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Injuries suck.

There you are, training is going well, you are in shape, and you are winning at life.

And then it happens, you get injured.

I am not talking about a little injury like a sprained ankle; I am talking a severe injury like a broken jaw, a fractured leg or serious back issues.

Injuries that make life seriously complicated let alone training.

In this article, I am going to give you 5 things to consider and methods to keep training despite a serious injury.

Ready, let’s go.

1. When Injured Your Chances Of Being Attacked Go Up….So You Must Mentally Assess Your Ability

Who is more likely to be attacked? Stong version of you who walks confidently down the street or the version of you on crutches.

I think we can safely say the version of you that is the most vulnerable and presents an easy target is the one that any street predator will look to exploit.

So we need to be clear, you must not stop training if you are injured. This, of course, doesn’t mean you need to go to class each week but you do need to train mentally and prepare yourself for any situations, which is this first tip.

You must mentally assess your ability to fight because this largely will dictate a lot.

For example, right now I have a severe hand injury, I can’t punch or even close my fist.

But I can land open hand techniques.

I can use my elbow, and I can use Hammer strikes.

What can you do even with your injury?

2. Time To Read Books

So, you are injured.

But your mind is fully operational, so the next step is to feed your mind.

This is a great time to start to read books on self-protection. I am not talking about technique books but books on crime and how the criminal mind works.

You will be surprised about how much you can learn around self-defence by reading books on criminal behaviour and psychology.

3. Study Street Fight Videos

YouTube and Facebook are full of street fight videos here. You can watch real incidents.

Most are not pleasant viewing, but you can learn a great deal from them. My advice is to get a notebook and take 10 videos and break them down.

This is how I would tackle this:

1. Where are they?
2. What clothes are they wearing?
3. Do the clothes offer any tactical advantage you could use if you were there?
4. What are people doing with their hands?
5. How are people standing?
6. Is there any time between the attack and first confront, and if so how long?
7. What attack do they use first?
8. Does it succeed?
9. What is the follow-up attack?
10. Does the victim get a strike back in?
11. How does it end?

Copy that list out and go through each video and you will have learned a lot about real attacks by the time you finish.

4. Learn Through Technique Videos

Defence Lab has an extensive online university with content that could save your life. And if you injured it is a great time to engage your brain into learning online.

There are hundreds of videos on YouTube for free but you need to be more focused, and this is where an online university comes into play.

Each week take your note pad and start to treat the content as your actual class.

Make some time in your diary to go through this, and you will massively increase your knowledge through focused learning and when the injury heals you will be back in class and ready to implement what you know.

Yes, the physical skills might take some time to catch up with the intellectual ones but they will catch up, and you will be more skilled as a result.

5. Use The Shadow

Just because you are off your feet, or have an arm or hand injury doesn’t mean you can’t move other parts of your body.

The Chinese have a saying, ‘running water never grows stale’.

This is because we know that movement is good for human beings and even if injured you will be able to move as well.

Do some shadow techniques, be as light or slow as you like, it is not about resistance, it is about getting the blood flowing to your muscles and keeping focused about your Martial Arts while injured.

Conclusion

Ok, so there you have, how you can train when you are injured.

Injuries suck,l they really do, but it doesn’t have to mean giving up what you enjoy to do.

You just need to adapt and keep your mind and body as active as you can.

Thanks for reading

 

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