Some plans

I have lots of plans, and not all of them are evil.

One of them is to get a photo of everyone… EVERYONE… in each of the classes and all together. This is going to sound uber ghey but I think it’d be nice to frame the inception of Informed Performance MMA. We’ve got a good crew of people right now and I suspect things are going to start getting a lot bigger in the near future. In general, I’m going to start taking more photos as the blog is looking a bit sparse these days.

My hour of ouch

So people know that I have a bad back, or, at least people know I moan a lot about my back anyway. It’s in a bad way since the return to training and it’ll be a while before I’m pain free. So if I’m a little crankier than usual, that would be it. I had a conversation with someone yesterday about it and they actually looked at me like I was a bit crazy. Here’s the jist of it. Basically, every morning I wake up and I can’t move for about 5-10 minutes. It’s not paralysis, or even laziness (my wife thinks there’s an element of that), it’s just pain. It hurts too much to move. Some mornings are better than others. They range from 30 seconds of pain followed by 5 minutes of stiffness to “if there was a fire, I would sooner stay in bed”. So when I wake up, I look at the ceiling for a while, then begin to try to move my shoulders. Rolling over isn’t really an option, so instead I try to move my head from side to side. Once I get a bit of mobility going in my neck, I chance rolling over. Sometimes this works fine, and other times I just give up and go back to the beginning. I’ve been to physios, osteos, doctors, midwives, accupuncturists (despite myself) and I was thinking about getting a live goat sacrificed and drinking it’s blood to see if I could absorb it’s lifeforce, a ritual I saw on National Geographic one night. It’s been much better in the last year due to some smart training and warm ups but lately it’s back with a vengeance.

How to avoid a neck/back condition in a few easy steps:

1. Don’t do stupid things like I used to do.
2. When you get stacked, let go of those arm locks/triangles
3. Warm up your neck before every session. Don’t just roll it around a bit, do a proper prehab warm up for the area
4. Lift heavy stuff that strengthens the neck
5. Don’t allow people to neck crank you

And that’s it. Hopefully this wave of back pain will pass in the next couple of days but until then, if I snap at you, refer back to this post.