The training goes on and in order to avoid repeating myself too much let me just say I am impatient to fight and have nothing much scheduled. But that's not what this post is focused on, its about all the ways I have found to injure myself as I have been doing this training stretching from the earliest days of basic classes to the present hard training and sparring.
It was specifically inspired by my latest injuries one to my foot and one to my knee.
The foot injury was the result of me being pushed off the mat while I was clinching a much larger partner. He put his head down and slid me right into a exterior loading bay door and I cut my heel very nicely on a bolt on the door. I bled all over everything and it took quite a bit of effort to tape it up and let me continue to train.Urgent care the next day and a tetanus shot were required, but I was back on the mats on my usual schedule and it healed very quickly. The urgent care doctor really captured my whole Muay Thai experience when he said, "wow these are excellent vitals for a guy your age..(long pause)..can you explain again exactly how you managed to hurt your foot."
I managed the knee injury by throwing a slapping knee straight into the point of an elbow. I was so hyped up that the instructor asked me if it hurt and I couldn't figure out what he was talking about at the time. I trained the next day but that was probably a mistake as I have been limping around a bit since, no swelling and its recovering quickly, so I am guessing I dodged serious injury this time. This is the third significant knee on elbow hit I have managed this year all during sparring.
These experiences got me wondering as to whether I am injuring myself more frequently than might be expected (and might therefore need to consider doing things a bit differently) or whether I could continue reasonably on my current course (the "suck it up buttercup" approach). I am not an especially young guy nor an especially tough guy so it was a real question around the sustainability of all of this effort.
So the first thing I did was see if there was anything definitive about injury and injury rates in Muay Thai and quickly stumbled into a very helpfully named article called Injury and Injury Rates in Muay Thai Kick Boxing, leading me to conclude the knowledge of the whole world is really just a matter of a precisely correct search term.
As a brief digression, it was a real treasure chest of key data and included a couple of tidbits not directly related to the question I had started with that are worth mentioning 1) they estimated in 2001 that about a million people worldwide are doing Muay Thai. I doubt this included everyone in Thailand (nor those practicing related forms in SE Asia) where there are nearly 70 million people alone, but its probably a good order of magnitude guest-timate of those outside the region training in Muay Thai. So not a lot of people in the greater scope of things. 2) the rates of injury are lower for Muay Thai than for Football, Wrestling, Gymnastics or even Women's Soccer. In fact, the injury rate was lower than for Golf or even general exercise. This suggested that Golf is a much tougher sport than I thought, and that the definition of injury may be a little shaky. Still I have repeated these figures to my unenthusiastic-about-kickboxing wife, who was unimpressed.
So here's my math on this one. The researchers found that there was a rate of injury of 24 injuries per 1000 minutes of practice. These can range from bruises to broken bones. They acknowledge that the rate of reported contusions is undoubtedly low because people just get used to bruises, so I am assuming that reported bruises are those really nice ugly ones. The required time for belt rank advancement at the main place I train is between 600-900 per rank, so this can be used to estimate how many minutes I have practiced and yield a prediction of how many injuries I should have seen. The result is probably a minimum of around 240 injuries with 60 (25%) being substantial ones during the course of my training.
This left me with a new problem, I walk around bruised all the time and can't really accurately recall any but the absolutely nastiest ones. I tried to recall all my injuries and leaving aside serious bruises and similar bumps ended up in the range of 30 or so, but clearly this leaves out a whole significant category. Fortunately, there was one additional piece of data, between 4-7% of the significant injuries actually required significant time off from training to recover. These were injuries where you could not train, and the predicted number for me was 3-4. Now this is a really subjective thing at some level, I know that a number of injuries I have had and trained through would have seen a smarter person sitting out for a few days. That said, I have actually had 3 injuries serious enough to sideline me for a week or more: two ankle sprains and a back strain. My current injuries have seen me modify my training a bit, as have some earlier ones, but keep to my schedule.
So it seems like I am right where I ought to be, I am going hard but not crazy hard. Which leads me to the conclusion that buttercup had best suck it up.
