The relationship between BJJ and fingers is a love-hate one. You have to grapple in BJJ but that isn’t easy on your knuckles, ligaments, and wrists. To be fair this is a common issue with many combat sports including wrestling and Judo.
But since grappling techniques are at the heart of BJJ, your hands take a thorough beating every time you step onto the mat.
Does this mean that BJJ players should take hand damage as a foregone conclusion and resign themselves to the fact that they’ll never moonlight as hand models? Not by a long shot. You can still keep your fingers intact and prevent hand injuries if you go to class or the tournament well prepared and ready for what awaits you. Read on to find out all about hand care in BJJ both on and off the mat.
BJJ and Hand Damage
It’s not uncommon to ask a BJJ black belt who’s been through their fair share of competitions about the body part that took the most beating and they’ll look down at their hands and mumble something about how their fingers ache, man. We’re talking about a tough person who has endured so much pain and got themselves out of numerous bad situations on the mat many times before. Yet when it comes to hands, everyone is a big baby.
So what is it about the hands that make them such a vulnerable point in the armored body of the BJJ practitioner? To answer that we’ll have to go through an anatomical tour of the hands. Each finger except that thumb has 3 joints. So the two hands have 28 joints between them. Add the wrists and you have 30 vulnerable spots. Each one of those is a veritable weak link in your defenses that your opponent can exploit.
And since many offense and defense techniques in BJJ are closely related to grappling, you can imagine what those sore points go through. It’s no wonder that after each class or training, the player goes home with swollen knuckles, bruises, bunions, redness, and bumps. If you ask them how their hands feel, they’d answer that they feel like they’ve been put through a shredder.
When you consider that age is nobody’s friend and that even the healthiest joints and bones show wear and tear with time, you can only imagine what would become of those hands as the player gets older. They’d probably be a constant source of pain and aching. But that’s not the only impact that BJJ can have on your hands.
Is there a Connection between Arthritis and BJJ?
All that wear and tear can have lasting effects on your body and your hands in particular. One of the often cited examples of hands gone awry in the world of BJJ is the famous player Joao Miyao. It’s fair to say that his mangled hands are just as famous as the man himself. And he won’t stop talking about them.
The law of nature is where there’s pressure, something has to give. In the case of BJJ, your hands are the first to give in. Use and abuse them on a regular basis on the mat and you might develop osteoarthritis. That’s a form of arthritis that has nothing to do with genetics or the auto-immune system. It’s something you inflict on yourself when you don’t take care of your hands. So how does osteoarthritis develop?
Remember those 30 joints we talked about? They’re held in place by a cushion called the cartilage which is as tough as they come. In normal situations, the cartilage is durable and will serve you a whole lifetime without giving you trouble. But when you put them through hell with excessive training and improper care, you’re really asking for trouble. This cushion wears thin and eventually disappears altogether.
Now your bones are rubbing against each other without protection. Imagine the inner parts of your car engine working without engine oil. That’s exactly how your bones feel without a healthy cartilage. First, there will be a pain, then bone spurs appear and if things get worse, you could develop bony enlargements which are not fun at all.
It’s the gripping and grappling that puts that mechanical distress on your fingers and causes these health conditions. As we all know you can’t progress in BJJ without grappling. So if grappling is a must, what can you do to protect your precious fingers and give your hands a second life?
Does taping your fingers help?
There are two ways you can help mitigate the problems that might develop in your hands and fingers as your BJJ practice gets serious. You can protect your fingers with tape and use techniques that safeguard you against common combat injuries. We’ll elaborate on the latter below. So let’s see what tapping the fingers involves.
The market is full of medical tapes designed specifically for fingers. They’re made with BJJ players and other combat sports and MMA in mind. A review of these products is beyond the scope of this article. Instead, we’ll focus on how to use the tape to protect your fingers before each practice or match.
- X-taping: In X-taping, you apply the tape around your finger in X shapes. The point where the tapes cross should lie directly on top of the middle joint of your finger. The advantage this method has is it gives maximum protection to the fingers while also providing you with mobility. The tape doesn’t interfere with your movements and you can perform your grips and grappling techniques with ease.
- Restrictive Taping: You use restrictive taping with an already injured finger. It is supposed to help the finger heal while protecting it from further injuries. The way you apply it is to wrap the tape tightly around the joint or joints of the injured finger. This immobilizes the joint and limits its movements, hence the name. One drawback is your finger might get snagged in your gi.
- Buddy Taping: With body taping, you apply X-taping not just to one finger but to bind two fingers together. One of those fingers is the injured one while the other acts as support. In other words, you’re creating a tourniquet but instead of using a stick, you use the neighboring finger. It still restricts the mobility of the two fingers but its protective advantages are immensely high.
- Thumb Taping: With thumb taping, you’re protecting an injured thumb. Due to its unique position in your hand, your thumb carries a lot of the heavy lifting as far as your grappling is concerned. This puts you on the spot if your thumb is injured. You want to keep training but you know that might not be a good idea. Taping the thumb is the least effective type of taping and you should stay off the mat until that digit has healed.
Hand Pain Prevention Techniques
While finger tapes are a good option, their uses and protection for that matter are limited as we have already seen. A better way to keep your fingers in good shape is to learn to take care of them and not throw them in the wringer. That might sound easier said than done but in BJJ it pays to listen to your body and make several adjustments to your training.
One of the first adjustments to consider is your guards. Guards that rely heavily on gripping tend to be hard on the fingers. Take the Spider Guard for example. It forces you to grip the sleeve of the opponent and keep that grip tight while the adversary is doing all they can to break loose. In this case, it’s your fingers against the whole body weight of the opponent. Not an ideal situation for your knuckles. The same thing applies to the la Riva Guard. You might want to look for alternative guards. I’d recommend the Half Guard, Butterfly Guard, and Closed Guard to put less strain on your joints.
Another technique is to do more training without your gi. While the gi is crucial to acquire the necessary skills in BJJ, you can still learn a lot when you train without it. For some reason, the coarse material the gi is made of puts more strain on your grip and requires more pressure which accelerates the wear and tear of the joints we talked about above.
And finally, you need to go easy on your adamant obsession with grips. Yes, your instructor will demand that you have a steely grip that keeps the opponent pinned, but try not to go overboard with that grip. Here, moderation works wonders. So try to use that tight grip sparingly and give your hands a break between each deathly grip you use on your rival.