Well that sucked…

Almost a year ago to the day I had my worst injury to date.  Tore my biceps tendon and had to have a surgery to repair it.  I am just now easing back into martial arts and am still very cautious about what I’m doing, who I’m working with, a very clearly asserting boundaries in training. 

Pointing blame on why this happened doesn’t help anything, but what I can do is help you understand the circumstances that led to it so you can hopefully avoid such an epic fail setback. 

The day it happened:
There were only two people in jiu jitsu class & we didn’t really do a warmup.  We were problem solving guard passes and I wanted to play with some things I had seen that I thought would work better, so we were experimenting a bit. We then added some resistance, but that resistance quickly went to nearly full tension, full speed on an arm-bar attempt, a change of direction happened and snap. 
No pain, no pop, no agony.  The only equivalent thing I can relate to is if you’ve ever caught a big fish and had it swim under a rock, all of the tension in your line gets tighter then releases.  That’s what I felt happen in my arm. 
Me: “F**k, something just went.”

My big take-aways from this:

• Warm up every time you train.  If you’re training somewhere that doesn’t cut it for you with warmups, go somewhere else or do your warmup drills and mobility at home or before class starts.
• Continuous communication with your training partner.   “Slow down” “less tension” “take the speed down 30%” 
• Make sure the boundaries of what you’re working are clear to you and your training partner.  “Be heavy, give me some resistance, but don’t explode or go for submissions”
• Check your ego if and when it escalates: if one person starts making it a competitive scramble when you are trying to learn and doing something outside of your element, you’re at more risk.  There’s nothing wrong with having the days in training when you do pressure test things at a higher resistance and speed, but everyone should be on the same page

Be aware of your body and anything that is bothering you or giving you persistent issues.  I am pretty good about this and had told my naturopath that does acupuncturist, soft tissue work, on me that I had been having intermittent tightness in that bicep sometimes after lifting, but not regularly and I wasn’t able to figure out the cause.  Several months post surgery the surgeon believes there may have already been a partial tear.