Q HOW DO I TRAIN TO MAKE MYSELF INJURY-PROOF?
Strengthening your connective tissue is the key to avoiding injury
Is gym training helping you stay free of sports injuries? It’s unlikely. A high percentage of such injuries come from awkward collisions, falls and impacts. Gym training will make you stronger, but it won’t protect you against these injuries because you always move through safe, specific movement patterns. Calf raises won’t help when you roll your ankle playing football.
I’m 52 years old and have been training and competing in grappling-based sports – including wrestling, judo and Brazilian jiu jitsu – for over 30 years, all of which place considerable strain on your joints. Most of the guys I began training with have had hip and knee replacement operations and are in pretty bad shape, but I can still train and move like a 30-year-old. The reason? I’ve spent years training my connective tissue – the ligaments, tendons and fascia – that surround my ankle, knee, hip, elbow and wrist joints
Connective issues
I first came across connective tissue training through the Russian concept of “poisonous exercises” (see box, right), which place your joints in unnatural, stressful positions and force them to adapt to those positions without actually injuring them. This works like a vaccination that introduces a small amount of a disease into your body so it can adapt and create antibodies.
The key is to build your connective tissue’s tolerance to these positions very slowly, because too much strain too soon will lead to injury. If you imagine a pain scale where one feels fine and ten is absolute agony, you should always stop immediately when your discomfort level reaches four. Over time, your capacity to push these biomechanically bad positions further and hold them for longer will increase as your connective tissue adapts to them,
significantly reducing the risk of injury when your joints are forced into these positions unexpectedly.
In addition to adapting your connective tissue, poisonous exercises will also recondition your nervous system so it doesn’t perceive these unnatural positions as a threat. This is particularly important, because a lot of muscular injuries are the direct result of an overactive stretch reflex, whereby your body involuntarily contracts muscles if they’re placed in unfamiliar positions.
It’s impossible to fully injuryproof your body, but training your connective tissue will significantly reduce the risk, and keep your joints functioning healthily into later life.
Poisonous exercises force your joints to adapt to unnatural positions