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Injuries are a part of any sport and sometimes they are inevitable. However, some tips can help you to avoid most of the serious injuries. Here are 6 safety tips for MMA beginners that can save you from injuries.
Warm up
Warm up helps to gently bring the body from rest to the activity mode by increasing the heart rate at a gradual speed. The temperature of the body increases gradually that helps muscle to be prepared for an extensive activity. Light cardio, stretching, and low intensity joint mobility exercises help to activate muscles for MMA training and therefore warmup prevents muscle injuries. Jumping rope, stationary cycling, or rowing can be good choice for light cardio before MMA training where as doing yoga poses can be best for stretching. So, 5 to 10 minutes of warm up can help you to prevent muscle injury during MMA training.
Safety gear
Wearing a proper safety gear is the most important tip to protect yourself from injuries during MMA training. Gloves, knee pads, rash guards, ankle support wraps, and hand wraps are the fundamental safety gear for MMA training. Gloves are considered to be the most important gear for MMA training and therefore always go for high quality gloves. The gloves should be flexible, comfortable, and durable. They must provide sturdy support to your wrist along with knuckle guards that can bear the punches from opponent. Rash guard should be of good quality to protect your skin from rashes. Ankle support is important for avoiding injuries that may happen from rolling around the mat.
Posture
In any kind of exercise, posture holds great importance. MMA is a combination of martial arts, boxing, and wresting therefore there are many positions and postures in MMA. These postures and positions are of great use to have an effective workout, however, mastering them is a need to have protection against multiple injuries like tears and sprains. Remember, the injuries that are caused due to wrong posture are not linked with the quality of safety gear you’re wearing. The best posture for standing before making any move is to keep your hands up between the shoulders and hip while bending slightly on your knees. Your core must be kept straight to keep it aligned with the shoulders. Make sure your spine is straight which improves overall balance of the body.
Know your abilities
Another way to protect yourself from injuries is to know the level of your abilities. It’s good to have believe in you and in your skills, but being rational is important too especially in MMA. If you’re not sure that you can spar then don’t do it unless you learn it correctly and have practiced it well. It is true that MMA takes you beyond the limits but it never encourages you to play unsafe. So, setting the pace of your training is essentially important to protect yourself from injuries.
Breathing properly
Well, breathing technique is very important in any kind of exercise and therefore MMA has no exception in this regard. For MMA, slow breathing technique is appreciable and therefore you should always prefer to inhale and exhale slowly that allows you to take long breaths. It makes your lungs to inhale more oxygen hence increasing lungs capacity to breathe effectively. This helps you to have a control over your breath while you are performing high intensity movements in your MMA training. Moreover, the biggest benefit is that this breathing technique can avoid having cramps and your body does not starve for oxygen during the training. Such a breathing technique can never make you breathless during MMA training and hence you can constantly make movements to win against your opponent.
Learn to fall properly
Falling in MMA training is inevitable and commanding over how to fall properly is something that is vital to avoid serious injuries. Don’t rely on high quality mat as you can still be injured if you fall inappropriately. You must need to learn how to fall on the mat properly without getting yourself injured. The person who is about to fall tries it hard to stop falling on the mat and therefore he generally makes use of his hands. This results in broken wrists and other severe injuries and the only way to avoid this is to learn how to fall. The common techniques to fall are forwards roll, backward roll, forwards break fall, parkour forward break fall, and forward fall. If you’re being taken down, don’t be upset as it is not going to make you lose the game. Rather try to defend it with all your skills and capacity but make sure that you do not do any stupid thing to avoid a takedown that can lead to a serious injury.
