and engage with your environment, making eye contact with people. This alone will start to make you look more confident and give you a more upright posture.

Secondly, improving fitness will impact on your balance, coordination and strength which in turn should help you develop a more positive walking style.

Finally, learning some self-defence skills has been shown to actually reduce your chances of being attacked. This is related to the confidence and assertiveness cues you give out in your general body language.

So, it’s time to analyse the way you walk; don’t make yourself a victim through ignorance. If your posture and gait is found wanting do something about it – you can’t change it overnight but you can change it over time and the sooner you start……

Ref: Why is everyone always picking on me?
Body language and assault prevention

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Awareness – let's not just pay lip service to this important area of training.

How often do we pay lip service to the skills of awareness in relation to self-defence training? Every self-defence course you go on will tell you how important awareness and avoidance are. Five minutes later you will be moved on to  learning some physical techniques (the fun part) - after all, isn’t that the reason you’re really there, to learn some self-defence?

Yet we all know that most physical attack situations can actually be avoided if we are truly aware and paying attention to our environment. So why spend so little time learning the skills of awareness? Perhaps you don’t think it is a skill. Perhaps you think it is something we can all do naturally and we just need reminding about it now and again.

Do you think you have good awareness skills? Watch this:

Did you notice it? This just shows that we are only aware of things that we are looking for. If we are not looking for something we won’t notice it. Do you know what you are looking for when you are told to be more aware of your environment?

Here’s another video:

This shows us that even when we know what we are looking for we don’t necessarily notice it all the time. This shows that good awareness is a skill that needs to be learned, honed and practised just like the physical skills we learn in self-defence training.

So what is awareness? According to Randy LaHaie of protective strategies.com:

 “Awareness is the ability to ‘read’ people and situations and anticipate the probability of violence before it happens. It is knowing what to look for and taking the time to notice safety-related aspects of what is happening around you…..your level of awareness should be appropriate to the circumstances you are in……….some circumstances call for a greater degree of awareness than others. Obviously, you would want to be more aware when walking alone to your car  at night than when shopping in a crowded mall with friends."

This poses some practical questions?  What is it about people that we need to ‘read’? What are the things in our environment that we need to be alert to? What are we supposed to notice about particular situations? How do we determine which circumstances require a greater degree of awareness?

Okay, so some common sense is required and we do have such a thing as a survival instinct which helps us determine when a situation or person is dangerous. We also have gut instincts that seem to instinctively tell us when something is not right. However, both common sense and gut instincts are learned from experience or training.  Our parents, school teachers and other people teach us from a young age not to talk to strangers, walk home alone at night or go down unlit alley ways. We eventually file away information like this under ‘common sense’. In addition, personal accounts from others or personal experiences we have ourselves of being followed, watched or even grabbed/attacked can internalise and resurface later as ‘gut feelings’ when we experience similar (pre-cursor) circumstances again.

But can we be sure that we have counted all of the ‘Fs’ and not missed the moonwalking bear without specific awareness training? I don’t think so. Why should we presume that we instinctively know what we should be aware of?

In other areas of our lives related to personal safety we expect or be taught or told what we need to know or even to do special training. As children we are taught how to cross a road safely and have numerous practices at it with our parents in attendance until we are deemed safe. Later, when we learn to drive we are taught about hazard perception and tested on our ability to spot hazards.

In both these cases we are taught the things we need to be aware of in our environment – where is a safe place to cross, how to observe the traffic before stepping into the road (speed and direction of traffic), observing for the ‘green man’ etc; or when driving we learn to anticipate the behaviour of people on the pavements (is someone likely to run into the road?), notice a parked car that is about to pull out in front of you and we learn that we must give special attention when approaching an unmarked crossroad or when the traffic lights are not working.  This learned behaviour eventually becomes internalised and we perceive much of it as common sense or gut instinct – we have learned to have an appropriate awareness of our environment for the task we are engaged in.

So if that task happens to be ‘preventing oneself from being attacked whilst going about our daily business.’ What are the things we should be aware of?

There are many very good articles (including the one I linked to above) that tell us about the importance of awareness and how to be more aware but they don’t specifically say what we should be aware of, except in the vaguest of terms e.g. ‘observe for predatory behaviours.’

I would like to put together a guide called ‘Awareness in self-defence- what to be aware of’ and I need your help to do so. Leave me a comment with your advice about what we should be aware of in our environments and why – be specific, not vague. Also tell us the things we can do to practice our awareness skills so that they improve. If I get sufficient comments back I will turn them into a guide  - similar to the ‘World guide to passing your black belt’, in which I will accredit each author with their comment and provide a link back to your blog/website/profile.  I received 21 comments to my request for information for that guide and hope to get a similar level of response for this guide.

Please help if you can….thanking you in advance……

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