Tell Tale Signs of a Combat Arts Injury

Kung fu masters can do some amazing things because of body conditioning, control, and brute strength. Chinese kung fu master Li Liangui practices suogugong, or body shrinking kung fu, a little known style of kung fu that teaches dislocation of bones. 

Liangui is 70 years old, and contorts his body into positions that hurt just to watch. He says it’s an amazing complete system and he’s open for students. Master Wei Yaobin is known as the kung fu “Iron Crotch,” with balls of steel, who demonstrates receiving a full-on kick to the genitals, slammed with a brick, and bashed with a huge wooden pole, all to the privates without even a wince.

Then there’s the kung fu master who walks on his hands with a rope around his waist pulling a 2204 pound minivan almost 33 feet down the street. In the even more extreme category are clips of stunt performers letting power tools near their own heads. Treat those as spectacle, never as training — no amount of conditioning protects the skull or the brain, and an injury like that can be fatal. Ordinary kung fu practice, with graded conditioning and controlled contact, is a long way from any of it.

Martial Art Training Is Dangerous

Some of these masters do things that are definitely dangerous—if you’re not trained and conditioned to that amazing level! However, part of martial arts training is teaching you how not to get hurt. Intensity of training, preparedness of participants, who typically start learning how to fall, evade being struck, and other protective measures from their first day of training helps prevent injuries. It is also because martial arts teach emotional and physical control, so the least amount of force will typically be used during training and sparring.

Incidence of Injury Varies With Style of Martial Art

Injury rates differ from style to style. Full-contact styles such as muay thai, krav maga and MMA involve far more repeated impact than low-contact practices such as tai chi, although published injury rates vary a great deal between studies and depend heavily on how hard a particular school trains. There are hundreds of different martial arts styles, some little known like suogugong (see above), kalaripayattu, kuntao, and bando. Judo is among the most widely practiced styles in the world. In the U.S., karate and taekwondo hold that position.

How Martial Arts Injury Rates Compare With Other Sports

Comparisons with sports such as football and soccer are hard to make, because studies count injuries differently and training cultures vary enormously. Injuries definitely happen! However, as anyone who has ever trained in MMA will tell you, it doesn’t happen as often as expected. Certain martial arts styles do have a higher incidence of injury, so likelihood of accidental injury also depends upon which type, training school, and instructor are chosen. In martial arts emphasis is always placed upon safe movement that does not harm joints and muscles, protection of self and other, when training involves more than one participant and danger of injury rises.

Difference between Signs of Injury and Symptoms of Injury

A sign of injury is something that can be seen or observed from the outside by another person. Everyday signs include: heat and redness at the injury site; a joint that looks swollen or misshapen; limping or favoring a limb; bleeding, wounds, cuts or bruises. Other signs mean stop everything and call emergency services — any loss of consciousness, unequal pupils, a seizure, someone confused or dazed after a blow to the head, an obvious deformity or a bone piercing the skin, a limb that is cold or pulseless, or bleeding that will not stop with firm pressure.

Symptoms of injury are what the injured person feels and reports. They include: feeling dizzy or confused; vision problems such as spots, blurring or difficulty focusing; pain; tingling; loss of memory; inability to move a limb or joint; numbness in an area. Several of those are concussion symptoms. After any blow to the head, confusion, memory loss, a worsening headache, repeated vomiting, slurred speech, or weakness or numbness on one side means the athlete stops training that day and gets assessed urgently.

The ancient art of Tahtib is a 5,000 year old martial art that was taught in the ancient Egyptian army. It was part of three primary military disciplines learned by Egyptian troops, together with wrestling and archery. Adel Boulad, who is responsible for reviving and documenting Tahtib as an Egyptian martial art, says it’s a combat form using two sticks, and the intention is to “destroy the other man’s head.” Tahtib is one martial art that undoubtedly results in multiple signs and symptoms of injury when practiced like the ancient Egyptian army did.

Pay Attention Over Time

Jet Li began learning wushu at the age of eight in Beijing, China. It was intense. Jet Li has described his wushu training as “bitter,” and has spoken about being kept in training on a broken foot as a teenager. That is a story about the culture of the era, not a model to copy. Training on a suspected fracture can turn a clean break into a displaced one, delay healing by months, and leave lasting damage. A bone you cannot bear weight on needs an X-ray, not another session.

A good example of that type of injury would be training to do martial arts throws. One person is greatly outweighed by the other, but succeeds in performing the throw correctly, practicing over and over again in class. However, the day after that training session, a little ‘hitch’ is felt in the lower back by the smaller person, which swiftly develops over the next few weeks into extreme pain radiating up and down the back, and finally becomes debilitating sciatica making it difficult to walk.

Back pain that radiates into the leg like that needs a proper medical assessment. A doctor or physical therapist can work out whether it is a disc problem, nerve irritation, or a muscular strain, and rule out anything serious. Be wary of anyone who says a vertebra has slipped out of place and needs putting back — there is no good evidence for that model. Red flags that mean same-day care: numbness in the groin or inner thighs, loss of bladder or bowel control, or weakness in a leg that is getting worse. 

Or it could be the new karate practitioner who pushes herself to keep up with classmates doing heavy bag straight punches that first day. But her form isn’t good enough yet, and wrist strength is lacking, so she develops nagging wrist problems. It is easy to minimize the pain or injury during the excitement of training or class, but a close eye should be kept on any injury, no matter how slight it appears in the moment.

Pay Attention to Pain

Take pain seriously when it is getting worse rather than better, when it wakes you at night, or when it starts as ordinary stiffness and then makes it hurt to move or to breathe deeply. Pain in the back or a joint that radiates down a limb — into the hip, buttock and leg, higher up the back, or into the shoulder or neck — can mean a nerve is involved and should always be checked. Chest pain, trouble breathing, or pain after a heavy blow to the ribs or abdomen is not a wait-and-see situation: get medical help the same day.

Often the most common sign of an acute sports injury is also the most obvious. Pain or swelling in the knees, ankles, elbows or wrists after intense training can be the first hint that something is wrong, especially if it is still there two or three days later. Get it looked at sooner than that if you cannot put weight on the limb or use the joint, if the joint looks deformed or gave way under you, if the swelling came on within minutes of the injury, or if the area turns hot, red and increasingly painful with a fever — that combination can mean infection.

The film Once Upon a Time in China, starring Jet Li was actually written about a real martial arts master living in the late 1800 to early 1900s who became a Chinese folk hero. Wong Fei-hung was a renowned Hung Gar Kuen martial arts fighter and physician made famous by the Chinese people because of his tireless work helping the common people, such as founding a clinic where he taught martial arts, acupuncture, herbal medicine and bone-setting.

Wong Fei-hung’s father was a kung fu master who was one of the famed “Ten Tigers of Guandong,” one of the ten top martial artists in southern China. Fei-hung’s father taught him many secrets of the southern Shaolin fighting monks. A rival master challenged Fei-hung’s father to a fight, but instead, Wong Fei-hung at thirteen years old fought the rival master and vanquished him easily.

Increase Training Intensity Levels Slowly!

Protect your bones. The reason that training intensity levels need to be increased slowly is to give the ligaments, tendons, muscles, bones, and body time to prepare. Bones will gradually become stronger and denser over time, and able to withstand harder, more intense training. The key here is ‘gradually,’ giving bones time to destroy old cells, create new ones, remodel and increase density.

Build stronger bones. Martial arts are great for strengthening and rebuilding bones to be tougher and denser. Bones have a strengthening process called remodeling, which means bone tissue is destroyed by bone resorption, and then rebuilt in an adaptation process that results in greater bone strength and density. This process takes time.

That is why training loads must be increased slowly and gradually to give bones time for this adaptation method to occur. Otherwise, if training is increased too quickly, remodeling does not proceed normally. The normal remodeling speed will increase so that more bone tissue will be destroyed than is rebuilt, resulting in weaker, more fragile bones very vulnerable to stress fractures, rather than stronger and denser bones.

Martial arts and bone mineral density (BMD). Studies of adolescent judo, karate and kung fu practitioners have generally found higher bone mineral density in both sexes than in non-training peers. These are mostly small, observational studies, so they show an association rather than settling how much of the difference the training itself caused. 

Six Injury Warning Signs — Plus the Red Flags That Mean Emergency Care