How To Return To BJJ After Back Pain
Michael Fatica
Back Injury Expert. Speaker. Lead Consultant Osteopath For Back In Shape Program.
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is a great sport both for its physicality and mental stimulation, and in my opinion one that we can do for years and decades to come, just look at some of the most experienced pioneers in the sport for evidence of its enjoyment well beyond retirement years. The problem arises when we get injuries, specifically low back pain. Having been doing BJJ for a couple of years now & competing a couple of times myself too at blue belt, low back injuries can be something that can really get in the way of the enjoyment of the sport.?
We’ve also had a number of comments on our YouTube videos and some DM’s by people who’ve been struggling to get back into BJJ with their back injuries, so we thought it would be helpful to put some of our thoughts together into a dedicated episode on BJJ and lower back pain.
Just before we start, as a blue belt, I’d certainly put myself in the novice category of the sport, however spine issues are our speciality. Clinically and with members, we’ve been helping people with lower back injuries for years, and we know how to get those better!
To watch the full video click here.
Why BJJ can challenge your lower back
First and foremost, if you’re engaging in BJJ you’re making a decision, just like me, that there is a degree of risk associated with the sport, after all it’s not like we’re playing video games, relatively free from physical strain. Necks, elbows, shoulders, knee’s are all at risk, perhaps interestingly the healthy low back could be less at risk than these other areas.
However, once we have an injured lower back, perhaps the most common would be a disc bulge or herniation at L4-L5 or L5-S1, things take on a different picture and this must be considered.?
Forward bending in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu
Through many classes we spend our time rounded, curled up in a ball with the lower back flexed, knees towards the elbows, whether this is in an open guard position, or a butterfly guard, the list goes on. When passing on the feet, again we have this rounded posture in our lower back as we seek to pass our sparring partner. Then there is the stack passing and other compromising positions which we might be subjected to, such as during inversions.
These are all movements that the un-injured person might not be particularly threatened by, allowing it to happen. Because under ordinary circumstances, we are not necessarily as worried about a stack pass as an arm bar being set up.
Comparison to other injuries in BJJ
If we compare this to an elbow injury you might have, this can in some ways be easier to manage. Primarily because, the elbow may have been injured from a previous arm bar, so you’re hyper aware of avoiding any future arm bars. There are dedicated escapes you’ve probably learned to avoid such submissions, and generally speaking you can start to see that the arm bar is being worked towards, at least with opponents of a similar skill level. The injured arm would become at risk later on in the progression of the sparring round as you get closer to a submission being a viable option for your opponent.?
This is all to say, we are trained to avoid being caught in arm bars, and they tend to happen under a specific set of ever increasingly threatening circumstances.?
The strain on our lower back on the other hand could come at any time in the round, even in positions we do not typically consider to be threatening. For example, you’re never going to happily let your sparring partner place their hips behind your shoulder, and legs over your torso holding your arm. On the other hand, when trying to pass full guard you would often try to posture up from a low position which would place a lot of strain on an injured low back.
Avoid flexion and loaded flexion as best you can
Just like avoiding strain on the elbow when you have an elbow injury, understand that flexion, rounding of the lower back, and certainly loaded flexion of the lower back is something that you need to avoid in the sparring environment. It is this one scenario that is almost guaranteed to set you back if you’re recovering from a low back injury.
Understand that with a disc bulge or herniation, the structures on the back part of your spine that keep the natural lordosis, a natural arch in your back, have been damaged. When you then put force through them in the rounded position it is very easy to retear the tissues that are trying to heal.
A plan for success in returning to BJJ after a low back injury
Chances are if you are rehabbing right away after injuring your lower back, that you’ve still got a good degree of strength in your core region as not enough time has passed to lose significant strength. You might however need to work on spinal control a little more. We’ll break these strategies down into three parts. Relief strategies to combat the strain of both daily life and your Jiu Jitsu class. We’ll also cover rehabilitation strategies to strengthen your back, and finally some specific ideas and concepts to help you within your sessions on the mats.?
Reliving the strain from life and your time on the BJJ mats
Firstly, you might have tension and stiffness in your lower back, STOP doing knee hugs and rounding your back after class – you do not need more of this. The amount of time I see people doing this after class, saying their back is sore, is shocking. You’ve just spent 60-90 minutes curled in a ball, as if you needed more! Don’t do it at home either!
Lumbar towel decompression & bed decompression
There are two great stretches you should be doing to help take pressure off your lower back, Firstly after class when you get home lying across your bed doing this bed decompression stretch shown below, whereby you’re using your arms to gently pull your upper body away from your pelvis, this will give a gentle stretch which can be pumped for reps to help decompress your spine in a NEUTRAL position.?
Aim to hold the pumps by pressing your upper arm into the side of the bed, for 3-5 seconds then relax, do 10 to 15 reps of this.
Following this, using a rolled up towel like in the below image, lying on your back, allow the towel to support the natural curve for 3 to 5 minutes. After you finish, be sure to roll slowly to the side without twisting your spine.
Both of these stretches can be done as often as you like and should always be done after class. I would generally recommend these to be done 2 to 3 times per day under normal circumstances, but in the early days of an injury more frequent applications are certainly only going to be a help.?
For a full demonstration check out the video demonstrating these decompression stretches for your lower back.
Maintain good hip mobility to decrease strain on your low back
As with all cases of low back pain, keeping good hip mobility is going to be a great help for the recovering low back. Robust stretching only needs 10 minutes or so to keep those hips nice and mobile, for a full routine that you can do at home and follow along with check out this hip mobility routine.
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Massage guns can help release tension in your lower back
Nowadays these guns are not expensive and can be a great way of easing the tension in your lower back when you want to round the back to stretch it. Instead you can stand tall and use the gun on the muscles to eliminate the tension in a much more “injury friendly way”. If you’ve not got one, both Hyperice and Therabody do some great affordable models around the ￡100-130 mark. For a quick guide on a complete lower body and back routine check out this massage gun routine that you can follow along with too. Doing this daily can again be a great “relief strategy”.
Strategies to strengthen your lower back injury effectively
It will be worthwhile starting briefly with the basics but I would expect as an athlete you should be able to master this quickly. Movements such as the modified dead bug help you improve the recruitment of your core to stabilise your spine effectively, preventing it from? arching or flattening is the goal here – if you’re doing it right, bracing with your core well, it should really fire up the whole abdominal region. For more detail on this exercise and training points, check out the complete deadbug tutorial video.
Load bearing strength building in the neutral position
The inescapable fact is that our back is going to have loads going through it and we need to rebuild the ability to bear this load, therefore the main bulk of your rehab work needs to be you practising building textbook form on movements like the hip hinge, squat and step up. These three movements are great, especially the first two, because they will allow you to put your spine in the safest possible position, a neutral spine, to bear load.
Simply put, a squat or hip hinge offers you a testing ground with minimal risk to rebuild your back’s strength giving you the best chance of challenging but not reinjuring the low back. If you cannot bear to do 10 reps of close to your bodyweight on these exercises with a neutral spine, what hope do you have of sparring with someone of equal weight whose stack passing your spine into a C shape focusing 100% of their load AND strength through ONE joint in your lower back – that recovering L5, S1 herniation.?
Your strengthening work is there to give you “reasons” why you should be ok to return to the sport in a way that you feel unencumbered by your “recovered” back injury. This is not to say you cannot return until that point, but it’s worth thinking about and aiming for if you are serious about returning to the sport in a more intensive manner.?
When you get into the gym and try this, see how you find it, and start at whatever level of resistance gives you no pain, working from there, some tips for doing this effectively IN ORDER are as follows using sets of 10 reps:
Strengthening in the rounded position
We do NOT recommend strengthening your back in the rounded position for the vast majority of individuals as it’s simply not worth considering until you are using a significant amount of load in the above exercises WITH A NEUTRAL SPINE.?
However if you are doing BJJ there is good reason to work to introduce this, I would suggest delaying until such a time that you are able to comfortably perform 10 to 15 reps carrying your bodyweight with very good range of motion in both the hip hinge and the squat. Doing so prior to this is unwise in my opinion.?
To be clear, for example: I weigh around 100kg/220 lbs so I should be happy to do 220 lbs for 10-15 reps on the squat & hip hinge with good range of motion BEFORE considering adding in flexion.
However, movements like the Jefferson curl done following the same principles and step by step instructions as we’ve just mentioned VERY slowly and controlled would be worthwhile considering your rehab work.
Strategies for on the matts while you’re doing your rehab & for the long term
For those of you reading this who are far more experienced than I am on the mats, please bear in mind there will be nuances of the sport that I might have missed out here, so feel free to add comments below if you can think of other circumstances that might be worth adding to the considerations below.
I find it a personal pet-peeve when people ask you to be careful of their injury, for example, a bad knee or elbow, only to proceed to jump around like they’re on a pogo stick or offer up arm bars left right and centre. It’s very frustrating to spar with and you nearly always end up in trouble as the “non injured partner”.?
Don’t be like this! Modify your game to protect yourself! The sport is so detailed and deep in terms of the techniques so there is no reason why you cannot eliminate some of these aspects for the time being until such a time as you feel like you’ve made enough progress on the rehab front to consider them.?
And remember sparring at your club on the mats is not life and death, there’s no reason why you should not tap out or give up the position if you’re seeing things move to a too-compromising position now you’re more aware of what this might look like.
Positional consideration & game plan
Consider movements as the bottom player such as inversions, such as very closed butterfly guards or perhaps single leg X-guard, De La Riva guard, spider guard. These often involve significant rounding of the lower back and seem to be more prone to being at the mercy of stack-style passing. Where possible eliminate these from your game.?‘Consider movements as the bottom player such as inversions, such as very closed butterfly guards or perhaps single leg X-guard, De La Riva guard, spider guard. These often involve significant rounding of the lower back. Where possible eliminate these from your game.?
Start working to identify when you’re vulnerable to stack style passes and work on ways to off-balance your opponent or bail out of the position effectively so you do not allow the progression to a stacked position. The great thing about defence that I’d like to think I’ve learned is that when you’re focussed on avoiding a specific position or action you can be quite effective at forcing the person to go in a different direction, especially when sparring with opponents of similar and even slightly higher level.?
Consider these “bad positions” to be akin to submissions for you and become aware when they are being worked towards, the sooner you can identify a submission might be coming, the sooner you can work on preventing grips, repositioning and working in frames, rendering the submission much more impractical. If on the other hand you naively lift your chin to the sky as your partner is feeding their arm round for a rear naked choke, you’re doing the exact opposite!
Perhaps spending more time working on guards like half guard, and neck submissions from side control would result in you really spending 6 to 9 months sharpening the saw in this aspect of your game. As opposed to focussing on triangles from closed guard and arm bars, both positions which often are much more likely to involve a high degree of rounding in your lower back.?
Long term view of your Brazilian Jiu Jitsu
The great thing about BJJ, that attracted me to the sport, is that you can participate for the long term. If you’re the same and love the sport even having only done it for a few years, then devoting 6-9 months or so to properly rehabbing your lower back and being strategic on the mats for 6-12 months will be such a small amount of time in the grand scheme of things. Especially when it comes to working other aspects of your game, it can be a real blessing, forcing you to work with purpose on a specific aspect while your back is getting stronger and healing well. I think working to avoid the positions mentioned above, and perhaps spending more time working your half guard bottom and top positions as well as your side control game will pay real dividends in the long run. As your back recovers you can then build on a well practised foundation.
I know that those of you with more experience in the sport than I will have other areas that could work nicely in line with principles of avoiding such “bad positions”. If you are a more experienced higher belt, you’ll also be at a significant advantage as you’ll be able to command and direct your rolls much more effectively, for example, a purple or brown belt rolling with blues.?
Take your time and focus in the short to medium term on your rehab in the gym to build strength, being much more strategic on the mats, as you feel ready to get back into class, try to cherry pick your sessions in line with the techniques that are likely to be covered, or better yet, if affordable, fist spend some time working one to one with your coaches and professors. Gradually feeding into the group classes again working with purpose!