#26 How To Fix Your Sore Fingers & Tight Wrists

“I can’t straighten my fingers. My wrists are too sore for push ups. I have to use finger tape…”
Does this sound like something you might say?
At some stage in your BJJ journey you will suffer a small joint injury (finger or toe) and the terrible thing is they hurt like hell and take their sweet time to heal. Another side effect of lots of gripping  during rolling is tight wrists.
In this episode JT & Joey discuss how you can go about speeding up your recovery time for an injured finger and the exact approach you can take to remedy those tight wrists.

Speaker 1: 0:04

Very careful a good martial artist does not become tense, but ready, essentially at this point, the fight is over. So you pretty much flow with the goal who was worthy to be trusted with the secret to limit the spot . I’m ready ,

Speaker 2: 0:29

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another Bulletproof for [inaudible] podcast. I am JT. What’s up guys. I’m Joey. Today. We are talking about how to fix your sore fingers and tight wrists. Common problem in BJJ. People are always talking about it. My fingers are sore. My wrist subject. What do I do now? This is something I’ve experienced myself. I mean, I’ve done a lot of G um , done a bit of judo , uh , so much gripping of the geese by the guard. The fingers do get snafued , uh, but then also so much flection and gripping risks to get very tight. Um , have you experienced something like this, Joey? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Over the years, I kind of intentionally don’t play a lot of heavy grip game because I notice every time I try to with it, I just get punished. Like for the next couple of days, I’m really sore. And even in the training session, I feel like my hands are smoked. Yes. And I’m like, this isn’t what I, it’s not the style of jujitsu . I like, like, I don’t want to feel like that. Yeah . So I think, you know , over the years I’ve dabbled in a little bit of spider guard and whatnot and a bit of lasso. Yeah . But I always ended up going back to the X guard . Do any of that? Yeah. Yeah. I’m a grip centric guy. So I’ve kind of always leveraged it for scripts , not a flex , but just like you can’t break my grip and that really flows people, but I have paid the price and have dislocated a finger or two in roles . And subsequently we’ll probably end up with terrible arthritis, but I mean, what do we do about that? Because a lot of people may not even be on that level. They’ve just come to jujitsu . They’ve started gripping like a maniac. Cause that’s what happens when you start, you overgrip and then over time you learn to back it off death grip to death grip, the , the white belt death grip, because there’s other, I think too , like of my hands and I’ve, I’ve wrecked fingers also. Not even from the gripping thing, but from jarring them. Yeah. I remember one recently with our boy Kiran . Yeah. It was a pretty innocuous moment, but I think I , I passed his guard on that round. I had my, like, I was just had like sod control and I had like a arm under his body kind of, and it was like, you know, flush on his body. But somehow he like bucked and tried to bridge and my pinky finger got kind of turned in and then he came down on it and I was like, and at the time I was like, ah , that hurt, but kept rolling. Yeah, man. It’s been it’s wonky now. Swollen and swollen for , for months. Yeah. So I think, you know, you can cop a lot of damage to the hands and wrist , even if you’re not playing the heavy grip game. Don’t yeah . Yeah. That’s true. Definitely whether you are playing a gay or no gate . Cause I find that even in no-gi grips, get quite tired just from trying to squeeze and stay tight on certain positions. And this is just par for the course. So what are we going to do to remedy that? Because we have talked in the past about spending a lot of time inflection and , and you know, this kind of position now you Joe , because you have spent more time doing handstands and we’ve talked about this extension piece. Do you find for yourself when you do your risk prep and you do certain things around, get yourself ready to do a set of handstands, do you find that helps you? Yes. I find I’m not working on handstands a huge amount at the moment, but I around with them . Sure. Here and there. And probably the first thing I noticed when I’m practicing them less, is that when I first put my hands on the ground and start to warm up, I feel tight. Yeah. And if I’m training more jujitsu around that time or like, no , like I’m not trying to do it at the moment . Right . Cause we’re in lockdown. Uh , but generally, you know, if I’m, if I’m sort of doing my three or four days a week of jets and then, and not really playing with the hand sense and I go to do some handstands, I’m like, oh man, my wrists feel restricted. Yes. Whereas when I’m doing plenty of handstands and probably not much to do too , I don’t notice that. So yeah. I definitely notice that just having that, that practice of putting my hands on the ground and yeah. And starting to build that extension keeps my wrist mobility in a good place. Whereas if I’m not maintaining it regularly, it starts to go the other way. Yeah. And you know, this is what we talk about is that jujitsu sends it the other way. That’s right. Yeah. I had a moment. Uh, I think it was the first time I was full-time in Brazil, 2012 blue belt just going super hard and trying to train as much as I could at the end of the second week. You know, they always do the same warmup run around the hall. Now we do, you know, alligator crawls and all the stuff that you do to do to hip escapes. I found at the end of the second week of trying to train like three times a day, I couldn’t actually put my, I couldn’t put weight in my wrists . My forearms had gotten so tight that I couldn’t even put weight into my hands to do the alligator crawls. They were so jacked. Wow. From over gripping and, or just training grips so much and not doing the , the counter stuff of the opening up and the extension. I was very fortunate that I took an arm aid with me, which is like a forearm massager . And I basically just had to have kind of like a week off and just stretch and stretch and just try and open up my forearms and let them recover. And then I kind of came back gradually and was able to do a pushup and , and put that weight there. And I just thought to myself, man, I have to do more maintenance. I had a similar experience in Brazil, but I found that an ancient remedy they’d been using there for a long time and you actually bathe and I say, oh, amazing. Just sprinkle the granola and the honey and the slicer on top of the bath. Right. And your forearms come good. Wow. Yeah . All your injuries come good. Is that what those guys are doing? Yeah . Got it . No one shared with me. Thank you, Joe. You’re going to take out a loan to purchase that quantity of I say , but works . Yeah. Don’t worry about a nice bath . You get that say , yeah, boy . I mean, you do kind of go slightly purple, but don’t worry about that. The girls love it. Here’s the thing , uh , extension. So I actually had some pretty bad kind of radiologist pain just about two years ago, just in my forearm. It was when I was doing a fair bit of judo and I went so a good friend of mine, Shamus Hayes , shout out , uh, Shamus is big, strong human smart guy. Great with kettlebells iron fixes that Seamus . Yup . I am fixing this stuff on the gram . I like it. Check him out. He’s a good guy, smart guy. And he had recommended to me to get a thick , uh , like elastic band, rubber band , uh , the kind of dark red brown ones. You see that kind of look kind of industrial and put it around the gearstick of my car and just have it sit there. So when you’re sitting in traffic, put it around the fingers and then practice opening the fingers out like that. Oh wow. Yeah. He’s like you spend so much time closing your hand. You actually have to practice strengthening the extensors to help balance this out. And I actually started doing it and it did make a difference. Obviously getting some treatment from him. He’s a great my therapist. And then also very similar to the golf club routine that we have that we have done before. We’ve posted on our Instagram doing the , uh , different amounts of rotation and just working flection extensions through the wrist. Along with that opening of the fingers, actually it took a little while, but just getting in the habit of doing it, semi-regularly made a huge difference. I would think, ah , it’s just a rubber band. Like what’s it going to do? But just opening up their hand and spending that time, getting the blood flowing in there really helped loosen up the tissues. And that was something that made a huge difference to loosening up my, my sore forearms and my tight risks. We do a bit of forearm prep. That’s part of what we do. And I actually was exposed to that many years ago. I had aspirations to do a plant, but unfortunately, 80% of my body weights in my legs. So what a cop-out come on, man, is this plant harder? There’s only so much you can do. If anyone, if anyone listening is not familiar with the lungs , uh, it, we’re talking about , uh , like a pushup position, but your hands are a little bit wider than usual and your arms are straight during the top of the push-up position and then you’re leaning forward and then your feet up off the ground. So it’s , it’s, you’re holding yourself into support. Yeah, it’s ridiculously hard . And if made even harder, if you got some thickness down the bottom, I was watching too many breakdowns videos and there’s a b-boy in France called Jr . For any of you who are into break dancing , just Google Jr . He has one leg shorter than the other significantly and has basically taught himself to walk on his hands and has amazing, amazing moves in the upper body. And I was like, I want to be like that guy little did I realize, you know, it is a lifetime’s worth of work. It’s it’s easy. Like , uh , if you’ve got skinny legs, it’s a two, three year project and a friend of mine was like, oh, you want to get a plan study ? All right , do this. And he showed me his risk prep routine and he was showing me the wrist pushups and the close knuckle , like he’s a movement guy. And I was like, I can’t do any of that stuff. He’s like, well man, if your risk contact that you’re not, you’re never going to do a plant. I was like, you and your facts. So I adopted this , uh , risk prepping routine and it, it was awesome. I mean, not just, I never got anywhere close to a punch. I think I was doing like a tuck thing on the parallettes for like a couple of seconds at a time, you know, but uh , never on the floor, but by spending time working my wrists through these different ranges of motion, I actually didn’t have any wrist or forearm problems for an extended period of time. As long as I was doing it, I was actually good. It was only when I went super hard to do two super hard weights without that maintenance that’s when the forearms and the fingers just really suffered something on that. It’s actually an interesting thing that , that I picked up in the, you know, in the movement sort of world and something that I think will, could change things for a lot of jujitsu players. When your risks are tight , you will naturally not want to put your hands on the ground and place weight on them because your body knows that if you do that, it’s going to get hurt. Right. I can think of like my , my father is a really good example. He’s got tight, mid sixties, early seventies now is tight, particularly through the hands because he’s worked physically his whole life. Yeah. A lot of gripping. So he can’t put his hand on the ground and then put weight on that hand because it involves too much extension of the wrist. Right. So it’s to such a degree that say, he’s trying to, and he very rarely, as a result of that gets on the ground. Right , right. Like it’s, you’re not going to see him jump down on the floor, play with his grandkids and then hop back up because getting down and up is actually a real process for him. Of course it’s not unconscious . It’s just what happens. Right. So what happens then to him, if he takes a fall and tries to put his cause naturally if you’re falling, you’re going to put your hand out . So you’re either gonna shatter your wrist or your fingers up. Yup . Oh , you’re gonna break an arm just scannable or as to a lot of old people, you’re going to not put the hand down properly and you’re going to fall and break your hip. Yeah . So there’s this flow on effect of this lack of mobility, right? It’s not quite the situation that most of the people listening to this, finding themselves in right now. But think about this when you’re trying to play jujitsu, in essence, you’re trying to be acrobatic and explosive. You’re trying to pass someone’s God. There’s like multiple things going on. Place your weight here, switch your hips. A lot of this involves you having to put your hands on the ground or hands on the yes, sir. In the same way that like you can’t do a proper knee cut pass, unless you’ve got adequate, like low body mobility through the knees and the ankles and the hip. Um, very similar . If you don’t have this risk mobility, you’re going to be clumsy through these positions because you can’t actually comfortably get into them . Yeah. You’re not going to like do that single arm post and Lucas leopard Cartwheel your way. Exactly. Out of the position. You’re probably just going to fall on your neck. Exactly. And your coach is going to be like, Hey, you’re doing it wrong. Do it like this. Yeah. Yeah . Put your hand here. And it’s one of those things that it’s, it’s one of those things that we see with what we do , um, that jujitsu coaches tend to miss, which is like, yeah, okay. There’s a technical awareness. That’s required in order for the student to pick up the technique. But there’s also a physical capacity. That’s required. They need an amount of strength and an amount of mobility at a very basic level to be able to fulfill certain movements. And a lot of people on the mats didn’t have it . And I would actually go a step further and say, any of you out there who’ve been doing jujitsu , say two, three years, you’ve got your blue belt. You’re somewhere into your blue belt. You’ve probably have forums like a 60 year old laboring person because you are doing that much grouping like jujitsu . People do more gripping than PR other than say judo than pretty much any other sport I know, or bouldering or rock climbing. This is the thing that’s interesting to me. This is just a slight segue ex client of mine from way back in the day. One of my first clients, Angus Angus forest , he had a bike accident just riding his bike, got totally driver. Wasn’t looking, hit him, knocked him off his bike. He went head first and landed two hands forward, completely shattered. Both wrists, hands like had to have reconstructive surgery on both hands. Now I wasn’t training him at this time. I didn’t know anything about it, but he contacted me about nine months after the accident and said, man, I need your help. I need to do this rehab. This is what I learned from Angus’s experience. Having reconstructive surgery on his, you know, radius and Elmo and his hands. And it got covered by insurance. So he didn’t have to pay for any of this, which is fantastic. He was getting his hands massaged every single day by nurses. Like they would put his hands in wax and he would have to try to open his hands to like crack the wax . That was like the first step on strengthening his hands. And then it’s not like old school Kung Fu, but you know, they do the hand conditioning. Like it’s like striking sand and then iron filings. Yeah. It was kind of similar. They would make him put his hands into a certain viscosity of goop and he had to open his , yeah , I don’t know. He just said it was like Clagg yeah, just like this kind of white, gray liquid, but it was thick. And he had to open his hands out against it. This is something that he had to do almost every single day, because they said, if you don’t move your fingers every single day, they’re just going to, into arthritic nots because of the level of trauma that happened. And you , you , your fingers and hands and mainly connective tissue. I mean, they’re an extension of the connective tissue of your forearms. There’s not actually much muscle meat other than kind of around the thumb. It’s , it’s mainly connective tissue. So this is what I took away from that w whenever I have had a jarred finger or a knowledge finger, he was saying that it took six months of like nurses managing his hand every single day to try to get blood to the connective tissues. Cause not a lot of blood flows there. And so when, like when I totally cranked and dislocated my finger, it was pointing sideways. Um, shout out cyborg is son of a gun. Uh , anyways passing my guard, my finger like got Courtney’s gain, rip sideways. And I was like, ah, didn’t want to let him pass my guard, my fingers like this. And I was like trying not to get smashed and then pulled my finger back to reconnect it into place. And then still got my guard past , got smashed, but whatever I had to just absolutely work so hard to kind of get it straight and it’s still not straight. And that was when I was a purple belt. But that thing that guys, your fingers, don’t get a lot of love and attention spending some time stretching your hands, opening up through the fingers, opening up through the wrist, goes a long way to getting rid of these aches and pains to stop you from turning yourself into a arthritic pensioner in your thirties. That’s not where you want to be. Yeah. And then is I , um, there’s a flow on effect stream when you got tight hands and tight wrists, which is elbow pain, right? Correct. And this is, we deal with this with a lot of folks. And I think for people listening who work on, like if you’re following our program or if you’re following some kind of strength program, you can probably, there’s a resonate with you where you’ve been doing some like heavy pulling work, whether it’s bent over rows or pull-ups, or chin-ups something like that. And you get this kind of like a tennis elbow golfer’s elbow. And it’s usually like if you’ve ever had golfers or tennis elbow, it’s really annoying. It doesn’t really hurt that much, but it , it niggles usually on your first couple of reps get sharp and then you don’t feel it. And then it’s like, you’re trying to go to sleep at night and your elbows aching. And it just won’t go away. And it’ll be like that for months. And the tricky part is that you’ve got to kind of back off from the heavy pulling work to let it settle. But often what happens is that’s a result of taught forums, which is a result of dysfunctional risks in hands. People can maybe understand if we look at the lower body, it’s a bit simpler to understand. It’s like, if your feet are really up and you’re wearing these shoes that trap your fate all day long, like let’s say you’re in like really tight office shoes. It’s your feet don’t work properly. So there’s a high chance that your knees are going to cop an injury because the fact that the lowest portion of your extremity doesn’t work right. Fades back up towards the knees and the hips and you start to get issues up there. So it’s the same thing with the hands and the elbows. So when I’m talking to someone and they’re like, oh man, I’ve got issues with the elbows. That’s the first thing I’ll look at is , has your wrist mobility, can you get into extension? Do these stretches like, are these manageable or do these really suck for you? And whenever someone’s like, oh my God, how do you do that? That’s so high . That’s what you need to work on. That’s it? That’s the low hanging fruit. Yeah . That’s that’s you bro . It’s true. And I can comfortably say that even about non-digital people like it is risk for us . It’s a symptom of being a modern human that’s. Right. We don’t use our bodies enough. And therefore we get really efficient at not using them. We get really good at not doing so then when we are forced into doing it, especially if you’ve got someone jumping on you and you have to post, it’s not just your weight, it’s their weight too. That’s when things can break and it can get quite serious. So your recipe for success with this one, Joe town, what do you recommend, or what do you personally do in terms of keeping this balance? Like anytime I’m going to train, and this was not a conscious decision, but whenever I’m going to go train , whatever it is, jujitsu or strength training, I will do some risk mobility. And it’s just part of it. You know, I’ll do some cost X squats, I’ll loosen up my hips and then I’ll just put my hands on the ground and like do a bit of that. And I might do one set. I might do two or three sort of gauge it on the day. If I’m doing some handstands, I’ll, I’ll take it a bit more seriously and maybe spend five minutes doing a few rounds of some of those different push-up like risk pushup , prep, drills we do. And I’ll also do it after jets. And this is a piece of awareness that for anyone listening, if you can try to develop these for yourself, this is super valuable. But if you can do a Git session and then at the end of the session, you kind of have an awareness of what got really overcooked in that session. So maybe we’ll work it on spider God that night. And I come out of that class. I’m like, Hey , my wrists are cooked in the same way that if I’ve been working on a guard all night, my hip flexes will be super tight. So I’ll just naturally do some restretch after that, do some flex stretching. And I find that that is kind of how I keep a good level of maintenance through my wrist mobility, definitely. And elbow function. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, I’ve been doing a lot of gripping lately, more dead lifting . Obviously we can’t do jets . I’ve just been trying to strangle barbells, trying to work on my, pull up a bit more. I always do a certain amount of warmup , but on the days I’m not lifting, I do at least 30 minutes working on the problem areas. So for me left hip a little bit of shoulder and just, yeah. Wrists elbows, just making sure I basically clean the shop so that the next day when I am lifting, I feel good. I don’t feel restricted. I don’t want pain in my body stopping me from doing what I want to do. And I think Brazilian jiu-jitsu is a far more high-maintenance version of that. Cause unpredictable stuff happens. Whereas barbells and weights and , and gravity is, is pretty fixed. And it’s inherently unbalanced. Yeah. As in, you will spend 30 minutes of the class grouping for dear life. Whereas if you’re following a strength program, it will have this nice balance of what we need to do. Some pushing, some pulling, maybe some squatting, you know, like it, it has considerations of those things. Whereas digital is like, no, no it’s sports specific. Yup . Done that . The person pass your guard. Yeah. So the physical ramifications are who gives a. Yeah. Just deal with it. Yeah. Just eat. That’s your problem. So to solve your problem relevant to your , your sore fingers guys and your tight risks , definitely building in a practice of prepping and then also stretching post is a super easy way. Like a no brainer for making your hands feel better to stop you from feeling tight and sore and arthritic. And just try it, just try it for a week. I would say, definitely even if you only trained jets three times a week and you’re able to do a bit of risk prep and stretching just three times a week, you will notice a difference. Yep . And the risks are one of those ones that you can sneak them in anywhere. Like, while I’m talking to you right now, I can be stretching some risk flection . Right. I can be using the table here. I can just be kind of stretching out a bit of wrist extension. Like you don’t need a lot, you don’t need to go and make it a workout or get to the gym. If you start to build a bit of awareness around that, you can really start to change the way that area works for you. Yeah, definitely. And look for, like we said before, it’s really important to understand that for a modern human tight wrists and hands are already a problem when you do jujitsu on top of that, you only consolidate or can, or rather yeah. That issue. So yeah, you got to do it. Definitely. So we , we’ve got plenty of information around this guys and um, definitely you can have a look, we will be putting up more and more content on our YouTube channel. So if you’re not across our YouTube channel, just go to YouTube, put in Bulletproof for BJJ , it’ll pop up lots of information there and we can update it because we do like to answer questions. And speaking of which we actually have a bit of a facial feature today. Mr. Joe, we’ve got the first of the official Bulletproof of BJJ podcast voicemails. Oh yeah. We’ve got two that we’re going to respond to , to that first one’s coming from Dylan. Now bear with us guys. This is an extra in a similar way to that. Towards the end of the movie inception, it was quite hard to understand what’s going on, which level of dream state you were in. Um , this is where we’re at on a technological front right now. So I’m going to go ahead and play this voicemail from Dylan.

Speaker 3: 23:13

As I dislocated my kneecap earlier this year in a bridging role, gone horribly wrong. Uh, I’ve done my rehab and I’m back on the mats now, but one leg is significantly better than the other. For example, I can bang out like a set of Cossacks easily on one leg, but it’s a real struggle with , um, I guess fairly poor form on the other. I’m wondering if I should change my training for the imbalance, for example, train my bad leg more or my good leg less. Or should I just continue as normal and wait for things to catch up? Thanks so much. Love the program.

Speaker 2: 23:46

Awesome. Dylan, you legend. Thank you. My brother. Absolute pleasure to have you ask. Yeah, no, we appreciate all your questions. I just get a discount and they that’s no fun, no terrible. And it’s common in jujitsu. It happens. And some people, they have a bit of laxity around the knee and the kneecap pops out and a lot of people say, oh, I just pop it back in. They never really address it. And I think speaking to Dylan’s question, this would be my recommendation do keep training. Your good site don’t change that, but the way you would approach training, the problem side would need to change definitely to bring it back to a level. So, you know, it’s taken it step back. We’ve got to balance that out. So relevant to like patella tracking or any issue with that. We’ve got to bring back a certain amount of stability around the knee at the different ranges of motion. And that’s the thing everyone’s like, oh, just go back to some pistols or whatever it is. And it’s like, well actually you’ve got to teach a needle work again. And um , this might be something you can speak to as well, Joe , that idea of bringing stability in the kind of vastus medialis and, and being able to keep your knee over your toe while lunging squatting and restoring range was actually a big part of what you were doing with you already had. It was yeah. What he’s getting at there is like, should I be trying to get balanced back or should I be pushing my strong side and wait for things to even out things probably don’t they don’t even out do they. So you’ve taken an injury to one side of the body. And if you now just keep training both sides independently, you’re always going to have this imbalance. Now imbalance is part of physicality. However, we do know statistically, and we know this 100% the case that the larger, the imbalances, the higher chance of reinjury correct. And this is the case for any part of the body. And if you go to a physiotherapist or an exercise physiologist, who’s worth that white , uh , they will tell you that you have to get back to bounce as soon as possible. Now I had this with my own knee and the recommendation for me was I should actually neglect my strong side in order to, because we tested it. We did strength tests and it was like a 50% difference. So it was like, well, your strong sides , 50% stronger than your weak side, you shouldn’t neglect the strong side. And you should really double down on working on the weak side to try and get that within 10% difference. Once you get to that, then you can train both sides again. Interesting. I did that and I worked well for me. Amazing. Yeah. And it’s, it’s kind of counter-intuitive because yes, there is evidence to show that it’s still good to train your strong side and all those things, but once you’re out of that acute injury phase and you can get back to moving and training, I think getting back to balance as soon as possible is the goal. Yeah, definitely. Well, I think that’s a , that’s actually an awesome insight. Uh, I was going to speak to a broken Lin case, which is somewhat different, but it was showing that like, if you had a broken arm, if you trained your non broken arm, it was able to reduce strength loss in the broken limb, just by keeping the nervous system working. But the thing that I’ve found, because I’ve had imbalances with my hip and my knee through injuries, the change in the training ended up being a lot of volume on the injured side to try and really get it one, get the blood flowing, but to reeducating that limb and then reduced volume, still some training on the uninjured side, but nowhere near the training volume of the rehab side. And what is so funny, not that your injury is funny. Don’t misunderstand me though . Seen this in many clients, their rehab side becomes more stable, more coordinated than say their uninjured side. People go how’s that possible while you’ve been trained in the hell out of it five days a week. You focusing for once. Yeah. So I think , um, I think that’s a really good insight, Josiah. I think definitely. Um, Dylan, if you can take something from that, it’ll make a big difference to your training. Next question.

Speaker 4: 27:44

Hey guys, I’m recording this from the toilets of the gym where I’ve come for a cry. Two days ago, I got my blue belt, but I’m a 40 year old with salt and pepper creeping in on the sites . My problem is I already feel the intensity increase where people trying to steal my neck. What advice do you have for me to relax or progress or just not get killed? Cheers.

Speaker 2: 28:08

Now, JT, salt and pepper on the sides. You can speak to that. Look, Joe, I feel like the thing I can’t speak to is the , just no , the thing I can speak to is people trying to kill me. That’s for sure. And I think this happens every belt level. Thank you for your message. Didn’t get a name on that one, but yeah. Thanks . Thank you brother. Appreciate it. S salt and pepper. Legend. Yeah. Look, it’s one of those things age to the side guys. I think we probably put too much stock in age. I actually think there’s an advantage to being a bit older in the sense that you actually have had a lot more experience to put stuff in perspective. Whereas when you’re a bit younger, you have no perspective at all. But speaking to people, coming for you, it doesn’t matter what age you’re at . Every time you get another belt or you level up people are coming for you. Yeah. You don’t know it, but there’s , there’s some new wipe outs . Like I’m going to make that blue belt today. It happens in the most special way that white or blue belt transition because people are, you know, you’ve, you’re early in the journey. Yes. Particularly the athletic strong white belts who are trying to prove that they’re a blue belt. They want to smoke those blue belts. Whereas by the time you get to purple brown, everyone’s chilled a little like it’s still on, but it’s maybe it’s a bit more technical and a bit more kind of pure jujitsu. Yeah. What I would say relevant to this is you , you have to realize that there will be some people you roll who have no consideration for anything you’ve done. They don’t care. If you’ve got kids, they don’t care how old you are. They are coming to kill you. And you’ve got to be kind of, even though you may not know it at the time, it’s not till you get 10 to 20 seconds in the role . Like my God, this guy’s actually trying to kill me. And you you’ve got her, like you better switch on and you better be ready. You know? And the thing is, it doesn’t have to be a younger person. It could be an older person. It could be a higher belt. They just decide today’s your day. And you are getting smoked in this situation. The best thing I can recommend is a degree of preparation. And also sometimes it’s okay to get your kicked. There’s that too. Like you shouldn’t, it’s got nothing to do with being a blue belt. Oh , confess something right now. Just before I got my black belt, I got choked out by a white belt and the gym was aghast within context, a very Savage white belt who got his blue belt. Not long after. Well , it must’ve been a real kicker. Well, I just didn’t, I didn’t respect him because I didn’t respect him. I was like, ah, I can pass this guy’s garden . I was passing and he tried to throw on a choke and I was like, for lame, choke, next minute I was out. I was just, you know, and then I kind of came to him . People like, mate , you just got choked out by a weapon. And no one was concerned for my wellbeing . People. I concerned for your ego. What’s wrong with you? Yeah. Like it was, they would like people, oh , shame on you. They’re like, should we stay friends with James? And I did actually have one guy who I know quite well on my Instagram. I’m going to lead it right now. I literally, he literally said, dude, what is wrong with you? No, no, no. This is a brown belt or brown belt said you felt like you fell off, bro. Like. And I was like, I actually in truth, it didn’t bother me. I think I was just a bit euphoric from it . Oxygen deprivation was like, oh, let’s go again. I don’t mind whatever. You know, it’s all good. Um, funny thing was though after the class he came to me, like time is off, everybody’s carrying the mat and he goes, want to roll again, bro? I was like, really? Because I didn’t take you seriously before, but now the respect level’s gone up. It’s not going to be the same role. There’s no timer. And there’s no witnesses, bro. Like I said, you short and he’s like, yeah. And they’re like operations to make right of reply. It was the worst. Uh, I don’t know how many minutes of his life. I didn’t even submit him. I just physically kind of just dominated , put the domination on. He never asked me to roll ever again. But what is going to say is this, anyone can smoke. You, you can smoke anyone. And it shouldn’t be too much of a personal affront. I understand when you start to get older, there’s all this dialogue around. Oh you’re older and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, you aren’t sure it doesn’t matter what belt you are. Someone’s going to beat you. And it also doesn’t matter how old you are. So I’m going to beat you. It’s jujitsu how you then internalize this and put it in perspective is if you are just a new blue belt, white belt are going to catch up. Right. And you’ve got to grow into that blue belt. So don’t, don’t feel down your coach clearly thinks you’re good enough. Now it’s time to grow. So if you feel like people are beating you on athleticism and maybe it’s time to get a bit more athletic, get a bit stronger, get a bit more mobile. That’s within your control. If you feel like you’re not technical enough, you can also work on those skills. So then you’ve got to put some time and effort in to make sure you’re improving in that way. And in truth , we all have those moments where we want to have a little cry because our nemesis or the kid from the kid has just upgraded from the teens classes , kicking our that’s jujitsu brother. You just got accept . Yeah. And I agree with all that. I think , um, something that stands out for me, if I look at the situation that I’ve seen play out in a lot of the gyms I’ve trained at, and I don’t know about this fellow, I don’t know if he’s athletic or not, but I’m just going to make the assumption for the sake of this discussion. That he’s a fit strong 40 year old. Sure. And what you get often with fit strong sort of middle-aged guys, you know, guys around our age , but they’re but we’ve been doing jujitsu for over a decade. They haven’t. Right? So they, they come into the sane and the gym is all these there’s a lot of younger people and the fit strong guy can apply the fitness and the strength, but it’s sometimes like they , they can scrap. Right. But they can’t sustain that. It’s it’s like, you can see, you’re like, oh , there’s an injury waiting to happen. They kind of always pushing a little bit harder than they need you . You’ve got these 22 year olds in this , you know? And I say, guys, I gotta , I gotta correct myself. This goes the same for females. Right? Absolutely. You’re trying to hang it this level of output. And what happens is I think a lot of these people end up finding themselves, I’ve set up this level now. And I’m training in this way with my teammates that I can’t sustain and copying injuries. And then you cop and disappointment and the 22 , I was , ain’t give a , just bouncing around. Like you can ragdoll them as much as you want. Right. They’re not getting injuries, whatever. So what I would say to old mate is take a step back and look at how you’re training. And if you’re realizing like, I’ve been trying to match fire with fire. And I’m now finding that it’s like doing me damage and perhaps I’m on the short end more often than not, I would try and change how you’re training a little bit. And it doesn’t mean you can’t go super hard, but you want to start to be a little bit more tactical about it. I, for a long time, just relied on my physicality still does still do still do it . I know that it gets me into trouble sometimes. And I can have a role with, I can have a role with a white belt and it can be like Wiley and scrappy and all that. And I come out, I’m like the was that. And it’s like, I , and I know it’s because I went into it without any self-awareness and just scrapped with someone. Right . So then I tell myself, okay, no next round, I’m going in with an intention to shut this person down. And I’m , you know, whatever, maybe I’m thinking about what their game is and how I’m going to shut them down controlling. Yeah. And it’s a completely different role and it’s all because of how I approached it. So I think for old mate , it’s like, well, yeah, in on how you’re approaching it, I think that the changes are there within very similar to what you’re saying. Yeah. I think being strategic within how you use your energy in jujitsu important for the most part, no one teaches you this. No, no teacher will say to you, Hey, you need to modify your energy. And Hey, when you do, like, they just want you to learn. So they want you to train as much as you can and all of this, but for you from a, just a personal development perspective, if you know, there’s someone who wants to war with you, you know, you’re going to have to bring the energy there. But then sometimes there’s people that you can work with who are not as intense. And then you can back your energy off. You need to be modifying how you roll within a class. So you don’t burn out and you don’t work yourself into injury. This is actually important from a self-management perspective. Last point, actually further that. And then we’ve experienced this with some of the females that we train with, right. That you coach sure. And part of it is, look, if you find yourself, maybe it’s rolling with certain people in the gym, or maybe it’s rolling with most of the people in gym. But if you find that you’ve , you’re like, you’re getting a little bit intimidated going into these roles. You’re like, this is getting like way more widely than I want it to. You need to find a way to go into those roles and feel safe, be able to protect yourself. Yeah. So it might be a case of you’re not going to dominate, but you’re also not going to get your guard past . So you’re not going to get into any unsafe positions. You’re just going to be defensive and you’re going to be just keeping them at bay. That’s effective jujitsu. That’s a win, right. That’s a win. So being able to feel safe in the sport that you’re playing is a big part of it. So if you find man, I’m sneaking off to the toilets for a little cry more days than not that well, let’s, let’s try and find a way to build a bit of safety back into the game. Um, and that’s, that’s you, that’s your technique. That’s a conversation with the coach. Yeah, definitely. And uh , Hey man, don’t worry. We’ve all been there. We’ve all been there. All right guys. Thank you so much. If you would like us to answer a question of yours, please go to Bulletproof of bjj.com and click on podcast . Scroll down. There is a red button there and you can leave us a voice message. We will play it. We will answer it. Thanks for listening guys. Thank you, Joe .

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