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Saturday October 3 2015 - Hope from injuries and understanding the transition from sub to pro	Some thoughts
About a month ago, I had a back injury that left me grounded in bed for about one week. All in all, it took me three weeks to recover and even now, I still feel the consequences of it. It healed about 90% and you are left with a reminder in the 10% that never heals, probably for the rest of my life. It's like my right shoulder injury. It's away most of the time, but occasionally, it will come back and haunt me if I pull out a rough move with it or if somebody jerks a hold aggressively on it. I see more and more profiles on my website where people leave submission for good and switch to pro. I start understanding them better. When you accumulate all these injuries over the years and when these injuries don't heal completely after time, one day you are faced with the decision to either stop wrestling or to switch to a style that is safer for you, or that will slow down the progression of new injuries. When I had my back pain, I almost felt like crying.. I felt like I wouldn't be able to wrestle for the rest of my life. Wrestling is my passion.. I've pursued it for the last 15 years and I've met so many great people because of it. My matches last week-end gave me hope; hope that I can still wrestle, that I can live with my injuries or with my pains, heal from them, learn from my mistakes, wrestle around them, do exercise that will help improve their condition over time, be more careful on how I move and choose my opponents wisely. I forgot to mark it here, I kind of use this blog here as my personal diary and to remember whom I have wrestled in the past. At the end of July, I wrestled with Samjamba (id 997). He gained a bit of weight over the years and he had a 90 lbs advantage over me when we wrestled. We were wrestling competitively. It was fun initially, but after a while, I felt a bit scared... The weight he was putting on me was weakening me a lot... I felt vulnerable and I felt like this guy could land of me in an incorrect way, or put a hold and jerk it in such a way that I could hurt myself... I could easily break my ribs, hurt my back, worsen or twist my shoulder incorrectly or break something. Then I suddenly understood better why people choose to only wrestle submission with guys withing their weight range, and they will only do pro for those above their weight range. That's actually a very safe thing to do. It's all common sense. You can easily hurt yourself if you're not careful in sub because the moves are much more intense than pro, and they are also applied faster. In pro, you can vary the pace and you can vary the intensity. Sure, you can do the same with sub, but it is actually very easy to get carried away and go full out, full strength, full competitive. Mind you, I still do love wrestling bigger guys... especially to put them over my shoulder in a torture rack, but that's a pro move and the opponent cooperates with you. It has always been a bragging point for me to be able to say, hey, I lifted 230, 240 or 250 over my shoulders. I just need to think differently or think twice if I'm going for submission against a much heavier opponent. Is he experienced? Is he careful? Will he know not to go over my limits? People with wrestling experience are the best to tangle with... I've wrestled many newbies that will go all out and put a full strength pressure over an incorrectly applied sleeper, and that's one of the most dangerous thing to do. Pressure must only be applied gradually or you'll run the risk of hurting someone... badly. These newbies want to prove themselves and they don't know that they can change someone's life forever. The experienced ones know what they do and they often release the hold before I tap, they never jerk a hold, they understand the concept of gradual pressure because they know when injuries can happen and they want to prevent that. After all, the goal of wrestling is to have fun, not to hurt someone. Sometimes, you also need to have some humility and apply the concept of preventive tapping. I tend to increasingly tap more often nowadays out of prevention. Knowing that my shoulder or my back can't take as much pain as it can take in the past, I tap before I feel too much pain whether it is from stretching or from squeezing. This is to protect these pains from growing worse or from reappearing. Anyway, that was my rant for today. I know I can still wrestle for quite a while and I'll keep on doing so for hopefully, a couple of more decades. I'm 35 now, I'm not old, but I'm not super young either. I need to be careful and I hope you guys out there will be careful too after reading this.
Blog ID 33

Date created:	2015-10-03
Date modified:	22:23:39.289848
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