Rosi’s Blog

I had a great training session tonight. In fact, it’s been a great day altogether. I’m buzzing. The last few weeks have been frustrating. I’ve been feeling tired from training, and some things have just not been working for me. Then I had a weekend break, most of which I spent in the swimming pool with Luis. I came back feeling refreshed, and all of a sudden a few pieces have fallen into place, with a couple of realisations.

It’s like this. When something’s not working in MMA, or indeed any combat sport, there are three possible causes.

1. Technical - you don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing

2. Physical - you know what you’re supposed to be doing, but your body isn’t able to do it effectively

3. Psychological - you know what you’re supposed to be doing, and your body is capable of doing it, but there’s a mental or emotional block that’s stopping you from doing it

Part of the art of training effectively is being able to spot the difference. A huge number of frustrations come from mistaking one of these kinds of problems for another. There’s no point throwing a bunch of technical information at someone when what they really need is to hit the gym, lift some more weights or improve their cardio. Then you have the fighters who always seem to be tired in training but really are suffering from a lack of motivation. Conversely, poor conditioning often masquerades as (and often causes) a lack of motivation. Then there are the people who think they have a conditioning problem - they’re not strong enough, or fit enough - when in fact, what they need is to improve their technique so they’re more efficient.

Psychological issues come in many shapes and sizes, and however well adjusted we think we are, most of us have them. Motivation, confidence, fear, aggression, frustration… all need to be carefully balanced. To much or too little of any of them can result in things not going right on the mat. These can be some of the hardest problems to spot, and never easy to solve, yet if something keeps going wrong despite all your best efforts to improve it, it’s something to consider.

One of the things I realised just recently is that a lot of mental blocks can be worked through just by getting the right balance of success and failure in training. Too much success makes you lazy, too little makes you demoralized. If every time you try something you get punched in the face, you’ll find it hard to get good at it. Initially, it may be because of a technical or a physical problem, but sometimes even when you’ve sorted those out, you find that you still can’t do it, because your subconscious has (without your permission) convinced itself that you can’t. It doesn’t work because you expect it not to.

So change the drill. Drop the intensity, or the amount of resistance, or try shorter rounds, or get a smaller training partner. Whatever you need to do to get things working…. and then build it up. You need enough failure to keep you hungry and sharp, but enough success to keep you confident and motivated.

Sometimes when you shift that mental block, you find that the other pieces of the puzzle - the technical and the physical start to fall into place. You realise a whole bunch of technical stuff that was right under your nose but you couldn’t see it. Or you discover that what felt like a physically tough session is a lot easier to do when you’re confident and motivated.

OK, I’ll admit it. I can be a teeny bit competitive at times. I hate losing. I hate not being the best at something. I hate tapping, even in training. So shoot me! That’s been giving me some headaches recently, because a lot of my training partners are damn good. Even leaving aside the ones with a sizeable weight advantage, a lot of the time I find myself struggling.

Maybe I’m the only person to feel like this, and you’re all wondering what I’m talking about, but I suspect not. I know there are some enlightened folk who seem serenely unbothered by about such ultimately unimportant things as making a mistake and getting choked in sparring, and I salute them. At the same time, I don’t think competitiveness is necessarily a bad thing. As with certain other things in life, “it’s what you do with it that counts”.

A trap I see a lot of people fall into is the “big fish in a small pond syndrome”. I may even be guilty of it myself now and then, until I catch myself doing it. It’s nice to be the biggest fish around, and an easy way of doing this is to shrink the size of your pond. The easiest way to do this is to surround yourself by people you know you can beat. If I’m being given a hard time by one of my training partners, I could massage my ego by torturing a few white belts. I can decide to only ever play my A-game, and stay away from areas I’m less good at. To ensure that the other fish in the pond don’t get too big, I might try to keep all “my” secrets to myself. I could keep things back from someone I’m coaching… little tricks that might give me an edge. Then with a bit of smoke and a few mirrors, I can convince myself that I’m even bigger than I am, and that my little neighbourhood of pondweed is representative of the whole world. 

The thing about big fish in small ponds though, is that they tend to get eaten pretty quickly if someone takes them and drops them in a larger pond where there’s some real competition.

The only way to get really good is to surround yourself by other big fish. That element of healthy competition drives a competitor to develop and improve in a way that being able to casually annihilate everyone s/he trains with never would. Homo Sapiens evolved in a hostile environment amongst a bunch of other species who wanted to eat us, and may have seemed to have all the obvious advantages… size, speed, strength and really big teeth.

It’s not all about competition though… it’s about collaboration too. What you want is a whole group of big fish together in the same place, all sharing their ideas and growing together. The bigger the other fish get, the more I can learn from them. While it might be hard work keeping up, and tough on the ol’ ego at times, it’s also the perfect environment for getting seriously good.

Now I’m off to bed before I mix any more metaphors…

I dislocated a toe a few weeks ago. I was just grappling, going for a guard retrieval when I got my foot caught and heard something snap. Didn’t hurt at all, until I looked at it and my toe was sticking out at an angle that toes aren’t supposed to stick out at. I just lay on my back and looked at it for a minute, while everyone else went “urgh!”. Karl put it back in for me, and THEN it really started hurting.

It’s not the worst I’ve seen. I know a couple of instances where people have practically torn their big toe off by getting it caught in gaps in the mat - now they were nasty. It’s not even a particularly important toe - just one of those ones in the middle that are there to make up the numbers. But it’s bloody annoying just the same. It’s amazing how a little thing like that can get in the way of just about every aspect of training.

Fingers and toes are a grappler’s nightmare. Judoka and gi-BJJ players often seem to have hands or feet that are mostly held together by tape. Wrestling boots can prevent injury, but a lot of  grapplers (including me) dislike wearing them because of the loss of sensitivity.

From a sports therapist’s point of view, fingers and toes pose a tricky problem too. Because of the limited blood flow to the area, they can stay swollen and painful for a long time. Not much thought is generally given to rehabilitating a damaged toe, but left to itself it may remain painful and stiff, sometimes for years. When it comes to treating injuries, I learn most from personal experience. I think knowing how something feels first hand, and having worked on my own injuries gives an edge that you can’t get from books, courses, or even working on other people.  So this gave me a good opportunity to give some thought to what is often a neglected area.

So, here’s what I’m doing with mine. Some things just take time, but it’s usually possible to give them a nudge in the right direction.

Immediately after the injury: 

• RICE - rest, ice, compression, elevation. In particular, get ice on it in the first few minutes after the accident to reduce the swelling in the area. Keep icing it every few hours for the first 2-3 days.
• Strap it up to protect it initially, but don’t leave it strapped up. Every few hours, take all the strapping off and give the toe a gentle stretch to maintain range of movement.   

During the healing process (after 72 hours):

• Contrast bathing - alternating ice pack with warm water to increase blood flow to the area. This is one of the best ways to speed up healing in a damaged extremity.
• Mobilize, mobilize, mobilize - make sure you keep things moving gently.
• Dont’ leave it taped up if you don’t need to. One of the most common mistakes with an injured digit is to leave tape on constantly. This allows the scar tissue to stiffen up and you may lose range of movement.  (Of course, if it is fractured then you may have to immobilize it for protection. But that’s a different story). If you are going to tape it to protect it while training, then make sure you take the tape off when you finish to allow it to move normally.
• Anti-inflammatories. It’s important to be careful with these, as the potential side-effects can be very nasty indeed. Not being a medical doctor, I also can’t advise anyone else to take them. But that said, they can be damn good at getting a finger or toe that looks like a balloon back down to a sensible size.
• Ice after training, to take care of any excessive inflammation that may have been triggered off, and to reduce soreness the next day.
• Protection - look at methods of taping, or consider wearing wrestling boots.
• Rehabilitation - treat it like any other joint. Once the inflammation subsides, start working the muscles around the joint. With a finger or toe, start with gentle flexion / extension movements, at first with no resistance, and then just against a small amount of pressure.

I’ve just spent the last five days doing one of my Osteopathy residential weeks. It’s been damn good in parts, and dull in others. Even a healthy dose of PhD’s wired was hard pressed to keep me awake through six hours of clinical medicine on one day.

One of our lectures about spinal mechanics, though, got me thinking again about MMA and the problems that fighters tend to pick up.

How often do you hear someone say something like “I can train five times a week and don’t get injured, and then I wrecked my back just getting out of bed the other morning”? Or “I don’t know how it happened, I didn’t do anything to it in training, I just woke up one day and it had started hurting”? If you’ve been around the sport a while, you probably know someone this has happened to, and there’s a good chance you’ve said something similar yourself at some point.  

The thing is, as I keep telling the fighters I work with, injuries don’t “just happen”. Most have been building up for months or years, and then something insignificant just pushes them over the edge and suddenly you’re in agony. Not wanting to be too gloomy about it, but there are a hell of a lot of MMA fighters out there walking around with ticking time bombs just waiting to go off. Often the very training that is supposed to be “conditioning” the body and making it stronger has the effect of storing up chronic long term problems that might appear years later, perhaps just as the fighter is hitting the peak of his career. At MMA shows, I see these fighters walking around. Just by looking at them, I know that if they don’t already have an injury in a particular place (often neck and/or shoulders) then they soon will have. So what could they do differently?

Wear and tear on the body is sometimes seen as an inevitable result of being a fighter. We know we’re going to end up shredding the cartilage in our knees, or giving ourselves arthritis when we’re older… but we try not to think about it because, well, it’s depressing.

It IS worth giving some thought to, though, because there are plenty of ways of minimising the damage. An intelligent, balanced approach to training, and catching potential problems early on before they develop into bigger ones can make a huge difference to the length of a fighter’s career, and his long term health. It’s with this in mind that I’ve been writing a series of articles for Fighters Only Magazine about the common postural imbalances that fighters tend to pick up as a result of training, and a few simple exercises and stretches to help combat each one.

Of course, this isn’t a substitute for getting individual advice from a professional, but my main aim is to raise awareness that MMA ”conditioning” should be about more than having great cardio and being able to lift large weights. Having a body that is balanced with the right amounts of mobility and stability at each joint will not only keep you in the game longer, but will also improve your performance.

Photo courtesy of Hywel Teague

Frustration - everyone gets it. But being a small(ish) female in a male dominated sport is just asking for more than your fair share. One of the most common things I get asked when I talk to other women who train is how to deal with bigger, stronger training partners who seem to just want to sit on top of them. Maybe some think that I’m immune to this problem, or that I have some kind of magical solution. The real answer is…. get used to being frustrated. A lot.

That’s easier said than done, though. A few months back, I got a message from someone who was suffering from exactly this. Recently, I dug out the reply I wrote to her, because - well - I needed reminding of my own advice.

I spent pretty much the first six months of training grappling, more or less just getting sat on. Eventually things did start to improve, but even now I still go through periods where I get really frustrated with it all. When I’m trying to drill a new technique on someone twice my strength whose only goal in life seems to be to pull hard enough to detatch my head from my body… or when someone who’s been training three months gets a submission using pure brute force and ignorance, and I just wonder whether I’m wasting my time… or someone won’t take me seriously because he’s 200 lbs and I can’t make anything work on him… or when I’m rolling with guys who just want to sit on me and hold me down for a five minute round…. or if I’ve got a coach calling instructions to me, and I know what I should be doing, but I’m simply not strong enough to do it. I get annoyed when they use too much strength… but I feel patronised if they’re “going easy on me”.

Over the years, there have been many, many occasions when i’ve left the mat wanting to either hide in a corner and cry or to break something. I know exactly how you are feeling - and i know it’s tough. Often, I wonder what I’m actually doing in this sport. But stick with it.But… if there’s one thing I’ve learnt from doing this, it’s that frustration is not just normal, it’s an essential part of the learning process. You’ll keep going through it over and over again… but in between the frustrating bits, you’ll have wonderful moments where it all comes together and you manage to do something that makes you smile for weeks just thinking about it. And then it gets frustrating again. But eventually, you start to realise that the times when you’re experiencing the most frustration, when you feel like you’re wasting your time - they’re the times when you’re actually learning and growing the most. So that’s the time to hang in there, grit your teeth and dig deep… because it WILL all be worth it. When all of a sudden, one day you find yourself able to do something you couldn’t do before… when a new guy walks into the club and you see the look of shock on his face when he gets tapped out by the small female who he thought would be an easy roll… when one of the bigger guys looks at you in confusion because they can’t work out why they can’t get you off them… when you catch a beautiful submission out of nowhere on someone you thought you’d never submit…. when you win that competition, or that title that you’ve been aiming for…. THEN you’ll look back on these times and understand what it was all about.