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Originally uploaded by sud273

Neck bridging is an exercise that is unique to the grappling arts. It is also controversial.

Broadly speaking, there are two main ways of bridging: the backwards neck bridge (as in the picture) or a forwards neck bridge (where you are belly-down to the mat). Most grapplers who bridge do both forward and backward bridging.

First the pro of bridging: it is a great way to strengthen the neck in sport specific positions. If you grapple you are eventually going to end up using your head to post on the mat or to push your opponent. You will also occasionally have your head introduced to the mat with velocity and force by your opponent. Either way, if your neck is strong and conditioned to bearing your weight, then you will be less likely to get injured when your head is bearing the entire weight of your body.

The major con of neck bridging is that some people’s necks can’t take it – my own included. My neck is strong enough to do at least one hundred front and back bridges, BUT if I do more than about 20 of either type I’m guaranteed a neck-ache that will last for days and require several trips to the chiropractor. Something about the compressive force on the vertebrae makes my neck very unhappy, and the resultant discomfort makes the benefits of bridging not worth it. I’m not alone here either – while there are some people who claim that bridging actually cured their neck problems I think the reverse (bridging causing problems) is much more common.

So given that a strong neck is important to prevent injuries, resist submissions, manipulate opponents, and make your clinch more effective, what are your options if you don’t want to bridge? Here are just a few:

1. Lie flat on your back and lift your head off the ground a bit. Now repeatedly and reasonably rapidly move your head up and down, bringing your chin towards your chest and then away again. Start with a set of 20 or 30. You can add a bit of resistance to your forehead by pushing on your forehead with your fingers.
2. Lie on your back on an exercise bench, your head off the end of the bench. Now place a folded towel on your forehead and hold a 25, 35 or 45 lb plate on top of that with both hands. Now bob your head up and down just as in the previous exercise, but for fewer repetetitions.
3. Lie flat as in the first exercise, but now turn your head from side to side, looking towards one shoulder then the other. Start with 10 repetitions (10 times to the right, 10 times to the left). I like alternating this exercise with the first one in this list.
4. Neck harnesses, available at various wrestling and boxing suppliers, can be used to strengthen the erector muscles at the back of the neck. Think about resisting someone pulling your head down in a Thai clinch and you’ll get a pretty good idea of what exercising with a neck harness feels like. Even though using a harness does compress the neck vertebrae somewhat, I find that it doesn’t bother my neck if I don’t overdo the weight or repetition.

The above list is only the tip of the iceberg: there are many other exercises and pieces of equipment that can be used to strengthen the neck. In general I would caution against extreme measures as the neck isn’t really a body part you want to take to failure very often!

I’d like to wish you all a Merry Christmas (or Happy Chanukah, etc) and a Happy New Year. I’d like to thank you for your support in 2006 and hope that 2007 has good things in store for you, your family and your friends. May you have an injury-free and breakthrough-filled year of training.

Sincerely
Stephan Kesting
www.grapplearts.com

Q: “What are the true dangers of neck cranks?”

A: It is funny how many clubs ban leg locks but allow neck cranks. Necks are under a lot of stress in grappling, even under ‘normal’ conditions: throw in a couple of uncontrolled neck cranks and you are looking at herniated disks, osteoarthritis, spinal stenosis and a whole host of other painful degenerative conditions.

A lot of things can go wrong with a neck crank. First the person applying it can be just plain malicious. Or uncontrolled. Or he can slip. Or the person caught in it might not tap early enough. I’m not saying ban them outright (although you could make a strong case for doing just that), but treat these submissions very carefully: they can easily end someone’s grappling career.

Part of what makes neck cranks dangerous is that nobody ever taps when they are just lightly applied. It’s always like this: say you’re caught in a neck crank – it only hurts a little bit – you suffer through the pain, hoping to find a way out – your partner applies it harder – you resist – your partner applies it harder still – you finally tap out. Subsequently, surprise surprise, you find out that your neck is injured!

If you tear ligaments in your knee, your ACL for example, you can get it fixed with surgery. It is a painful procedure with a long recovery time, but it can be done. If someone slams a neck crank onto you, however, your surgical options are much more scary.

Until the day when surgeons routinely do full neck replacement surgeries (don’t hold your breath) APPLY THOSE NECK CRANKS LIGHTLY, TAP EARLY AND DON’T BE A HERO. If you can’t do these things then don’t play with neck cranks at all.

While I’m referring readers to interesting articles, let me also direct you to another piece which analyzes injuries and injury rate in MMA competition. It seems to confirm a suspicion I have long held that MMA competition is pretty dangerous when it comes to injuries, although your chance of dying is quite small.

There was lots of reader feedback about last week’s tip, and everyone who wrote in wanted to emphasize an additional reason for not training while sick: not making everyone else at the club sick too! While I didn’t mention this point myself last week I am in complete agreement with watching out for your training partner’s health and welfare.

One reader summed it up by saying:
“A sickness or an injury that prevents us from doing something we enjoyand makes us feel great can be extremely frustrating particularly as we get older and a break from training can really make it a lot harder to get back up to full fitness.

Another very important consideration is that of the health of others in the dojo. Turning up to train and having your partner sniffle,cough or worse still tell you “my throat is on fire” while grappling is unpleasant and a recipe for spreading the ilness to other training partners. Yeah I know it’s not an old school way of thinking but training time for me is precious (as thefamily has to come first) so having someone in the dojo keep me out of action by bringing along a cold or flu is inconsiderate.

Don’t get me wrong, after a sickness or injury I am champing at the bit to get back at it but like you, this old dog has found that taking just a little extra time to rest and heal generally means the illness does not prolong and that others are not put at risk”

This phenomenon seems worst around competition time: everyone is training hard and a little worn down, and nobody wants to take a break from training. I can’t count the number of times I have seen a sick person ‘helping’ a serious competitor by training with them right before the competition. I have seen this happen to high-level Brazilian jiu-jitsu, submission grappling, and high-level mixed martial arts competitors, so no one is immune.

This is GRAPPLING folks, and your flu germ will quickly become your partner’s flu germs.

It is said that lessons repeat themselves until learned. If this is true then there is one particular lesson that has been really hard for me to learn, and I have had to repeat it time after time after time. That lesson is: if you feel sick, don’t train.

My usual pattern goes like this: I feel under the weather, perhaps with my nose congested and my energy low. I decide to go train anyhow, telling myself “I’ll just go light”. Then I head off and do jiu-jitsu (or go for a run, or lift weights) and usually go a little harder than I had planned on. After training I feel proud of myself: ” I didn’t let those sniffles stop me!”. I go to bed, and wake up the next morning sick as a dog.

When I was young and impressionable an ‘expert’ told me that if the sickness was above the neck (i.e. in the throat, nose or sinuses) then it was OK to train. Supposedly you were only supposed to stop training if the sickness was below the neck, in the chest or stomach. Well many years later (and after many colds and flus) I realize that the best way to bring an illness from above the neck to below the neck is to go and work out.

I’m better now – at least 75% of the time when I’m feeling under the weather I back off and do nothing. As a result I’m not sick as often and also lose a lot less training time. I end up feeling like a slug, but at least I’m a smart slug. Better to take a day off and go hard the next day, than to tough it out and lose a whole week of training.

Now you can’t say that nobody ever told you…

In a recent article I listed the treatments used, and practitioners consulted, in my quest for a pain-free lower back. What I want to highlight this week are the actual treatments that made a difference.

I mention that there were a lot of treatments I tried that work well for other people but didn’t work for me. For example acupuncture, although it has helped several people that I know, has never worked for me. Does that mean that you shouldn’t try acupuncture? Of course not! It didn’t help me, but it might be exactly what your aching back needs.

Not getting thrown (as often): as I hinted last week, I eventually figured out that Judo was bad for my back. Every time I got thrown in Judo my lower back pain increased. Unfortunately it is very difficult to improve in Judo if you aren’t willing to be thrown, so I made the difficult decision to stop doing Judo and concentrate almost entirely on groundfighting.

As a side note, I found that most freestyle wrestling takedowns didn’t irritate my back nearly as much, so now when I do train standup my takedowns look like a weird hybrid of Judo and wrestling.

Ice and anti-inflammatories: Whenever my back got really bad I headed for the freezer first and then the medicine cabinet. The underlying reasoning was the same for both destinations: I wanted to reduce the inflammation. Many people use icepacks when they have a sore arm or leg, but using cold on the back is less common for some reason. The ice reduces inflammation, and thus the pain.

Conversely, while a hot bath or Jacuzzi feels nice when my back was just a little bit sore, I avoided it when it was really bad, because the last thing I wanted was more swelling and inflammation in the afflicted area.

Over the counter and prescription anti-inflammatories can also be very useful, especially if you take them right after injuring your back. I found that one or two days of antiflammatory treatment early in the injury probably cut a week off my recovery time. You don’t want to take them regularly or too often, however, because of potential kidney and/or liver damage!

Chiropractic and massage: I found that chiropractors and massage therapists were useful resources in managing back pain. They weren’t as useful when I was in extreme pain, but they could often provide me with some measure of relief when my back was moderately painful. This relief was never permanent, but it was relief nonetheless. I still use both today.

Stretching and Yoga: Many people have sore backs because their hamstrings and lower back muscles are chronically tight. These people often find that increasing their lower back and leg flexibility helps with back pain. By contrast I have always had a relatively flexible lower back and hamstrings, so many of the ‘classic’ stretches for lower back pain didn’t help me at all.

What I did find useful, however, were the backward bending stretches in Yoga, such as the ‘Cobra’ and ‘Upward Dog’ position. One doctor told me that this backward bending helped me because I had a posterior disk herniation, and these stretches were easing the bulging disk back into place. I’m not sure if his diagnosis and proposed mechanism were correct, but these stretches and postures did seem to help at certain times in my recovery.

It is important to realize that if you think that you might have torn or strained a muscle or ligament in your back DO NOT STRETCH IT RIGHT AWAY!! You have damaged something in your back and the tightness is your body’s way of protecting itself. If you stretch it (and potentially strain those same tissues further) your body will react with increased spasm and pain, making the situation much worse. Wait a week or two before beginning to stretch the sprained area; I speak from painful first hand experience here!

Another factor that may have helped were the many Yoga postures which strengthened the core and spinal erectors (see the next point).

Strengthening: Through trial and error I found that if I did back extensions (also known as ‘back hyperextensions’) once or twice a week that my back was much less likely to go into spasm and ‘lock up’. This is probably because it helped stabilize an unstable area of my body.

Nowadays I normally conclude every gym session with about 30 bodyweight repetitions of this exercise, or a lesser number while holding dumbbells with my hands cocked at my shoulders.

You can see a detailed description of this exercise here: www.rice.edu/~jenky/sports/back.extension.html, and here: www.global-fitness.com/exercises/exercise033.html, as well as in the bonus section of my Dynamic Kneebars DVD (www.grapplearts.com/Kneebar-Info.htm). Back extensions are a great injury prevention exercise, as well as a very functional grappling exercise (which is why it made it into my video in the first place).

Pelvic Alignment: My most recent progress has to do with ensuring that my pelvis is correctly aligned, and not rotated, tilted or flared. I have used a book (The Malalignment Syndrome), as well as workshops and sessions with the author (Dr. Schamberger) to learn how to self diagnose and correct the most common pelvic misalignments myself. I am currently doing this twice a day, and it has made a significant difference to my back. You can find out more at www.malalignmentsyndrome.com (and no, I’m not collecting any sort of royalties or fees from them).

I should probably warn you that although the book IS very good, it is not an easy read and is actually quite a technical document. A background in physiotherapy, massage, anatomy or a related field would definitely help understanding the mechanisms, diagnostic techniques and treatments therein.

In closing, if you suffer from low back pain I wish you good luck in your search for relief. If you’ve never had a bad back then feel free to send the permanent link of this tip (www.grapplearts.com/2006/03/fixing-bad-backs.htm) to someone who might benefit from it.

I have met many people, both on and off the mats, who seem to take their injuries with resignation. They say things like: “I just have bad shoulders”, or “I’m going to have to live with this bad back for the rest of my life”, and are content to live a less rich life. My reaction to injuries has always been to try to educate myself, and then to tackle them head-on.

To illustrate, let me talk about my lower back. I first injured my lower back getting thrown onto a wooden floor back in my Kajukenbo Karate days. I then further aggravated it by getting into high-level whitewater canoeing, where you are exerting a tremendous amount of unilateral twisting strain on your spine and torso. It got so bad that, when I was doing Judo, even with proper breakfalling it only took 3 or 4 times getting thrown onto my back for my lumbar spine to sieze up completely.

Most of the time I just experienced a dull discomfort in my left lower back, but when it flared up (after a Judo class, or weightlifting with bad form) it was really, really BAD! The worst time it was so bad that I was trapped on the floor of my study for almost 24 hours because I simply couldn’t walk, crawl, or be dragged to my bedroom.

All this time I was actively pursuing various treatments and therapies. Over a period of about 1o years I tried doing the following things to cure my back problems:

1. stopping Judo and concentrated almost 100% on groundfighting
2. switching from whitewater canoeing to whitewater kayaking
3. consulting ‘Western medicine’ (i.e. family doctors,visits to the ER, back specialists, etc.)
4. going to physiotherapy, developed and used my own routine
5. using anti-inflammatories (3 or 4 different types)
6. trying herbal and vitamin treatment
7. applying Chinese tinctures and ointments
8. doing Yoga
9. acupuncture (from at least 3 different practitioners)
10. having frequent professional massages (from at least 4 different massage therapists)
11. trying deep tissue massage / Rolfing
12. taking hot baths and jacuzzis
13. applying ice packs and cryotherapy
14. consulting a pelvic malalingment expert
15. going to ‘normal’ chiropractic therapy (from at least 6 different chiropractors)
16. trying ‘no-touch’ chiropractic therapy
17. buying and using several traction and inversion devices
18. having cranial-sacral therapy

Various experts (and ‘experts’) diagnosed the problem as being herniated disk(s), rotated disks, facet syndrome, misalinged pelvic bones, excessive scar tissue, tight muscles, loose ligaments, torn ligaments, cervical problems creating low back pain, lumbar problems creating cervical misalingments, etc. etc. etc. Naturally there tended to be a correlation between the diagnosis of a given expert, and the services they offered; very few diagnosed me with something that they supposedly couldn’t cure with their services!

As you can see I tried about everything except short of putting a pyramid under my bed and having surgery! Now this was time-intensive and finacially-expensive process, and I was very fortunate that many of these treatments were partially or fully covered by a combination of the public health plan (I live in Canada) and my health plan through work. I realize that unemployed (or underemployed) people will have difficulty pursuing as many treatment options as I did, BUT some of these options are low cost or no cost.

My point isn’t to talk specifically about back injuries and treatments per se, but rather to illustrate the lengths I went to in order to live a healthy and energetic life. My bad back cut into my training, my family time and my general enjoyment of life, and I wasn’t about to accept it as part of the definition of who I am.

Next week I’ll talk about some of the treatments that actually helped me make progress with my back problems.

Over the last couple of months I have written about various pieces of training gear, ranging from wrestling shoes to mouthguards. Looking over these tips I realized I had left out the single most important, completely indispensable training gear of all: your partner!

Grappling is a contact sport where we struggle to apply techniques to our sparring partners while these same people are doing their very best to resist and apply similar techniques to us. The training of techniques against partial or full resistance is the central pillar of our training method, and it relies absolutely on having sparring partners. No sparring partners equals no sparring equals no improvement of skills.

So given that this is true, then why do some people take such poor care of their sparring partners? Why do some people think it is acceptable to crank armbars, or apply full force toeholds? At best that person will stop sparring with them, at worst they may sustain serious injury requiring surgery. Either way, the person without control loses a sparring partner and makes it more difficult for himself to improve his skills.

Preserve your training partners – it’s the only way to get better!