Combat sports clinic

You know how frustrating it is when you go and see someone about that injury you picked up in training? Ever had that experience where you try to explain how you did it, while the person looks at you disapprovingly and then tells you to take 3 months off?

“Combat sports clinic” is a network of therapists who all understand and love your sport as well as being qualified to deal with sports injuries of all kinds. So you won’t get blank looks when you tell us that you hurt your neck when someone sprawled on you, or you injured your shoulder resisting a kimura in competition.

We’ve got people in Liverpool, Manchester and London, with more coming soon. I’m keeping this to a small group of therapists (osteopaths, physios and sports therapists) who I know personally to be good, as well as having a personal involvement in combat sports.

See the facebook page for contact details and locations

http://www.facebook.com/CombatSportsClinic

Full website coming soon!

First day of term

So, after a summer of taking it easy(!) I’m back to making the 700 mile round trip again this weekend in my ongoing quest to qualify as an osteopath. 

It’s funny, I’ve been in formal education of one sort or another for around 24 of my 31 years on this planet. And still, the first day of term feels much the same as it did when I was eight. There’s the fresh familiarity of being back. There’s the enjoyment of seeing friends and colleagues again and talking about what we did over the summer. And then there’s that feeling of amazement at having made it as far as the fourth year. It doesn’t seem like three years ago that I started, and I remember on one of my first days in clinic feeling overwhelmed by how much the fourth and fifth years knew, and how confident they seemed in what they were doing.  

Looking round at everyone else, though, I can see how far they’ve all come since we started, and especially in the last year since we started treating patients. I hope I look the same way to them. We were discussing a point about hip joint testing this afternoon in a practical session and everyone’s asking questions, adding points, debating the relative pros and cons of different methods, showing alternatives, taking part, working things out, wanting to know more. At the same time, we’re having a laugh and there’s a bit of good natured piss taking going on. It’s a great group to be part of. 

This year’s going to be a lot of hard work, but at the same time, there’s a lot I’m looking forward to. We were talking about research projects today, and it looks like I might get the chance to play with some biomechanical modeling. I’m probably rather more excited about that than is good for my social status, so I’ll stop writing now and put my inner nerd back in her box….

Injuries waiting to happen

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.