Staying healthy and injury free in martial arts is an ongoing battle due to the very nature of it and the physical requirements, its not like playing tiddly winks or ping pong! There is a requirement to balance training, active rest, rehabilitation, diet and sleep. Here are a few rules to assist you in your quest for injury free training:
Warm-up process: The warm-up isn't there to go through arbitrary activities with no relevance to the activity you are about to undertake. Also just foam rolling and general, arbitrary functional movements are also not appropriate as a full warm up. The warm up is an opportunity to enhance your training performance and rehearse movements and activities with effective programming. Put some time into designing a well-rounded well thought out warm-up routine that's specific not only to the training session ahead, but to your specific weak links as a martial artist. If you chose to use a Self-Myofascial Release (SMR) technique, corrective exercise or activation drill, you should make sure that this has a relevance to your training objective and benefit the training phase. If it doesn’t design a warm up that actually produces results and stop wasting your time. Make it a goal to master specific drills so that you are performing them correctly and perfectly. You should also be aware not to keep doing the same warm-up that's done out of habit, have a reason for using each drill.
Plan your training: We can sometimes get sucked in to jumping on to the latest fad programs, exercises or drills. We should always assess and analyse any new program or drill for its relevance, safety. The ideal is to look at your own physical capacity and capabilities and not some utopian version of yourself that more closely resembles someone of much greater ability than reality. This is not to say that you do not strive to be as good as the star in your club that you aspire to be and use them as motivation, but when it comes to staying healthy, knowing your body capabilities is important for staying injury free, don’t get ability and ambition mixed up! Define your strengths and weaknesses as a martial artist and work each training day to improve upon those areas that need improvement, negate to do this and these weak points will eventually fail you.
Nutrition to meet your goals: This is a major aspect of human performance that people either don’t give enough time to or even neglect it totally; when training hard you need to fuel the body correctly. This area can be a mine field with all the misinformation in the media and social media. The key is to eat the right stuff in the right amount, get this wrong and you are putting a physiological stressor into your system. The more stress you place on your body, physical, mental or emotional, the more likely you will get ill or be injured. One key to achieving a well-rounded and varied diet to achieve an intake of fuel, regenerative nutrients is to make sure you enjoy what you are eating and make your diet varied, also very importantly don't forget water, we generally don't drink enough. Faddy diets are just that, fads! And generally are not a long term strategy for health, at their worst they are dangerous.
Train the core: Your spine was designed to be a strong and stable functional unit that can withstand serious force. But as soon as aesthetic appearances such as 6-pack abs start to preoccupy our mind, the core is destabalised through imbalance and the strong and stable functional unit is compromised. By over or under working a muscle group in this area it can have an effect on the pelvis and spine affecting the biomechanics of the area affecting other connected aspects to it. The key to a strong core and injury risk prevention is to train with symmetry in mind and perfect the skill of creating internal tension through the stabilising muscles of the spine and core stabilisers. Every time you flare up your back, you're more susceptible to it happening again, only worse.
Performance progression: Just adding extra intensity to your training program isn't the only way to make progress. There are hundreds of ways to continuously progress, and prioritising life-long progression in multiple areas bodes well for long-term pain-free success. You can't add load or intensity to every training session. If you do, overload will eventually catch up with you. First, your performance suffers and abilities drop. This is usually followed by pushing harder in a session until you break down and get hurt. Challenge yourself in a myriad of rep ranges, conditioning activities, cardiorespiratory endurance, mobility movements.
Fundamental movement patterns: The ability to execute clean and effortless movement patterns when executing techniques that look as good and feel good is the goal. Moving well takes years of mastery, one challenge is making sure that you are using the correct movement patterns in the first place and not habitualising poor and incorrect ones which could lead to injury down the line. This can be easier said than done and can take an appropriately qualified person in biomechanics with an excellent knowledge in the activity you are doing to assess this and correct poor technique and movement patterns. The trick is once you have good functional movement patterns to not loose these patterns and abilities, it’s far easier to maintain a physical ability than it is to create or rebuild one. If and when these movements start to feel poor or even start to cause pain, don't just ignore it as the consequence of training hard or old age, but rather identify the origin of the cause before it leads to injury.
Poor form: Placing yourself in positions where you're compensating and push out poor quality reputations of a drill will never be part of any pain-free training program. When conducting an exercise, you can choose either achieve volitional failure or failure. If you are looking for improved technical abilities going to failure is not going to achieve this but will result in cheating towards the end of a drill set to achieve the last repetitions. Failure training is appropriate when you are looking to achieve physiological overload and push the physiological conditioning of the body not for improving skill sets. However over do failure training and you will be prone to injury. There are times and places for training through the brink of failure, but for the most part, these types of techniques need to be strategically placed into your programming.
Recovery days: Everyone needs a day off of the higher intensity workouts however it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to do nothing; these are your active rest days. These are the days you use to work on patterns (Tul), brush up on technical movements challenges at a lower intensity than usual. Other uses for these “rest” days is to concentrate on a rehabilitation program if you have one, stretching and mobilization, SMR techniques or to undertake a low impact, low-intensity steady-state cardio activity such as swimming. Set aside 20-30 minutes every day for recovery work. The term overtraining should be replaced with "under-recovering." If you're serious about staying healthy, don't under-recover.
Physical longevity: You have one body that needs to last you the rest of your life, so you need to be your own best advocate for long-term resilience against injury. It's your job to take ownership of your long term health and not your martial arts instructor, personal trainer or chiropractors job to keep you healthy and functioning (although they are there to assist and advise). Injuries can take away that what you love to do, training hard. Injuries do happen, and sometimes we can't prevent them. But if you try to follow the above rules, your injuries should hopefully be kept to a minimum.
Martin Noddings