Joel Kriska Intro: Sport Physiotherapist & BJJ Guide

Hi there and welcome to the new rehabilitation section of Yoga for BJJ. My name is Joel Kriska. I'm a sport physiotherapist and a brown belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I've worked as a sport physiotherapist for over 20 years and I've worked with every sport under the sun.

From football to snowboarding, volleyball to swimming. But my true passion is working with combat sports, kickboxing, MMA and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I've also worked at the Olympics and I'm an examiner for Sport Physiotherapy Canada. The whole point of these videos are to give you some short little videos to help you break through some of the plateaus that we see in injuries.

Particularly as we're trying to get back into doing yoga or back into doing a sport specific activity like drilling or even back into rolling or competing. The other aim of this is to maybe help prevent some of these injuries from happening in the first place. Whether due to an existing weakness, an imbalance or a tightness that is very easily solved with a proper almost sniper like stretch, strengthen, mobility drill. When we have an existing injury, please make sure to follow the video with discretion.

What I mean by that is listen to your body. There should never be any kind of sharp pain and if you feel that it's not helping, don't do it. That goes without sense but I just feel it's really important to say that because we're not actually assessing what's going on in your injury. Unfortunately with these videos we tend to kind of take a little snapshot.

But again, the things that I'm going to be presenting to you guys are things that I see every day in my practice that are missed by health care practitioners, particularly ones that are focused on trying to get you back to jujitsu. There's really an under representation in the medical world with regards to athletes dealing with getting back into kickboxing or MMA jujitsu. The answer is never just do nothing or you shouldn't do that sport. Clearly we have to be very focused on what we're doing and we want to get it right the first time.