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o matter what the reason we train in martial arts we can all agree that an injury slows us down. Injury prevention is at the heart of survival if you wish to keep up with the pack and not be left behind to fend for yourself. Contrary to popular belief the ‘lone wolf’ is usually at the end of the cycle and isn’t in any good shape to keep going for much longer. So how do we reduce our injury risk and keep going to fight another day. Our training sessions whether they are in a supervised class or at home should be structured to provide the most benefit with the lowest risk of significant injury. The odd bump or scratch should be considered minor injuries, something that you could train with but a sprained joint, muscle / ligament tear or fracture should be considered major. We all have stories of ‘back in the old days’ we had blood on the floor at every training session and everyone nowadays are just soft. To that I say have a look around you and see if those blood hardened warriors are still attending regular training sessions 30, 40, 50 years down the track. If they are they most likely wised up and learned to train with more respect for their own bodies and their training partners. My father would say that he wanted to ‘die young and leave a good looking corpse’ and we would respond with ‘you aren’t that good looking so you may as well keep living’. I will say the same thing to you ‘train hard but don’t smash your body so you can keep on training’. The level of injury in martial arts is actually relatively low compared to other contact activities and even better if your martial art is a non-contact activity. Even better than boxing however not so good if you are doing professional level mixed martial arts competitions. Consider your risk aversion to injury before signing on to a martial art and choose the one that has injury reduction strategies even if you are happy to play rough.
Warm-up and cool-down to prevent injury How protective against injury are warm-up and cool-down sessions in a structured training program. Most research seems to agree that a warm-up session may be a good injury prevention strategy and this is where the agreement ends because the amount of prevention varies greatly across sports and the type of warm-ups used. The whole idea of a warm-up session is to bring your body temperature up to an ‘optimum’ level for the activity that you wish to perform. You can do this actively or passively. The active version being low to moderate intensity exercise and preferably specific not only to the martial art or sport but specific to the activity that is in the next part of the session. A passive warm-up is when you use heat to warm up the body like a hot shower or heated jacket / trousers. You can also use a combination of both whereas you would use exercise to warm up the body and heated clothing to maintain the body temperature whilst you wait to perform at a martial arts tournament or display. Research suggests that a warm-up session may be more beneficial for some sports such as sprinting. Passive warm-up using heated clothing has been
