Should You Practice Jiu-Jitsu When You Are Sick?
Learn from my mistakes
I made a dumb mistake that cost me three months of feeling extremely sick. Learn from me so you don’t make the same one.
Last year I had an important tournament coming up. The national championships were in some weeks and I was training hard to win.
I was a white belt at the time, but I was going to compete with blue belts as well because this particular tournament doesn’t use the belt system — and I got a blue belt in my first match by the way.
It was February, and the weather in Spain was pretty bad at that time (even though this year is even worse). As you can imagine, colds were everywhere, and I caught one. The smart thing would have been to take a few days off and return to training once I was fully recovered, but the nationals were getting close, and I needed to train, so I kept pushing.
You might think I took it easy at first, but that wasn’t the case. I kept rolling hard every single round without any concern for my health. The result? What was initially just an annoying cold became almost three months of sickness in which I was coughing as a lifelong smoker and couldn’t sleep for that particular reason.
As you can imagine that played a role in the tournament, which I lost. Yeah, I won my first match by submission against a blue belt which to this day is still one of my favorite competition memories, but I was really underperforming. There was one match in which I literally couldn’t breathe at all and ended up just defending until I got submitted. I was really frustrated after that match, and I could have avoided that and all the sickness period by just taking some days off after initially getting sick.
I still remember those nights in which I was trying to sleep but couldn’t because of the pain that coughing generated me. I couldn’t understand how it was possible that just a cold lasted so long.
When I went to the doctor several times I was told that I did not have any special disease. Nothing was making sense. But a little later I understood it. I already knew it, but I didn’t think about it.
It turns out that when you do high-intensity physical activity (like Jiu-Jitsu) your body is getting stressed out. That stress weakens your immune system. Now that effect is temporal and if you recover then your immune system will actually get stronger. The problem is when you don’t allow it to recover properly.
So my immune system was already weak because it was fighting against a cold, but then I kept training hard and that made it even weaker. I never stopped training and things just got worse and worse until I felt like I had the black plague instead of a cold.
Just Don’t Train
If my story didn’t convince you to stop training when you are sick, maybe avoiding infecting your partners will.
There’s no secret that Jiu-Jitsu is a sport with an absurd degree of contact. That’s the best place for a virus to spread. So if you don’t care about your health (which you should), at least care about other’s health. Some of these people have family; jobs; plans; or other things going on in their lives, don’t interfere with it, please.
I understand that you can feel like if you don’t train you are losing your time and you are going to get left behind by your training partners, but if you don’t stop you are going to make it worse, and at one point you will have to stop anyway.
It doesn’t take as much time to recover from a cold if you rest and have good habits. Just one week and three days should be enough to get back to training. But that can be a lot of time if your identity is attached to Jiu-Jitsu like mine was (if that’s your case, that’s a problem). So I would like to give you some advice about what to do in those days.
What To Do
Sleep as much as you can at night, drink a lot of water, rest… These are things to get better quickly but will do nothing to keep your mind in the right place if you are not training.
When I was out of training for an injury or being sick, I usually got depressed and started to be all day on my bed scrolling on my phone. That’s not good. If you are using Jiu-Jitsu as therapy, then once you can’t train you won’t have your therapy. Maybe you should go to an actual therapy, which I greatly recommend doing so, but there are other things to do as well.
You can read more; write stuff; watch a movie; spend more time with your family; watch Jiu-Jitsu instructionals; watch Jiu-Jitsu matches; study something you want to learn; create a plan for when you get back to training; think more; do some light exercise if you feel good enough; write down things you are grateful for…
I talk about it because I’m living it right now. As I write this, I’m sick myself. As I said in the beginning the weather is pretty bad right now. It rains too often and sometimes it even ends up being more of a rainstorm. I usually have to walk 45 minutes to my gym and on multiple occasions, it started raining in the middle of the road. As a result, I caught another cold.
I wanted to keep training, I still do, but I know that the best decision I can take is to rest for some days.
I’ve been using this time productively, or at least I’m trying to. I started learning German, watched the Sapateiro’s world championship and wrote an article about it, watched Mateusz Szczeciński ankle lock instructional and hopefully I can keep it out and do some extra stuff like starting to seriously self-educated (if I’m not studying I should keep learning about topics that are not related to Jiu-Jitsu anyway).
So…
Getting sick sucks because it breaks all your momentum in training. It’s hard to simply stop training and take some time off but that’s the best thing we can do for ourselves and our training partners. So use that time to grow and become a better person. When you come back, take it easy and slowly build up to your old training intensity and frequency.
Remember, Jiu-Jitsu will always be there. Your gym won’t grow legs and run away, and your instructor won’t (hopefully) be arrested for tax evasion. So make sure to be able to come back to Jiu-Jitsu.
By the way, I will keep asking questions for my non-existent audience at the end of each article. For now, I keep the same question as in the last article. What is your next goal in Jiu-Jitsu? If you don’t have any, then use this as a way to set one. It can be anything, like winning a tournament, developing a new area in your game or even just getting back to training. If you are reading this in your email box just hit me back, and I’ll be reading the responses.
Anyway, hope you enjoyed the post, have a great day!