Ronda Rousey: "I never wanted to talk about concussion"
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
After months of mostly-useless conversations with doctors, neurologists, etc, we visited a sports medicine specialist who worked with snowboarders, skiers, etc, people who get concussions frequently.
The way the specialist described common concussion symptoms was really interesting: Effectively, your brain finds balance by using a combination of sight, touch (feet), and your inner ear. A concussion can impact the inner ear part of that equation, so your brain is overly reliant on sight and touch to compensate. This can cause all kinds of common concussion symptoms: Dizziness, sensitivity to screen time, etc.
Anyways, after giving us the rundown my partner was prompted to do a few simple exercises to test concussion symptoms. One of them was to stand on one leg and track a moving pen with her eyes. She'd done OK on some of the previous exercises but this one took her out, she lasted maybe 5 seconds and was completely exhausted and dizzy for the rest of the day because of it.
We ended up with a physical-therapy-like balance exercise plan that she stuck to regularly for a few months, and it ended up getting her to complete recovery.
Here're the videos where he talks about it: https://www.youtube.com/@StrangeParts/search?query=brain
Like you said, extremely eye opening, and very good information to have. There is help available, and it likely won't come from a normal neurologist until their training catches up to the research.
If you aren't near any skiing, I'd seek out sports medicine/physical therapy folks who work with your local concussion-heavy athletes. Mountain bikers, cyclists, maybe football/rugby, etc.
I was dizzy for days whenever I laid down. It was as if I was spinning in an amusement park ride slowly.
I called an ex GF neuro radiologist, who after realizing I wasn't going to go in for any scans (no health insurance at the time), told me of a series of "brain/balance reset exercises" you can do. I did the exercises, moving my head in several positions in a particular order, and all symptoms went away.
The brain is crazy.
Like I said above consult a vestibular therapist, neurologist, or someone other than this dummy if you want real medical advice.
But it is real fascinating that this kind of physical manipulation is so effective.
But when a crystal hits a hair, your brain interprets it as “I am suddenly moving about one axis at high angular velocity.” You become insanely dizzy. The nature of this phenomenon is that when you turn your head one way, you feel like you are falling forever in that direction.
Solution: the Epley maneuver. Turn your head quickly in the direction of the falling while you are sitting in a bed. As your head turns, fall backwards quickly on to the bed. This motion more or less tucks the crystals back into their niche so you can regain your sense of balance.
The brain is crazy. The inner ear is crazy. See an ENT specialist before you follow my dumbass version of doctor’s orders, but if you suffer from Bppv maybe this will be interesting information.
In MMA, if someone’s head is bouncing off the mat then you should be grabbing the opponent's elbow immediately.
Some extra awareness will hopefully help
We didn’t catch Lance Armstrong using PEDs for something like eight years.
They're not being stupid by continuing the fight and trying to hide injuries. They are trying to get a w instead of an l, and sometimes that just means you need to keep the fight going another minute or two until the time is up. That can literally mean the difference between having a successful career and retiring with a mediocre record. It can be the difference between a shot at the world title, versus being on the free undercard fights. Fights. They are making a calculation, and probably the same one I would make in their same situation. It is very easy to look back on the reckless youth as being stupid. Fortunately, I have enough recording of myself from that era to see that I actually had thought it through pretty well, I just didn't realize how bad it could be in the future. But, if I had a world title under my belt, none of my current maladies would feel nearly as bad :-D
But wanting to continue when even your coach knows it’s over is a kind of pressure sale situation. You’re in the moment and sort of trapped, and having a concussion and a brain full of adrenaline makes you have even worse judgement.
I blame the committee, only partially the refs since the refs aren't makign the rules.
To be clear my disagreement was with the parent that said adrenaline made the fighters stupid.
For me, I can hardly think of a worse use of a life than fighting for sport. There is not a single fighter on earth I would trade places with. Not one.
What's the deeper meaning of getting heart disease and myopia by sitting at a computer learning how to be a good programmer?
What's the deeper meaning of doing anything? It's all temporary vanity. In a million years, even the Pyramids will have worn away!
It's all ships in bottles to keep us busily interested til we die. :D
All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already in the ages before us.
There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be among those who come after.
When I consider how Naoya Inoue fought 11 rounds with a broken orbital socket I am profoundly inspired by the heart he demonstrated and his will to win - his focus and his skill to change strategy mid fight.
It's easy to handwave his ability to fight through pain thanks to adrenaline... until you try it for yourself.
It's inspiring to know just how much we can overcome ourselves if we want something enough.
My girlfriend was a martial arts trainer for a few years, and many of the girls she worked with cited Ronda specifically as their inspiration. They're not competing, this is a hobby, but they're doing it because they were inspired by people like Ronda.
I just envy their discipline...
I have to ask, what's your ideal life look like?
Slightly off-topic though; you're acknowledging that they might contribute which isn't unfair here.
We are still looking at whether over the counter pain killers are mood altering substances. I’ve seen circumstantial evidence of this in myself. (Though I don’t think I’d want me or a friend to fight on painkillers - reduced coagulation and bruises are no joke).
Suppose that there are enhancement drugs. They work, and a lot of competitors are using them. Then it becomes far more believable that the current champion is enhanced and has managed to hide it, than that someone who is not enhanced has miraculously managed to beat the entire field of people who have such a big advantage.
My view lead to me being certain about Lance Armstrong years before he was caught.
The most effective doping agents are often the easiest to detect, and modern anti-doping programs like the biological passport and whereabouts program are very effective. It's no reason to be complicit -- the science continues to evolve, athletes who go awry will continue to get caught, and athletes who follow the rules will continue to have to work hard to stay within the boundaries (it is not trivial to stay within WADA guidelines even as an amateur athlete; a lot of people who get medical treatment for a common issue would violate the rules a few times over without realizing it).
But to look at an entire sport and disregard them all as cheaters without evidence does nothing but encourage young athletes to feel like they need to risk their health in order to compete and belittle the accomplishments of clean athletes. We need to hold cheaters accountable, not throw in the towel.
I agree that "a lot of competitors are using them" is an assumption. In the case of Lance Armstrong, so many other bikers had been caught before him that it was no longer an assumption. But that does vary by sport.
I entirely dismiss the argument that our tests catch cheaters. There have just been too many examples over the years of athletes getting away with cheating for years. At this point the burden of proof is on those who think we're catching them. In fact as articles like https://www.shu.ac.uk/news/all-articles/features-and-comment... show, anonymous surveys show that most athletes are getting away with it.
All that said, I agree on holding cheaters accountable. And think we should go farther. If someone who trains with you gets caught, you should also be punished. On the assumption that there is a chance you were just not caught, and if you weren't doping, you likely knew and didn't tell. That would create social pressure to not put your teammates at jeopardy. And I think THAT would finally end cheating.
Haha no, definitely not. For clarity, we're talking about banned substances, which isn't always the same thing as performance enhancing drugs. It is actually debated whether a lot of the WADA banned substances are performance enhancing drugs; but WADA would rather athletes don't take things that could be harmful to them because they might enhance performance so they tend to err on the side of adding things they worry about or have evidence of athletes abusing.
Moreso, I mean that it's simplistic to assume that the type and amount of illegal substances you can get away with while skirting an increasingly aggressive testing framework will be sufficient to be the world champion. There's a risk tradeoff here and a million variables in high performance training -- athletes put their entire career on the line when they take banned substances and get no guarantee of return. Take the recent case of Collin Chartier in triathlon: reached #14 in the world, started doping over the off season, caught within a few months of use, and career is now over.
> In the case of Lance Armstrong, so many other bikers had been caught before him that it was no longer an assumption.
Right, and once they're caught, they're banned. They are no longer a "competitor who is using them". Your logic makes an assumption that the population that is left just hasn't been caught yet, rather than that their negative tests actually indicate a lack of doping. And that is an assumption.
> anonymous surveys show that most athletes are getting away with it
These surveys come up with numbers showing anywhere between 1% and 70% of athletes have consumed a banned substance. Remember that weed is a WADA banned substance that 50% of the US population has tried. These studies are glorified guesses that vary depending on the wording they use.
The fact that Greg was such a brittle rider - a god one day and barely finishing another - gave me hope that he was legit. The fact that he has focused in retirement on cheating cemented that for me.
Last I heard he was trying to watchdog riders sneaking small electric motors into their bikes. Even 50 watts is a lot of boost for a cyclist.
Why not bring a gun to an MMA fight while they're at it too
And steroids make you not only dumber but more violent.
Scientific American agrees[1] that violence is not correlated with testosterone:
> "When aggression is more narrowly defined as simple physical violence, the connection between [testosterone and violence] all but disappears."
Another study finds higher testosterone promotes pro-social behavior[2].
Personally I've found that rather than androgens being a mediator of violence, estrogen seems to be a much powerful inhibitor of rage/violence-potential. Low estrogen causes particularly difficult-to-control emotions. Generally when someone is taking high amounts of steroids they are likely also taking anti-estrogens (blocking testosterone's conversion to estradiol).
This low estradiol, due to another drug, not steroids seems to be what most often causes violent emotional dysregulation. Generally not testosterone or other androgens without anti-estrogens.
Perhaps my TRT is making me extremely dumb though ;-)
0: https://lithub.com/it-turns-out-theres-not-a-lot-of-science-...
1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-....
2: https://news.emory.edu/stories/2022/08/esc_testosterone_anim...
Tell me that you have no idea about physiology without telling me.
It would change the strategy of the sport, but it may help prevent brain damage over time.
What would make sense would just be to disallow head strikes. Hit your opponent in the head and forfeit.
Or you could go in the other direction, and let fights be to the death.
What's the benefit of the middle ground? If you want to see what works in a fight, it's crippling the other guy. If you don't want people to be crippled, you probably shouldn't allow crippling them in the future either.
Among the sets of rules that allow head strikes, traditional boxing is the worst.
It is much more dangerous than any kind of kickboxing or MMA, because the boxers have few methods to defend themselves and few other means of winning, except by a knockout that is easiest to achieve by a head strike. Even during the Greek antiquity, pancration (i.e. MMA) was considered to have a much lower risk of injury than pugilism (i.e. boxing).
But they distinguished between that and stand up striking aka pugilism? Though the latter is a Latin word hmm
I'd be very uninterested by non head striking martial arts.
Martial Arts is a search for truth. It's not only about fighting as it is also about discipline, self improvement, peace, community and some spritualism
But if you care about combat them you have to fight/spar. No point pretending taichi is a combat skill if no one in two generations or more have applied it practically.
MMA is the closest we can get to a controlled safe arena to facilitate that search for truth.
Do what works. Love him or hate him, the Conor McGregor shoulder punch was a great moment of reminding people that the spirit of MMA should be formless.
For that reason I find it frustrating that UFC has banned 12oclock elbows and football kicks and grounded knees. Not because I want to see people's heads getting smashed but because the obvious desire to not get struck by those would promote less risky takedowns and would probably make the sport less wrestling dominant.
Pankration allowed striking, kicking, wrestling and submission grappling, so it was very similar to the MMA of today.
However, the pankration fighters did not bandage their hands with leather straps, like the pugilists, so they were not able to hit as hard the head of the opponent.
Moreover, they had plenty of other options for winning a match, so striking was not as emphasized as in pugilism, which remains true today in MMA vs. boxing.
> Martial Arts is a search for truth.
> But if you care about combat them you have to fight/spar.
> Do what works.
The truth is that barehanded fighting has been obsolete since the invention of rocks.
If you want to see what works, expect to see a lot of strikes that break the opponent's knee, and wrestlers putting their opponent's eyes out.
If you don't want to see that, how are head strikes supposed to be different?
> No point pretending taichi is a combat skill if
Huh? Nobody does pretend it's a combat skill. It's a set of exercises† practiced voluntarily by grandmothers, and imposed upon schoolchildren, for notional health reasons. If you suggested to either group that it might be relevant in combat, they would find that hilarious. (In fact, I have read a Chinese comic series in which there's a running joke that someone is seen as a martial artist when, in reality, all they can do is morning exercises. That person eventually defeats a gorilla -- the gorilla has been beating up actual martial artists by copying their moves, faster and stronger -- by doing some morning exercises, which it copies. Their total uselessness in combat means that the gorilla is no longer threatening.)
It is best known for the funny narrations that people make up to accompany and describe the exercises.
"I have a watermelon."
"Here you go."
† Well, really, tai ji is the interaction between yin and yang. The exercises are tai ji quan.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rRGrzPU0zDY&pp=ygUQdGFpIGNoaSB...
I think taiji gets a bad rap. Although I haven't done explicitly taiji, when I did some shaolin quan which included baduanjin I was very impressed with how holistic the training was (with the exception of combat application). I think the training was "boring" but has the necessary ingredients for preparing the body to be conditioned for very fluid movement which turns out is very good for long term health and preservation of your MSK system. I came away impressed that we've had so much of this figured out for so long well before we had the science to explain it. Baduanjin was actually designed to be accessible regardless of age or prior skill level.
> The truth is that barehanded fighting has been obsolete since the invention of rocks.
So with a rock or even a rock weapon like an axe or whatever you are telling me you think you could take on Khabib? That rocks have completely obsoleted physicality and skill so now you will win.
> If you want to see what works, expect to see a lot of strikes that break the opponent's knee, and wrestlers putting their opponent's eyes out.
This quora post captures exactly what I think is about the search for truth in martial arts - there's so much "theory" that struggles to hold up in practice where a bouncer/martial artist reflects on how knee breaks are a low percentage high risk technique when trying to execute in real life. https://www.quora.com/Are-knee-destructions-illegal-in-MMA
I think non practitioners routinely underestimate the difficulty in executing these kinds of techniques under duress. I mean, a proper liver strike is a 1 hit KO and karate teaches the liver kick where you strike the liver with the ball of your foot. How often do you see that technique used? It's like the mma equivalent of the football bicycle kick.
IIRC Jon Jones used knee kicks and they werent so effective that they were banned or changed the face of the sport.
Eye gouging is weird, I'm unsure how it would change MMA and we'll never find out. If they're good as a strike people will stop engaging and resort to kick range but kicks can make you more liable to take downs which then brings you into gouging range in wrestling.
If anything UFC rules has shown that physicality kind of trumps skill unless the skill gap is very large. Which is a frustrating outcome but a truth nonetheless - martial arts is only useful if you're also strong
I know that this would ruin multiple billion dollar industries as we know them (boxing, MMA, gridiron football, more), so nothing substantive will change, but in my opinion there's a grotesque conflict when we're paying people to put up with TBIs, broken bones, et cetera.
There are sports where violence and injury are clearly not the goal but aren't negligible, such as racecar drivers and baseball pitchers, and I don't know how to approach those -- but violence as sport seems far more clear cut.
There certainly are sports that ban head strikes. Certain forms of karate, for instance. Fight fans _like_ seeing heads get punched, and they like seeing knock outs. There's not currently a very big market that wants to see fighting without head strikes.
I think that's a huge symptom of my point. You can strip out tackles from football and make MMA way safer, but the large MMA competitions are popular because they're closer to two people doing whatever they can to win a fight than something more restrictive, like karate or wrestling. As you mention, the fans will be pissed at safening the sport, and I'd almost bet money that the vast majority of the fighters would be pissed as well -- just like I've seen plenty of coworkers and workers in other industries get angry at OSHA regulations, even the ones that are as ridiculously straightforward as labeling the bottle of formaldehyde so someone doesn't spritz it around a clinic.
The most common preference is somewhere between a Captain America movie and a John Wick movie, I think.
Folks who can't stand to see real violence wish it just didn't happen, the way I wish street fights didn't happen. But you're not gonna get anywhere offering what an MMA fan understand as an inferior product. And the MMA fans know there's karate and wrestling and BJJ to watch, they just aren't as interested in it.
I don't try to rationalize it much. I know most people, especially in the circles I'm in, can't stand to look at it. I don't mind that.
The idea that society has moved past the need for violent spectacle or something just doesn't work for me, because I enjoy the sport. And plenty of other people do, too
Fighters for the most part are going to do what will make them the most money. If the fans are there for knockouts, they're gonna go for knockouts. If BJJ tournaments offered the same money making opportunities that MMA does, a bunch of fighters would very happily switch
Ironically the growth of UFC and Boxing tells me we're trending back to the Roman days. Sure we won't have full on gladiators but everything old is new again feels like...
To hold up Roman as some sort of maxima doesnt really hold up. Its just that they were rich so they invested more in spectical, just as we do now.
Hah, not so much - https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=biffs+bumps+bra... - big hits are a big thing, to the point TV specials and such are made on it.
Full contact but restricted martial arts also exist and mitigate risks by limiting the range of allowed techniques. Some of them do it in different ways than others. Judo is full-contact but disallows strikes, which makes it massively different than something with strikes. Semi-contact karate avoids the full-contact part, which makes it different in a different way.
Full contact practically always comes with risks, and full contact with fewer restrictions comes at much greater ones. Spectator expectations or other parts of culture may encourage the athletes to take risks and go to greater lengths than they otherwise would. But it's difficult for me to agree that modern society should have no place for sports that mentally healthy people actually want to participate in just because it comes with a risk of physical injury or intentional roughness. If they wanted to participate in a different sport, they'd have options.
In the end it's of course a matter of where to draw the line. Rather few people would nowadays want to allow fights to the death even if the participants wanted that. (Although, in reality, I don't think such a sport would get that many willing and actually voluntary participants either.)
I think if someone seriously injured themself doing parkour or base jumping (or bare knuckle boxing) there's an implicit assumption that people partook in that activity knowing the risks whereas with a professionally recognised high stakes sport (where the athletes may also have contractual obligations to perform) then there need to be higher standards and awareness.
For instance why is head trauma more of a problem in NFL than rugby when rugby players don't even wear helmets
I'm also wondering if that's partially connected to exactly the fact that they don't wear protective equipment. In many cases it's of course definitely helpful to have protection, but since it can also make the risks less obvious, using heavy padding might also encourage heavier contact. If, on the other hand, none of the participants are under any illusion of safety, that could discourage recklessness and perhaps even encourage a sense of mutual respect.
Helmets generally don't offer that much protection from concussions. They do reduce the risks of other serious head injuries such as fractures, as well as more superficial injuries, but if helmets make people think they can take heavy contact with abandon, that might increase the number and severity of concussions.
If so, then you agree with the person you responded to, you just want to draw the line in a different place.
That feels like an ad hominem, but I'll focus on what I think your point is.
I don't really have a problem with amateur MMA, etc. But paying people for violence as a sport isn't just acknowledging it; it's encouraging it. And it's encouraging athletes to push themselves into injury, some of which is life destroying.
Should people be allowed to attend private sex clubs where consensual sexual violence is a key part of the group activity?
My complaint falls away when you remove the profit or the long-term injury.
Boxing is beautiful so are many of the other martial arts, but there is something just so magical about a good boxing fight that can have skill and technique, emotion and grit. And actually watching all the other adjacent sports - MMA, Muay Thai, Kickboxing just serves to elevate boxing and show how much further you can take an idea when you specialise.
From what I know, boxing seems way safer than say NFL nowadays but you know it's not "fighting".
Their target demographic is people who will pay to see a violent spectacle. There are certainly people who find violence thrilling in martial arts, but there are a lot of people who have never done any training, who are uninterested in learning that running away is your best defense or how to de-escalate a tense situation, who have a credit card and want to see someone get punched in the face until they're bloody. That's who MMA producers and refs are targeting, not you.
I'm a kiteboarder and a skier. Do you think that the stores with Dakine luggage or North Face jackets at the mall (which feature prominently-placed posters of people kiteboarding and skiing) are really intended for me? No, they're intended for people who wish to send social signals that they are wealthy, stylish and adventurous.
It's the same with (a subset of) Nascar fans - Many are uninterested in karting time trials that might be more approachable to more amateur participants in motorsports, but they'll on the TV every Sunday hoping to see a big crash, and the same with (a subset of) NFL and NHL fans - they just want to see someone's head bounce off the turf/ice.
That spectacle is what's for sale, it makes money in a way that 10 years of patient practice does not.
I prefer ONE which feels a bit more pure. I like how they promote mutual respect between contestants and some of the highlight reels celebrate restraint (look up Xiong maybe).
Combine that with their same approach to cutting weight and I think they're a much classier promotion.
Sometimes UFC and boxing feels like soaps for male dominated fangroups. But boxing is just so beautiful sometimes
Some guys would be proud of ending someone’s career but it doesn’t sit well with everyone. And a couple people have died after a fight. I don’t know of any stories where the other fighter felt anything but terrible about it.
Wrestling/no-gi BJJ doesn't have a gi, so players can't lock down their opponents as much and there's a lot more movement in neutral. And Judo has a gi, but the way you win is via high-amplitude throws, which is a much more spectacular win condition. I think they're both much more exciting to watch than regular gi BJJ, especially for non-practitioners.
I think BJJ's main spectator-unfriendly flaws are that it has a gi and doesn't reward high-amplitude movements. So, unsurprisingly, the metagame has evolved around locking down your opponents.
(Background: I did Judo as a kid, and do BJJ now.)
What really makes me appreciate it isn't knowing how to do it, it's more that the buddy who got me into it was very, very talented, and had retired into coaching at a gym, and before I ever stepped foot in a gym, we'd hang out, have some beers, and watch footage as he explained what was going on. At the professional level, it's quite nuanced and complex, like a chess match.
I don't agree that consistently is the right word. I've certainly seen more extra hits than necessary, but good refs step in fast and with authority. Perhaps you watched lower rank fights with less experienced refs?
Combat sports are an ancient discipline existing across distinct and varied human cultures and every mature form acknowledges this constraint by having a third party to referee the match.
I'm not sure your distinction has any material significance here. As others have pointed out, the referee is there to stop the fight and the fighters are trained to continue until the such a time.
Let's not fool ourselves. They are mainly prize fighters, despite the "martial arts" name of the sport.
Fighters often do stop, an example from just last week is Bahamondes vs Giagos (although this is probably not a good example of avoiding concussion).
https://youtu.be/X2Z1En-eAgk?si=8lBY27afFMfv_Z90
But there's many, many examples of fighters stopping when they know their opponent is finished, and IMO only very few examples of fighters egregiously not stopping.
Recently there was an interview with Takrowlek Dejrat [1] and he talks about how defense was something that they spent a lot of time with first as kids training, which is different than this generation of fighters. Which I find to be true in my own training, I often feel like working on defense is something we only drill as an after-thought to offense.
Then there is a somewhat mutual respect and understanding between fighters that while they want to win they don't want to get injured cos back then people may be fighting weekly. None of this 3 month fight camp and skipping and ducking fights for years that people like Mayweather did.
And then I never quite understood why but once everything was rigged by gambling circuits it all became very clinch dominant.
Not to mention that the traditional scoring also does not favour muay mat (punchers).
Chatri wants to make martial arts more entertaining because no one wants to see people just pull guard in BJJ or grab each other's legs in Judo. And why should only practitioners of Boxing see these huge purses when Buakaw and Saenchai stayed essentially poor.
Also very traditional muay thai/boran fights were done with kard cheuk anyway which aren't much different from those 4oz gloves...
That's fair about kard cheuk being like the 4oz gloves, I've seen some fights with them, but like you said hands never scored as high, whereas One scores things equal these days iirc.
Not that Lethwei is the golden exemplary sport for preventing head trauma...
It's almost like there's an honour code that you aren't trying to kill each other and ruin each other's career.
I guess it's like very very hard sparring rather than the kind of bad blood fights you see in some western promotions. After all, you do get KOs in sports like TKD too.
There are def some of the older generation who lament about injuries or head trauma and having a short career. But then you look at the muay femur who specialise in evasion (like Jockey Gym) and they all had decently long careers
What's gonna matter most is how the athletes train, how hard they get hit in sparring. A very long professional career might be 30-50 fights, but that's thousands of hours of training. If you're spending much of that sparring hard, even if you don't get many concussions, the cte is going to build up
My thought was that since western boxing is limited to hands and standup, you’re going to go for headshots a lot more. You’re limited in your weapons. Muay Thai has a lot more options, and since punching scores less, you end up with a lot more shots to the body.
I only brought up the 4oz gloves in my original comment because I just don’t enjoy watching the style of lots of punching headshots as much. I feel like modern scoring and use of gloves that get through guards easily changes the style and encourages more punching to the face, which isn’t what I find artful in Muay Thai. My personal weapon of choice is going for knees.
And the mention of your "untrained" friend being unable to enjoy a traditional Muay Thai fight the way _you_ can just reeks of some kind of odd elitism. My guess is you saw a topic about fighting on HN and couldn't wait to tell us all that you trained.
With 4oz gloves you don’t have as much to work with in your guard, so punches can slip through a lot easier. On the other hand they protect the hand less, so some fighters are more apprehensive throwing with them on. The small gloves definitely feel like they leave a lot more repeated damage to the face, whereas a clean headkick is probably going to result in a KO. Obviously neither are great if we’re talking about concussions!
I can only speak from my own experience, but I never enjoyed watching fights until I started training. Once I started training and began understanding the rule set, I started seeing what was going on. I don’t think that’s controversial, when you have experience in something your eyes are a little more open. Watching and training is for everyone though! Nothing elite about it all, just a lot of showing up and putting in the work. It’s definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever done physically.
It's a pretty common thing. Sometimes highly technical music doesn't have that appealing an aesthetic to the average person, but to other musicians it's very impressive because of how hard it is to play, or how unusual it is on a theoretical level. There's lots of stuff in life that's like that. Isn't the appeal of most spectator sports partly buoyed by memories people have of playing those sports as kids or young adults?
I don't think it's hard to believe at all, nor elitist. Everyone has things they'll notice more details about because they have experience with them.
Old people complaining about lack of defensive training is universal in most sports.
But I disagree that gloves only protect the hands, as gloves protect the face and head too. There is more volume in my guard in larger gloves that allow me to protect from head attacks while wearing larger gloves.
Anyway, if you watch fights from other promotions that have more traditional Muay Thai rules (even if it is still entertainment Muay Thai), you see a lot more attacks to the body with kicks and knees. I just find the more traditional style to be more artful.
One could also say the encourage to have excellent boxing, offense and defense rather then putting a premium on everything else giving the defender pads to hid behind. You actually have to be good at dynamic defense, using head movement, footwork, clinching, hand fighting, distance and so on.
Combine that with the large ring and you have a more dynamic fighting sport. I do wish they would not separate clinches so fast as that is a vital element that makes MT different and interesting. But generally they have been striking a decent balance there, it depends a lot on the ref.
A lot of traditional MT is just two guys hiding behind gloves while spamming low kicks against each other while standing in the middle of the ring.
Its just a reality of the world that in actual fights punching people in the head is effective, so by that measure One MT looks more like an actual fight rather then ceremonial combat sport.
I do agree that the gloves protect the face, but mostly because you can use them defensively, not because of the actual padding on the hands itself.
Of course, one can have preferences what is more enjoyable to watch. I think One MT is a amazing striking competition.
> They are trying to draw an MMA crowd and often even pass out KO bonuses to encourage that style.
I am not disagreeing that, that is what they are doing. Having a promotion that deals in many different fighting styles they also have to differentiate, where the retained the large gloves and MT where they have the small gloves.
Bonus for KO are a pretty logical intensive, to make sure fighters want to win, rather then run out the clock when they are ahead in points. Also it makes it hard to do lots of illegal things regarding buying or influencing the refs. Something that we know was common in lots of combat sports for the last couple 1000 years and in MT too. Of course that has a lot of issues too.
I totally understand that people want to watch a fight that is more true to what would happen on the street. Clearly all the bouts on One are filled with super talented people and all these fighters deserve to make more money than they were making even a few years ago if they can. I just have a lot of aversion to it and don't find it as beautiful as watching, say, old Karuhat fights.
I wasn't trying to suggest that, being partly ritualized doesn't mean that these were not incredible fights and athletes. And MT was far ahead of almost everything else in terms of how 'real' the fights were.
- The judges just score the match and sit outside the ring. They do not have the power to stop a fight. The referee is supposed to intervene.
- It's a common misconception that fight referees belong to the UFC. For fights, an athletic commission is responsible for refereeing. In most fights, this is the Nevada State Athletic Commission.
- The UFC has been quite vocal and registered many formal complaints with NSAC when a referee allowed too many punches before stopping a fight. There was that referee that I'll only mention by first name, so I don't get sued: Steve.
- It is my opinion that professional MMA fighters need some sort of independent organization that oversees their well-being and assures they get proper medical care. It should be funded from fight profits. Things like what's happened to Spencer Fisher should not be happening.
This sounds a bit like a distancing attempt.
Surely those referees follow the rules of UFC. So ultimately UFC is responsible no matter which entity enforces the rules.
I may be wrong, but I think it's the other way around. The commission sets the rules and hires the referees to enforce them. Dana White has be openly critical of certain referees and made it clear he'd fire them if he could. The UFC must follow the rules of the commission. I believe that's why some past fights could only occur in certain jurisdictions, and with modified rules. The unified rules of MMA are set by commission voters, not the UFC [1].
[1] https://www.ufc.com/unified-rules-mixed-martial-arts?languag...
"Unified rules of MMA" were developed at the state athletic commission level (NJ maybe?), but not everywhere implements them: https://www.mmafighting.com/2019/4/16/18358920/abc-survey-at....
The ending of one fight in TX had betting implications because of their odd rules. https://www.mmafighting.com/2022/6/21/23177038/texas-commiss...
That's how you get kyokushin style tournament. The problem is people want the head to be part of it, even the fighter themself. It's just a tough sport considering human only live once
The UFC has historically been wildly aggressively opposed to any sort of fighter organization or rights. I was a UFC fan for years but eventually faded away largely due to how repulsive I found the company's behavior, so there might be some recent developments I'm unaware of. I completely agree with you, but can't see it ever happening while the UFC has a de facto monopoly on the sport.
We had a guy join our gym and end up posting a hand on the wall the first night during a drill. He was out for a month. I have done the same on the floor with permeant results.
The neighbor (a grown man) was hanging outside when the troublemaker started trash talking the guy for no reason. "Put the gloves on and box me, p*y!" After about 10 minutes of that, the guy agreed. Punched the kid a few times in the head. He was done.
We walked down into town and the kid asked us how we got there. He had no recollection of us walking down the street. Scary stuff. From then on, he became even worse. Last I knew he was in jail.
I'll never forget that. The headaches I got after sparring were eye openers and I quit. Jiu-Jitsu is much friendlier in regards to your brain, but probably worse for your spine, elbows, and knees... Have to train something, though. Nobody should be the gardener in a war.
Nowadays, I stick to technique based learning and lightly spar. Never competed, never will. So yeah, don't be stupid like me and BJJ will be kind to you. :)
As a developer I vastly prefer no-gi because gi grips totally wreck the fingers.
I am primarily a gi player but no-gi is much, much easier on every part of your body.
When you have the gi it can be used as a handle, or a lever, and there can be very little slip ... but skin on skin slips and gives a lot and is much more forgiving.
Note: I train gi and no gi and have been for almost 10 years. My biggest injury happened in the gi (broken hand), but I've had significantly more ankle and knee sprains and shoulder dislocations in no gi. Also, the morning after no gi feels like I got hit by a truck compared to the morning after gi.
Once I know the other person is good at the gripfight in a certain position, I immediately let go and try to counterattack from another angle.
It's the only reliable way I've found to save my fingers lol
Well, back in those days, boxing was part of the training, even for pilots who would never see hand-to-hand combat. My colleague found that pilots who had their EEG scans after a boxing class were far more likely to show epileptiform brain activity.
Saber fencing especially is pretty quick. Which is probably what they’d like—at least, I don’t think the Air Force would like to promote a mentality of taking a few hits and slugging through.
(also my understanding of the curve, based on our national level hospital statistics, is that a substantial fraction of the really bad wrecks happen to people with under 500 hours)
My wife's a horse trainer. I could go down a long list of injuries of various severity that she's suffered over the years. There's at least one concussion (that I know of!) in there and a solid whack to the face that drew lots of blood but no other noticeable injury.
And that reminds me of the software developer I used to work with who was also previously a horse trainer but switched to software after being run over and breaking five ribs.
Unfortunately, this stuff is considered expected and accepted [shrug].
Then again, I knew someone whose wife did intake at a nearby ER and pretty much all of their equine-related injuries came from the same trail riding outfit nearby!
https://library.olympics.com/Default/doc/SYRACUSE/37431/trai...
(I have heard that WWI era air bases had signs "no spurs in the cockpit" but am not sure that these aren't just modern retconned "collectibles")
I think the Air Force would prefer epée (full court press: first mistake loses).
But I’m very unlucky with concussions. I once got one in a swim meet for running head first into the wall. So ymmv.
Back when I trained, I remember going home with headaches because as senior student, my job was basically to stand in front of a line of junior students who took turns whacking me in the head :-)
But your Jiu-Jitsu won't help you much when bombs gonna fall on your head, so better keep a nice garden if you can. ;)
Apropos of nothing much, where does that first I come from in "jiu-jitsu"? It's not present in the Japanese, but for some reason it appears in Portuguese even though the original vowel is a monophthong.
For instance the first article about ju-jutsu and judo that was written by Jigoro Kano and translated into English by T. Lindsay in 1888, has used the spelling "Jiujutsu", i.e. neither "jujutsu" (as written in this article) nor "jiujitsu".
In Japanese kana, in the 19th century, before the spelling reform that happened after WWII, the spelling was "jiyuu-jiyutu". The Japanese spelling might have suggested the writing of an "i" after "j" in the Latin transcription.
In the corresponding Latin alphabet spelling "jiu-jitsu", the reason why a "u" has been preserved from "jiyuu" but no "u" has been preserved from "jiyutu", is likely to have been because the first "u" is long, so it is pronounced clearly, while the second u is short, which in modern Japanese is pronounced without rounding the lips, so it does not sound like a "u". It also does not sound like a "i", because it is a back vowel, but English or French do not have this vowel, so they can render it only as either "u" or "i", and it appears that the choice has been random, because all variants are encountered in the old publications.
So there exist both "ju" and "jiyu" and they are distinct. In "juu-jutsu" there are only "ju", there is no "jiyu" (the latter can appear only in compound words).
Before WWII, in kana there was no distinction between "ju" and "jiyu" (there was no small "yu"), so you had to know that the word written as "jiyuujiyutu" must be pronounced "juujutsu", in the same way like you had to memorize many other differences between the old Japanese spelling and pronunciation (e.g. yahara => yawara, osahe => osae, kuwatu => katsu and so on).
Isn't that why English words ending in -t or -d get transcribed into Japanese with a final vowel of -o rather than the -u that is used for other final consonants?
You are right about the transliteration of English words into kana.
This seems unlikely. The pronunciation was tsu before WWII. But the organization of the syllabary strongly suggests that the pronunciation was once tu.
I don't know to what degree the syllable 'tu' is viewed as impossible in Japanese as opposed to merely nonexistent. (Compare Mandarin, where (as in Japanese) there is no syllable /si/, but it's not especially difficult for Mandarin speakers to pronounce /si/.) I'd be interested if you knew.
The kana syllables are grouped by their consonant, so a direct transliteration would use the same Latin consonant for all kana in a group, e.g. "ta-ti-tu-te-to", but when it is desired to suggest the English pronunciation, like in the Hepburn transliteration, that corresponds to "ta-chi-tsu-te-to".
Before WWII, the kana spelling corresponded to a much older Japanese pronunciation, from about one thousand years ago, so there were much greater differences between spelling and pronunciation. So in my examples, what was written "yahara" was pronounced "yawara" and today it is written like it is pronounced, what was written "osahe" was pronounced "osae" and today it is written like it is pronounced, what was written "kuwatu" in kana had been earlier pronounced as "kwatsu", then the pronunciation has become "katsu" (= life) and today it is written "katu" in kana and "katsu" in Hepburn transliteration.
Even when you know some Japanese, reading any book published before WWII can be difficult, because many kanji used before have been replaced with others and the kana spellings of the old kanji can also be confusing because they are different from the modern spellings too.
Or in other words, complete nonsense. You can't answer a pronunciation question by appealing to spelling conventions, particularly spelling conventions that are completely divorced from the reality of pronunciation.
Muay Thai has also been okay. It's brutal when you first start (RIP your toes and shins), but the sparring at my current gym is very relaxed, nobody is trying to kill you. This is how most muay thai gyms should be (not saying they are).
When we spar, it's always in full padding, and either points fighting or light contact continuous sparring. It's about tagging or outmanoeuvring the opponent, rather than hurting or defeating them. Except for a bruised rib I never had any injuries, training twice a week for over two years.
I recommend finding a gym where you train with people in your age group. It's difficult training with a bunch of teenagers who recover quickly and don't care about bruises, when you're the only one aching the next day and having to drop off kids and see clients.
Purely maximizing strength and fitness and minimizing injury would look like some form of resistance training combined with low-impact cardio like swimming or cycling.
Martial arts with minimal injury would look like a boxing fitness class (as opposed to a boxing class) or something with slow motion sparring or no sparring. Not sexy at all, or particularly helpful in a fight, but safe.
The injuries in BJJ come from newbies rolling with newbies, and completion, stay away from those things, don't be afraid to tap early, and you'll be fine.
Most of those gyms also do BJJ, and I do very frequently see joint and ear injuries from those. Nothing major, but people will rotate in and out of injuries for a few weeks at a time.
With any gym, it's important not to rush into sparring before you get your bearings (and protection, like at least a mouth guard and shin guards). Some places require head protection too, but I'm not sure if that actually protects you vs just giving your opponent a false sense of "it's okay to hit you harder". You might be trading light grazing blows (and visibility) for heavier blunt impacts...? Not totally sure of the science there.
It's also super important to choose good sparring partners, meaning they are both adequately skilled at self control and not prone to bouts of anger that make them lose control. Watch other people spar for a while and talk to the coach about your own ability and theirs before jumping in. The absolute worst is beginners jumping into sparring each other without good self control, causing an unintentional slugfest where people don't know what they're doing and end up getting hurt. Don't do that, take it slow and play it safe. If you're not planning on competing there's no reason to rush through training or disregard safety.
I know I sound like an old geezer lol, but seriously, it's entirely possible to do martial arts safely if you just lower the aggro level and don't go all out.
She said last time that happened with someone during sparing it broke her kneecap instead, so I guess I was 50/50 on that one.
People are shocked when I tell them that a sport where you try to hit other people in the head has a shockingly low rate of injury.
> Some places require head protection too, but I'm not sure if that actually protects you vs just giving your opponent a false sense of "it's okay to hit you harder".
Plenty of studies have come out showing that head gear increases the rate of injury, to the extent that head gear and padded gloves should just be banned in every gym.
The safest way to spare is bare knuckle with a mouth guard. No one in their right mind punches full force when bare knuckle, at least not more than once.
(Also, bare knuckle, still wrap up, and hit with the first two knuckles. Boxers in thick gloves learn to hit with the bottom two knuckles, which will shatter the shit out of any hand that tries to do that without gloves on...)
So #1 is you like the gym and the vibe. That means you'll keep going back and stay with it.
Either BJJ or Kickboxing (or any striking art) will get you into a general sense of "in shape".
In my experience (and I have #s from chest heart rate monitors to back this up), kickboxing does a much better job getting you conditioned than BJJ does, and if you just want to look good, hitting the boxing bag will get you a nice v-shape upper body, especially if you throw some push ups in the mix while hitting the bag.
Neither alone will get you ripped or build strength the way a dedicated weight lifting program will, if you just want to be able to pick up heavy things, practice picking up heavy things. :-D
Also you won't lose fat unless you also cut calories, I've rolled with plenty of chunky peeps in BJJ. Your body will want to eat more right after an intense class, you'll need some discipline to tell it "no". If you can manage that then you'll also shed the pounds, but even if you are in the gym 2 hours a day 5 days a week, you won't automatically lose weight w/o self discipline in the kitchen (but you will be able to eat a lot more before you start gaining weight, so there is that).
For BJJ gyms, take some sample classes at different gyms, see what they are like. Some gyms are guys in their 30s and 40s who have left their egos behind, some gyms are very "go go go" and will run you ragged. No judgement either way, I've worked out at both styles of gym and both styles can be fun so long as safety is paramount.
Safety should be discussed. You should hear the instructors talk about it all the time.
At a good BJJ gym, more senior students will be asked to help out the junior students, and roll with them and show them how to do things safely. At more ego driven gyms people with black belts may not even talk to people who are just starting out. IMHO avoid those types of gyms at all cost.
Same goes for kickboxing. Sparing is an important part of learning, the only way to learn how to dodge punches is to have someone try to punch you in the head. But good gyms don't want people getting hurt, and they should be very aware of TBI and how to avoid it.
I actually trained for a couple years at a professional MMA gym, and despite being really high energy with lots of shouting and hard core warm ups, they were incredibly serious about avoiding injuries during training. The reason was simple: Injured fighters can't go in the ring, and thus don't get paid.
I've been injured 3 times during training over 10 years, which IMHO is pretty good given at one point I was training ~15 hours a week.
Tip: In a good gym, the highest risk of injury comes from training with new students who don't know how to control themselves yet. Someone in boxing class who doesn't know how to pull their punches, or who doesn't understand their reach and bops you in the face by accident.
The 2nd highest injury risk comes from yourself and not knowing your own limits.
When I was just starting out I had a senior student tell me I needed to stop because I was about to break my own arm if I didn't tap out.
That is what a good training partner at a good gym does.
All the black belts at my gym will roll with anyone. And yes, it's not common which is silly. Everyone in the gym has progressed so quickly because the different black belts are so willing to help.
> Safety should be discussed. You should hear the instructors talk about it all the time.
My instructors all the time, "the most important person in the gym is your training partner - do not hurt them. If they don't tap from a joint lock, let it go"
> When I was just starting out I had a senior student tell me I needed to stop because I was about to break my own arm if I didn't tap out.
Yep. I just let people go and tell them about it later. :)
While BJJ is a great workout, I would also suggest adding some weight/strength training.
> “It’s now known to be essentially the population with the highest known incidence of traumatic brain injury, even above when we consider athlete populations and other known populations like veterans,” said O’Connor, now a clinical neuropsychologist in the acquired brain injury program at Hamilton Health Sciences.
There are a huge number of TBIs in the homeless population.
Most people have no martial training and never need it. It might be better to train in descalation or something much more useful, like JavaScript.
I started training martial arts years ago. Of the brawls I've been in since then, usually with the homeless or drug addled while out on the town, de-escalation has never worked. I've been in bars where you can't talk someone down. Do you know how long it took for the police to arrive when a homeless guy started a fight with me for no reason? After giving the guy what he deserved I escaped to safety to call the police/medical. They never arrived. Sobering. He ran off eventually. Which, frankly is a testament to the power of street drugs.
You can't de-escalate someone who is determined to harm you. This is a fallacy promoted by people who have never had to fight. You are universally safer by knowing how to fight and never using it than not knowing how to fight at all.
The correct answer is understanding the escalation of force spectrum. Always start by trying to talk some sense into them. Then, based on their next move you either escalate to physical violence to defend yourself, or lethal force if they use a weapon. FWIW BJJ and Muay Thai are the only martial arts you should ever do.
Life is not a video game. The police aren't there to help you. There are bad people everywhere. It's better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.
I think that deescalation might just not be your strong suit
That (common approach) takes what is rationally a question of risk and turns it into a reactive question of survival. The reality is that there are many risks in life and I can't mitigate them all. I need to identify the greatest risks and mitigate those, and also I want to live my life - not prepare fearfully for danger.
So far, I've never needed martial arts, off the top of my head I don't know people who could have used it more than a few times - probably not enough, even if they knew what would happen, to spend the time learning it. It's like people who want guns for personal safety - 'what happens if you need one?' turns the question into survival; the reality is that I don't know anyone who ever would have benefitted from having a gun in private life; I don't think the risk is there (also, even in truly dangerous situations guns are rarely useful - a wild west shootout isn't a good solution).
Other people have different lives and experiences. Maybe they have more risk of situations where they need martial arts. Personally, I'd try to change my life so that I wasn't exposed to those situations but I really don't know about their lives. I guess if I was going to be incarcerated a maximum security prison, I'd want to learn something.
I don't totally disagree with your overall point, but I have to say...I'm 41, I've lived in cities all over the US, stationed abroad in the military, traveled all over the world, and I've never been in a single "brawl", nor have the majority of other men I know.
Maybe your neighborhood or line of work is such that you can't avoid it, or maybe you just have a higher risk tolerance than I do, but the best skill to have to avoid losing a fight is avoiding putting yourself in situations that lead to fights. No martial arts training in the world will save you forever from the wrong opponent, multiple assailants, weapons, or just being unlucky. If you keep getting in brawls, sooner or later your luck will run out.
I don't know you but there might be another way. I've interacted with many, many people who appeared unhoused (I usually don't ask people about their homes); I've never had a problem or a hint of violence. I've never been in a brawl or been close to being in one. Violence is easy to avoid IME.
> You can't de-escalate someone who is determined to harm you. ... There are bad people everywhere.
I've never encountered someone determined to harm me, afaik, and if that's how we define bad people, they are very rare. Humans are social creatures - just stand on a sidewalk downtown in a busy city - look at all the people getting along peacefully, being polite, helping each other. Logically, if you think of humans a bears - lone, anti-social creatures - then the danger makes sense, but very few people live on their own, away from other humans, like bears. We are social creatures, evolved since our proto-chimpanzee days to live harmoniously in groups, to only function even on a fundamental cognitive level when we are with other humans (solitary confinement drives people insane and is considered torture).
> You are universally safer by knowing how to fight and never using it than not knowing how to fight at all.
I'm universally safer knowing how to fly a plane, because what if a pilot is incapacitated? However, I don't need to plan for that.
>>Most of the year I would be having concussion symptoms. There are grades of severity but my worst was being thrown on the back of my head at the Pan-American [Judo] Championships in Argentina. I completely blacked out till the next morning.”
Rousey’s concerns were ignored. “I’d be treated like I was complaining about a headache. People would say: ‘Your head hurts? Suck it up. What if your head hurts during the Olympics?’ That’s how I was taught to deal with it from a very young age. It became a way of life.”<<
Doing impact sports (football!) professionally or fighting professionally and staying healthy is just not possible without neutering the sports. Maybe this should be made even clearer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalopat...
You can imagine her reaction when the NFL played stupid with "we had no idea the players needed so long to recover" 40 years later.
I think helmets were, to a large degree, merely there so that the fans could pretend players weren't getting concussions as often as they really were. Boxing fans (and non-fans) are aware that getting hit in the head a lot is bad, but there aren't enough boxing fans in the US to fill a single NFL stadium, much less 16 a week.
Not necessarily: The increased and stacking vulnerability to brain damage after concussions might not go away ever. I don't think this has been researched.
There are some permanent cumulative effects of concussions, though it's pretty well-accepted that repeated concussions in close succession (without sufficient time for recovery) is worse than concussions that are spaced out. Second impacts are much more likely to have serious consequences, including death, than initial impacts of similar magnitude[0].
You'll never get "definitive proof" of this because a double-blind study would be extremely unethical (let alone impractical), but there's enough understanding of the underlying science to make this conclusion relatively safely.
In short: repeated head injury is bad regardless of how much time is allocated to recovery in between and has some permanent cumulative effects, but repeated head injury in short succession (for some definition of "short") is markedly worse.
There used to be. Boxing used to be huge. I've seen the theory floated that the reason boxing died as a spectator sport was precisely that all the fans got to watch their heroes lose their minds.
Do you have any proof for this at all? The most anticipated boxing matches usually get over a million pay-per-view buys, not including the tickets sold for the actual arenas.
[edit]
Yes, there are literally more than 80,250 (MetLife stadium's capacity) fans of boxing in the US. However e.g. the Kingdom Arena (location of Fury v. Ngannaou) seats about 30,000. If there were a 17 week boxing match season in the US, it clearly would be a much smaller draw than gridiron football, and that doesn't even include the college game, which has 8 stadiums that seat over 100k (and 6 more that are larger than MetLife).
Well the first I heard even doctors making a big deal about them was the mid 2000s CTE research. And even that research was strongly linked with just one lab at BU iirc. It sounds like you're comparing the NFL to big tobacco. As much as I detest NFL commissioners/management, I don't think that comparison tracks with the science.
American Football, like Australian Rugby is a much more violent sport.
Here's some hard data.
There tend to be more cuts and thus more blood, but that seems like a better trade off.
Seen some pretty bad knuckle fights in high school where someone ended in a hospital pretty messed up.
Plus, the risks are still probably lower than the risks of elbows, knees and brain issues.
Most real damage from fist fights comes when someones head hits a solid floor after losing balance or consciousness - that is certainly very dangerous.
I just got her second book, which addresses what it was like to get beaten after going 15:0, then beaten again. I think she's going to talk about finding a way forward after her whole identity was being a fighter. I started today and can't wait to get into it.
Concussions should be taken seriously. The idea of waving off a rattled brain as a headache, and keep playing through, makes me cringe in the literal sense.
I've had 3-4 of them, and I worry about my memory and mental performance over time. I'm only in my mid 30s.
UFC isn't professional wrestling or anything but western combat sports have a tradition of a bit of theatricality and showmanship to them. Those are probably real elements of her personality to some extent, but choosing to visibly play them out was surely as much a marketing decision as a personal one.
By contrast judo tends to be skeptical of that sort of presentation, and as a judoka it wasn't very apparent in her interactions.
This is the same year that Serena Williams, a household name, won the first three Grand Slam singles tournaments. This coming off a 2014 US Open win so 4 in a row. Anyway, some historical context lol.
https://www.si.com/mma/2015/05/12/ronda-rousey-ufc-mma-fight...
Imagine a soccer player saying she was going to take the ball from midfield, go straight down the middle, and then drill it into the top left corner of the goal, and it working eight times in a row.
Then she won four more fights, all very quickly and with more diverse skill set. It was shocking.
There are about 248 active female UFC fighters?
The talent pool in other sports is much, much, much deeper.
If you like that, Napoleon Blownapart's videos are probably the next closest thing. A bit more of an obscure recommendation (but free on Youtube!) is The Smashing Machine, a doc about Mark Kerr's personal trials and tribulations during the Pride years.
One thing I've not seen discussed here is the emotional side of recovery. I pretty much was manic-depressive. I would have just the highest highs. I've never felt better in my life before or since. Just felt like everything was great and that the world was amazing. And then I would have the lowest lows. Suicidal ideation, couldn't get out of bed, loosing friends, unfortunately typical stuff. I'd laugh at really weird things, I'd get angry at normal stuff. My brain was making me crazy and it took a toll of myself and those around me. I'm better now, but it took years of healing and mostly bumbling along.
Sure, yeah, I had (and still do) problems with memory, vision, and hearing. But for me, it was the emotional stuff that was most surprising. I don't tend to see a lot of that in anecdotes and research.
I know that I'm likely going to end up with dementia or something worse. I know I'm going to loose my marbles. And I'm still trying to make peace with that. I don't know if I ever really will. Any tips here would be appreciated.
If anyone else with a lot of concussions wants to chime in on their experiences, I'm happy to chat here.
Sorry, this comment is kinda strange.
The difference between fighting someone and maiming them is a single punch.
His decline and last days was not good according to his family.
https://slate.com/technology/2024/03/concussion-symptoms-sig...
Helen Maroulis is another athlete openly talking about concussion.
I'm a referee in wrestling (Olympic styles) and I don't let the match to continue until the competition doctor clears the wrestler after a hit in the head.
There's AB before the hit and AB after the hit.
youtube link to the hit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8iFSP_S5h8
most times you think -- concussions are a matter of repeated effect -- but one can change your life drastically.
It became popular because people were tired of Karate/TKD/Kung Fu/Krav Maga morons telling everyone their martial art can "kill in one touch" or something. So, Pride and UFC started and the entertainment was watching martial arts compete against each other in a near luta livre style. The idea of course being to find the best martial art. BJJ, Wrestling, and Muay Thai were the only survivors.
Once the global maxima was found it became relatively boring. At least to me. But lord was it fun watching "masters" of traditional martial arts get beaten up and down the ring and all the magic of their martial art going along with them.
I would say that what makes the sport less interesting is all the advertising, including the betting. Also, some commentators are so used to fighting, they often struggle to stay on topic. I get that they like the commentators to be personalities but it gets rather tiresome.
That's bs. We knew about concussions and head injuries being nasty. That's why patriarchal societies didn't let women box, a good thing, but amused themselves with poor men, "rif-raf", beating themselves senseless (a bad thing)
What we have had since the 1950s is that nasty little refrain: "there's no scientific evidence linking <x> with <y>" and the like. As if something doesn't exist until we can detect a statistical signal.
Science has been ruined by this. All other means to explore Truth, Beauty, logical Reason [1], etc, are dismissed under the weight of "statistical evidence".
We knew Ronda. We knew.
[1] yes, even logical reasoning unless underpinned by fast materialistic assumptions like QED are dismissed.
How are serious injuries during high impact sports and professional fighting even treated from a legal perspective? To contestants sign waivers? -> "I consent to my enemy breaking my nose, making me lose my eye or tear off my ear."?
On another topic here is a really great video on concussion in MMA https://youtu.be/EU4AhFFSlLg?si=iaHawCdigvVuKkPe
For sports, though... yeah.
But those are one and done helmets. The helmet destroys itself to save your noggin.
There was talk of putting blue gel inserts into football helmets to provide some of that same protection but in a reusable form. I don’t recall if those became standard though.
Bicycle and motorcycle helmets are primarily designed for the vertical drop, not the horizontal. If we recall our basic physics, impacts have a vertical and horizontal component. The vertical drop from 6+ feet under gravity is the big problem. Most of the time, the horizontal force is the drag of someone slowing down and sliding. There's also the repeated impacts of tumbling to consider.
A horizontal impact mitigation really isn't in the cards. A vertical impact from 6 feet is roughly 15mph. From 15 to 25MPH is almost 3 times the energy, so you can see how it can quickly get untenable to try to mitigate the horizontal impact energy of a rider striking an object.
During a crash, most folks don't strike things horizontally, but they're pretty much guaranteed to hit the ground. Therefore, the helmets are designed to solve the more common problem and most common source of head trauma.
Even though bicycle and motorcycle helmets ostensibly solve the same problem, i.e. melon -> concrete, motorcycle helmets are more robust to deal with the higher speed tumbling and abrasion issues that bicyclists don't really encounter. Plus there's a lot more potential creature comforts in a motorcycle helmet designed for 50MPH travel.
This is false. Or you misspoke in some way.
New helmet designs do indeed help prevent concussions by deforming to take the blow and lessen the brain movement in the head, hence reducing concussions.
https://theathletic.com/4776016/2023/08/28/vicis-helmets-nfl...
> According to the NFL and NFLPA, the safer helmet designs that have resulted from the innovations of VICIS and other companies have eliminated between 20 and 25 NFL concussions per year over the last five to seven seasons.
This kind of reminds me of the genre of preschool study where the headline result is cutting the average number of incarcerations per student later in life from 6 to 4.
I see that in 2011 there were 32 NFL teams and a team can field no more than 11 players at a time. If I assume an average of 352 concussions a year, one per year per "stylized active player" - and I would bet the number is higher - a reduction of 25 per year is basically meaningless. That would correspond to a reduction in concussions per player-year from 1 to about 0.93, or if the rate of concussions was three times as high as I assumed above, from 3 to 2.9.
As far as the preschool studies go, people like to use them to argue that the same intervention should have some kind of beneficial effect when applied to normal students whose average lifetime incarcerations are zero. There is no justification for this.
Really, I'd say those 25 people are very happy to not have concussions. You're begin extremely crass just dismissing the health of 25 people.
Which I guess can happen if you look at things strictly through a stats lens and not a personal impact one
Sometimes it's more important to recognize whether anything meaningful has been accomplished than whether people have their hearts in the right place.
If you'll notice, I did explicitly treat player health, as opposed to concussion count:
>> The difference in effects downstream of the incident being counted ("can the player remember where he lives?") is likely to be much smaller than the difference in incidents, because for most purposes there is no difference between the pre- and post-treatment results.
For example:
https://ufhealth.org/news/2021/headgear-significantly-reduce...
Female high school lacrosse players are significantly less likely to sustain concussions and other injuries if they wear headgear, a landmark study led by University of Florida Health researchers has found.
Girls who play the sport in states that don’t require headgear had a 59% higher concussion rate than players in Florida, the only state with a headgear mandate. The researchers also found lacrosse games were more hazardous than practices: Concussions were 74% higher during competition among players in states without headgear requirements when compared with Florida players.
Those details emerged from data collected during 357,225 games and practices in Florida and other states during three seasons from 2018 to 2021. The findings were presented today at the American Academy of Pediatrics national conference
[edit]
I'm also glad there's data; one reason the players are resistant to the idea of a helmet is that they fear that reduced visibility would lead to increased injury.
They are definitely right about that. The point of the helmet is to make injuries less serious, not less frequent.
Saying they "do nothing" isn't completely true, at least based off more recent designs, but it is generally true that helmets are less effective than most people think. The problem is that your brain can move around in your skull so there is only so much you can do by adding protection outside of your skull. Think of it like putting an egg in a glass jar. Adding padding to the outside of the jar might be enough to save the egg in a single drop, but it isn't going to stop the egg from breaking if you shake the jar.
There is also the fact that safety equipment impacts behavior. Someone wearing a helmet is going to be more cavalier with their head than someone not wearing a helmet. It is possible this effect completely cancels out the slim benefits of a helmet which has caused some people to argue that a game like American football would actually become safer if helmets were outlawed. The main obstacle there is that we absolutely would see a rise in acute injuries like fractured skulls and those are tougher to ignore than the chronic brain damage that might take decades to reveal itself.
Gridiron football has large, quick people starting facing each other, often getting hit from the blind-side, and no helmet is going to prevent all (or even most) concussions in those situations, which is part of why the NFL has (very belatedly) attempted to address things with rules changes.
Sports that involve being intentionally hit in the head repeatedly (like MMA or boxing) are going to be much worse. You still see people wearing helmets in friendly sparring matches for those sports because it can prevent freak-accident concussions that happen in such a context.
A motorcycle helmet or auto racing helmet will do a much better job at preventing a concussion than a football helmet and is designed for bigger hits against harder surfaces.
But no one wants to replace a motorsports style helmet after every play that causes a hit on the helmet in a football game. Hence they wear football helmets, which are designed to be much less protective for a single large hit but to be able to protect against sustained smaller hits.
Realistically I think this is the elephant in the room for football. The NFL could afford to have each player go through hundreds of helmets a season and they would be well protected. But as soon as the NFL admitted that was needed everyone would demand it for college and high school, and it would be too expensive and fewer people would play football.
Getting punched in the head is pretty unpleasant, so you try to avoid it - but with headgear on the sting dulled significantly - it hurts less but your brain is still absorbing a huge amount of that energy. This makes fighters take more shots to the head than otherwise, and this is why english amateur boxing rules now have removed headguards.
Perhaps it's a background in science, but whenever I read a sentence like that I always expect to find it ending with a footnote linking to the reference demonstrating some evidence for the claim that's just been made.
Then I remember that a journalist (or her [sub]editor) doesn't need to bother with stuff like that.
A pity, really.
Q: Is she an [ex-]MMA fighter or a neurologist?
> it's not like they're making shit up and trying to sell it to you here
Not wishing to sound unnecessarily snarky, but she is selling her book.
I can't help but feeling that the process looks like: press release > journalist > article > clicks.
Some days, the clicks seem to be all that matters.
I'm not sure how the author is supposed to have any idea that due to "so many [previous] concussions [they knew their] brain could not withstand multiple more blows to the head". A PhD in neuroscience? Maybe it's just pseudoscientific claptrap that seems be being lapped up by other sports fans.
If you actually think your brain had already been damaged, you'd stop doing contact sports immediately and completely, not somehow keep going but fighting harder and faster, Ethan Hunt style. Of course it's amazing that she "can now share her secret"... <rolls eyes>
"Her ferocity was built on a hidden vulnerability" is about as believable as your average Hollywood movie plot. A gripping story to push a new book, that's all.
Complete and utter nonsense.