Persistent injuries

[MuKen]

Everybody who's trained for awhile seems to have one or two injuries that are just with you forever and seem to "flare up" at inconvenient times. I thought it'd be interesting to hear what these are for people, and what if anything they've discovered to help with them.

For me, it's a shoulder injury I received from failing to breakfall correctly years ago. It happened when I first started training, and fell prey to an Osoto Gari, and stupidly stuck my arm back to catch my fall. The impact injured my shoulder, and ever since it randomly "pops" during rolling and puts me out of commission for a couple weeks at a time. Sometimes it even pops from overextending a jab during padwork in Muay Thai.

Recently, at a friend's suggestion, I've started strengthening the muscles with this exercise:

http://www.exrx.net/WeightExercises/...lRotation.html

I've also been stretching the muscle regularly along that range of motion. I've found that these helped dramatically. I can physically feel increased range of motion in that joint, and less of a "guarded" feeling when extending it, and haven't had another popping issue since. I'd highly recommend this to anyone who has suffered a similar injury.

[judoka_uk]

As someone who's been on the recieving end of two major shoulder injuries I'm a firm believer in not self-diagnosing and seeking proper medical attention ideally in the form of a sports injury specialist or physiotherapist.

[goodlun]

Not going to go too much into my own injuries but I have found it to be helpful to ice down my trouble spots on days that we have worked on them. IE if we are drilling shoulder locks even if I didn't specifically hurt my shoulder I will go ahead and ice it down that night anyways. This tends to help quite a bit.

[MMAMickey]

I've had a myriad of injuries and I'm only 20 years old.

Probably my better ones were:

• Torn rotator cuff from a sanda match (lead to a dislocation)
• Broken fingers from incorrectly judging a kick parry in karate
• Broken toe from a bad sacrifice throw in judo
• severely sprained neck from a fucked up throw in no gi grappling
• another torn up shoulder from over extending a jab in a boxing match
• partially torn ACL, minor damage to knee cartillage from a big clumsy **** taking me down badly in judo.

I deal with most of them by consistently icing anything that feels 'tweaked' even if it doesn't hurt. I also consistently do rotator cuff strengthening exercises and regularly practice yoga to keep me flexible.