is 10th planet bad for your knees?

[chronic_jiujitsu]

haha.. my bad i meant to say royler.. :P

[michael grzybek]

I dont think RG can hurt a knee but when I was rolling with a higher blue belt tonight he put me in lock down and my knee kept popping in and out.

[AJ Camacho]

Lateral knee movement.. it's a killer and it can potentially occur in many positions not just rubber guard. Basically... stick your leg straight out, now try to wiggle your leg left to right at the knee (not the hip).. I know it's silly.. but you can't because there are no muscles on the lateral and interior sides of the knees, just tendons. Tendons meant to stabilize and prevent such a movement.

Now bring your leg in resting it in a normal sitting position. Now you can move your shin left and right but notice that it is your hip that is rotating your thigh, your entire leg is move left and right. Anytime your hips and thighs are locked out, and your shin is forced side to side (by you or your opponent) there is a potential for injury to your tendons.

Can you blow your knee out in rubber guard? Sure, if you are pinned underneath, your hips are locked, and you muscle your own ankle to your face off axis from your knee. But the same injury could happen in half guard, during leg locks, an omoplata attempt, hell... any time your knee is in play and your hips are locked.. anything jamming your shin sideways could injure you.

[stlnl]

Grappling in general, and JJ, whether 10PJJ or BJJ can be (is alot of times) hard on the knees. Matter of fact every contact sport I know of, where you use your lower body at all, puts the knees in a position at some point to get tweaked. I dont that I would say RG is harder than the sports/arts in general, I do think folks forcing positions they dont have, RG or otherwise carries a greater risk than having the proper position/angle/technique.

[Sam Dibble]

I find long hours on concrete and playing basketball to be way harder on my knees. Or a long Muay Thai sparring session, damn those leg kicks hurt like hell after a while.

[Brent Smith]

Theres alot of garbage thats said about 10thpjj..if you stick around long enough you realize how full of shit people are...haters gonna hate

[Banksy]

To be fair I think if you don't work on your flexibility and think you can play rubber guard off the bat then you are asking for trouble.

[ben hewitt]

All in the hips, if you can butterfly stretch with knees to the floor easily then your knees will be fine. If you don't have hip flexibility you can transfer pressure to your knee. Work your butterfly stretch daily.

[Chris Herzog]

Hence my comment about it being done under a certified instructor, and it being done correctly. If you are doing RG correctly you'll be using the correctly angles and positioning, alleviating the stress on the knee, not increasing it. I do not have the same level of flexibility as most of my students, due to my hip and knee injury (I continue to stretch daily, do yoga and go to my chiro 2x a week), but yet I have little issue running the basic path (with omaplatas, gogos, straight jacket, triangles, pumps, etc.), its all about doing it correctly, and not playing at it. When you half ass anything in a combat sport you risk injury.

Bottom line, if it hurts or injuries you.....your not doing it right!

[mike]

Hey i was just wondering.. is 10th planet/rubber guard at all bad for your knees in the long run? I keep seeing people online talking about how all these people end up needing re-constructive surgery on their knees after doing 10th planet for awhile. And seeing as though i dont know squat about anatomy or how the body really works.. i figure someone could answer this for me. To me.. i dont see why stretching would be bad.. but i didnt know if it was just because our knees arent supposed to stretch that way or something.. i dont know. I was just curious if there was any truth in this. Or if it was just haters looking for a reason to say 10th planet is bad. and just to avoid people from responding with random guesses.. if you could explain the reasoning behind your answer i would appreciate it.

To my knowledge there hasn't been a study of it, but I really don’t think it’s bad for you, unless you fail to warm up or force the position, which would be bad anyway in any position. We can look at the anatomy of the knee a little if you like. The two main areas of the knee that rubber guard puts pressure on are the LCL (Lateral Cruciate Ligament) and the ITB (Iliac Tibia Band). The LCL doesn’t really stretch out much, as another poster stated it is designed to prevent a motion similar to that of the movement needed for rubber guard. That being said, it will stretch a little but must be warmed up, however it’s not really the LCL that needs stretching in order to properly perform the rubber guard, it’s the ITB.

Iliac Tibia Band syndrome is an over use injury commonly seen in military grunt units and Special Forces units, but also in athletes of all types who put in long hours. It is a tightening of the band on the outside (lateral) of your leg, that runs from your "knee" to your "hip". A simple test is to sit up straight in a chair and put one leg cross legged position (like rubber guard) on the other leg. Now relax, if your knee is not parallel to the floor your ITB is to tight and might expose or at least increase your risk of ITBS. Most people are at risk.

Guys who are very flexible or play a lot of rubber guard are parallel to the floor in the above mentioned position. So while there is risk of LCL damage, it is no greater, in my opinion, than the normal risk of LCL damage associated with grappling or any other combat sport, or even football or soccer, it’s just not bad for you. In fact the flexibility needed for 10th planet to be done correctly is preventive medicine against the more common over use injury of ITBS. ITBS is very painful, takes a while to heal, is a common i9njury, reduces trai9ning time and just sucks, and is very very often misdiagnosed. General practitioners will often diagnosis ITBS as an LCL strain or PFPS, usually one needs to see a sports medicine Doc or a physical therapist to get a correct diagnosis of ITBS.
Treatment of ITBS is ROM (range of motion) exercises, stretching, ice, Motrin, and perhaps some phono.
I was a U.S. Navy Corpsman for 12 years. I have seen many cases of ITBS. I am a plank owner of the original US Navy SMART (Sports Medicine and Reconditioning Therapy) center located at USMC base Camp Pendleton School of Infantry. I have also diagnosed and treated this injury at the US Navy SEAL School in Coronado California and the USMS basic recon school in Coronado. I have also seen it a lot in the USMC soccer team and to a lesser degree in boxers of the USMC boxing team