An old maxim, from die hard masters, sounds like:
“if you hurt one of your limbs you still have 3 to fight with”
I that really true? Over the last ten months I broke a rib and tore the tendon of my left bicep in two separate accidents about 6 months apart. Following the maxim above and ignoring most of doctors’ suggestions I carried on training, missing no more than a handful of training sessions.
As I already discussed in a previous post I decided to adopt an active approach to recovery by training as much as possible as long as it was not causing pain. In both cases it was matter of assessing what moves, techniques and combinations were possible and set the limit to a point which would not hurt, aggravating the injury or slowing down recovery. As each injury is different I adopted a very empirical approach which allowed me to assess every week the level of progress as well as the intensity and speed of each technique I could perform.
When you get injured you realise how the whole body is deeply interconnected; ribs are more or less in the middle of your body and you don’t realise how much you move them until one or more of them is painful. In fact it’s pretty difficult to do anything intense without triggering some serious pain. The arm is obviously more peripheral to the body but most sharp and intense body movement will have an effect on the arm itself, even just because the arm’s muscles get naturally tensed within the natural instinct of keeping a decent guard.
So going back to the maxim mention in the first paragraph, how does it qualify to an everyday practitioner of martial arts? While injured, in my opinion you can:
- Practice gentle warm up techniques and movements which stretch the body and some power activities which are not using the injured parts
- Practice regimented and pair techniques as long as you perform with a very controlled partner or partners substantially weaker and light than you which, in case they deliver at full power, will not risk to injure you
- Avoid sparring or any power activity; in fact I tried sparring while my arm was still recovering by using one arm and both legs but any sudden movement has an impact on the whole body and was often hurting the operated arm. Once more I applied the rule of training with light and inexperienced people which would allow me a little workout while teaching them a few new techniques and it partially worked
I would like to conclude that you should be very careful if you decide to follow my suggestions. Pain is there to warn you against worsening conditions. You should really listen to your body and follow what works for you, while challenging yourself on a daily basis.