Spine injury

Have you ever worked with judo players who have had problems with pars stress fractures to the spine in particular L5. Is this career threatening injury for a high performance player. Anyone with experience player/coach? I would love to know your story, good or bad. How did you recover, did you have surgery etc

Billy bongo wrote:Have you ever worked with judo players who have had problems with pars stress fractures to the spine in particular L5. Is this career threatening injury for a high performance player. Anyone with experience player/coach? I would love to know your story, good or bad. How did you recover, did you have surgery etc

Are you talking about a real spondylolysis of L5 ? In what age group ? These injuries are not common in healthy adults with healthy bone, more in adolescents, unless there is underlying pathology such as osteopenia or metastasis from prostate cancer and the similar. When spondylolysis does occur the indeed L5 is its preferred location.

The questions that have to be asked are:

Are there any -symptoms ? Deformity ? Pain ? Stiffness
Is there any residual neurologic deficit ?
Is there spinal column instability ?

General approach is assuring bone health (sufficient BMC through dietary adjustment and loadbearing exercise) + strengthening of back muscles
Obviously contact sports mean you have no absolute control over what is going to happen and therefore are not ideal, certainly not a high-impact discipline such as judo. Before returning to judo it is therefore recommended that one has months of preparation in other noncontact sports. When one does return to judo it may be wise to not engage in the high-impact activities of judo such as falling, or the parts where one has the least control over its outcome, i.e. randori and nage-komi. Thus preferred judo activities are: kata (without undergoing ukemi), tandoku-renshû, yaku-soku-geiko, kakari-geiko, uchi-komi.

"Is this a career-threatening injury for a high-performance player ?"

Well, the spondylolysis is an injury, but what was the cause of that injury ? Was it congenital, was it the result of a acute trauma (bad ura-nage), or are there underlying factors that significantly have altered the bone health of the individual (e.g., a young woman with serious menstrual irregularities such as long-lasting oligomenorrhea ?). In other words, the answer to that question will depend on how successful one is in preventing the cause of the injury from reoccurring and the degree to which the old injury is recovered from. If the answer to those questions is all ideal, then no, there is no reason for a jeopardized career, on the condition that one's training is customized. In judo though, training is usually not customized, certainly not at high-level for the simple reason that high-performance coaches have little or no knowledge about judo science but are instead most often champions of the past with the ensuing and wrong idea that if one applies similar training to a different individual that the result will be similar. This is entirely untrue, and judoka may require totally different training depending on gender, ethnicity, weight class, strengths/weaknesses, and injury history.

--> Moderators, please move this thread to the Health & Fitness section

Thanks for your detailed reply, the athlete in question is 18 years old and on the national team. His preparation has been well managed with a good strength programme, Pilates etc under constant management. This is the second time the injury has occurred, the fracture being on the left hand side previously and we feel that over training may have contributed to the first injury, not sure until we see the next scan as to where the damage for this new injury has occurred. Hopefully it is not a new fracture but the symptoms are familiar, soreness in the lower back, restricted movement when twisting the hips, inflammation and muscle spasms. Because his strength programme has been so closely monitored because of the previous injury, it makes me wonder if he has been doing additional load bearing exercises in his downtime at the gym, you know what young men, testosterone and gyms are like? I say this as I know the personality of the young man and how his desire to train can sometimes be too extreme and needs to be reigned in on a regular basis.

The injury happened whilst doing newaza randori, nothing too strenuous so it seems that the problem lies elsewhere. He trains approximately 15 to 20 hours per week with around 60% of this being technical instruction.