The Cost of Repetitive Blows to Non-Vital Areas of the Body

As a very young martial artist we were taught two types of foot sweeps; front and rear. When executing a front foot sweep you kick your opponent with the top of your foot. With a rear foot sweep you kick them with your heel. To sweep your opponent’s foot you simply kick them in the ankle or calf. The purpose is to slow them down by creating soft tissue damage (damaging their calf muscle) or simply to kick their foot out from under them so they lose balance or fall which is easy to do when kicking the ankle.

I couldn’t land foot sweeps with a high success rate unless I tucked them behind my jab. My strategy was to throw a jab at my opponent’s forehead and start the foot sweep as I was pulling the jab back. With a lot of practice my skill at executing them improved. During class one day I was sparring with an opponent who was 5’7”. At 6’3” I had a reach advantage. I could force him to react to my jab and hit him with a rear foot sweep at will. I poured it on for our first 3 minute sparring session, hitting him repeatedly in his lead calf. Afterward, he approached one of our Sensei’s and asked for advice. The sensei told him to “stay rooted”. To focus on keeping his lead leg firmly planted. We began another 3 minute sparring session and I poured it on again.

Keeping the lead leg planted only magnified the impact of my rear foot sweeps.

This was on a Tuesday evening. The next class was the following Thursday. Before class he came limping in, pulled up his pant legs and showed me his legs. His right calf was twice the size of his left. It was bruised to the point that the front of his lower leg was completely orange.

On Tuesday the following week he didn’t show up which was rare. He never missed class. On Thursday he showed up on crutches. He asked, “Do you know where I was on Tuesday? I was in the hospital in Intensive Care. I got up Friday and couldn’t walk. My wife took me to the doctor. He told me that I had damaged my calf to the point that if a blood clot broke loose and went to the brain, heart, or lungs, it would be a life threatening situation.”

This scared the heck out of me as well as our instructors. We had no idea that blows to non-vital areas of the body could be life threatening. From that point on our instructors took a common sense approach to injury prevention by eliminating foot sweeps from sparring. You can spend years in the gym conditioning yourself and building muscle mass. You can be a talented, well trained martial artist. You can outrank your opponent, but there is a limit to how many hard blows the body can take before it breaks. This applies to all martial artists and all athletes.

We recognize that we can cause harm to pitchers' arms with too much throwing. We don’t know exactly how many pitches or how much stress will cause an arm injury so we take a common sense approach and limit their pitches. We don’t take the same approach to leg injuries for athletes and we should.

Several orthopedic specialists have performed film studies of actual ACL injuries. The doctors concluded that ACL injuries were most likely to occur:

• When landing from a jump

• Decelerating from a sprint

• Changing directions rapidly

• All performed with the knee at full extension or nearly so

Much like the proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back”, overtraining & over-stressing knee ligaments from landing, cutting and stopping can cause the weakened ligament to tear. All of these movements are hard “blows” to the lower body. They are not as powerful a blow as a full-force heel kick to the calf but they are none the less blows to the body. They are not life threatening but they can be season- and possibly career-ending. There is a limit to how many blows an athlete’s lower body can withstand regardless of how well conditioned or warmed up they are, before something breaks. We don’t know what that limit is, so how can we take a “common sense” approach to injury prevention? There are two ways to do so:

• Landing, decelerating from a sprint, and cutting or changing directions rapidly should be removed from all conditioning drills. Endurance training should be comprised of a variety of low impact exercises.High impact training such as running line drills that require the athlete to decelerate and change direction repeatedly should be avoided.

• Utilize our technique modifications for landing, stopping and cutting. It is essential to learn non-intuitive ways to move, practicing these techniques correctly for sufficient duration to become automatic.The process is repeated over and over for a student to become a black belt.The same process is required for athletes to commit our technique modifications to subconscious memory so they can be performed automatically.

There are those who feel that injuries are just part of sports. We disagree. Many injuries don’t have to be. There are common sense ways to reduce certain injuries so that athletes can continue to compete.